My Beautiful Big Girl

Good news first:

• My sister is coming, my sister is coming! She is the one who is going to watch my girls while I have the baby and probably stay for about a week after to help take care of them. I am SOOOOOO thankful for her. She is coming out for three days this week to learn her way around as far as school and swim lessons and such. The only downside to depending on her is that she lives in the OC, and I live about 75 miles north. Should be no big deal, right? Well, if you live or have ever lived in So. Cal., you know that driving to, from or in Orange County is one of the most loathsome experiences on the planet. I would really love to get down there more often, but it might as well be a pilgrimage to Mecca. On foot. From London. With a bad ankle. During a Holy month. Ok, that’s a little dramatic, but I’m not too, too far off.

The only other concern is that my sister does not drive on the freeway. I think she has PTSD from a car accident 3 years ago, because it was never a problem before that. Now, she will have a panic attack and have to pull over to the side of the road. This means that either her husband (busy at work), my other sister (flake, though I love her dearly), or my mom (gasp!) will have to drive her out when I go into labor. This could cause a bit of a delay, but I have plenty of people who would be glad to take my girls in the interim. I just hope it’s not at 2am. I also hope that she does not have to rely on my mom to bring her out. She always has to get her snarky two cents in about my religion or my husband or how I raise my kids. “Oh, you have everything so regimented!” Ok, three meals a day, no more than 2 hours of TV, and a bedtime. Oh, and they’re not allowed to drink a gallon of juice and snack on cookies all day. I guess some would call that a regimen. I call it basic order. It’s not like we punch a clock nor do we have a billion activities consuming our time. I guess it’s just hard for her to understand, since we had NO structure in our house growing up. Every time I set a limit, she says, “Oh, I just let you kids do whatever you wanted.” Great. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, and my good news has turned into a rant about my mother. Darn!

• I only gained a pound at my last OB visit! Yay!
• My Christmas shopping is 90% done. Just have to order a few books for hubby.
• The house is officially decorated inside and out.



Now the not so good:

• I have some weirdness going on in my mouth, more specifically with my tongue. I think it might be Thrush (gross! ). I need to go to the Dr. tomorrow and have it checked out.
• I have spent the past two nights wedged in between my feverish child and my extra cuddly husband. Normally, we don’t have kids in the bed with us. We decided kind of early on that we wanted to have a Mommy/Daddy nightlife and munchkins in the bed don’t fit very well into that plan. So, for the most part, the kiddos are in bed by 8 or so and they sleep in their own beds all night, or as my daughter so cutely says, “Until the sun come ALL the way up.” We offer special dispensations for illness, bad dreams, and the occasional need for extra cuddles, but these are few and far between.

So, Big Girl has had an odd, nighttime only fever for the past two nights, which I suspect might be a reaction to some vaccines she had earlier this week. I let her come in bed with me for a few hours each night, and it is killing me! I have been waking up feeling totally boxed in by the two of them, unable to heave my big pregnant body from side to side without shoving one of them out of my way. I think tonight will be better, but it’s hard to tell since she has NO symptoms during the day.

I think that is all for “news” around here. Thanks for all of your nice feedback about my birth story and birth plan. At his point, I know that things could go completely off the rails and none of the plan will matter, but we figured that if the possibility is there to have the birth we want we need to a) know what we want and b) tell the medical staff what we want. So, it was nice to get some positive feedback on our plan.

Have an awesome day!