Back from my blogging
hiatus. Well life went from really pretty normal and laid back to crazy again
in just a couple weeks time. I plan on trying to write more frequently again
but my plans usually don't happen the way I planned them. The biggest news....Travis
and I are going to have a baby! Just a disclaimer, this may contain some TMI
depending on your level of comfort about pregnancy. And mostly I'm writing
about pregnancy this post because it is my biggest news.
This Thanksgiving I
wanted to have some wine as per usual. So I decided to double check and make
sure I was being a responsible adult. Naturally, it was the one time I'd ever
attempted a test where I wasn't the least bit concerned and forgot about the test
before getting the results. Because there was just no way I'd get a test so
early, I'd be only 3 weeks pregnant. So I was a bit shocked when I went back in
to throw my test away and it looked like there was a second line on it. Travis
and I spent most of Thanksgiving in our pajamas staring at a tiny stick that
I'd peed on. Classy. And the trip to the grocery store felt like one of those
that the checker probably laughed and gossiped about after we left. We bought a
turkey baster, pregnancy tests, and some sparkly juice.
I should be due early
August. Current due dates are the 12th or 10th, depending on methods of dating
I should be edging towards the 2nd trimester very shortly. Pregnancy math is
stupid, you're pregnant for 40 weeks but the first 2 really don't count.
There's something like 3 different ways to count trimesters. And 9 months
is total crap. It is more like 10. Unless you don't count those first 2 weeks,
but it is still more than 9. And babies don't apparently care about deadlines,
so basically I'm due anytime in August. Or there's a very slim possibility of
late July.
Travis' sense of humor
has grown since finding out the news. He has nicknamed my pregnant alter ego
"Tina." My brother on the other hand, nicknamed it
"Smaug" or "Mike Tyson." But I swear, I'm really not
THAT awful and hormonal. I don't think I've done anything crazy yet. And fun
fact, Travis has also seen much more childbirth than I have, so it is nice to
have him to rely on, knowing he'll handle it well. However, Travis likes to say
he is fairly certain this video (You can skip ahead to second 19 or so) is an accurate representation of
what will happens during birth. My brother found it so hilarious that he
decided I must name my child Uruk Hai. Travis, being the mature adult that he
is, claims the only boys names that he likes are Uruk Hai and Marty McFly. He
is at least slightly more reasonable about girl's names. So naturally we're
probably going to have a boy.
We had our first
ultrasound a few weeks ago and got to see a surprisingly squirmy baby with a
nice heartbeat. And there was only one in there, phew. I was a little
nervous my early positive test meant I'd get twins, but I was wrong! It is
really surreal to realize I have a tiny human growing inside me though. I
actually also got and echocardiogram the same day and saw my heart on ultrasound.
So really I saw more of my innards in one day that most anyone else ever does,
and we got to hear/see the inside of both my heart and the baby's heart.
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We got to tell Travis's
family in person when we visited before Christmas. We had everyone get
together for a picture and had his mom take a video instead of pictures while
saying, "Everyone say 'cheese'...everyone say 'Miriam's pregnant!'"Mostly
people thought it was a joke at first. Travis's Grandma Micki had my
favorite reaction, "I noticed she wasn't drinking and was running to the
bathroom all the time, I thought the poor girl had a kidney infection!" As
if that would deter me from a glass of wine or a beer. My mother annoyingly
enough, called me exactly 2 days before I found out and said, "I predict
you will get pregnant while home for Thanksgiving." Sometime's she
is spooky and weird like that. Travis and I did have a good laugh at my parents
during our Thanksgiving phone call with them before they had been notified of
the new arrival. My mom started griping about how someone needs to get
them grand kids already. Other than family and very close friends, our
bartender was the first to know. (She was actually the fourth person to find
out if you count Travis and I as people 1 and 2). I ordered three sodas
in a row. And when I went to ask for n OB recommendation (she was days from
giving birth at that point), she screamed, "HAH! I knew it!!! I always
know when our beer girls order sodas!" And then the whole bar knew after
that.
My brother came to visit
for a week after New Years, which was a lot of fun. Luckily he is family so he
wasn't shocked when everything fell apart into a chaotic mess about an hour
after we got back to the house. We were playing a board game and everything was
fine, when suddenly I had to vomit. So I run to the bathroom. Apparently
pregnancy does a number on your digestive system. I had eaten an apple but
turns out, my stomach decided to do zero work on digesting said apple. When I
puked up an entire, virtually solid apple, I became convinced that I would die.
I would meet my end while choking to death on my own vomit while Travis
and Martin sat in the other room, blissfully unaware. As soon as this ordeal
was over, I wandered to living room, in tears, step directly into a puddle of
dog pee, and immediately started to swear violently. Martin and Travis looked
up and immediately become very alarmed. It appears Dinger got nervous or
macho with a new person in the house and decided to show us all who was boss.
Martin and Travis begin running around trying to clean up and bring me a
new pair of socks while I tell them about how I nearly died. Welcome to our
life, Martin.
I've been feeling
relatively normal other than this whole morning sickness business. (I wrote
that sentence a week or two ago and I now take it back.) The weirdest
symptom for me...I can smell things! I know this is a typical pregnancy thing,
but I've never had much of a sense of smell as long as I can remember. It
is actually rather unpleasant and makes the morning sickness worse. Everything
is just too much and it has changed the way everything tastes. I hate the
grocery store, I can smell the candy and fried chicken at the same time....not
ok. And my dogs....their farts are a whole new level of hell.
Unfortunately this morning sickness seems like it is getting worse
instead of better. Which is just lovely since it also makes me extra motion
sick and we have a long road trip coming up.
Which brings me to the
other major news came about a week into January when Travis and I found out
that we were moving back to Fairbanks, Alaska by the end of the month. We had
entirely discounted that possibility as an option, which is probably why it
ended up turning into our definite plan. We're still figuring out all the
details but hoping to be settled into a house before that baby arrives. Movers
are coming today and tomorrow and by Friday Travis will be trekking across Canada
in the middle of winter with a pregnant wife, a mastiff, a tiny dog, and a car
stuffed with supplies. Wish him luck....someone should start a betting pool on
which of the four of us is left somewhere by the side of the road in Canada.
We can now say we
officially finished unpacking this house the same day the movers are coming
back to move us back to where we started. I don't remember if I have
complained about our cursed couch before, but here's the back story to all
this. While living in Fairbanks, we got this sale couch on a trip to Anchorage
after realizing we had no furniture upon leaving college. The couch was called
a "Click Clack" (you can convert it to a bed and it makes a click
clack noise). It was made from this brown suede like material and it also
had no arms. That was our first mistake. Never buy a couch without arms,
you'll regret it, I promise. It also had a small but "fixable" rip in
back. I say that with quotations because, obviously, we never got around to
fixing it, and it just became a larger gaping hole as time went by. By the time
we got it to our house after the 6 hour drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks,
something had snapped on the bottom of the couch and it developed a slouch. One
side of the couch was just a little more sloped and closer to the ground.
Annoying, but we were stuck with the non returnable sale couch. And what were
we supposed to do, make another 12 hour roundtrip to Anchorage? Soon the couch
began to develop a lean as the click clack function broke down. The slouch
side of the couch no began to more permanently recline back at an angle.So now
we have this couch with a gangster side where you sit close to the floor and
have to lean waaaaay back if you sit on the left side. It feels like a
fun house couch without any fun. Meanwhile we are dealing with it while trying
to save up for the wedding and other furniture essentials, like a bed so we
didn't have to sleep on a mattress on the floor anymore, and a table so we
didn't have to eat sitting on the gangster lean couch, etc.
So the movers pack this
cursed couch along to Republic. As we begin to unpack we are a little
confused about where the movers might have put the couch legs, so we leave the
couch sitting directly on the floor while we unpack, keeping an eye out for
them. They are gone, completely missing, and we are eventually forced to
conclude that they somehow did not get packed, even though the movers packed an
empty tissue box and the coffee grounds. At this point, Dinger came into our
lives. With the couch sitting at floor level, and this new mastiff puppy, we
had some pretty serious pee on couch situations. At this time, I hate this
couch with a fiery passion that continually grows. It has no arms or legs, it
has been peed on, it leans back at approximately 140 degree angle on one side,
(but at least the bottom half is level since the legs are gone) and it is
ungodly how uncomfortable this couch has become. It just feels lumpy and makes
my back hurt (the reason for this became clear to me today). Finally we
move the couch to the porch for the dogs to sit on and we buy ourselves a real,
non-sale couch complete with arms and legs.
This should have been
the end of the cursed couch story. But today, as Travis dragged the old
couch to load in the car for the last trip to the dump, I made the comment,
"We never did find the damn legs for that thing." Not two minutes
later, Travis comes running inside with a large paper wrapped bundle yelling,
"I found the couch legs!" Apparently, there was a secret compartment
on the bottom of the couch. No wonder the stupid thing was so
uncomfortable, we'd been sitting on couch legs the whole time.
