So very much has happened

Since I last wrote, I've had a wonderful visit with my family, a wonderful lake/boating trip, a wonderful baby shower, wonderful gifts, a crashing back to the reality of regular life, and then a whole day of "needle boy" needling with his tiny riverdance feet.

My wonderful visit with my family started out with a cool summer morning getting to sit on the porch and watch the water sprinklers tick. When I was a kid and my parents would watch the water sprinkler, I never understood why that was fun. I get it now! Mom & Dad came out and sat with me and we got to have a good low key visit. One of many throughout the weekend.

On July 4th, we took the boat out on the lake and visited the favorite swimming holes. The water was cool and a beautiful emerald green. Delicious! Not that I drank any of it. There's an old picture of my mom floating in the lake when she was pregnant with my sister with just the baby bump above the water. I wanted a shot like that and we got one!

A cousin of my husband's lives relatively nearby and so does my best friend from high school. They both came to my folks house to visit and we all had a very fun time. Good to see her. It's been maybe 18 months since I'd seen her last! And she got me a camcorder for a baby gift! That's huge! And it's tiny and only the size of a man's fist.

Sunday, our cousin managed to catch a 22 inch bass in the lake cove just below my parent's house. We had never even seen a fish that big in that little cove! He filleted it and ate it and had a blast doing so.

Also on Sunday, off all us ladies went leaving the men to go to a gun show nearby. I'm glad they had a very guy thing to go do, seeing how they wanted to stay as far from the baby shower as possible. The shower was so much fun!!! Lots of wonderful stuff, extremely yummy cake, and I got to see a lot of family and friends that I hadn't seen in nearly 10 years. Mom had made me two fleece baby blankets and a dozen burp cloths with very cute little boy cloth patterns on the back. A dozen is a lot! And I now have plenty of burp cloths. Mom and Dad also bought me a car seat exactly like I wanted. We had to take it out, put 8 lbs of sugar in the carrying part and haul it around for fun. My best friend's mom had made me an afghan, hat and booties by hand with bright yellow and green stripes on white. Very soft and cuddly. My sister gave me a high chair and all the shower stuff. She had the cake made exactly like the little invitations she sent out! And the cake was very yummy too.

The amazing thing (to me) about the shower was that during the probably 90 minutes where I was the center of attention, I didn't say a single embarrassing or stupid thing! I was shocked. My depressive little mind loves to go over things and over them again until I find something to feel guilty about when I wake up at 4:30 in the morning. I can't think of a single thing to feel guilty about. If you were there and know of something dumb I did, please don't tell me. I rather like this little disillusion.

We all had a multiple lovely swims in the cove below my parent's house. Lots of sitting around in the cool mornings or cool evenings with way too many snacks and plenty of healthy food as well. Monday morning, it even rained! A rare thing for where we were in Texas. We sat on the covered porch and watched, letting the dog chase balls in the rain. So wonderfully peaceful.

We packed all the little shower gifts into a huge suitcase and Mom and Dad will drive the rest (car seat and high chair) to my house in early September. The plane ride back was miserable just because I'm 7 months pregnant, but that's how it goes. We got home, and all I had the energy for was sprawling horizontal on the bed listening to the cat lecture me on leaving her alone for 4 days.

As a result of my lack of motivation on Monday night, I didn't have clothes planned out or lunches prepared for the rest of the week. This fact ruined most of Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Then I'm slightly depressed because I didn't get anything done and as a result, don't get anything done when I am at home. Vicious cycle. Finally, Wednesday, my best (camcorder) friend's husband is in town for a work conference and we're meeting him for dinner. The result of this was that I had an extremely productive 45 minutes at home between work and dinner which made me feel extremely accomplished. After our good visit and dinner, I made myself buy three things at the store on the way home and then put in another extremely productive 30 minutes at home before crashing into bed. All this productivity (and getting to bed on time) allowed me to wake up not feeling guilty for my lack of activity and I therefore had ANOTHER 30 minutes of productivity this morning before work. Also, it's amazing how much better my morning goes when I know what I'm wearing and what I'm eating for lunch when my eyes first open. Weird, I know.

The trick for tonight is to try to be productive while my husband isn't home. Something about when he's not there that I just sit on my butt in front of the TV feeling rotten for doing just that. Then when I hear the car pull up, I wish that I had some accomplishment to brag about having done while he was gone. It's not like he's a slave driver and wants to know what good I've been doing and I "better have a good answer, young lady". He's never mad at me if I've just been lazy all evening. The only things he gets upset about are when I STILL haven't mended his pants or I STILL haven't tried to get that stain out of his shirt. I wonder if I asked him to ask me what I've done when he gets home if I would enjoy the recital of chores done, or hate that he asked. Perhaps I shouldn't ask him to start that habit. Perhaps I should just bring up my list when I have a list to recite. If I said all cheery, "listen to what I've gotten done and then brag on me," I'm sure he could do his part by saying 2 sentences of how great the list is. And if I don't have a list of things done, I could just keep my mouth shut. It's never a good idea to start a policy (policy of always asking what I've done) that I could easily resent. It's also never good to start a policy that involves him guessing as to when I want the policy enforced. Never count on a man to read your mind. It will never turn out well.

Oh, then there was needle boy yesterday. For about 8 hours straight yesterday, the baby poked me non-stop. Never any real vicious kicks. More like how you would poke someone to get their attention or wake them up. But it never stopped all day long! So all my guts were constantly giggling all day long. That gets really old after a while. It's like having butterflies in your stomach for 8 hours straight. Walking didn't help. Eating didn't help. Pressing in on a spot he was needling only resulted in about 10 seconds of non-movement followed by more Irish step-dance 3 inches away. And sometimes he would step-dance directly on my bladder. It's really frustrating to go to the bathroom and hardly pee at all, even though you really really had to go. So that's my big complaint about not being comfortable while pregnant. Pretty wimpy, huh. We should all have it so rough.

But I'll focus on all the good things that have happened recently and how productive I've been lately. You know, I've had a wonderful visit with my family, a wonderful lake/boating trip, a wonderful baby shower, and wonderful gifts. A truly wonderful long July 4th weekend!

The holidays

Aren't the holidays wonderful! I of course mean these mid-summer holidays. July 4th, hubby's birthday, nephews birthday, parents anniversary, annual pilgrimage to my folks house for lake festivities, and this year, a baby shower there for me! And most folks at work take advantage of the three day weekend by planning their own vacations for the same time, effectively getting a 5 day vacation while only using 2 days of vacation time from work. My boss is doing this too, which means that I can't start on my next big project until she gets back to do her preliminary stuff. So what am I going to dooooo! Which of my "must be done before baby arrives" chores can be done at my office?

Let's see, I can catch up the 10+ year journal, but that's nearly done anyway. My 10 year journal is this wonderful journal that gives you 4 lines to fill per day for 11 years, all in one book. Filling four lines isn't daunting and I freely allow myself to skip whole un-eventful days or just put in 3 words or whatever. If I have more to say than 4 lines, there's overflow pages in the back. I've been doing it since 2004 and it's been handy and informative. I noticed that I got "sick" every year during the same days that the leaves first appeared in the forest out back. Well, duh, that would just be allergies. And since I've noticed that, I hit the allergy meds pretty hard about that time each year and save myself being sick. Pretty cool! Also, it's easier to keep track of car repairs, when did we get the cat, how long have they been married, which year did the furnace die in February leaving us cold for a week, how old is that child now, and other big important things like that. I've started keeping small weather reports there too. Just the high, the low and how much rain we got. I was completely sold on this 10+ journal while breakfasting with hubby's grandparents one day years ago. Hubby's grandfather reached over during breakfast, took a journal off the shelf at random and turned to that days date. "On this date in 1964, Tom hit his first home run." He snapped the book closed, shelved it, and we talked about that day for 5 minutes. Very cool!

So I could completely finish getting the 10+ year journal up to date. I could address Christmas cards for this year (we've got them already in the attic anyway). Yes, I'm that nerdy. With baby boy arriving in October, how likely is it that Christmas cards will get done if I wait until November to do them? And I plan on sticking one photo of baby boy in the cards this year. Birth announcements and Christmas cards all in one! I could caption all the photo albums. I've got nearly a year's worth of pictures to do that with right now. They are printed and in 2 albums though! That's half the battle! I got the Ireland photo album captioned a couple weeks ago - only 9 months after returning from the trip. Good thing I had captioned the digital versions. There was already a lot of details I'd forgotten.

I still print my digital photos out because media storage is always changing and you never know if jpeg file formats will really be around in 30 years. If you just keep them in your computer, they could get lost, damaged, or technology could move on without them. If you save them to home-made CDs, those don't last more than about a year and then you've got nothing. One thing about preserving photos for 50+ years is that printed photos will stand the test of time. They may fade or turn slightly red (or some other color) but the basic image will very likely still be visible 50 years from now. And you won't need a special gadget to look at it, just your own eyes. You can still see if your daughter looks like your great-grand mother when SHE was 30. And that's what photos are for. To clear up the edges of our mental pictures.

My cold/allergies have gotten better! I think due to the fact that I ran our air filter on high for 4 hours in the bedroom yesterday evening. Much less congestion this morning and I'm coughing up less stuff. That was graphic. Sorry. We went on a 2 mile walk yesterday and my foot isn't any worse! Very refreshing to go for a walk again.