What a crazy few months it has been. Yes, it’s been three full months since I have really kept up with my blog and I think that might be the longest hiatus I have ever taken. This post will serve as a quick update to a lot of things, and hopefully a gateway to new posts. After all, I’m getting ready to go on maternity leave (and summer break! squee!) so even if things start back slowly, I will have a lot more time to get things organized and caught up.
We’ll start with the biggest elephant in the room – me! LOL I’m just kidding. Seriously, though, this pregnancy has been a lot different and yet eerily similar to my last pregnancy. In January, I started having contractions in the middle of the night and had to go get shot with Breathine to stop them. That was fun, considering I wasn’t even to the survival threshold yet! Things got better but then at the end of February I started having trouble walking and started having a lot of pain. They still aren’t sure what is causing the pain, but basically standing, walking, and even changing positions when I’m sitting or laying causes me extreme pain near my hips and pelvis. It’s not the baby pushing on things, but it’s not fun. Did I mention that I take four flights of stairs eight times a day with my third graders??? Not fun. I’ve been wearing a belly support band and that helps a tiny bit, but it is still excruciatingly painful to do things as simple as stand up from a sitting position or put on my pants. I’m not joking – sometimes I have my husband hold my pants and I lean on him to put them on because it hurts less than trying to bend over.
You can imagine how clean my house looks (actually, it is not that awful thanks to my amazing husband) and how disorganized my classroom currently is. I have to wheel around the room or hop from chair to chair to try to limit the impact during the school day. Still, I’m not quite ready to let go of my classroom. I want to finish as much of the school year as possible. Last week, things got even more complicated. I’ve been having series of regular contractions a few times a week, and this time they were pretty darn close together and time-able – at school of all places. In addition to the contractions, major pains started stabbing me and my legs even went numb for a few minutes. My blood pressure kept crashing and spiking. I finally left about 15 minutes before the end of the school day and went to the hospital. You know what caused all this fun? My son had turned himself around breech, taking with him a lot of my nerve impulses. Luckily, he finally stopped and settled in feet down for the afternoon, so after 2.5 nonstress tests (because he kept kicking and punching the monitors off), I got to go home.
And of course, I got to experience all that pain and fun again that night as he turned himself back around. Quite enjoyable at 35 weeks, don’t you think???
Now, things are going much better. This week off has been good for the both of us. I’m still in immense pain like before, but I’ve been getting lots and lots of rest, which means that I haven’t been having regular contractions this week at all. I’ve had a few here and there, but no more 13-in-a-row-at-6-minutes-apart contractions lol. By comparison, my water broke with Clark on what would be this upcoming Wednesday, so I’m interested to see what happens with Colin. I thought I really wanted him to come early like I did with Clark, but now I kind of want another two or three weeks with my class to get them close to the end of the year, and a bit more time to prepare for him to arrive. I wonder what’s going to happen?
As for the house, there are lots of updates and there are very few updates. Confused? So are we. We are reorganizing our priorities based on the fact that I haven’t really been able to help the last two months like I was and based on possibly buying the house next year – meaning, do we want to do quick fixes or do we want to wait, save money, and do the major upgrades we’d like if we bought?
Anywho, here’s what has been going on so far. We’ve finished Clark’s room except for a few tiny tweaks and design elements, meaning we KILZed the whole room (ceiling and all) a few times to cover old paint and nicotine (after washing the walls – yes, J did this part – I did not wash nicotine off walls while pregnant!), painted, tore up the old shag carpet, hung new blinds and curtains, and painted the ceiling medallion under the ceiling fan. J tore up the shag carpet in the living room and we’ve rearranged the furniture, added a for-now IKEA cabinet, got a new couch and rug, and have been deciding what we are going to do next. We honestly aren’t sure yet and it isn’t really high priority.
In the master bedroom, we have pretty much only set up our “walk-in closet” area. We haven’t really done anything. In the kitchen, we’re just living with things as-is for now because if we buy, that’s going to be a major upgrade. The bathroom has just had some new caulk, and the basement has been completely reorganized, to the point that we can finally move around and even store some stuff again. The exterior has just been cleaned up a bit with a couple quick fixes for the time being.
And Colin’s room… well, that is enough drama for a couple of posts. We haven’t been great about taking pictures (I know! I’m a terrible blogger!!!) but let’s just say we are finally moving on to the completing-prep stages and getting ready to paint during the next few days. Still so much to do before he gets here (and even after he gets here since some of it he won’t use immediately), but I’m hoping he’ll hang on so I can get some of it done. J has been amazing footing all the work with no complaint on top of pretty much being a single parent since I’m prepping for leave and doing a ton of work for his fast-tracked grad school. I owe him big, big time after all this pain is gone and I can do stuff again.
So, that’s a really-quick-please-don’t-kill-me update that will hopefully be accompanied by lots of posts and such moving forward. After all, I will soon have lots of time to kill as I am trying to feed every hour or two and I can always blog from my iPhone, right? You’d forgive me for less than perfect pictures taken while breastfeeding, eh? š
Two Blue Pillars 