Baby G.

Over a year absence from the blog.
I got pregnant. On purpose.
My body dislikes pregnancy. Thirty weeks in, I went into premature labor and was hospitalized for about a week. Six weeks of bed rest followed to prevent me from going into labor too early. My baby arrived 2 days after his due date....
I had a baby boy. A large 9lb. 14oz. baby boy. A planned home birth without any pain medication. I'm a total glutton for punishment.
G was a high needs infant. I haven't slept for longer than a 2 hour stretch in 8 months. My memory is gone.
He is my world and mostly adorable. At 7 months old, he is crawling and loud and hilarious. He is bald and looks exactly like his dad.
I quit my job. I'm now a completely boring person.
I can sing "Hush, little baby" over and over while simultaneously thinking about something else.
I have made wonderful new mom friends. Our playgroups keep me sane.
G went for a jog with his dad today in the jogging stroller. His six month contract with the baby union to scream hysterically in any stroller just expired. This is a wonderful new activity. Half an hour of me time.
It is 40 degrees out today. Infant fuzzy suit required. Bear ears optional.

Generation Gap

My birth year lands on the cusp of Generation X. Recently, I took a Generation X vs. Generation Y quiz and the results failed to surprise me as I fell squarely in the middle of the two. The uses of certain technology were the main distinguishing factors between X and Y.

Text Messages
I will occasionally text message but only to a select few people. I don’t text my parents or all my friends but I do use text as a verb. I send around twenty text messages a month, give or take a few depending on how many of my friends I’m still on speaking terms with. I love text messages; I think they were created for non-social types like me. You can communicate just the necessities without having to have a 10 minute conversation as well.

MySpace
After extreme peer pressure from certain so called friends I broke down and created a MySpace page. I must admit that I find the whole site and experience extremely obnoxious, namely when friends who know my personal and work email address perfectly well send me a message over MySpace. Since I never logon directly to MySpace, when they email me there, that means I get a message in my personal email that I have a MySpace message and I have to log into MySpace to read the stupid message. They could have just as easily sent it directly to my personal email, saving me a step. If you wanted to meet new people, which I’m terrible at, I understand the usefulness of using MySpace email. Not many random people met over the net are TRUSTWORTHY enough to get your true email address. Having worked for a short stint as a web designer all the overdone graphics, songs and misplaced ads on MySpace try my OCD mind crazy. I prefer FaceBook because it has a consistency in style and you can allow certain groups to see your profile and not anyone outside of those groups. I’m trying to work through the irritation with MySpace, because I don’t want to admit that I’m old and grouchy and totally not with it.

IPod
I love my IPod. My husband gave it to me for my birthday (March 7th) and I’m addicted to downloading all my podcasts. My parents had NPR on every morning and every weekend so it is like a security blanket for my siblings and me. Saw Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me when it came through Portland and laughed so hard my stomach hurt the next day, which is really more of a reflection on my lack of motivation to work out than anything else.

YouTube
Does it sum it up to admit that I believed YouTube was spelled UTube for the longest time?

Engagement Counseling
(I came across this unposted blog I wrote sometime in December 2006 and decided to post it instead of coming up with something interesting to write about.)

Remember that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you meet someone special and you think it might turn into something. Maybe you exchange an email or a phone call and any contact with them turns you into a love struck fool. Yeah. Great feeling right? I get that way for about a day or two when I start dating someone. I am somehow missing the necessary genetic coding to be on cloud nine in a relationship for more than about 48 hours. Then I go about dissecting everything and anything that could go wrong. I observe and let every little detail about him sink in. My mind then proceeds to overanalyze every interaction between us, everything said and done and imagined. This causes just a few arguments, hurt feelings, anxiety and otherwise un-fun emotions to come up in the beginning of my relationships.
To answer the obvious question – I have no idea why anyone ever dates someone as high maintenance as me. My brother-in-law and I have a long standing joke about me becoming a crazy cat lady. When I first starting dating the fiancée my BIL invested heavily in crazy cat lady stock because, “you just aren’t flexible enough or willing to compromise enough for a relationship.” Now looks like he will probably lose a bundle on the stock unless of course the fiancée wises up and runs before the wedding day. He claims he shorted the stock but I’m loathe to believe him.
To get married by the fiancée Catholic priest we must attend three counseling sessions. Before attending our first session booklets arrived in the mail with scantrons. We have to fill out the scantrons and mail them on to the processing center. We were asked repeatedly questions addressing finances, children, tempers, personalities, arguing styles and rosy-glasses syndrome. Our first counseling session was on Monday evening. Guess who scored perfectly in not having rosy-glasses syndrome? Me.

My extended absence from my blog excuses:
Wedding
Honeymoon
Moving
Selling House

Wedding achieved without scandal.
Honeymoon achieved without accidental pregnancy.
Moving achieved without anything breaking.
Selling House achieved in 72 hours after a full week of cleaning, painting, touching up, fixing, making pretty. Close date in two weeks. Holding breath.

Husband also ordered his BMW with a scheduled arrive date of May 2nd. I feel sorry for him, really I do. He is getting this beautiful ultimate driving machine – that is me buying into the hype completely and fully – and he might get to drive it on the weekends if he plays his cards right. My commute is over 30 minutes and his commute is 7 minutes for jobs that start at 8:--am. Guess who leaves the house earlier?

I leave tomorrow morning for a girl’s road trip down to Southern Oregon. Last time I ventured into that territory I broke up an engagement. This time I shall to try to limit my damage but I make no promises.

Don’t Touch Me When I’m Sleeping

The day after I met the fiancee, I went home and told my family I had met the man I was going to marry, he just had two almost fatal flaws. I did not let on to the fiancée that I thought this, he would have run for the hills immediately. Do not take this admission that I was in a hurry to get married. I wasn’t. I just somehow knew he was the one. Back to the flaws: 1) he had a live in girlfriend. 2) he had the same name as my ex-boyfriend – the long term, co-habited, took years to get over ex-boyfriend. Now it would be one thing if their name is Jason or Michael or Bob or even Fred. I cannot tell you their name because I promised the fiancée that I wouldn’t revel his identity to the two or three people who read my blog and already know who we are. Just know that it isn’t a particularly common first name. After meeting, the fiancée and I started emailing occasionally until he had eliminated his first flaw from his life. During this time, if I tried to talk to people about him they automatically assumed I was talking about my ex and it could get really confusing.

My roommate at that time and I would cuddle up on the couch with some decadent dessert, most often HoHos and Doritos, and watch Grey’s Anatomy every single Sunday. If the network dared show a repeat I would have to call my best friend in San Francisco so we could both vent about their audacity to not bring us a new show. The disappointment would mean we would have to run out and get beef jerky sticks to go along with the HoHos to stave off the empty feeling it would leave us with. I digress.

Anyway, I found out the fiancée’s middle name was George and my roommate nicknamed him O’Malley from the character George O’Malley on Grey’s Anatomy. From now on, I will refer to him as O’Malley on my blog. When the actor who plays O’Malley, I have no idea his name or nor do I care enough to look it up, came out of the closet, my O’Malley and I had the following conversation:

O’M: So, SB I read online that my namesake came out of the closet.

SB: Yep. I already knew that...

O’M: Does that make you worried about us getting married?

SB: Nope. I’m only marrying you for your money anyway. Doesn’t make a difference to me.

O’M: Shut up, SB.

SB: Make me…

This childish banter leads me to our first meeting with our engagement counselor (try getting married by a Catholic priest, oh yes, the requirements never stop). She told us that our biggest relationship problem hinged on using sarcasm as a weapon. Right. Big news flash there. Though I did enjoy some of her insights and found her engaging and clever, we are both perfectly aware of our behavior. In an argument, O’M will say something condescendingly to which I reply in a condescending tone that if he wants to repeat whatever he said in a non-condescending tone I will listen. To which he will condescendingly reply that he would repeat it if I ask him to in a non-condescending tone. I know, those sentences are a little hard to follow but if you reread them a couple of times it all might make sense. Obviously I could try to rewrite them. But no, I’m not going to.

Despite the sarcasm, I am a firm believer that our relationship will last. Mainly because we both have a don’t touch me when I’m sleeping rule. All you cuddlers and heavy sleepers out that are thinking, "WHAT?". But for us light sleepers, this is a non-negotiable item. He is the first and only man I have ever met that didn’t want to cuddle while sleeping. Who lets me get night after night of beautiful, uninterrupted sleep. To make sure we don’t have any trouble abiding this rule he upgraded from a queen to a California king bed and also purchased a luxurious mattress. I would still prefer to have the whole bed to myself, but with the Cal. King, I willing to compromise and he is allowed to use a quarter of the bed. Since that amounts to about the size of a twin mattress I feel I’m being more than fair.

P.S. I cannot find my glasses anywhere for the last week and the headaches are starting to get obnoxious, if anyone has seen them, please, please return them to me.

P.P.S. We went cake tasting this weekend and they were so darn delicious we are going to have 7 different cakes. We just couldn’t narrow down the flavors more than that.

Mountains of Laundry

I hate doing laundry. I’m not one of those totally undomesticated females for I do love to cook. I will clean if I must. But laundry is my nemesis and nothing, absolutely nothing except running out of underwear actually motivates me to do a load of laundry. In college I owned hundreds of pairs of underwear limiting the necessity of doing laundry to once a quarter. I would throw a few select pieces of clothing in my college boyfriends basket and this extended the not doing laundry period by even a few more weeks. These days the fiancé usually does the laundry but we have been extremely busy lately. Our dirty clothes were crammed into the closet and were starting to sneak out. I would walk downstairs, look down and see that an extra sock had stuck itself to the bottom of my shoe in an honorable attempt to escape from the mountain of laundry. Both the fiancé and I realized something must be done to fix this situation. He needed to do the laundry.

The fiance worked from home yesterday. Nothing like getting up at 6:45am, showering, getting pretty and looking over and see your beloved still lounging in bed. I’ll admit at that moment I hated him and his flexible job. When I got home last night, all that jealously evaporated because he had done load, after load, after load of laundry. We suspect from the smell it was omitting last night that he might have killed our dryer from running it continuously for 8 hours. I had the unimaginable luxury when I got up this morning of a whole lovely closet full of clothes to choose from. I picked out one of my favorite shirts to wear that hadn’t been clean for a good 6 months.

I walked into work this morning to the following email from the fiancé: “I’m going to do laundry all the time if you’re going to look that cute everyday.” Wow. I just hit the laundry jackpot. I won’t do laundry but I can definitely do cute.

Billy and Bob

I just purchased a brand new chest freezer from Lowe’s. The freezer sits in my garage and mocks what it hides inside by shimmering perfectly white and clean. My sister and my brother-in-law raised two steers named Billy and Bob. Recently those steers met their predetermined fate and I purchased what anyone in the know refers to as a “side of beef”. I packed my frozen solid and wrapped in white paper side of beef into my shiny new freezer.

My sister lives close enough that I occasionally helped feed those boys. I helped herd them from pasture to pasture. I knew their names and could tell them apart. But I fail to feel guilty or even queasy about my yummy white packages. One of those packages turned into a delicious Shepard’s Pie last night and I ate two servings. Growing up on a ranch must have permanently warped me. It reminds me of the Far Side cartoon pictured above that my parents sardonically hung on our refrigerator while I was growing up. And now I really have just one question – who is in my freezer – Billy or Bob?