Anyway, recently I HAVE been blogging a little bit. Just not over here. I started up a new blog just after New Years where I’m talking about things that are specifically baby related. I mostly started it for my mother who lives in Northern California and will only be able to see her granddaughter a handful of times a year and also I thought it might be nice to keep all that stuff in one place in case B wants to read it when she’s older (while avoiding some of the more colorful moments I’ve had over here).

I figured I’d hold on to this blog though for the next time I have a good tequila fueled, almost-getting-arrested type story.

So if you are reading this and feel the need to keep up with me for the rest of my pregnancy and my journey into being responsible for a small human – which will be wrought with peril and mayhem, I’m sure – please visit me at Our Life With Betty. Someday soon I hope to edit it a little to make something a little more visually my style. Stock templates make me all twitchy.

First of all, this is one of those things that I want to document in full because my perinatal center is one of those that does not allow video taping. Oh how I WISH my husband could have filmed my reaction to finding out the sex of the baby on Monday.  I can’t imagine a moment that I will ever experience that kind of emotion again for the rest of my life. Come to think of it, maybe it’s kind of a good thing M wasn’t holding our flip video cam, because he probably would have dropped it or thrown it across the room and destroyed it when the tech told us the news. Out of pure joy of course.

Going in to this appointment, I was VERY nervous. This was the BIG ULTRASOUND. The one where we get to see all the inner workings of my precious little person and make sure that all the parts are where they should be and functioning in whatever correct way they are supposed to. I spend a fair amount of time on internet pregnancy sites and so have been exposed to stories of a wide variety of possibilities that can be found in these ultrasounds. Basically, I scared the ever-living crap out of myself. You know the worst thing a pregnant woman can do? Google stuff. My brain knew that and yet…I still did it. I cannot blame anyone but myself for my pre-scan anxiety.

We get to the hospital and I’m practically hyperventilating into my bottle of Simply Orange that I bought on the drive over to get baby all sugared up for the appointment. (And it was working…I have been able to see occasional outside kicks for a couple weeks now and was watching my stomach jump around as we sat in the waiting room. CUTEST. THING. EVER.) My appointment was at 11am, but M and I were forced to sit and wait for an additional 20 minutes. I probably wouldn’t have minded so much if some rude cow wasn’t having a way-too-loud conversation on her cell phone in the middle of the office the entire time. Lucky for her, the tech finally called my name right as M and I were about to launch a hostile takeover of said phone.

So of course before we got started, I had to pee because when I get nervous I pee 11 times an hour whether I’m pregnant or not. After taking a few moments to compose myself in the restroom, I was up on the table with gel all over my tummy and the scan was underway.

OMG Mini was so much BIGGER this time than at 12 weeks! (Yeah I know…that’s what happens when a baby grows, but it was still amazing to see.) And so hyper! (I apologized profusely for drinking the orange juice.) The tech seemed to be getting all the shots she needed though; we saw the brain and the heat pumping away with all 4 chambers, the umbilical cord, and the spine, and everything looked so great and measuring right on track. We checked out  the little face, and the little hands (we even got a thumbs up!) and the cute little feet. She took some ADORABLE pictures of my little superstar’s profile…

…and then asked us if we were ready to find out the sex.

Let me preface this by saying that going in to this appointment, I had been 100% sure that Mini was a little boy. I will admit that I was originally kind of hoping for a girl , but obviously first and foremost we wanted a healthy baby, so I started telling myself that baby was a boy to get used to the idea of having a son. I guess I did a REALLY good job of convincing myself too, because when the tech said:

“You are having a little GIRL!”

I screamed “OH MY GOD!” like 10 times and started weeping uncontrollably all over myself and M and the tech who was passing me tissues as fast as she could. That moment still holds so much emotion for me that I am crying a little as I type this.

Obviously I can’t say for sure what my reaction would have been if I had been told that my princess was a prince, but I can pretty much guarantee that there would have been nowhere near that level of shock. I am STILL in shock. I just cannot believe I’m having a little girl. My mommy intuition totally sucks.

So now we are in full girl preparation mode! We already had nursery ideas planned for either outcome and it’s so much fun to start working on it. I love being able to refer to her as a “she” now and use her name when I talk to her. It was all real before, but now it’s REALLY real…especially for my husband. Miss Betty already has daddy wrapped around her little finger. We just can’t wait to meet her.

How far along: 17 weeks + 1 day. (160 days to go! OMG that is not a lot.)

How big is baby: According to the Bump, who likes to compare baby size to various fruit and veggie items, Mini is the size of an onion this week.

I sort of take issue with where The Bump might be getting their produce because the ones they have assigned to each week have tended to be freakishly small or large compared to the previous week. Like…a lemon is three times bigger than a lime and nearly the same size as an orange. I’d love to know where they are getting these steroid lemons.

Total weight gain: As of last Wednesday, 6 pounds total since the beginning of my pregnancy. I’m pretty sure at least half of those are in my bra.

Sleep: Is starting to get kind of uncomfortable. My hips hurt when I wake up. I guess it’s time to invest in one of those giant body pillows.

Maternity Clothes: I just got my first pair of maternity jeans yesterday and I don’t know what I ever did without them. I can finally give the finger to the stupid Target BeBand that I’ve been using to hold my pre-pregnancy jeans up. It’s nice that I can still kind of wear my other pants, but I will not miss that stretchy piece of fabric riding up around my waist every time I get out of my chair. I also got some awesome leggings. Now it just needs to not be 80 degrees outside so I can enjoy wearing them.

Food cravings : None. Food cravings went out the window after first trimester ended. I’ve just been eating pretty much the way I used to, except in greater quantities.

Food aversions: Fruit, but I hated fruit before too.

Symptoms: I’d love to be able to eat something and not get epic heartburn from it. A bagel with cream cheese is not supposed to give you heartburn dammit.

Movement: YES. OMG it’s the coolest thing ever and I can already tell I’m going to miss it when Mini is on the outside. It’s not constant or anything yet, but just about every day (usually in the evening) there will be a period of some fidgeting around in there and last night I felt a few distinct kicks in one spot (or really more like taps because the little feet in there are still so small).

Boy or Girl?: WE FIND OUT IN 13 DAYS!!! Let the betting begin….

What I’m looking forward to: Duh…finding out if Mini is a boy or a girl. I seriously cannot wait. We have a great name picked out  for either situation and I want to start using it. Referring to the baby as “he-or-she” all the time is getting tedious and I feel like a crappy parent if I say “it”.

What I miss: Hot yoga. Or just any kind of strenuous yoga. I love prenatal, but it’s just not the same. I can’t move like I used to. I hope my body remembers how to do all my tricks after the baby gets here.

Next appt: October 10th. ANATOMY SCAN!

And of course my belly:

Mini and I are going on a trip tomorrow! Sans M because he has to work and also I suspect that the thought of spending an extended period of time with his mother-in-law wasn’t registering very highly on the vacation fun-o-meter. It’s okay. I have a built in travel partner and we fully intend on enjoying this flight, which I’m thinking will be my last for at least until Mini is out of diapers. Airplane bathrooms terrify me enough as it is without having to deal with that kind of mess in there.

I haven’t seen my mom in a year. Mostly because she went and got all inaccessible on me by packing up and moving about as far away as she could get while still being in the continental US. I haven’t been to California since I lived there three years ago and now that I don’t feel like crap all the time, I’m pretty darn excited for my visit. In the time I was there, I only got a chance to visit the northern part of the state a handful of times (if I had driven that distance north from my house now, I’d be in Boston or Canada or something), so there will be a lot of new stuff for me to see.

Good AND bad apparently.

You see…my mom and her boyfriend have been dealing with a certain infestation. I might have been a little more excited while preparing for my trip if I had been left in the dark about this, but no. They would rather send me a picture of one of their uninvited house guests.

Oh HELL no.

This isn’t the exact photo that was sent to me. I think I deleted that one out of fear the second it hit my inbox. but this guy looks remarkably similar to one they found hanging out under a mattress in the house. Like a bed mattress. As in the kind you sleep on. Mom’s boyfriend (we’ll call him B) has already been stung by one and nearly by another that got on him while he was sleeping. And I swear to god…if one of those things gets on me while I’m sleeping, you will all know about it right when it happens because you will be able to hear me screaming all the way from Sacramento.

Apparently there is a little system in place in the house right now where the undersides of pillows (omg omg omg omg omg omg) and mattresses and the insides of shoes (can you even $#@*ing IMAGINE!?) are checked thoroughly before heads and bodies and feet are rested on and in these things. Needless to say, learning about the system didn’t really make me feel that much better because as you can see from the photo, scorpions have many legs that they can use for walking and no amount of checking my shoe would stop one of those jerks from climbing up on my face in the middle of the night.

It quickly became obvious that they had really freaked me out.

Then a couple days ago, B sent me a text informing me that he thinks these critters stowed away in his stuff when he moved from Arizona. I’ve watched enough Discovery Channel to know that they live in Arizona, so I guess this is a completely plausible theory. Whether or not he is just telling me this to make me feel better, I’m not sure, but I will continue to hold on to it with every fiber of my being or else I am destined to not sleep at all for the next week.

I’m still going to be checking pillows, mattresses, and shoes even if no one else is doing it anymore. Better safe than in the hospital with scorpion inflicted injuries.

Bon voyage.

I use the word “celebrities” loosely in some cases because some of the current preggosaurs include such irrelevants as Tori Spelling, Hilary Duff, Mel B of the Spice Girls, and Rebecca Gayheart. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t she kill someone with her car at some point? If so, I think it’s pretty telling that that’s the only thing I remember her for.

Anyvehicularmanslaughter, there are also a couple of legitimate famous people in Hollywood that are all knocked up and garnering lots of attention right now. Pun totally intended because one of them is Jennifer Garner.

The Garner-Afflecks announced that they were expecting their third baby last week, but really…who the heck did she think she was fooling wearing those hobo-sack clothes for the past couple months? I’m happy for them though; they seem like a really nice family. Maybe this one will be a boy though I would be interested in what sort of name they would come up with for a third girl. They started off fairly vanilla and got progressively more “creative”, so maybe the third would have a random number or an ampersand thrown in there or something.

Now then. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve already heard about this…the ultimate of all pregnancy thunderstealers:

I think we are due right around the same time and she’s SO lucky I decided to go the low-key route and not announce Mini via vlog by showing off my bump and wearing MY purple bedazzled jacket. (Because you know I have one. GO RAVENS!) I totally let her have this one. You’re welcome, Beyonce.

In all seriousness though, good for them. I bet they will be really cool parents. Beyonce and Jay-Z have always struck me as the kind of celebrity power couple that will be together for the long haul. Like the Garner-Afflecks up there. And the Stefani-Rossdales and Gwyneth Paltrow and that guy from Coldplay.

Sadly it took me like 5 minutes to think of any other important Hollywood duos that have actually been together for any significant period of time. Two of those couples are even kind of pushing it as far as importance is concerned.

Who is your favorite celeb couple? How about your favorite celebrity baby?

My answer will always be Mini.

As always, thank you to Google for providing me with pictures for the blog.

]]> http://www.saltsays.com/?feed=rss2&p=6790 28 http://www.saltsays.com/?p=6773 http://www.saltsays.com/?p=6773#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:08:30 +0000 Salt http://www.saltsays.com/?p=6773 My wonderful husband purchased me the cutest little pregnancy journal shortly after we found out that I am expecting. (For the record, I HATE when women say things like “WE are pregnant” or “when WE have the baby”. He’s not the one toting around the mini-human and he certainly won’t be the one who has to push said mini-human out later.)

Let me just tell you what an epic failure I have been when it comes to filling that thing out. I hope this isn’t a reflection on how I’m going to be as a parent.

It was fun at first, but then the morning sickness kicked in really bad and I wasn’t taking a lot of joy in describing how wretched I felt every week, nor do I think that Mini will take a lot of joy in one day reading about how sick s(he) made mommy. At least until Mini is a teenager and hates me and then I’m sure my previous miseries will be the funniest thing ever.

The original plan was to document things on my blog too. (Which I can do now that I outed myself YAY!) After listening to my 13 year old brother bitch and moan endlessly about having to read one book this summer for school (ONE. ONE BOOK. When I was his age, I swear we had to read at least 400 books for summer reading.) I thought it would be nice to have my pregnancy documented on the more-angsty-teenager-friendly Internet as well in case Mini wants to read it. Then s(he) can go back into my blog archives and read all about the time I dressed up like a bee in the snow or got stuck in a bike rack after a long night of drinking  or ate a grilled cheese with the plastic still on it and be totally embarrassed by the fact that I am his/her mom.

Part of this documenting includes taking pictures of my expanding midsection. I actually started to take photos at around 8 weeks and I look just about the same now as I did then. Except that back then the bump was all retained water and now the bump is baby and probably also tacos. Strangely enough, once I got through the REALLY nauseous stage, tacos suddenly always seem like a good idea. So do things drowning in hot sauce. This pregnancy is weird.

So there you have it. Mini Salt at 12 and a half weeks. I’m right on the cusp of “Aww look at her baby belly!” and “Geez what the hell has Salt been eating lately?”

Answer? Tacos.

I will enjoy still being able to tie my shoes while I still can.

I am also green (in the face) with envy because obviously it wasn’t that bad for them if they only felt like crap in the morning. A couple weeks in M asked me if it was actually called “mourning sickness” because I was in such a dire state 24/7. Or because I was such a miserable pain in the ass that he was in a state of mourning for having to live with me. Either way, I had heard stories, but wasn’t expecting it to be that bad. I even foolishly thought that I could be one of those few people that avoid it all together! No such luck. It basically felt like I had the world’s most disgusting hangover and I didn’t even get to go out and have any fun to get it.

Another reason I have been absent from the Internet besides the whole ‘terrible at keeping secrets’ thing was because I felt so rotten most days that it hurt to look at a computer screen. As I’m sure you can imagine, this caused some problems at my job that requires me to look at a computer screen for 8 hours a day. As of today, I am exactly 12 weeks and 3 days pregnant and feeling mostly better, aside from a few waves of nausea throughout the day, but weeks 5 through 9 were pretty much a non-stop, morning, noon, and night gag-fest.

The only thing that made me feel moderately better at any point was eating and so I was eating constantly. Somehow I have managed to not turn into a rhinoceros at this point even though most days naps after work trumped a date with the elliptical trainer.  (Although I’m not even going to pretend that I can button my pants right now.)

The thing is, with all the constant shoving of food in my face, I could only actually eat like two things without my stomach revolting against me: bagels and these:

I suppose there are much worse things that I could have been eating besides organic spaghetti o’s shaped like bunnies (like dirt or cigarette butts…have you ever heard those crazy pregnancy craving stories!? EWWWWW!), but it was a little disheartening that my palate had regressed to that of a overly picky 3 year old.

I’m starting to get back to more normal foods now, but I still don’t like a lot of things that I used to. Or a lot of things that I should be eating like fresh fruit.

Speaking of things that I used to like, an upside to the aversions is that the mere thoughts of two things that I used to love and am currently not allowed to partake in – namely my beer and my quad-shot Starbucks drinks – have become so disgusting to me that the temporary break-up has been extremely manageable. I wasn’t planning on cutting out caffeine entirely, but it just kind of happened that way. And I have discovered the outstanding entertainment that is going to a professional sports event and being one of the only sober people there. I certainly hope that I have never been so much of a trainwreck as the crazy-eyed girl who stumbled into the public restroom after me proclaiming that the line was too long and she was going to have to pee in the sink. I was nice and let her go ahead of me. I have to pee A LOT at this point, but I definitely didn’t have to go pee-in-the-sink bad.

For the moms…did you have to deal with terrible morning sickness and weird food restrictions? If you aren’t a mom yet…did I just scare the crap out of you?

Which is today. So without any further ado…

Coming soon to a planet Earth near you in March 2012:

Or it could be the end of February, but I’m not going to bet on it since Mini is spawned from a long line of professional procrastinators.

Hooray! The cat’s out of the bag! And now I can get down to talking about all my fun adventures so far, which have mostly included lying on the couch moaning and feeling like I’m about to die. With 2nd trimester in my grasp, I feel like the pregnancy honeymoon can finally begin. Hopefully.

I’ve missed you, blogland.

Okay that’s not quite true. Peeling, reptilian Salt has been back since Sunday, but it has taken me this long to recover from the 3 previous days of debauchery. I am WAY too old to party like a college student and it’s a good thing they only have this event once a year because I wouldn’t be able to handle anything more than that. Either way I think I had a lot of fun and no one got hurt (aside from a few mystery cuts and bruises).

Lesson learned: If someone hands you a shot and you ask them what it is and they say “I don’t know”, it is probably best to not drink it.

Anyway, the couple stories I have won’t be in chronological order. I’ll be staring with the last morning I was there, aka: the morning where I felt like the largest amount of crap.

For three days, my car was parked in a safe-enough-looking spot on the street, one block south from the hotel where all the happenings were occurring. My motel (I think the ‘m‘ stood for ‘mildew’) was actually 17 streets below that, but I felt comfortable leaving the car where she was because:

1. She was parked right outside my friend’s condo, and
2. In plain sight of the area where a large amount of the partying was occurring.

Sunday morning, I was awoken (not very early, but it certainly FELT early) by a phone call from a friend that was staying up at the hotel. It was difficult for me to process what she was telling me because my head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton and then lit on fire, but the gist was that I needed to get back up the street ASAP because something had happened to my car. She said there was a ticket on it, but that she hadn’t touched it. And that I might want to call the police.

So obviously this was the point where I started having a massive panic attack. Panic attacks suck when you have a wicked hangover.

Upon arriving on the scene a short time later, this is what I saw:

Okay so…I might have been having a little too much fun over the weekend, but I DO know for a fact that I was originally parked head-in in that spot and also that at no point did I get behind the wheel for three days. I might be an idiot sometimes, but never like that.

So what happened here? I’ll tell you. Because I found a few witnesses that heard/saw it happen.

At some point – late the previous night – a group of gentlemen (I use that term loosely) wearing tee shirts on their heads decided it would be the OMFG FUNNIEST PRANK EVAR to physically lift my car and turn it around. Clearly they were a bunch of sissy, frilly-pink-panty-wearing, girly-men that were too weaksauce to get my car all the way around, so instead they opted to leave me all crooked like that. Nice job, fellas.

Then at 6am, some officer who must have thought that someone was enough of a jackass to park so illegally like that themselves, left that ticket on my windshield…a $30 fine for being improperly parked.

Awesome.

See how my passenger-side wheel looks kind of jacked? That worried me, so I called the police and didn’t touch or move anything until one arrived a respectable 10 minutes later. One thing is for certain…I can’t remember the last time I felt like such a moron as I did trying to explain to the dispatcher over the phone why I needed that cop to come out. I’m sure everyone down at the precinct had a good laugh at my expense.

In the end, my car is not damaged (thank god). Also in the end, the cop, while friendly, was not able to scratch the ticket for me. He realized I was not the responsible party, but said I was either going to have to try to deal with it over the phone or be present in traffic court to plead ‘not guilty’, which will not be happening considering that said traffic court is three hours from my house. So let’s hope the former can happen or else I’m out $30 for something that I didn’t even do.

I guess I should have known that I wouldn’t make it through a weekend that crazy without some sort of law enforcement involvement, but at least that the involvement didn’t actually involve ME getting in any trouble.

And I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised either. I kind of signed myself up for this brand of stupidity when I chose to drive a Smart car.

We did hire movers for Saturday morning and though I thoroughly enjoyed them and their thick Russian accents, the only thing they saved us from was having one of M’s friends come over to help him carry the sofa down three flights of stairs since I sure as hell wouldn’t have been the one doing it.

Only breaking to throw back some Sea Breezes at a friend’s pool party on Sunday evening, we were moving the entire weekend. And we still aren’t done. There is stuff in a storage locker at our old place and if I didn’t know for sure there were a couple things in there that I wanted to keep, I would totally say ‘eff all that’ right now and let the people over there throw it out for us. Unfortch, I just have to have a sentimental attachment to some crappy paintings I did in college and can’t seem to part with them.

After hours of sweating my ass off moving boxes and then hours of inhaling toxic bleach fumes in a dangerously enclosed space as I got the kitchen and bathroom into spotless order (goodbye, brain cells!!), all I really wanted was like 4 gallons of icy cold water and a long shower. Saturday evening was my first shower at our shiny new place, and just like every other move prior to this one, I approached it with a level of uncertainty. One of the only things I consider worse than having to move is the discovery that you have moved somewhere with shoddy water pressure.

I’m sure we’ve all been there before at some point. You’re hot, sore, grimy, tired, and (especially in my case) exceedingly grouchy. All you want is to wash off the stress and gross of the day, and then you anxiously turn on the faucet to be greeted by the most pathetic stream of water you have ever seen. The kind where if you are lucky, you might have the shampoo washed out of your hair in 20 minutes.

Thoughts of the terrible shower at my LA studio apartment filled my brain as pulled the faucet on at our new place. Immediately the water was pouring from the spigot with impressive force. So far so good. Then I tugged on the bit of metal that would transform my bath into a shower and I can only describe the results as ‘GLORIOUS’.

Or ‘FIRE HOSE’.

We have the kind of water pressure that, if turned on all the way, will blow you against the back wall of the shower. There is an adjustable ‘massage’ setting that I am afraid to try out for fear of permanently damaging and/or removing my skin. It felt slightly unpleasant on the sunburn I picked up at Sunday’s pool party, but overall I can’t remember the last time I took such a fast, efficient showers. This is especially awesome considering that we pay for our hot water now.

Have you had any bad water pressure experiences? Is it as awesome at your house as it is at mine!?