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...

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 ;)

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

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? ;)

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 fête.

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

how to babymoon

i've decided that there is a rule out there somewhere that something unfortunate must happen on all our trips together. this summer there was that plane ride from hell which has loverboy convinced he can't fly anymore. two years ago there was that completely rained out trip to Charleston. two thanksgivings ago, we went camping in the freezing cold and the screen on my camera cracked. and before that, there was the epic failure of our honeymoon in Mexico, wherein we got sick from the water somehow (even though we tried to avoid it at all costs) and spent the next two weeks at home wrapped around the toilet, all our stuff still in boxes in our new apartment. that was a wonderful way to start married life (honey, pass the toilet paper). yes, i might still be a little bitter about it.

so, in keeping with tradition, we decided to get food poisoning on our last day in the mountains in North Carolina during our babymoon this week. we spent the whole drive home and all that night as sick as dogs and only started feeling back to normal again this morning. you gotta love tradition, don't you?

speaking of traditions, you may not know that we don't celebrate christmas. i didn't celebrate it growing up and now loverboy and i still don't. i've never put up lights or decorated a tree or stayed up waiting for santa...and to be honest, i never really felt like i was missing out on anything. however, i may have fallen completely in love with the bazillions of christmas tree farms we passed on the way there. i never knew christmas trees could be so cute—all lined up and fat and puffy! especially since on the day we arrived there was snow on the ground in the mountains. i totally get the allure now.

see: 

these could be better pictures if they weren't taken from the car window. but after five hours on the road, we are more like aren't-we-there-yet-angry-face than oh-look-lets-stop-for-a-photo-opp. and when i say we i mostly mean me. i wish i were more of the scenic route variety person, but i'm just too impatient.

the trip all began when we thought it would be fun to rent a cabin in the mountains and be all outdoorsy for our babymoon. instead, we ended up staying in a lodge that was "cabiny." as in, there was wood on the walls and a hunting motif:

 

but with extras like a hot tub and dining room. it was a really cute room though and we even got the front desk guy to find us a plug for the bathtub so we could use it. apparently he knew the plug was broken but no one has wanted to use the tub before. most of the trip was nice except that we realized when we got there that it's really a skiing town. and being that close to winter wonderland fun that i've also never done before and couldn't do still, was kind of a downer. to cheer ourselves up we searched for snow-worthy coats as it had snowed five inches just before we got there, visited three different locations of the legendary Mast General Store and stocked up on candy, drank hot chocolate and watched indiana jones in our room when it started to rain.

we did have fun driving on those twisty mountain roads, taking photos of beautiful farmland and looking around antique stores. my favorite part was the snow, playing pool and spending time together. but as we drove home in agony, loverboy decided we were never going back there again. which is probably good because it makes it that much more special.

and now for some pics of the good times:

first hot chocolate at a bagel place while frantically trying to find a bathroom. oh pregnancy!

festive truck in boone, north carolina

Mast General Store, home of candy and other outdoor goodness

loverboy looking studly with his Cheer Wine soda out in the country

once the snow melted and it started raining i didn't feel stupid wearing wellies in the mtns.

on our hiking trip before it got interrupted by a monsters-sized, loose, black dog who wanted to eat us.

just before loverboy demonstrated the consequences of scratching on the eight ball. our last night of fun.

our just-been-poisoned faces before we left to puke our guts out.

and that, folks, is how you babymoon.

xx
so-happy-to-be-home B

an accomplishment of dinner

i really, really feel like it's in the cards for me to one day work a full, creatively fulfilling day, run five miles with lars, whip up a nutritious, not-from-a-box/freezer dinner, load the dishwasher, have brilliant, spirited conversations with lover boy, write something beautiful and touching on here—and be really happy doing it all, too. (come on, just go with it.)

i also think that one day i'll live on a farm with miniature donkeys, raise baby tigers and sleep under the stars. but that's not what this is about.

this post is about making dinner. dinner has not been on my list of things to do lately. i mean, i'm already making a living person out of my own body, what more do you want of me?? that's my take on it. which means we've been eating an awful lot of Buitoni pasta with pesto. and broccoli if i'm feeling exceptionally epicurean.

but maybe i'm finally getting that second trimester "energy burst" everyone keeps saying i'm going to get. or maybe it's the cookies and chocolate and pumpkin pound cake that keeps getting sent to our office at work (please make it stop, my huge belly begs you). either way, this week i made chicken tortilla soup for dinner (which has lasted us five nights so far!), and if you ready my last post you should know that this was an accomplishment of grand proportions. maybe even calling for a trophy. just saying.

anyways, i felt like since this was one of the handful of times i've actually taken the camera out for something other than a belly shot (not going so well either) in too long, it called for a blog post. right? i know, don't get excited.

(okay so, the chips are covering up the evidence. use your imagination!)

Lover boy says it's now a family recipe, never mind that it's basically the Pioneer Woman's recipe. it's that good. if you read nothing else in this post, read the recipe and go make it right now. you will probably want to give me a trophy afterward. 

Recipe Adapted from The Pioneer Woman: 

Ingredients:

• 1 Rotisserie Chicken
• Some Olive Oil
• 1 teaspoon Cumin
• 1 teaspoon Chili Powder
• 1/2 teaspoon Salt
• 1 Diced Onion
• 1 Diced Green Bell Pepper
• 1 Diced Red Bell Pepper
• 3 cloves Garlic, Minced
• 1 can (10 Oz. Can) Rotel Tomatoes And Green Chilies
• 32 ounces, fluid Low Sodium Chicken Stock 
• 3 Tablespoons Tomato Paste
• 2 cups Hot Water
• 1 Chicken Bouillon 
• 1 can (15 Oz. Can) Black Beans, Drained
• _____
• FOR THE GARNISHES:
• Diced Avocado
• Shredded Monterey Jack Cheese
• Cilantro
• Tortilla Chips

Instructions: 

Take chicken off the bone. Set aside.

Heat some olive oil in a pot over medium high heat. Add onions, red pepper, green pepper, and minced garlic. Stir and begin cooking, then add the spices. Stir to combine, then add shredded chicken and stir.

Pour in Rotel, chicken stock, tomato paste, water, bouillon and black beans. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer for 30 minutes, covered.

Check seasonings, adding more if needed---add more chili powder if it needs more spice, and be sure not to undersalt. Turn off heat and allow to sit for 10-15 minutes before serving. 

Ladle into bowls, then top with cheese, diced avocado, cilantro, and chips.

a short update and no pics

it's been so long that maybe i should feel too embarrassed to write anything, but since i've probably lost any readers i had, i'm going to take this long-awaited opportunity to hang up the ever-present internal editor and just write what i want here. there's a good chance it will be about nothing, but this is what i like to call reverse psychology and low expectations. tell me that no one is looking and i might actually blog more than once every other month.

so, yes, things have been rough around here. it turns out that getting pregnant and starting a new job at the same time is not the recommended way to do things. but i don't listen to recommendations when they really matter. cause that's how i roll.

apart from growing a human being in my body, i've been going to bed at 9:30 every night (lame!), going to work every day, and trying not to eat everything in sight. but seriously, it feels like that's ALL i've been doing. i haven't had much energy or capacity for anything else, which has been a bit depressing. but with a break from work coming up in a week, i'm starting to feel like it's time to bust out of this rut and have a life again...or at least pretend to.

this is what i want to remember about life right now:

baby kicks feel like frogs, jumping in my belly (so strange!). daily exercise never felt so hard - i might have misled the midwife last week about getting thirty minutes a day. i have a pregnancy workout that i've done three times...in almost six months. loverboy's dismayed reaction when i started patting my belly like a drum (it really sounds like a drum!): what are you doing? there's a baby in there! (i secretly think baby liked it). we are so proud of our morning green drinks that consist mainly of spinach, kale, walnuts, flax seeds, soy milk, fish oil and a banana. that's how i justified eating three sugar cookies at work today. the baby made me do it. i never appreciated before how easy it used to be to bend down and tie my shoes. or sleep on my stomach. lars is super frisky now with the cooler weather. looking for houses is sometimes fun (when you see a house you really like) and sometimes super stressful (when the house you really like is really too expensive) but we're also very sure that God will give us the right house. spending extra time in prayer with a few companions in these weeks has been so wonderful and renewing.


well, i think that's all the creative juice i have in me. plus it's already almost forty minutes past my bedtime!

goodnight all

xx
working-pregnant-uninspired B