Pregnancy Sucks

Riddle: What's worse than puking your brains out on a Friday night because you're totally and completely drunk?

Answer: Puking your brains out on a Friday night because you're not drunk.

I thought I was turning the corner on this morning sickness stuff, but apparently not.

You know that phrase, "Misery loves company"? I woke my husband up in the middle of the night so he could rub my back while I threw up. Then I made him promise me that the baby would love me more than him, because really, it's only fair.

Telling Family I'm Pregnant, Part I

Both my sister and brother live in California, so I wasn't able to tell them in person I'm going to have a baby, but I still wanted to tell them in a fun and creative way. I made them custom cards at Shutterfly using this deal, bringing the cost down to less than what it would cost to buy a greeting card from the drugstore.

I made the custom eye charts for free using this website. I had to play with the wording a little bit to make it fit without the superfluous letters at the end that the program adds. No matter what, the program adds an extra line of letters that I didn't want, so after I saved the image I cropped it using a photo editing program. Then I uploaded the saved file to Shutterfly (you could use any photo printing site, I only used them because I had a coupon code) and order the card.

Once the cards came in the mail I wrote something inside like "Can't believe your eyes? It's true!" and a personal message. I think they both really liked it. I liked that it was a different way to announce my pregnancy. I like to try to be original.

Remembering my Dad

Yesterday would have been my dad's birthday. Chuk and I celebrated with a makeshift picnic down by the river with some of my dad's favorites: shrimp fried rice and Jack and coke. (Don't worry, I skipped the Jack.)

This is such a bittersweet time for Chuk and me. Of course we're so happy to be expecting, but it's hard that we aren't able to share this exciting time with my dad and Chuk's mom. There's not a lot we can do about it, but we sit and reflect and talk and try to heal.

We scattered my dad's ashes in the Pacific Ocean, so it was nice to be by the water and think that there was a little bit of him with us.

Before

After

On another note, this is the first time we've picnicked like this. Is was so easy just to grab take out from the local Chinese restaurant and eat it outside. We don't get delivery or take out very often, but it made the picnic so fast and easy. It seems like such a better alternative to eating in a crappy restaurant or having a pizza in front of the TV. I'm keeping this idea in the memory bank for a cheap date. (The shared order of fried rice was $7 and the soda was $1.25 from the grocery store, and if we did this again we wouldn't have soda. Not bad.)

Made My Day

My sister-in-law sent me this video this morning. My sweet niece, who is the love of my life, has never been able to say my name...until this week. This is the first time I've heard it. So cute! But what makes me even happier is that she is so excited I'm coming to visit her. She kept running to the garage door to look for me. She must know how much I love her. I can't wait to see her next weekend.

This may sound crazy, but is a legitimate fear I have about having a baby, one of my biggest fears is that I won't love my baby as much as I love my niece. I honestly can't imagine loving someone as much as I love her. Chuk assures me I'll love our baby more, but I don't think that's possible. Did any of you ever worry about anything like that? Is this a normal worry? I've never heard anyone talk about it.

*Note: You'll hear my sister-in-law say Chuk's real name in this video. I always call him Chuk though.*

Like a Narcoleptic with Mono

If you don't like reading posts with lots of whining, you should skip this one. Seriously.

The last few weeks have been overwhelming. First, our air conditioner flooded so we had to get the carpet replaced in our hallway. (Why yes, we already had to get the carpet replaced in our hallway a year ago because of an earlier bathroom flood.) BUT, the carpet guy said he couldn't match our carpet color, so he was going to take the carpet out of our office/guest room to patch the hall and then replace the whole room of carpet in the office in a different color. So we had to move everything out of our office and pile it haphazardly into the living room because there was no other place for it.

Of course, then we realized we were going to have to turn that room into a nursery, so it's been coming back together slowly as we Craig's List furniture that is no longer going to work in the space and generally rethink, reorganize, and rearrange everything.

Last weekend, we escaped the chaos at home to go camping and tubing. We planned the trip before Hurricane Irene was on the radar, but since we had already paid for everything, there was no way we were not going to go. Long story short, the trip was aborted after only one night.

Long story long, the first night, I hardly slept at all. I was freezing cold, we had noisy neighbors, I was in pain from accidentally shoving a piece of wood under my fingernail, and I had a migraine. The next morning we drove to out of the mountains to go tubing, which was a complete nightmare. The water was freezing, it started pouring down rain and the wind was pushing us back upstream. The "lazy river" became a "swim for survival" exercise. I said to Chuk more than once, "We're going to die out here!" I may have been melodramatic, but it was torture.

Finally, we finished. We drove back to our camp only to discover that while we had been out all day the storm had destroyed our camp. Most catastrophically, our rain shelter had been pulled out of the ground by the wind and was bent and irreparably broken and our lantern had blown over and was broken into little pieces. So, in the pouring rain with sunset approaching, we found ourselves with no shelter and no light. I made the snap decision we were leaving right now!

We shoved everything we could salvage back into the car even though all of our supplies were soaking wet and drove through much of the night in thick fog and heavy rain back home. We had only been gone about 36 hours, but we had been through so much, it felt like eternity. We were exhausted and hungry, but at least we were in our safe, dry, warm home.

Except scratch that about safe, dry and warm. All of our windows had leaked in the hurricane and water was seeping through the walls too. Our apartment was flooded...AGAIN...except like ten times worse this time. The next morning Chuk rented a carpet shampoo-er to suck the water out of the carpet. He got more than four gallons out of our bedroom alone. Then he shampoo-ed all the carpets. We thought we were good, until we woke up the next morning and the carpets were wet again.

Sigh. My husband works full time in the day and goes to grad school full time at night. I'm still in my first trimester and sleeping like a narcoleptic with mono. There is so much to do, yet Chuk doesn't have the time to do it and I don't have the energy. So it sits. Our apartment smells like mildew and looks like chaos. Our basement is flung with wet, muddy camping equipment; I'm sure our neighbors all hate us now.

I try to breathe deeply and reassure myself it'll get done eventually, but in the meantime, all I do is nap.