8 Months

Single digit weeks left. You’re kidding me, right?

Actually, I’m stuck somewhere between sometimes feeling “holy shit only 8 weeks left aaaaah!” and sometimes feeling “oh my god, 8 more weeks? Hurry up already!”

I am so, so, so very grateful that leggings are still considered fashionable. Thanks fashion gods!

I have actually fallen pretty far behind in getting ready, thanks to all the other things that have been going on around here. I still have a small section of wall to paint in the nursery, plus another tree to put up, and we have to obtain the border. At this point I am REALLY grateful we decided to only paint one wall. I also have to finish the letters and get them hung over the crib. Thinking that since Cameron works late tonight, it would really behoove me to use that time to my advantage and get that crap done. Finishing the decorating will also give us a chance to step back and find out what else we need to complete the room as far as organizing goes. We’re already pretty limited on space to put “things” so I was thinking I’d get baskets to put on the wall for books and toys, but what do I do with other things like…the stroller? The bath tub? I seriously need some interior designer to come help me ORGANIZE the space. The other issue is finding a time to actually go and get those things we need, since a 3-hour drive to Denver is not exactly convenient when we need one thing. So since we will be down this weekend for my baby shower, it would probably be pretty smart to stock up on as many things as will fit in our car since I do not want to make another trip down anytime soon. Like, till Christmas.

We were supposed to start our childbirth classes last night, a 3-hour class every week for 5 weeks that would have taken us through childbirth, breastfeeding, and that whole “what do we do with a newborn when we actually have one” part of parenting. Unfortunately, the teacher lives in Berthoud, which is “normally” under an hour away, now 3+ hours away. The teacher really wanted us to get at least the basics of the course, though, so she is planning to come up in October and has arranged for us to do a marathon weekend course. We probably won’t be able to get anything other than the childbirth part of it all, which is something of a bummer, but I suppose better than nothing. It’s not till the middle of October though.

It’s kind of amazing how the flood has caused us to throw just about every plan we had out the window and come up with something else. This is still kind of hard for me to deal with because as I’ve mentioned before, I like to have plans. I like to feel like I have control, and the aftermath of the flooding means losing a lot of control. On Wednesday I read an article on NPR about our hospital and the challenges they are facing with winter coming and 1 of our 2 roads shutting down for the winter at any time. (“They” are saying that Highway 36 will be open by December 1, but I don’t think that’ll really happen and in any case it doesn’t matter much for us as far as the baby goes, assuming she comes when she is supposed to.) We don’t have a NICU at our hospital, which I already knew, but in the past if there were any serious problems, a different hospital with the right equipment was only an hour away by ambulance. Now, the closest hospital is 3-4 hours away by ambulance and the flight for life helicopter is only reliable in good weather, which is up in the air (no pun intended) a lot in the winter. Needless to say, this freaked me out a little. (Okay, a lot. It freaked me out a lot. I spent pretty much all of that night in the fetal position bawling my eyes out because it felt like everything possible was going wrong.) We had our 32-week appointment yesterday, which gave us an opportunity to get straight answers from our OB as far as what kinds of emergencies this hospital can handle and what happens if the “what ifs” happen, that sort of thing. It’s not an ideal situation by any means, but there are options and emergencies will be taken care of. Our doctor explained that the responsibility was pretty much on him to determine ahead of time if we needed to be moved out to a different hospital for pre-term labor or any other complications. He said normally what would be a “wait and see” attitude will now be a “better safe than sorry” attitude. Again, not ideal, but it’s there.

I really hate that the last weeks of this pregnancy are surrounded by so much worry on my part. I know I shouldn’t worry because I can’t control any of it, but that doesn’t mean I’m not or won’t. Now when I wake up in the middle of the night with random twinges and pains I immediately panic that I’m going to go into pre-term labor and we’ll have to be transported to a different hospital and deal with different doctors who don’t know my preferences and everything will be taken out of my hands. I know that’s a really silly way to look at things, but it all goes back to that desire I have internally to be in control and know at least sort of what to expect. The end of pregnancy is always a game of wait and see in which you have no idea what to expect, and that has been hard enough to deal with. Now I have a whole other list of things to deal with, and that sucks. At this point I just want to have it be over, have her be here and know that we’re all going to be safe and sound. It’s a lot of things I can’t control right now–and I absolutely hate that. My OB did remind me yesterday, “It’s my job to worry.” I’m working on that–it’s not exactly going as well as I’d hoped.

By the by, our sump pump is STILL pumping groundwater out of our basement. And it’s raining today. Some days…it’s hard not to feel completely defeated.

Anyway, to end this post on a slightly more positive/amusing note, I’ll share with you a conversation I had with someone the renaissance festival last weekend. He was a vendor selling hair pieces or something like that, and as I walked by his booth, I heard him say…

“My lady, you should not be out in the sun!”

I thought, okay, he’s being nice to the pregnant lady, fine, I’m game. I said, “I’m trying to stick to the shade and stay hydrated.”

He said: “Only one more month left?

Little personal, but whatever. “Two, actually.”

He put on that face…you know the one, the one that says “Oh, shit. I just called her fat.” To his credit, he apologized. I said it was fine. And then, JUST when he was about to dig himself out, he said…

“Two, really? Wow, you’re going to be huge!”

Way to go, man. Way. To. Go. If I’d been on the ball a little more I would have asked him how the bottom of his foot tasted, but I was so taken aback the only thing I could do was blink and walk away.

What do you mean this blankie isn’t for me?

Escape

This last weekend, Caroline and I (and my parents) went to Santa Fe. It was a very much-needed escape from Estes Park. Cameron had to stay behind to get his store opened back up, but since he was busy and there was a road out of town, I figured I would take advantage of it and got out of dodge.

The reasoning was mostly emotional. The last week had been such a wild roller coaster that I really needed a break. I have, just like everyone else up here, been going through a sort of grieving process after the floods. Nobody here was left unaffected in some way, whether big or small. I saw so many people going through the different stages of grieving last week and it was getting hard for me to handle because I still wasn’t coping myself. Town is opening back up and people are getting back to “normal” but there’s still a LOT of people who are displaced, without running water, electricity, phones, their houses…it’s a lot going on. Cameron’s Starbucks reopened on Saturday, which I think will be a help to a lot of people because it allows them a place to be if they need some normalcy. Anyway, after last week I was emotionally wrecked and exhausted and when the opportunity to get out presented itself, I took it. 

My parents and I go to Santa Fe every September to attend the yearly renaissance festival there, so that was the primary motivation for the trip. I was hoping to be able to go to the faire both days as is the norm, but I found out pretty early on Saturday that it just wasn’t going to happen. My endurance in the last few weeks has really tanked, probably another side effect of all the emotional upheaval I’ve gone through lately. By 11 that morning my feet were just killing me and I was not doing great in the heat (even though it was only in the low 70s). I actually went back to the hotel around 2 and had to lie down and go back to pick up my parents later. It was just harder than I thought it would be, so clearly I under-estimated this whole eight-months-pregnant thing!

Sunday I opted not to go back to the faire because I was really concerned about overdoing it especially being so far from home. (It’s about a 5 1/2 hour drive from Santa Fe to my parents’ house, and now because of the roads, another 2 1/2 hours to Estes.) I took my parents back to the faire and then spent the rest of the morning on the old town plaza. If you’re not in the know, Santa Fe is one of the oldest cities in the country, and some of the buildings there date back 400 years. So it’s pretty neat if you’re a history nerd like myself. I spent some time in the Palace of the Governors and the New Mexico History Museum where I was really intrigued by a display called “tesoro de devocion/treasures of devotion” and it was full of sculptures and paintings of Jesus and other important Catholic figures done by Hispanic/Spanish artists all the way back into the 1500s. I’m not religious at all but the mythology of religion at large interests me, so it was cool to see a different spin on the traditional Christian figures. After that I walked over to the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi and the Loretto Chapel. Again, not religious, but church architecture amazes me and the Loretto is sort of the holy grail of amazing design. Inside this (relatively) small chapel is this spiral staircase that they call the “Miraculous” staircase. Basic rundown of this story, in the late 1870s there was no way for the sisters to climb from the chapel up into the loft, so they put out a call for a carpenter to come and build them a staircase. No one came, so finally in desperation they did a novena (or however that goes, my knowledge of Christian rituals is fairly limited) and on the last day of the novena, a carpenter arrived with nothing but his tool belt and a donkey. He proceeded to build this amazingly beautiful spiral staircase without a single piece of “hardware”, no nails, nothing. It makes 3 360 degree turns seemingly without any support whatsoever. He refused any offer of payment and when he was finished, he left without a word. Naturally I’m sure you can see where the idea of the “miraculous” comes in, and the whole thing really is spectacular however it came to be built. The railings have since been added because the sisters were afraid to walk up it without them, and today it is only used for photo ops for weddings and things like that, and the chapel itself is similarly only used for weddings and special services, which allows it to stay in pretty pristine condition for being well over 200 years old. It was pretty remarkable.

I spent the rest of the day taking advantage of the WalMart there, since Cameron needed some new shoes and unless we order things it could be weeks until we get down the hill again. I ended up picking up a few pairs of leggings (thank you thank you thank you fashion gods for deciding leggings are still popular) since it has been quite chilly at home and I needed something warmer than skirts. I also went to Home Depot and bought another sump pump, since it would be stupid not to have a backup (ours has still been running constantly for nearly 2 weeks) and I’m pretty sure no one in Colorado has any right now (again, unless we order it we’d have to wait to go get it anyway) it seemed like a good time to take advantage of the opportunity. Monday morning we packed up the hotel room, had breakfast, and went back up to the plaza to visit 2 of my parents’ favorite stores, a Christmas shop and a super-hippie store, neither of which I’d ever been to. I picked up a couple doodads at the Christmas store and a bumper sticker at the hippie store that reads “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” (Every year my parents bring me back a good one; the last few years it’s been the quote “Well-behaved women rarely make history” or whatever the actual quote is, I think I might be paraphrasing that.) Anyhoo, after that we headed up north. The ride back was a lot more uncomfortable than it was going down, I think in large part to Caroline shifting down lower than normal. I also think the leggings I was wearing were a little too tight because by the time we got home my feet looked like massive sausages…

I waited till this morning to come back to Estes since the drive is so long these days. It meant leaving really early so I could get to work at a semi-decent time, but it’s good to be home, or at least in the same location as my husband. I’m not necessarily crazy about being here still, but it’s with him and that’s good enough for me. I pretty much came straight to work, so I still have to unpack and go to the laundromat (because of the sump pump our washer is still out of commission, since we don’t want to overload the pipes) and go grocery shopping after work today. So much for vacation right? Maybe if I’m lucky today I will get some writing done before I totally poop out. I have to go back down on Saturday for my baby shower, though it seems with the floods the majority of the people (who are in Estes) won’t be able to come, so it looks like it will be a pretty small affair, more family than anything. I think I’ll be staying down there since nearly 6 hours of driving in one day to attend a 3-hour party sounds lousy, but Cameron will probably come down Sunday to watch football with us and then we can caravan back home together that afternoon. Having to take such a circuitous route out of Estes is going to get really old really fast, so I hope some other route might open up soon…the earliest we’ve heard for Highway 36 is December 1, and I doubt we’ll be going anywhere at that point no matter how long it takes to get there.

But at least for the time being, I have this outside my window….

What to say

Wow. What a crazy past few days. There are still many to come, I fear.

I’m still working on how to wrap my head around it all. As is probably obvious, we do have our Internet restored at home. It came back on this morning, and our cell service was restored today too. It is definitely a huge plus to be able to connect with people–for a few days we were literally cut of as well as figuratively cut off from the whole world and it was not a fun experience. Still isn’t. 

I suppose I should say that it’s not just Estes that has been affected by these floods. Boulder, Loveland, Fort Collins, Aurora, Commerce City, Greeley and all the farmland in between….it’s a vast, vast amount of area that is currently affected by this disaster. We were sort of the “high point” of the flooding–our rivers overflowing contributed to the mass flooding from Loveland and everywhere east from there, but flooding out of the Poudre River and Boulder Canyon also did a lot of damage. Last I read, something like 19,000 homes have been lost and more than 1000 people are still unaccounted for. I think 6 people are confirmed to have died and the number is expected to go up. The scope of the loss in so many different kinds of categories is still impossible to sit down and look at a list of it all because it is evolving still. It’ll probably be weeks before we can look back at this event and understand it all.

The future is still sort of uncertain, too. I’ll put the pictures below because there’s just no way I can describe it in words, but the roads that come up this way are gone. Literally gone. Washed away by water. It is so difficult to imagine and looking at the pictures don’t really help because it is SO surreal. At the town meeting I went to yesterday we were told to expect 6 months to wait for the road from Longmont/Boulder to be repaired, and up to an entire YEAR for the road from Loveland to Estes to be repaired. Right now the only ways in/out of Estes are by going over Trail Ridge Road, or down part of Highway 7 through Allenspark, out to Nederland, and then to Central City which dumps you onto I-70. Both of these roads are (for the time being) limited to emergencies, deliveries, and residents of Estes Park. You can get out either way, but you have to prove that you live here to get back. No idea how long that will go on. It will also take you HOURS to get to Denver through either of these ways, but it is an option if you absolutely have to. 

Obviously, this has all been really overwhelming. When I woke up on Thursday after listening to the rain pour all night, I checked my Facebook and saw nothing but people saying that evacuation notices had gone out and that the canyons had been evacuated overnight. We had been warned that some flooding might occur since we were seeing an unprecedented amount of rain, but I don’t think anyone ever thought it would be this bad. All signs said that the river was on the rise and it was going to be bad. I contacted my office and they said to just stay put until we knew more about what the river was going to do. Cameron went over to the Starbucks to see the status of the river there. When he went in at 8:00 or so, it was about to come over the sidewalk. By the time he left about 2 hours later, it was coming up to the back door. He stayed to help sandbag with some other businesses on the strip and then came home to contact all his employees and make sure they were okay. We continued watching the news throughout the day and were just more and more distraught as it continued to get worse and worse. At 1:30, I went down to the laundry room to get dressed to go to an OB appointment and realized that there was groundwater coming up the stairs. The whole laundry room/crawlspace had flooded about 4 inches. We worked on getting it pumped out and we’re staying dry thank goodness, though still even now the pump has been running 24 hours a day since then just because the ground is so saturated that the bedrock has nowhere to send the water. We received an entire year’s worth of moisture in about 2 days.

So now, the cleanup begins. The river has mostly receded now, but there are still some places that are totally water-logged. Businesses downtown have to clean up and be inspected to ensure they are clean and up to code and safe too, because who knows if the water could have damaged foundations or anything like that. The future is very uncertain as to what will happen to the town at large because we are so cut off and could be for a while to come. We likely won’t be having the kinds of tourism that usually sustains us through the winter simply because many people will find it too inconvenient to get here. So the future really will be a moving target for a lot of people who live up here and especially those who have businesses. Everything really has to be taken one day at a time.

As for us, I’m really grateful that we made out okay and better than many have. We did not have to be evacuated by helicopter or zip line or elevated truck by the National Guard like so many people did. Our house is totally fine–many people in town can’t go home for months, let alone people who lived in the canyons. We only had a small amount of flooding, nothing was damaged, we never lost power or clean water and we have plenty of food. We do have my parents’ dog with us who was supposed to go home to them on Wednesday, but it looks like he could be with us for at least 2 more weeks. That’s fine, with the exception that he has medication he has to take, and he only had so much of it because we weren’t expecting him to be with us for so long. We are currently working with the Safeway pharmacy in town to see if they will be able to fill a prescription for him so that he can at least have his medication until we manage to get him home. It’s also something of a waiting game right now to see when we can both go back to work. I mean, not like I love work so much I’d rather be there than home, but it would definitely help with regaining a sense of normalcy. It’s been an overwhelming mental challenge more than anything for me. I was already so low emotionally/hormonally going into this whole event and it definitely did not help. Feeling cut off from the world was hard. Now that we can at least have internet and phone access, it feels easier, but it’s still frightening to think about the fact that we are pretty isolated. Shoot, my baby shower is in two weeks and it could take me hours just to get to it. It’s been a lot to handle and probably way harder than it normally would have been just by virtue of also being 7 1/2 months pregnant.

So, anyway. That’s where we are as of right now. I think I’ll let the pictures do the talking from here on out. Most of these I took myself, but if not, I’ll point that out.

The significance of this picture is that all of this is normally a field in front of the Estes Dam.

Photo courtesy of the Estes Park News

Photo courtesy of the Estes Park News

I’m not sure who took this photo, but it’s an aerial view of Highway 34, one of our major lifelines to Estes.

Photo courtesy of the Estes Park News

Clan Carruthers is OK

Hi friends.

I just wanted to give a quick post to let my blogger friends out there who might not be connected to my Facebook know that yes–we are affected very badly by this Colorado flooding right now but more importantly, we are okay.

Flooding began here late Wednesday night in Estes Park as heavy rain raised the levels of the Big Thompson River and Fall River to critical stages. They both overflowed Thursday. Our main street and most major arteries were cut off by water and some evacuation notices in town went out; luckily we were not among these. Both canyons to Loveland and Longmont and beyond have been closed and evacuated and a lot of those roads have been washed away. Highway 7 is also heavily damaged and Trail Ridge Road was closed yesterday for all but essential travel, so we are pretty well cut off right now. We have no cell service, no land lines for anything other than local calls, and most internet access is also out.

The good news is that where we live, we are far from any riverbanks. Our crawlspace did flood on Thursday afternoon after groundwater backed up and we got about 4 inches of water in our laundry room. Luckily, we have a sump pump, and with the help of a very gracious neighbor we were able to set up a system that is draining all the water into our drainage system. It has been running pretty much constantly since then, but it is very effective in keeping us dry. We are very lucky that we caught it early and that we only have a small crawlspace. Our neighbors on all sides have been flooded with up to 3 feet of groundwater in their basements.

We still have power and clean water, and we have lots of food essentials to get us through at least the next 7-10 days. The hospital is only 2 blocks away and my OB is local and I saw him for a checkup Thursday, so there is no worry about any sort of emergency with Caroline. Cameron’s Starbucks is effectively underwater and closed for at least several more days, and I am still waiting to find out about my office though given its position I am assuming there was at least some flooding. We tried to get to it yesterday, but the roads to it were closed and flooded. I am about to head over to a town meeting to see if I can get some more information about when the cell towers and internet service might be fixed. I’ve been writing this on my phone and will post it once I get to some WiFi downtown.

Anyway, just wanted to update everyone and let you know we’re all okay, and I will have a more informative post when I have internet restored and I can share some photos with you. This whole event has just been insane and hard to imagine the scope of it.

Won’t be long now….

…till socks will no longer be an option!

Up till now I’ve been pretty lucky in that it’s been warm enough for me to get away with skirts, gauchos and maternity shorts and just throw on flip flops or slip ons (I have a pair of Crocs that look like ballet flats, I bought them in Hawaii and seriously have worn them almost every day since, AMAZING and I am definitely not ashamed to admit that I wear Crocs on a regular basis). The last couple of days, though, some bona fide autumn weather rolled in and temperatures have been in the 50s and 60s and it’s been really rainy. Cue me digging out all my fall clothes, or at least the ones I might potentially still fit in. I have 3 pairs of maternity pants and a whole drawer full of leggings, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to get away with those until Caroline comes. However, with the cold weather also comes warm feetsies and as I discovered this morning….socks are not going to be very easy for very much longer. Oh boy. Shoes I can probably go easy on, I have a pair of slip-on boots and Dansko clogs that I can probably get away with for a while, but again…the socks. So much harder to put on than shoes! Better hope Cameron will not be working many mornings from here on out.

We have our 30-week appointment tomorrow and I am having major meltdowns. Not about the appointment–but about the fact that we are down to 10 weeks out. The last two nights have been breakdown city at our house and I am ALL over the place. Poor Cameron. I suppose a lot of it boils down to the fact that I like to be prepared for EVERYTHING. I was cool as a cucumber for our wedding last year because I literally had backup plans for the backup plans and every single detail was good to go, and the day was stress-free and pretty much perfect (except for the caterers slicing and serving our cake topper, but that’s a story for a different time). When it comes to a baby, though, there’s not much I can actually plan for. Sure I can have the crib and the clothes and all the “stuff”, but the actual having of the baby and bringing it home is not easy (impossible really) to plan for (my brain just sees all these contingencies and what-ifs), and it’s giving me major comfort issues. I am hoping that when we have our first childbirth class in about 2 weeks will ease my mind a little bit because I am one seriously crazy roller coaster right now. It’s to the point that I’m not even ON the roller coaster….I AM the roller coaster.

As far as being 30 weeks along goes, I do feel pretty good, despite my crazy rant during my last post. I think I found a method of dealing with the heartburn, which has really helped the last night. Right before bed I down a glass of milk and take 2 or 3 Tums. Dunno if it’s a fluke or a coincidence or it’s actually working, but the last 2 nights I’ve gone straight to sleep and haven’t had any midnight heartburn. Caroline is a crazy mover, and likes to roll from side to side and make my belly super lopsided. Usually when she does this it’s kind of uncomfortable, so I’m not sure if these movements are also being accompanied by braxton hicks contractions. My whole digestive region is having a field day lately with some lovely side effects I won’t go into, but let’s just say for once Cameron is the one getting smoked out of the bed. 😛 I can’t eat a whole lot in one sitting without getting uncomfortably full, which is a bummer because I like food. Oh well, all in good time.

I mentioned in my last post that Cameron’s dad had a heart attack followed up by some pretty serious post-surgery complications. I’m happy to say that yesterday he was removed from sedation and is now conscious and even was walking this morning. He still has a super long road to recovery ahead of him, but he’s a fighter and I think he’ll bounce back from this just fine. Oh, have you seen that video floating around the net of the guy waking up from anesthesia who can’t believe his wife is really his wife? Apparently Cameron’s dad came out of sedation thinking he was back in Vietnam again. Sounds scary to me, and personally I think it would be hard to deal with wrapping my head around the fact that I thought I was going to be “out” for a couple of hours only to find that it’s in fact been several days. But he seems to be doing much better now. Cameron and his brothers are planning to go out to visit him, probably in rotation so he is not overwhelmed, once he gets out of the hospital. I was supposed to go on a trip to Santa Fe next weekend, but that is kind of up in the air right now depending on when Cameron goes to North Carolina since I don’t want us both to be gone to different locations (it could be an ideal situation really but we’d have to figure out what to do with the animals at pretty late notice, since my parents are going to be in Santa Fe too.) So I’m hoping to be able to go, but there are priorities that come way before this trip and it might just have to wait. I’d go with him out to North Carolina but frankly we can’t really afford it since it’s so last minute, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to be so far away from home now that we are at 30 weeks.

Also, I ought to be cheerful because it is FINALLY FOOTBALL SEASON! Woot woot! Thanks to Peyton Manning’s superman performance last week, I managed to kick butt in one of my fantasy leagues and have my butt kicked in the other league (my opponent was playing both Peyton AND Wes Welker, bad combo for me). All good fun though, and frankly I am just glad that it’s finally that time of year when Cameron gets to take off Sundays so we can have “Sunday Funday” and watch football all day long. Oh–last week my mom gave us a gift set of Broncos paraphernalia for Caroline that came with a binkie, a bottle, and a bib. Mom said “the first picture taken of her better be with that binkie in her mouth so I can put it on my Facebook.”

Sorry Chiefs fans….actually no I’m not 😀

Hitting “That” Point

“That point” is defined as the moment in which Steph is tired, grumpy, and fed up with being pregnant…which I’m pretty sure is a point which all pregnant women hit, whether they admit it out loud or not. So what follows is not much more than blog!vent, feel free to skip right over this one. Really, go for it.

Last night was definitely my first feeling of “This is not fun anymore.”

Right around dinner hour last night, Caroline seemed to move into a very stretched out, vertical position and put either her head or her feet right into my stomach. And it hurt, a lot. Not so much that I was concerned, because I could tell exactly where the pain was and I could also feel her sitting there, so I knew it was just discomfort from that. I couldn’t even eat dinner because my stomach just felt so cramped. No particular way that I moved seemed to help much, so I tried to get her to move even just a little, but she was having none of it, so for about an hour I just laid back on the recliner because it was about the only way I could get comfortable.

Cameron was working late, so after the baby FINALLY moved and I was able to get some relief, I went up to bed to watch the ending of the Sunday night football game and ended up falling asleep sprawled across the bed for probably about an hour before he came home. He came into say hi and I woke up, which was fine, but after that I was pretty much wide awake until he came to bed at 11:30. And my heartburn was starting to rev up. It’s been sort of on and off so far, nothing too terrible, but the last 2 nights have been really exhaustive and very painful. I chewed a few Tums, had a sip of milk, and sat up in bed watching HGTV until Cameron came in. He naturally fell asleep in about 30 seconds from lying down, but this being the incoming fall allergy season, he’s snoring a lot more than normal until he gets into really deep sleep and then it stops. And he’s really tired from working so many extra hours lately, so on top of the snoring, it’s also harder to wake him up to get him to stop snoring. Finally I gave up, grabbed my collection of pillows, and traipsed over to the guest bed and tried to sleep there, but the bed is so much firmer than ours and just not easy to get comfortable on right now, since my range of options of sleeping positions is getting smaller and smaller. I finally gave up there too, and by this time my throat was pretty much on fire from the heartburn. I went back to our bed and propped myself up on a couple pillows, had a few more Tums, and listened to my husband snore…while I proceeded to get so frustrated and upset that I basically laid there crying till about 1:30 in the morning.

Hot, right.

The frustration wasn’t just from the heartburn, though it was SUPER painful, but also that I couldn’t seem to win no matter which way I tried. If I laid down flat, my chest felt like it was going to explode. If I sat up, I had to pee because the baby was sitting right on my bladder. And then my back would start to ache. And I was super jealous that Cameron was actually sleeping, which was also annoying at this point because he would quiet down until I was literally -this- far away from falling asleep, and then he’d turn over and start to snore again. Ugh. (That, and the uber-hormonal part of me was upset that he wasn’t waking up even though I was crying, but, I shouldn’t have been very upset about that one since there’s no need for us to both be miserable.) If I turned onto my side a little, the baby started having the hiccups. I really just couldn’t win. This all went on till probably 2:30 or so when I think I was finally able to fall asleep, at least for a couple hours. If I move out of my position in my sleep, I wake up with either a fetus on top of my bladder or aching hips, so I am waking up every hour or two to reposition. And I know this is all normal, the third trimester is the worst for sleep, that sort of thing, but I am so tired. My alarm goes off at 7, so needless to say I didn’t actually accrue many sleeping hours last night.

So, definitely getting to that point when I am not really enjoying this process very much anymore. I know you’re not supposed to say these things, but I hate it when she has the hiccups. I hate it when she flips around and wiggles all night long. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that she’s healthy and that she is doing those things, but it’s not “amazing” anymore. It’s just annoying. I just want to lie down for 30 minutes and not feel like a human fishbowl. I want to sleep through the night just once more before she comes. I want to be able to turn over in bed and have it not take 5 freaking minutes because I am so huge.

Bluntly put, I am ready for this baby to be on the outside of my body. And it feels a little disheartening that I still have 10 weeks of this to go.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t be so despairing or negative. I am grateful for this, believe me. I’m not looking for a pity party or to sound like I’m looking for advice (this morning I made a joking comment on Facebook about my heartburn and the baby’s hair and it turned into so many people telling me what to try for the heartburn that I ended up taking it down because I really, really don’t give a shit about advice which is, again, the grumpy pregnant lady in me talking.), I’m just blowing off steam in about the only way I know how, which is through this. Since I don’t have too many real friends to talk to and I have already bitched Cameron’s ear off enough…the blog it is.

Stress is just annoyingly high right now. Cameron is putting in a lot of extra hours right now because it’s that season when it’s still fairly busy but he’s lost a lot of employees who went back to school, that sort of thing, plus there’s a bunch of new policy programs and scheduling stuff being rolled out that he is kind of being the guinea pig for, so he’s been at work a lot more, and while I know it’s only temporary, his stress feeds into my stress and I miss him, frankly, and it’s been a rough couple of weeks. His dad had a minor heart attack on Wednesday, and while that in and of itself was not entirely serious, the double bypass he was supposed to have on Friday turned into a quintuple bypass and there were serious complications when he had an allergic reaction to the blood coagulation medicine he was given, so he’s been in a medically induced coma since then. He is expected to be fine and taken off sedation tomorrow, but it’s been scary especially being so far away. So, Cameron and his brothers are waiting right now to see when/if they want to go out and see him, which for the moment is a bit “hurry up and wait” to see how everything goes and how much longer he stays in the hospital, that sort of thing.

I know that it’s just a few weeks more before everything really slows down and it will all be fine. I spoke today with my employers about the fact that I’m 98% sure I’m not coming back after the baby comes, so they at least know that they need to get someone in to let me train before I leave in early November. Cameron is able to take off 5 weeks when Caroline comes which is really, really helpful and I am so grateful for that…but in the meantime it still feels very, very far away.

All this negative being said, some positive…I did pass my 3-hour diabetes test, so no more worry about that. And today at work one of the managers who is out from Nebraska brought me ice cream, so either he was just being really nice or I look way more rough than I want to…

Trimester the Third

Welcome to the Third Trimester, said the Universe. You’ve made it 2/3 of the way through this pregnancy. As a reward, have a gestational diabetes test and a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Nightmare. Oh, and then ANOTHER diabetes test, because the first one wasn’t bad enough. Isn’t this fun?

So yeah, this has been a fun week. I went in for my gestational diabetes test on Thursday (after it was rescheduled from Tuesday because the OB had 2 emergency c-sections, I mean what are the odds) and it wasn’t as terrible as I had thought it would be; the orange shit was definitely second-to-none gross, but I got it down and kept it down, so that was a positive. I got a little bit of a sugar rush but definitely nothing terrible, and I had some crackers and cheese right when I got home so I didn’t have a huge crash either. The nurse told me that “no news is good news” and they would only call if I failed, and that if I did, they’d call me the next day (Friday). Stay tuned for the rest of this story.

Saturday morning I woke up at 4:30 after a pretty terrible nightmare about the baby. I don’t dream very often, even since I’ve been pregnant, and usually my dreams are so bizarre and make so little sense that it’s no big deal even if I manage to remember them. This one was pretty visceral and real, though, and very upsetting. Cameron was in the shower getting ready for an opening shift at the ‘Bux and I had to get out of bed and tell him just to feel like everything was okay. So I stood in the bathroom while he showered and cried for a while and then went back to bed and watched an episode of The Office before going back to sleep. It was pretty rotten and I know it was just a little sliver of subconscious rising to the top of my brain that got all bent out of shape by the dream, but it’s still hard to shake something like that when it feels so real even for a little while. Luckily I had a massage booked for later that morning so I was at least able to go and have some relaxing me-time, which was probably what I needed in the first place.

And, to put the cherry on top of my “welcome to hell the third trimester” cake, I was under the assumption as of Friday evening that I had passed my diabetes test, since the phone never rang all day. Rock on, thought I. I figured, wrongly obviously, that since a holiday weekend was coming up, the lab would probably make the attempt to get all their important calls done before the weekend so people wouldn’t have to wait 3 days for results. Anyway, my phone rang not long ago with the hospital’s number and my stomach dropped. It’s the nurse from the OB’s office informing me that I have failed my diabetes test by 1 fucking point and my OB wants me to come in this week for the 3-hour test. Are you kidding me. One point?? Evidently the “normal” range is 75-139 and I clocked in at 140. Yeah.

So, despite my  annoyance with the fact that 1) I was told that if I failed they’d call 4 days ago and they didn’t, and 2) that I only failed by 1 measly point, I booked an appointment to go back on Thursday morning and do the 3-hour. I get to fast after dinner on Wednesday night and show up at 8 the next morning for what I’m assuming is just going to be more fun than a unicorn pooping lollipops while riding a double rainbow all the way across the sky. Luckily Cameron should be able to be with me for most if not all of it, so at least if I throw up I’ll have someone to hold my hair back. And I work for some really accommodating folks, so the fact that I’ll be in almost 4 hours late (if at all, because I am prepared for the contingency that I might just feel like total shit) isn’t a huge deal. So that’s good I guess.

So, yeah. It’s been a fun week. On the positive (since I need at least one), I was able to snag a crib mattress for only $10 from someone on a local swap site, and am going to pick that up later today. Maybe this will actually compel me to finish the nursery at some point because, oh yeah, I still haven’t done that.

And, since text-only posts are boring, here’s a picture of all 3 of my animals making it really hard for me to get out of bed this morning.

In the meantime, I’m off to hopefully get rid of this stomachache and try not to let my hormones get the best of me today. Least the office is pretty empty today….