Month: July 2011

Two weeks ago, July 14-16, Kyle and I went on our ward camping trip. We had a lot of fun! It was at Camp Shelly, a campground Livermore maintains up by Lake Tahoe. I think there were about 14 families there, and we got to split a site with the Badgers (which just happened to be near the bathrooms!). There are a lot of trees, so it's mostly shady, and a lot cooler than down here in Livermore. We had a lot of fun, but I got super cold at night. (I think my vascular system overreacts to cold.) We got through it though, and I'm glad we got to go since we probably won't get another chance to camp for a few years at least. (Kyle also took about a million pictures of chipmunks, but I don't have those. Mebbe he'll post some later.)

Last weekend, July 23rd, we went to see Macbeth at the Livermore Shakespeare Festival. It was just as beautiful out there as always, and we were super prepared with blankets and coats, so we didn't get cold. The play was really good, especially Lady Macbeth. She was awesome.

This past week has been full of baby stuff. We attended a breastfeeding class on Tuesday night and toured the Antioch hospital Wednesday night. Kyle kept playing with the plastic doll at the breastfeeding class and making it do weird things, like shake an angry fist at me. The tour was informative (even more so than you might think, due to our guide being a complete nutjob who would bounce from not-at-all-relevant topic to not-at-all-relevant topic) and, bonus, that hospital didn't freak me out! A lot of the medical equipment, tubing, wires, etc., in the birthing suites are behind cabinetry, so it really doesn't feel too hospitally. I think this is the hospital we're going to go with; we just need to make sure I don't need to go between 4 and 7 pm, because the traffic will be a nightmare. It takes 45 minutes to get there anyway! (The other hospital would also be bad at that time of day, but possibly not quite so difficult.) But Antioch is a much smaller, quieter facility and I liked the atmosphere there a bit better. More comfy-like.

I also had an ultrasound done Wednesday afternoon to check our little girl's growth (to make sure the medication I started a few weeks ago for migraines isn't affecting her). Everything looked great; all the measurements were pretty much spot-on (27-28 weeks), except for her legs, which were at 30 weeks. So I guess she'll have long legs! I also got to see her open her mouth, as well as her eyelashes and a lot of skin wrinkles. (Kyle had an important presentation at work, so he missed out. Sucka!)

We spent part of this afternoon rearranging stuff in the apartment to make room for the baby gear we already have. A couple of bookcases moved elsewhere cleared some space in the office for the crib and changing table. We'll need to make more room in there as we get more stuff, but it fits for right now. And we're still hoping a 3-bedroom apartment opens up soon! That would make things so much easier.

Okay, I've still got some old stuff to fill you in on, but I need to get today off my chest first.

On Saturday, Kyle and I were in Babies R Us, starting a registry. We saw that the travel system we wanted was on sale, but we didn't buy it. We weren't there to buy things. However, talking it over later, we decided that we should have (20% off is almost certainly the best deal we're going to get), so I planned to go back today and get it. First, though, I called the store this morning to make sure the sale was still happening (there had been no dates on the signs we saw). Unfortunately, I was told that the sale had ended on Saturday. Not awesome.

Well, Babies R Us is on the way to my biofeedback place, so I decided to swing by on the way to my appointment and check for myself. It was a whim, okay? Well, I walked in the store and the signs were still up, so I asked at customer service and verified that yes, the sale was still on. (Apparently there was another promotion that just ended...but the one I was thinking of was still going. Whatever.) Awesome.

So I buy the travel system, right? And the guy takes it out to my car and we proceed to try to get it in. Please note that I have a small two-door car ('99 Ford Escort, in case you care). Guy tells me to push the passenger seat all the way back and recline it all the way (in the process of doing which I manage to smack myself in the eye with the headrest, really hard--not awesome) and he finagles the huge box in. This is good, except that it's pressed up against my gear shift, making it impossible to actually drive the car. So he then tries to turn the box for a better fit, and I go around to the driver's side to help from there. When I do this, I see that he is exerting enough pressure on the box to crack my windshield where it is pressed up against it. So very not awesome! I get him to stop what he's doing and we just take everything out of the box and put the parts into my trunk.

At this point, I should have gone inside and gotten a manager, but I was quite upset and a bit flustered, and I had a biofeedback appointment to get to. (I also wasn't really mad—I know it was a complete accident, and it's not even like he dropped it or anything, just pushed too hard—so it's not like I wanted to storm in and get him in trouble and raise hell.) So I head off, crying all the way (I blame hormones!). I go to my appointment, explain what all had just happened (hey, she asked how my day was going!), and get a lot of sympathy and some good advice. Awesome. I also turn out to be a champion breather, as per the results of my biofeedback, which is especially impressive considering the emotional state I was in. More awesome.

On my way back home, I had to stop at the credit union to figure out what was going on with my card. (I'd tried to use it at their ATM on Saturday to withdraw some cash, but it said it couldn't read the card.) Nobody knew what could cause that, but it was eventually determined that there was something wrong with the magnetic strip. Of course, I went in last week to change the PIN on this card to something I could actually remember, and it was only after that that I started having problems. Logic would indicate that when she re-PINed my card, she screwed something up, but no matter. I had to order a replacement card, which will cost us $10. Not awesome.

So I finally get back home and tell Kyle (who was home for lunch) that although he didn't yet realize it, we were having a sucky day. Basically, Kyle is more annoyed about being charged for a new card than my broken windshield. I can't explain this.

Having been informed that a store like Babies R Us would almost certainly have insurance to cover exactly this sort of accident, I called the store and spoke to the store manager. He took my information and asked if I could come back to the store so I could sign a statement and he could take some pictures of the damage. I ate lunch and headed back out there, and although I never did get to see the manager (who was now trapped on a conference call), he had an employee bring me the paperwork and take pictures. I should hear back from him, though, and hopefully this will get resolved soon. Potentially awesome.

I came back home and got the stroller all put together and such. We don't have anywhere to put it and the carseat now, but still awesome.

So for those not keeping count, today's awesome:not awesome ratio is 5:4. Except that Kyle discovered when making dinner that the loaf of bread we just bought on Saturday (which should be good for another 3 days, and which he already used to make his lunch sandwich) has mold or something on it. It's just white, but it's speckled across both sides of every piece, rather as if their slicer was contaminated. [sigh] 5:5.

We went by the Alameda County Fair on Saturday, and that was fun. Some friends had called on Wednesday to ask if we wanted to go with them that afternoon, but it was 99 degrees outside, so I declined. Crazy people. By Saturday, it had cooled down a lot, plus we went in the evening. We mostly just walked around and looked at stuff, but we picked up some more of those fancy caramel apples we found last year and I got my cotton candy fix. The worst part was that we didn't get to ride the swings! I had been wondering how well my belly and I would fit, but then the sign said it was not recommended for pregnant women, which I think is just dumb. I'm still kinda sad about this.

We've been trying to buy a house, but it's not happening. We've put in 5 offers on 3 different houses, but no go. We both really wanted this last one, but they went with another offer for the same amount, but a larger down payment. [sigh] This has been enormously frustrating, and I think we're going to take a break and save up some money for a bit. For right now, we'll just concentrate on making room in our current apartment for the baby and hope a larger apartment opens up soon.

I've had a couple more OB appointments, and everything still looks great. I passed my glucose test (thank goodness!) and the baby is measuring well. I recently started on a medication (propranolol, if you're interested) that should help prevent my headaches. I sure hope it helps, 'cuz it's been kinda rough around here. I also started doing biofeedback, so hopefully that'll help, too. Only time will tell, though. The late-pregnancy aches and pains are starting to set in, so that's awesome. I can only imagine how much fun I'll be having in a couple more months. The good news is that I can feel our little girl moving around pretty consistently now, which actually is awesome.

Saturday morning, Kyle got a phone call from someone in our ward—while out running, he and his wife had passed a yard sale with some nice-looking baby furniture. Since he knows we're expecting our first, he called us to let us know. So Kyle and I head on over, and it's this changing table and crib, about a year old but in very good condition. Also a complete bedding set and mattress, all for $150 (we were told (and completely believe) that it all originally cost them $1,000). We hemmed and hawed for a bit, mostly because we don't currently have room for baby furniture and because it's white (we would have preferred a wood finish), but decided to buy it. I mean, it's cute, it's in good shape, and we saved a ton of money! So we drove to the ATM for some cash and paid for it, which just left getting it home. Of course, nobody we knew had a truck was around, so we rented one from Lowe's (this went much more smoothly than on previous occasions). Of course, unloading at the apartment was tricky, with just Kyle and me to do it, and getting the crib into the office was even trickier: there's a weird corner you have to turn, but we managed it by tipping the crib on end and taking the closet door off its hinges. So now our office is almost unusable due to the baby furniture taking up all the free space, but whatevs.

We spent most of the rest of Saturday recuperating (did I mention that it was 90-something degrees while we did all this?), and Sunday wasn't too exciting, either. Well, except when Kyle told his mom about our find. Of course, being a year old, it's a drop-side crib, so we knew it would have been recalled, but we just got on the manufacturer's website and ordered the kit to convert it to a static-side crib (it's already an extremely safe design, but they're now sending us a couple of brackets that will completely immobilize the moving side)—no biggie, right? Well, Kyle's mom informed us of something we had not even suspected: it is illegal to sell or resell recalled items! I knew retailers could no longer sell these cribs, but I didn't think it applied to garage sales. So maybe we're a little bit criminal. We're still not concerned; this crib seems to have very good workmanship, and we can't even figure out how this particular mechanism would fail anyway. We've decided we're okay with it.

Monday was, of course, Independence Day. We went shopping at the mall for some shirts for Kyle that afternoon, but that still left us with a fireworks dilemma. Sadly, Livermore canceled their fireworks display this year, so we had to find somewhere else to go. We headed up to San Ramon around 7pm, expecting to spend a couple hours walking around their fair-type-thing and be all ready for fireworks at 9:30pm. Well, we got up there and parked and started walking around, only to discover that there was no fair-type-thing, only a row of concessions. So we walked around a bit more, then bought some very tasty kettle corn and found a spot to sit. For an hour and a half. All we'd brought with us was a deck of cards, and we realized we don't know any games to play with a deck of cards except War (dismissed by Kyle as the most pointless game in the history of ever) and various iterations of solitaire. So I played solitaire while Kyle went back to the car for a second blanket (despite being blazing hot that afternoon, it was cooling down fast), and when he got back, Kyle showed me a magic trick. I pretty much guessed the solution right off. [Kyle's Note: "...guessed the solution right off" might be overselling things; I'm not that bad at this simple magic trick.]  Anyway, the fireworks finally started, and it was a really good display. We both had a hard time getting comfy, but we still enjoyed it a lot. All in all, it was a great holiday weekend!

Oh, and we've also been informed that I don't look pregnant in the recent pics on this blog. Don't worry, I am: