A few days ago as I was religiously scouring the web for unique baby stuff, I stumbled across this doll-maker, Blabla Kids. Blabla (is there a cuter name out there?) makes the most adorable hand-knit dolls I’ve ever seen, including some whose clothes you can change and others with rattles inside. I wasn’t going to post about my love for their products until I saw my favorite doll Mr. X- who must be Mr. It’s long lost cousin – appear in a Kia commercial last night during the Super Bowl. And then, today, NPR featured a short story on how Kia was breaking all the advertising rules by featuring other products within their own commercial and they even interviewed Blabla’s founder! Anyway, it must be kiss-met, so I’m buying a lotto ticket tomorrow so that I can afford to buy lil’ Lambert every single one of their $35 dolls.
After posting this, I discovered that Blabla has a blog (say that three times fast) and a little story of Mr. X’s adventures! I’m in love!
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 24 hours, you know that the DC area has been getting hit by a hurricane of snow. In about 24 hours, the snow fairies have dumped about just as much snow in inches on this poorly prepared city, leaving depleted grocery store shelves and awe-struck city slickers in its path. When I look out my window, instead of seeing metrobuses, firetrucks and people in suits scurrying by on their way to work (yes, even on the weekends), I just see mountains of white stuff with a few brave souls trudging through it. The metro, post office and just about every other service in the city have shut down. Somebody attempted to plow our small side street this morning, which would be great except for the fact that the genius who did it left the plowed snow in the middle of our road, so even if we could dig our car out we wouldn’t get very far. In other words, we are stuck.
Pregnant, cold and snowy.
So what’s a 6-month pregnant woman and her cabin-fevered husband to do in a situation like this? Well, we did venture outside to get a few groceries and were lucky enough to actually find a store open within 1 block of our apartment (sigh… I will miss the convenience of this place when we do eventually move). We counted our blessings for only being 6 months pregnant and healthy as opposed to being 9 months pregnant and having absolutely no way to get to the hospital. We saw that our favorite neighborhood watering hole was actually open on our way back and stopped in so Steve could get a whiskey (he said he had to support their resilience for opening despite the weather. I supported it.) Then, we saw that the windshield wipers on Steve’s poor car were just about bent to their breaking point, so he decided to crawl on his car and try to free them. I watched and giggled….
And now? Well, we have fully-stocked cupboards, full power and cable TV for now, so I think eating and watching lots of movies is our plan. Hopefully we’ll be able to dig ourselves out soon!
I’ve learned a lot from pregnancy so far. For one, I’ve learned the true meaning of being hungry and tired (even after being forewarned by my mom). I’ve learned that being hormonal does not perfectly translate into begin horny and in some cases does the exact opposite. I’ve also learned new vocabulary words and phrases like “anterior placenta” and “fecund“. This past week at the doctor’s I learned my newest phrase: fundal height, which according to wikipedia is “the measurement of the uterus to determine fetal growth and development… taken from the top of the pubic bone to the top of the uterus.”
Normally I wouldn’t be sharing such intimate details about my own fundal height, but I was completely shocked to learn that my measurement was 22 centimeters. 22 centimeters?! My uterus is 22 what?! How is that even possible? And how in the world will I ever go back to normal?
All this worrying about the size of my uterus also got me worrying about a lot of other things that won’t be going back to normal anytime soon. Like my waist size. Or our lives! I asked Steve what he was most worried about changing once the baby comes and he said our social life. I said my career. In either case it seems like the things we enjoyed most are now going to be nearly impossible – like taking an afternoon off and going to watch the game at the bar or taking 4 weeks to travel to another country for work. Don’t get me wrong, we are not having regrets or anything (and how stupid would it be to have regrets because oh darn, we just can’t squeeze in those leisurely beers like we used to!). We’re just both trying to cope with what is going to be the biggest life-shift we’ve ever gone through and we are both very scared. How will we make it all work? And how did hearing about a normal fundal height push me into such a self-reflective state?
Anyway, maybe I haven’t learned nearly enough yet. I guess that’s what the next 17 weeks are for.
According to my bible, lil’ Lambert now has functioning ears, which means that she can hear a lot of the louder sounds that surround me us on any given day. Living in a city means that most of those sounds are unpleasant and probably quite scary for the poor little thing: fire trucks, train whistles, barking dogs, car horns, steve screaming at agents on the phone – these things probably serve to make her think that the world outside is chaotic and overwhelming. While I’m not one of those moms that is going to pump Mozart or Beethoven into the womb hoping that my baby is born a genius, I am trying to take a little bit of time each week to play some happier sounds so she knows that everything will be okay once she enters this world (and yeah, ok, maybe a little bit of me is hoping to sway her music tastes into the right direction too).
Well, for all of you out there that kept asking me “why my belly was so small”, you can now wonder why my belly is so big! Granted, this pic was taken immediately following dinner, but all I ate was a chicken spinach salad, so I didn’t think it would bloat me out that bad. Still, the picture speaks for itself…
For this week’s Bipolar Wednesday! post I’d like to tell you a little story about how a seemingly innocent talk with a friend got me into serious trouble with the karma police.
Several days ago during a lunch date with my work BFF Lisa, we somehow got on the subject of ugly women*. I’m not trying to be mean! We weren’t just talking about your run of the mill unattractive female here. We were talking about the real deal. And in this conversation I started to tell her the story of some women I know who happen to have one defining characteristic: full-blown beards. Yes, you heard that right. Bearded. Ladies. (And no, I will NEVER disclose to you who it is. But trust me, it’s no one you know.)
Lately I’ve been singing the praises of a pregnancy nutrition book that I got for Christmas to pretty much anyone willing to listen. I’ve made a number of recipes from it, and each one has been easy to make with generally only 4-5 ingredients and has turned out delicious. I started searching for a pregnancy cookbook a few months ago, when I started reading up on how important it is to make sure you get a sufficient intake of certain nutrients throughout your pregnancy. I wanted something that went beyond saying, “you need to increase your iron and calcium and folic acid” to a book that would actually tell me how to do this everyday without having to buy expensive, unpronounceable ingredients or making extravagant meals. Surprisingly, when I started searching I realized that there really weren’t that many pregnancy-centric cookbooks out there. And when I brought it up to people, they all kind of gave me a perplexed look as if I was looking for a diet book as opposed to a nutritional guide. I even thought about recommending to my food expert friends that this could be the next untapped market that they could make millions off of. Luckily, my husband was sweet enough to do some research on his own and came across what has become a great pregnancy guide and a generally awesome cookbook that I’ll probably continue to use long after the baby is born.
The book is called “Eating for Pregnancy” and is chocked full of recipes and tips for pregnancy and after. I especially like the simplicity of the recipes (as mentioned before) and the fact that they explain why each recipe is good for you and the baby and in what way. It just kind of helps to make me feel like I’m doing something good for myself, especially after I’ve had a handful of chocolate or cupcakes. I also like that they have weekly meal plans and suggested accompaniments to round out each meal nutritionally. I also appreciate that they tell you how long each thing keeps for, pre-preparation tips to help save time, and easy variations.
I am huge Radiohead fan, and love just about every album they’ve ever come out with. However, since they are my favorite and I’ve listened to everything they’ve ever done a million times, I’ll sometimes go weeks if not months between obsession sessions (you know, when you listen to all of their albums back to back or even just one album over and over again). But thanks to a slight mention of an old Radiohead song the other day by Lisa, I got the itch to go on a Radiohead spree again and am now knee-deep in melancholy bliss. Sigh… Hence, I present you with the song of the day:
I promised in my post the other day that I would explain why this week had been so rough, so here we go. This really probably won’t be very interesting to most of you, and I’m not going to exert any effort at keeping it brief because frankly, this girl’s got a lot of venting to do and everyone that’s around me has gotten sick of hearing it so this is my only therapy option.
So. As you may have gleaned from my previous posts, Steve and I have been trying to buy a house for about 9 months now. We started casually searching and researching in the spring of last year, when we realized that the cost of renting in DC was so exorbitantly high that we might as well be putting that same monthly amount into a mortgage. We then spent the next 3 months or so browsing houses online and eventually ended up contacting a realtor to get more serious. Max, who since then has become our trusted realtor and friend, then began our ‘education’. You see, like most of the endeavors I’ve started in my life, I was extremely naïve, excited and stupid. I went into our search with a laundry list of must-haves for my dream house, an idea of what the neighborhood would be like and visions of us hosting parties and bbq’s in our huge backyard and deck. I wanted all of this and to be located in a hip, exciting part of DC (yeah, I know, anyone who says ‘hip’ is anything but… whatever). Well, then Max took us out on our first learning trips, where we visited about 15 houses in one of our preferred neighborhoods that were actually in our price range. Let’s just say that they didn’t exactly have any walk-out bbq-worthy back porches. Hell, half of them hardly had front doors! I remember one in particular that even had a rat carcass and dirty diaper in the front yard and probably drugged out squatters sleeping there every night. Not only were most of them completely uninhabitable, but some of them had some truly weird things going on. For instance, you’d walk into the downstairs of one house to see that it had been fairly nicely renovated, only to go downstairs and find a moldy hot tub and some sort of prison-torture device that just left you feeling creepy. There even was one house that had a bathroom with a sink, toilet and… another toilet! I really wish I would have taken a picture of this one – there literally were two installed toilets facing each other about a foot apart. Talk about sick!
January 21, 2010
· Filed under Home · Tagged nursery
So I know that I mentioned something about being frugal and how Steve and I were not going to just run out and buy every little girlie thing we laid our eyes in my last post, buuutttt it’s been a rough week and damnit! mama needs some new shoes! (More on our disappointment of the week to come.) (And don’t worry, it’s nothing that bad, just disappointing.)
