Wednesday, January 30, 2013

30 weeks!!

okay, first a confession: as we are currently experiencing tornado warnings in atlanta, this photo is obviously not from today. but you know, 29.5 weeks is basically 30 weeks, right? (except that my coworker said today that i already seemed bigger than yesterday, which might have something to do with a nightly cookies and milk habit this week). and also, although you can't tell from this photo, i am SUPER excited to be 30 weeks. let's get this little babe grown and out of here! ;)


 at 30 weeks i'm starting to have lots of back pain. and milk cravings (what??). also starting to think i might need to prepare for this little one as i'm getting lots of questions about a currently non-existent nursery. and maybe i'll have to buy something more than a changing pad cover (like a changing pad), which is currently the only thing we have. 30 weeks means lots of baby kicks and head butts...and less sleep. it means a lot less nausea but also a lot less space for food in my tummy. which is fun when i need to eat all the time (especially in order to get all that extra protein in!). most importantly, 30 weeks means we're 10 weeks (or so...i'm keeping that 41 1/7 weeks benchmark in mind!) away from meeting this baby.

10 more weeks! let's do this!

Sunday, January 27, 2013

the makings of a weekend

for the last two months we've been looking for houses every single weekend, and for the last month we've added birthing classes on top of that. suffice it to say, we've been super busy on top of our regular weekend activities. so saturday morning whole grain waffles with berries was a must to get us through the madness that is our weekends these days. i also can't complain about pizza at antico (totally worth the crowds even the senior citizen hour of 5 pm!). and today we tried a little hole in the wall mexican place, so that was fun.

but as usual, the weekend went by too fast and now it's almost time for another work week.


until next time dearies. 

xx
B

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

thankful in january


while january hasn't been a long month, it's been a long season. 
here are some things that i've been particularly thankful for: 

1. the wonderful excuse to eat as much fresh produce and dairy as i can.

2. all the soup we've been making lately: chicken tortilla soup, chicken soup (no recipe), lentil soup (my recipe is similar to this), white bean chicken chili, and cabbage soup (recipe below).
weeknight dinner has never been so easy—and nourishing.

3. our sunday dates to birth classes together (and the relaxation pose with massage at the end).

4. the surprise stunning necklace with our baby's birthstone loverboy gave me...i'm still in shock!

5. morning appointments with my midwife—because i get to sleep in a little!


7. baby kicks—and what feels like cartwheels and somersaults!

8. maternity jeans! i held out as long as i could, but i'm rockin' em now!

9. cake:)

Monday, January 21, 2013

this weekend life + an extra day off


the birthday cake i brought to our five guys date with some friends on thursday night to embarrass loverboy;) also the cake i might be slowly devouring all by myself. apparently no one else loves box cake as much as i do? 
 festive stockings for our saturday birthday dinner celebrations at fritti in inman park
it's official: fritti pizza is good but nothing can compare to the best pizza in town.
the birthday boy. love him.
 fritti
 perusing old magazines with hot chocolate on my day off
this is what angst looks like. also, serenity. but these days, mostly angst.

a few pictures from our busy, busy weekend. in between all the church life activities, birthday celebrations, birth classes and chores, we've also been looking at houses every weekend (no luck yet, oh this house hunting is hard!) it makes for a busy life round these parts. i was partly thankful for a day off just so i could get to some of the house cleaning that we've been neglecting for waaaay too long. and i barely made a dent. sigh. also why we haven't had any over in a while. but as loverboy says, that's just where we're at right now. so, another busy week, here we come...

Thursday, January 17, 2013

jazz turns 32

10 things you might not know about loverboy:

1. he belongs in the theater — as he will spontaneously
burst into strange characters and accents.

2. he will order his waffles with syrup, bananas, strawberries,
whipped cream AND chocolate sauce if you let him.
but he says he doesn't really care for dessert...

3. when he watches a movie, he listens to the soundtrack
 first, then the dialogue (sometimes).

4. he loves to teach lars new tricks and will play hide
and seek with him for hours. usually at bedtime when i want
everyone to be quiet and calm so i can sleep.

5. more often than not, his great ideas happen at 11 p.m.

6. he doesn't understand pinterest. (which is totally fine with me)

7. he cannot keep a secret (he is like this). except recently when
he surprised me with the most amazing, amazing gift. more on that later.

8. he was in a band in high school and plays the guitar. it's kind of a turn on.

9. our first sort of real date was at 6 in the morning at Sweetish Hill
Bakery, and they were closed so we just sat outside and talked. but we
had been talking on the phone since 2 am that morning, so we were
delirious and didn't have much to say.

10. before we were married, he once left his car running in a
parking garage all day while he was hanging out with me.

happy birthday my love!

i love you more than spaghetti ;)

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

cantankerous anonymous

today i woke up feeling cantankerous and ornery. like this:


actually, i think i went to bed that way. and possibly woke up that way yesterday, too. some days (months) are just hard. even though we have some wonderful things on the horizon, i can't quite help feeling like i'm treading water....just waiting for things to change, things to happen. i want to enjoy this time, but there is just some stress in my life that i can't change for the moment, and it makes it very hard for me to relax and enjoy the rest of life.

and let me tell you, it is especially hard when you have a small melon stuck in your gut, a backache to go with it, and the reminder of your growing back fat that you need to be exercising thirty minutes every day.

so to make myself feel better when i came home from work, i went for only a ten minute walk and then ate some toast. this also made me feel good because it wasn't A.) cake (ever since our teacher talked about the terribleness of sugar i've been noticing a terrible cake deficiency in my diet) or B.) Taco Bell (don't tell jazz as he will be horrified and disgusted and has prohibited me from ever eating taco bell again...good thing i'm a good selective listener!;)

so anyways, next time, we will make every effort to include something positive, uplifting and new years resolutionish. unless all promises are negated by pregnancy orneriness. in which case i can't be held accountable. you'll just have to wait and see. oh the excitement!

xx,

cantankerous anonymous B

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

loverboy & B & a baby bump

so, i'm pregnant. and apparently when you're pregnant, at nine months you have to pop a baby out. of. your. unmentionables. oh my gosh. we started our birth classes last sunday and at the end they showed a few vidoes of women giving birth and let me tell you. they should have had a warning on that video. i was not prepared. i told one of my girlfriends about it and she said i need to explore all my feelings about it, but really my feelings are very simple. i don't want to see other people giving birth. i mean, it is an amazing, miraculous thing that our bodies are created to produce and birth human life. i am in full agreement with this, and i'm so, so ecstatic about baby grace (and still can't believe it!). but in no way does that make me want to see other people giving birth. i mean. it's a little private. and, uh, gross. i know there are plenty of women out there who will probably disagree with me, and who can't get enough of the whole birth process and think it's so interesting and want to see these videos over and over again. i am just not those people. i'm mostly okay with the birth process itself (besides that it's gross and painful of course), but frankly, seeing other people give birth freaks me out! i mean, it's scary enough without watching someone else's experience! and okay, maybe i'm a little freaked out by the whole thing in general.

however, i also have a friend who loves giving birth, so maybe that's how i'll feel??

finally, a baby bump:


you're loving jazz's new slippers, right? ;)




Tuesday, January 1, 2013

2012

this new year has begun with that drizzly kind of rain that bears more resemblance to a cloud of gnats than the satisfying swoosh and fall of thunderstorms that i grew up with in texas. rain in texas, like all things texan some might say, is gloriously big and bold. it shouts and hollars and drops like all the heavens are descending, sometimes without warning. in constrast, the wet perspiration of these misting showers creeps up and clings to the neck, gathering under the nose and on the backs of eyelids like a faintly unwelcome memory. it is like the insides of me a year ago and the year before and a few more years before.

maybe i'm just remembering through my nostalgic-me glasses, but it seems like they just do rain better over there in the land of wide open spaces. in fact, it often seems like they do a lot of things better over there. i can't believe it's been three whole years since we packed up all our stuff into a moving van and drove it out here to the south. loverboy says it seems like we've been here longer, but to me, three years sounds real long. one of loverboy's three favorite sentences to say to me goes like this: did you ever think you would...(often followed by, "be married to such a cool guy?" or something along those lines—and no, i really didn't;) i also really didn't ever see myself living in the south. for those of you from the south, Texas is not The South. Texas is Texas. and i've kind of been missing it lately. maybe not just it, although i do miss austin with its manageable city size, informal people, amazing tacos, real coffee places, town lake that's really a river, and rain that falls with purpose...

[long post disclaimer: feel free to skip to the end]

recently i realized—as i started sobbing on the way to the mall—that what i really miss is people. i miss family. i miss friends. i miss the community i had for so long that was mine and was comfortable. i miss having family that i felt close to (geographically and otherwise). and i miss the communal, group-centric life i had during college and especially while spending two years at bible school after college. it was a constant hum of people and togetherness. and actually, i fought it in a way, at the time, because i was emotionally hobbled from various experiences and was mostly unable to just enjoy it. i was closed off and inaccessible, even to myself. still, so many people came through the cracks in my shell, even if they didn't realize it. even if i didn't dare venture out to theirs. and when six years ago i graduated and came home from school, and life changed in an instant, it seemed like i also slowly lost that community. friends got married, moved away, left bible school to go back to their own home towns. it felt like everyone was moving on except me. i may have moved on outwardly, getting married and moving. but inwardly, i felt like i was standing still, alone.

loneliness has been my shadow, an ever-present companion even on the most promising of days for what now feels like both forever and no time at all. i guess six years is pretty long. but during most of those six years it felt like no time was passing at all. as if those years never existed—and yet continue to exist. i know it doesn't make sense. there are still days when i'm in that vortex of bleak and tormenting confusion over how i ever got here in what feels like a stranger's life.

i used to think that i would one day wake up and things would return to how they were before. maybe they wouldn't outwardly be the way they were before. but i, at least, would be the same me i was before. i would be the me i recognized. i would be the same kind of happy that i was and the same kind of hopeful. and maybe i wished and hoped that a lot of my life would look similar to how it was before. of course that's impossible. but my struggle to accept that has been long and slow and disorienting. it felt like life itself had become alien to me. it is a thin feeling. a feeling of having lost myself. of being a ghost in my own life. i was constantly treading unfamiliar territory without even the cognizance that that was what i was doing. so surprised was i to even be this person i was with this life i had, that i wasn't really able to even recognize that things were unfamiliar. it was like being reborn. like i appeared out of non-existence, with no past experience of life to draw from—as if i'd sprung fully formed into the world—and discovered that i was alive and an adult woman to boot, but without the truth that i hadn't been this person before. because i was still me, just a me i didn't recognize.

but i guess what i'm trying to say is that i'm starting to recognize it, to recognize the deep longing i have within to be with family, friends. and also the need to accept and embrace the me i've become.

the truth is, i've experienced a huge amount of healing, a regaining of family and friends, here in the south. as much as i yearn for texas, most of the people i miss aren't there anymore. season by season, and with great strides within the last year, i've begun to climb out of that intense well of loneliness. happiness is something which i've begun to feel again in these last three years, since moving here. and i have to cling to that, to acknowledge it and bookmark it for all those many moments when i feel like i'm not really here.

but today, even though it is dripping like my nose outside, i am reminded that things are very, very good, here and now. i'm so thankful that we're going to be a family of three. and i'm thankful for the families and couples and friends we've gotten close to here in atlanta. i'm thankful for our friday night small group gatherings. i'm thankful for friends who get to visit from other states from time to time.

i'm thankful for 2012, even though parts of it have been the hardest in the last six. although i didn't really do a very good job of documenting most of it, 2012 was a big year for us:

first, we went on a special new year's eve adventure. then, we had a fun, frozen, long weekend in nyc. i had a miscarriage and spiraled into a scary place of fear and desperate sadness. i got braces (and never smiled in a photo again). we attended my sister in law's beautiful wedding (and three other weddings in three other states that same spring!). i dreamed of tacos and rambled my way through my last quarter as a grad student. i finished my mfa in writing at scad which i didn't post about because i was really going through too much to talk about anything. we visited the most beautiful beach in isla mujeres, mexico for our fourth anniversary and thought that was the end. i started to recognize myself again. we watched some fireworks on the fourth of july. i went to london to pass out free bibles during the summer olympics. i spent the rest of the summer sitting on the couch in nauseous misery but i couldn't talk about it because it was the most wonderful, mindblowingly awesome secret! but before you knew about that, i got a job and then turned the big 3-0, while apple picking which is not the worst way to head into a new decade. we also visited family in raleigh for thanksgiving and demonstrated how to (not) babymoon in the north carolina mountains. and finally, we celebrate the second anniversary of fĂȘte.

it didn't always feel like much was happening (especially last night while i was sick and we continued our tradition of not really being prepared for celebrations). but really it was a lot for one year. i'm thankful for it, but i'm so ready for 2013!

happy new year!

we are party decoration challenged:/ we know. we're working on it...

xx

B, loverboy, lars & baby