I can’t be the only one!

My back has been killing me for the last 4 or 5 weeks.

I’ve looked into taking an aquatics class for moms-to-be since I’ve been in agony.  Unfortunately, it appears as if I must be the only pregnant woman here who works. 

The YMCA has prenatal water classes, but they are only offered Monday through Friday at around 10 AM.  The same schedule applies to most other institutions that offer such a class.  I have found one establishment on the other side of town that offers the class Tuesday and Thursday at 5 PM.  This is somewhat doable.  However, it means Hubby needs to change his work schedule for the days I choose to attend (and by change, I mean he has to leave work a half- hour early, not take a lunch break, and make up the time later in the week) so he can pick our son up from daycare.  Also, if I didn’t finish work at 3:30 PM, and finished at 5 or 5:30 like most people, this class wouldn’t be an option either.  And, by the time I’m done with work all I want to do is go home and lay down.

It’s not fair!

So, here are my theories.

Either all of the working pregnant women don’t care about the fact that they are forgotten.  Or, and this is more likely, I’m the only person in my town who is a mother, is pregnant, and works.

I want a class on a Saturday.  I don’t care what time – it can be at the ass-crack of dawn for all I care.  I just want a class that I can attend without having to finagle anything else.  As it is, the OB stops seeing patients at 4:30 – leading to yet another change in someone’s schedule (son’s and his caretaker).

I should write a letter – but to who?

Snow day – part 2

I just got an email from my son.  Actually, it was written by his caretaker on behalf of my son.  The subject line was “Sorry Daddy”, see below:

Mommy and Daddy,

I am a ruff and tumble boy. . . usually. Today it is snowy and I had to find something to entertain myself. The girls told me that it would be fun. It was! In my defense, [their brother] did it too. Well, I’m gonna go play cars now.

Love,

[your son]

Can anyone guess what it was he was able to entertain himself with?  She sent pictures, pretty funny!  See for yourself:

Yep - that’s our boy….putting on eyeshadow!

Daddy will be so proud.

Snow day

I’m working from home today.  The weather is crummy and I didn’t want to risk getting into an accident.  Thankfully, I’m able to work from home on days like these.  Unfortunately, I have to go out later to pick my son up from daycare – at least it’s nearby, so hopefully the trip will go okay.

I was taking a break from work and came across this.  It’s highly addictive, but at least it’s for a good cause.  Head on over if you have some time to kill – your free time (and correct answers) can feed the hungry!  How cool is that?

Oh well, gotta get back to work now.  Bye for now!

You Can’t Get There From Here

How come Google Maps can direct me to five different addresses that Mapquest can’t even find?

Also, why doesn’t Google Maps make it well known that you can have more than one stop in your journey?  If I had known this, I wouldn’t have mapped out the five other locations that Mapquest could find to then use Google Maps for the remainder.  Had I known of the multiple stop map that Google Maps offers, I would have used Google Maps for the entire tour of my town I have to do for my job (it’s not a tour really, but it feels like I’m going to have to see every part of it for the ‘drive-by’s’ I’ve gotta do).

Ugh!

He Must Get It From Me

I have a friend who, when we were just about to become seniors in high school, thought what I did in my sleep was so hilarious she convinced her boyfriend that he had to see it for himself.

Apparently, whenever my friend would enter my room to wake me up in the morning I would sit straight up in bed as soon as the door opened.  I guess it must have looked as if the door had something attached to it that would push me up into this position.

Personally, I don’t think it’s that funny – though I guess I could possibly see some humor in it.  

I don’t remember any of this.  

But, do you really think it’s funny enough to enlist your boyfriend to be the one to wake me up one morning just so he could witness it? I’m just glad I was dressed!  (Joclyn, I’m not mad, I just think it’s funny) It’s looking like this little idiosyncrasy is genetic.  Sometimes, my son does the same exact thing.  I just assumed I was doing it because I was already expecting her to come in to disrupt my wonderful sleep.  But why does my son do it?  We never wake him up, for anything.  So, it’s not like he would be expecting us to.

Unfortunately, it appears my son has inherited my poor quality sleep and lets every single noise or disturbance disrupt his sleep – even if he doesn’t remember it.  Poor thing, he appears to have a lifetime of sleepless night ahead of him. 

That is not something that I would wish on anyone.

The Greenest I’ve Ever Been

With all of this talk lately on what we can do to get “greener”, it got me thinking about what I do to make this world a little easier to live in.  You can find out how “green” you are by taking the quiz, here.

We can’t afford to pay the trash company to recycle our recycleables, so we do a few things ourselves.  It’s not as much as if we could afford to recycle, but it’s better than nothing.

• We recycle all of our paper at the local recycling dropoff (free) at any one of the five Wal-Marts in our “town”.  (Yes, I know, any “town” with five Wal-Marts isn’t actually a town, but I just can’t bring myself to call it a city – I did grow up in The Big Apple, afterall!)

• We get our milk delivered every week.  I know this doesn’t sound like doing something for the environment, but the milk company takes back the empty milk containers and reuses them for more milk.  Plus it’s delicious.

• We turn off lights in any room we’re not in – and we’re normally all in the same room.  Driving down our street at night, you would think no one actually lives in our house – it’s pitch black.

• We use flourescent light bulbs.  Yes, I know they don’t last as long if they are used upside down, but it’s still better than a regular bulb – right?

• We don’t flush the toilet after every single pee – if it’s yellow, let it mellow…you get the idea.

• We have our water heater turned way down, and it still produces enough hot water!
  
• We wash all of our clothes in cold water.

Ok, so most of the things we do are to save us money, but it still helps the environment – right?

Even though we put in a semi-decent effort now, you should have seen me the summers from 1986 through 1993.

I went to camp.  A camp like no other.  It was called Hearts Bend.  I don’t think you would find a place anywhere close to being similar now, unless you were on some sort of commune.  Unfortunately, it’s closed now so you can’t experience it for yourselves.  Looking back, it was actually kind of gross.  I’m not sure how many peopler were there, but I think it ranged somewhere between 60 and 100, depending on the year.  The camp used a well system, and to make sure there was enough water for food preparation, drinking, the animals, and cleaning up after meals all of the people making up the camps population were limited to 1 shower a week.  That’s right folks, just 1 shower a week. 

Let me clarify.  I guess we were really limited to 1 hot shower a week.  The rest of the time we were entitled to take a colder than hell shower in the water fall anytime we wanted (using bio-degradable soap) if it was running – i.e. it hadn’t been stopped by beavers upstream.  Yep, parents knew about this little deal.  And yep, they kept sending their children back year after year.  Now, I get a little grossed out if my son goes three days without a bath – and he hardly does anything to get dirty!

Ok, so you’re thinking “what could these campers be doing to really warrant more shower time – 1 a week sounds reasonable.  Besides they’re probably swimming a ton anyway.”  For some, that would be correct.  However, for the select few die-hard horse lovers it was a different story.  I was one of those horse lovers.  I was in the barn every day, either riding or mucking stalls or both.  Yes, I was swimming almost everyday too (my nickname was “the fish”), but do you really think that was enough to get the grime of the barn off?  Hardly.  Lets not forget about the fact that I was sleeping outside for a good chunk of the time that I was there too.  One summer, I got home and took nice long shower and shaved my legs.  Prior to this, I had thought I was really tan.  However, it turned out that I was just really dirty.  After shaving my legs they were white as ghosts - apparently along with the hair I had shaved off the dirt too.

The water conservation was not the only environmentally friendly “activity”.  We also composted whatever items we could, and what we couldn’t was given to the pigs to eat.  We had a cow on site to give us fresh milk.  We grew some of our own veggies.  We even had a few outhouses (again, saving water).

So yes, this was the greenest time of my life so far.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the environment we were making greener, it was also the people we dared to tell about the goings on in this little community we called home for 8 weeks of the year.  I guess you’re a little greener now too.  You can thank me later.

Pregnancy update

It’s great being pregnant.  We even planned it.  What I don’t enjoy about being pregnant:

• Weeks 5 through 10 were plagued with constant nausea.  Boy am I glad that’s pretty much done with.
• My acne was bad enough to begin with, but now it looks like I’m a greasy, pizza faced teenage boy – and I can’t do anything about it!  How am I supposed to act like a professional looking like this?
• Now, instead of constant nausea, I live with constant hunger.  Makes getting work done at clients a little difficult when I have to keep stopping for “snacks”.  I swear, I hardly ate anything the last time I was pregnant.
• I can’t take advil – for anything.
• I can’t take the medication I need to take for the Thrush I’ve had on the back of my tongue since my surgery in July (that was only diagnosed after I found out I was pregnant – great!).  So now, I eat tons of yogurt and take acidophillus supplements to keep that (and any other yeast infection that might want to rear its ugly head) at bay.
• People asking me if I know what I’m having yet – come on people, it’s a baby!  In all seriousness, YOU CAN NOT TELL UNTIL MUCH LATER WHAT THE SEX IS!!!
• People I work with giving me advice on what it is I need to be eating (What, the bagel I just ate doesn’t meet your approval?).  It’s like they think my last child just materialized out of thin air!

Other than that, the pregnancy is going great – I hope.

Responsibility

I’m a bit lost for words.  I got a letter from my nmother a few days ago that I need to respond to – it’s more than twenty pages long.  She basically wrote pages and pages of why I’m so much smarter and better than her and then listed the reasons why.  Most of them have to do with poor decision making on her part.  I’ve made some bad decisions too, but she doesn’t want to hear about those.  She’s all about the “woe is her” mentality right now.  I have no idea how to respond to her, but I promised I’d send her an email this weekend. 

She also wanted advice on what she should do with her failing business.  How am I supposed to give advice on that?  What if it turns out that she follows my advice and it was the wrong thing to do?  I don’t know if I want this responsibility – and from a person I just met a few months ago.  How do I tell her this without hurting her feelings or making her angry with me?

In my other blog I had written about not knowing what to call her.  Right now I’m calling her by her first name.  In the letter she said that it might be nice if I were to call her Mama.  I can’t do that!  It just feels too weird.  Again, how do I tell her this without hurting her feelings?

I’m a little angry that she’s putting me in this position.  I also just recently realized that I’m upset about something regarding my adoption.  I guess I had always assumed that she had given me up because she was not able to look after a baby.  Also, I assumed it was so she could have a chance at making something better of herself.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as if she did.  The business isn’t really hers, it’s her parents’.  She’s been running it since her father died 9 years ago.  It appears that she’s not been doing a very good job at it either.  After I was given up, she went on to have another child just over two years later.  She never finished high school or college.  If she did something as drastic as giving her child away to have a better chance at life, why didn’t she make every effort to do that?  It just doesn’t make sense to me – it actually makes me a little angry.  I guess I just wish that she would finally take responsibility for herself, unfortunately it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

This is my new blog

I’ve started this blog because I was getting a little uncomfortable with who was reading my other blog, so I started this one. 

I was pretty sure members of my first family were reading that blog and, due to that, I didn’t feel free to say what was really on my mind or bothering me.  Hopefully, this one isn’t as easy for them to find.

If you want to read what I’ve said in the past just follow the link above – I think it will be the only time that I will link to it.  In fact, I may only have it linked for a little while.

If you’ve found me from AAAFC or from doing a Google search, drop me a line – I don’t like to feel like I’m being watched by strangers.

I think I need another weekend, to rest from my weekend

I don’t think I mentioned this before – shame on me. 

This past weekend I drove over 9 hours to the location where I should have grown up to meet my half-sisters and spend some time with my natural mother. 

Overall, I think this weekend went pretty well.  I visited quite a bit with my natural mother.  I was hoping to spend more time with her, but when I wasn’t meeting new people I was just so exhausted I couldn’t get the energy to be at the top of my game.  So, instead I chose to have an hour to myself one of the afternoons and later on that evening, and I feel guilty about it.  We were only there for a few days, but with the slew of people I was meeting, as well as the fact that I’m almost seven weeks pregnant, I was just so tired all the time.  Also, my son was pretty overwhelmed with all of the traveling and new people he was beginning to show signs of being unhappy and wanting to go home.  And having to deal with him when he’s not at the top of his game is exhausting to even think about, let alone deal with.  I guess I just wish I had more time there so I wouldn’t have felt like everyone was demanding of my time. 

I did get to meet all three of my half-sisters, a couple of their spouses, and their children.  They all seem like really nice people.  I was hit with a few bits of information that I was not expecting.  I think I have to process how I feel about it first before I can share – sorry.  I was also able to meet my nmothers’ mother.  She’s a pretty typical 80 something year old.  I didn’t really expect to be meeting her so I didn’t think about whether I wanted to ask her anything.  Oh well, maybe another time. 

The 9+hour drive there went well, as did the drive back – our four year old is a real trooper when it comes to long car/plane trips.  I did almost jump out of the car while it was going 60 mph yesterday because a spider appeared on the inside of the windshield right in front of me.  Thankfully I showed some restraint and begged my husband to stop the car to kill it instead.  I jumped out of the car once it had stopped so he could do the deed without it getting botched and landing on me.  I am petrified of spiders, so to be confined with one so close to me was really scary – even if it was only the size of nickel.  My husband said that he was really proud of me for not jumping out of the car while it was moving, as it would have been a little difficult to explain to the cops why I would rather kill myself and our unborn child over such a small spider – a tarantula might be understandable, but a teeny tiny one probably not.  Hah hah, he thinks he’s so funny sometimes. 

Exhaustion is starting to set in again – between that and the nausea it’s amazing I get anything done. 

Ta ta for now!