pregnant

At least I didn’t burn the house down

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I have run out of patience for my coworkers in the past, so I’m hesitant to call this a pregnancy symptom, but I’m pretty much calling EVERYthing a pregnancy symptom nowadays, so maybe…?

Anyway, just about everyone at work sucks today. Nearly every person I spoke to asked stupid questions or had us rehash decisions that had been made weeks ago or couldn’t follow basic instructions or figure out logical next steps on their own.  I spent much of the day really really really annoyed.

Then work ended and I mostly got over it.  But then I did another thing that I’m pretty sure I can blame entirely on pregnancy brain.  I made dinner tonight, and John came downstairs, went into the kitchen.  The ravioli was draining in the sink, the salad was in a bowl…”Did you make sauce?”

Uhhhh…you mean the sauce that’s still in the jar in the cabinet?  Because by “make”, we mean “heat up”.  Let’s not kid ourselves about how I cook.  “How about we do the olive oil and parmesan thing instead?”  So not a disaster by any definition, but certainly a slip of the brain.

Eating is hard

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This whole I-need-to-eat-every-two-hours-or-else-I-get-faint-and-cranky thing is getting OLD.  And it doesn’t seem to matter how much or how little I eat for dinner or how early or late I eat dinner, I always go to bed feeling bloated and gross.  During the day, I feel okay except that I haven’t mastered snacking (so, not bloated and gross, but hungry/faint/generally ugh).  Hold on – announcement:

I AM NOT LOOKING FOR SNACKING ADVICE.

Thank you.  I have the internet, I have my What to Expect book, I have info from the doctor.  I’m just bad at it right now.  But I’m trying.  Today, I went to the store at lunchtime and stocked up.  I have fruit (strawberries, raspberries, bananas, although the bananas aren’t even close to ripe yet), yogurt, granola, two kinds of granola bars, and applesauce.  I already had plenty of bread and crackers and peanut butter, and I’m not in the mood for carrots or celery or whatever, so I didn’t get those today.  I think what I’m missing are nuts, like almonds or something.  Ooooh, wait.   I have creme brulee almonds.  Does the creme brulee flavoring undo the nutritional value of the almonds?  I’m going with no.

Let’s review today:

Breakfast: Toast with peanut butter (usually I slice banana on top, but I was out)

Late morning snack: hard-boiled egg

Just prior to and after my lunchtime workout (and while grocery shopping): granola bar

Lunch: Yogurt (fruit-on-the-bottom) and granola

Snack: Applesauce

Right now: Hungry and cranky and mildly headache-y because my applesauce was gone over two hours ago and I was stuck on a client meeting and applesauce isn’t a very filling snack to begin with and I NEED TO EAT RIGHT NOW.

Saturday night head explosions

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John and I rent a townhouse in Providence.  Moving to Providence was the next step in figuring out where we want to live, settle, buy a house, and so far, we really like it.  We LOVE our neighborhood.  We’re not in any hurry to buy a house (still, although if we find one we like at a price we’re cool with, we might), and so the plan was to give this townhouse a full year, or at least get through the summer, and decide if we wanted to renew the lease or find another place.

That was the plan until our recent happy news.  Now, we know we have to move when our lease is up.  It would be easy to have an infant here, but once that baby starts to crawl…not so easy.  The entire first floor, with the exception of the entryway and the kitchen, which are both tiled, is old hardwood floor.  The old part is important – it was installed when you still nailed the floorboards down from the top.  So the entire first floor has row upon row upon row of tiny nails that are constantly popping up and ripping socks and hurting our feet.  No kidding – John keeps a hammer in the dining room cabinet.  Hammering down nails in the floor is nearly a daily occurrence.  Yes, we have a big area rug in the living room, but it’s not wall-to-wall carpeting.  A crawling baby on hands and knees on that floor?  I don’t think so.

Also, I think I take back the part where I said it would be easy to have an infant here.

  1. The stairs are twisty and steep.  And slippery.
  2. EVERY FLOORBOARD IN THE ENTIRE HOUSE CREAKS.  LOUDLY.  It is impossible to sneak around in this house.  If one of us is awake and moving, we’re both awake.  If this baby is a light sleeper…
  3. The back door (where we park) is hard to navigate if you have anything in even one hand.  It has stairs, a sharp turn, a railing that makes the space really small, a heavy storm door that opens out and takes up the remaining space, and an inner door that requires two hands to open (one to turn the key, one to turn the knob).  I have issues with it when I’m carrying groceries.  How will I handle that when I’m carrying a carseat with a baby in it?

Sure, none of this is insurmountable, but it’ll be a huge pain, and we can move, so we’re planning to.  Where?  NO IDEA.  I mean, somewhere in New England, but…that doesn’t help all that much.  So to find out, we’re going to drive all over New England most weekends for the next few months and scout.

Last Saturday, we headed to southern New Hampshire, which, to our complete and utter surprise, is only an hour away from us on a Saturday morning (because no traffic around Boston).  We drove around Nashua, Derry, Hooksett, Concord (lunch and a little walking, too), and Henniker.  Nashua and Concord are firmly on our list, and we’ve discovered that we probably don’t want to move to a town smaller than Concord (pop. 42K).  (Of course, that disqualifies all of Vermont except Burlington.  We’ll see.)  We got back home, tired and cranky from our long day in the car, and started talking about Providence.  Why have we essentially written off Providence after one day’s jaunt to New Hampshire?  Well, we haven’t.  We like it.  You know what?  Let’s focus on Providence for a while.  And then we realized one big thing we haven’t discussed AT ALL: schools.  The freakout began.  When we were thinking about kids years ago, it was easy.  We lived in the best (sometimes second best) school district in Virginia.  No thought required.  And while Rhode Island schools on the whole are pretty good, Providence schools SUCK.  Apparently.  Based on a couple of days of frantic research.  Everyone who lives in the neighborhood we want to settle in sends their kids to one of the three private schools nearby.  We are NOT doing that.  We went from “huh, New Hampshire could be it” to “Wait, we really like Providence, let’s just stay here” to “WE CAN’T RAISE OUR KID IN PROVIDENCE SCHOOLS AND OH MY GOD HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIND A PLACE TO LIVE THIS IS TOO HARD UNFAIR UNFAIR UNFAIR UNFAIR!!!!” in the space of two hours Saturday night.

Fun times.  And NO, this was not just me and my hormones.  John was right there with me, although he was more constructive about it.

We’re better today.  The plan for now is to check out the rest of Rhode Island, see what’s out there, see what towns we might like to live in and afford on OH YEAH HALF OF OUR CURRENT INCOME possibly – exactly what I’m going to do for work, both short and long term is still very much TBD.

It’ll be fine.  We’re not obsessed with making sure we live in the best school district ever – our bar for that is pretty reasonable, I think.  It was just such a shock to realize that we had NEVER considered schools in our plans to move around and find our perfect place to live.  We didn’t think we’d have to.

Was I going to say something?

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Is this pregnancy brain?  When I think I wrote something yesterday but it turns out I didn’t even have a draft?  How about when, at 4pm on one day, I schedule an 8:30 meeting for the next day, and then forget to call in to it?

It started snowing, I made hot chocolate, John is going to start cooking soon, and I am going to read my book.  You just try and stop me.

I’m still here

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Hi.  I’m back (as you may have noticed after the last few days of semi-consistent posting).  I’m sorry I went mostly dark, but I was trying really really hard not to talk about something, and when I’m bursting to talk about something, I can’t think of anything else to say.  I’m fine in person (although I went almost full hermit, so I didn’t have to test that very often), but for blogging purposes, it basically elbowed everything else out of my head.

But hey, the secret is out (THANK GOODNESS), and my head feels clearer.

I’m not being deliberately enigmatic.  I mean, I am, but not with the intention of leaving anyone in the dark.  It’s just that I don’t tend to get too personal here, so it feels kind of weird.  On the other hand, I plan to talk about it (or at least not NOT talk about it), so for the maybe ONE person who reads me who isn’t an immediate family member or high school/college friend: I’m pregnant.  Yay, happy dance, and all that stuff.

You know what?  I am going to talk about it.  Because it STILL doesn’t feel quite real, and it’s kinda freaking me out.  That it doesn’t feel real, I mean.  Despite the fact that less than a week ago I was at the doctor’s office and I heard the baby’s heartbeat, it appears that I need further proof.  (I mean, maybe that tiny fast heartbeat was just a clever ruse because the doctor is in on this charade or maybe it’s a tiny mechanical device, like a pacemaker, that somehow got implanted or hey, maybe it’s a tiny ticking bomb (and you know what?  it kind of is).  I’m not showing yet, and my first trimester symptoms have been pretty mild, with the exception of OH MY GOD THE WORST TASTE IN MY MOUTH ALL THE TIME except when I’m eating which means I want to eat ALL THE TIME but eating for two isn’t really a thing and gaining too much weight too fast is a BAD thing and also I’m supposed to drink a TON of water and water TASTES BAD because of this awful taste and please please please make it go away as this trimester ends….

It is getting slightly less unbearable, so I have hope.  Also, I have noticed actual feelings of lightheadedness and weakness when I need to eat something, which is new and unusual and super not fun.

So I’m looking forward to LOOKING pregnant.  I think.

Oh, also, we’re calling unborn child Hugo (Hugo Nebula when we’re being formal) until he or she is born because due to the timing, we will not be able to go to WorldCon for the Hugo Awards.  Turns out they don’t let women on planes when they’re THAT pregnant.  Color me disappointed, but there will be other years.  Our little baby nerd will go to LOTS of conventions with us.