Author: Jessica Dickerson

Apparently the whole I-need-a-new-birth-certificate issue kind of got left out of my blogging. So now I have to fill in backstory before I can tell you the latest developments.

I dutifully got online in July to request my new birth certificate. The main hangup here is that Puerto Rico’s government website is largely in Spanish (in a lot of places you can click to an English version, but not all of them). Fortunately, I did it while Josh was visiting (yes, this was back in July 2010) and he helped me get around the Spanish stuff. Basically, I just needed to tell them a bunch of info from my original certificate (like my parents’ info) and, oddly enough, stuff that wasn’t on the original (like what city the hospital was in). So that involved a few phone calls to my parents, but we got through it. Uploaded a scan of my photo ID, and done!

Except not really. I got an email 8/2/2010 (so a month later) saying that there was an error. Actually, it said a bunch of Spanish stuff, then it had an English version stating that there was an error. The error itself, however, was not translated, so I had to get some help figuring it out. But the gist of it was that the name on my ID didn’t match the name on my birth certificate (duh, I got married), so to call them so I could send them a copy of my marriage certificate. I could also check my application’s status if I followed this link (which took me to, you guessed it, a webpage all in Spanish).

At this point, I have to admit to being really lame. I’ve been really scared to call the phone number they gave because what if nobody there speaks English? Or just has too thick an accent for me to understand? So, yeah, I have let that email sit in my inbox for over a year. I know. I suck. But on Monday, while Kyle was home for lunch, I decided that enough was enough and I was just going to suck it up and call the number. I did. And it rang. And rang. And rang. (You get the idea.) So I hung up and, in my frustration, showed Kyle the original email and the Spanish website they sent me. He told me that if I were using Chrome (I was in Firefox), it’d offer to translate the page for me! So I pulled it up in Chrome and, sure enough, it did! And it worked! Brilliantly! And it turns out that I’ve had the ability to just upload a scan of my marriage certificate, rather than calling and getting an address to mail one to, all this time! So I did that and they now have it and my application is marked as In Process, not Error. Yay! Maybe I’ll get a valid birth certificate before my daughter does!

I’m gonna try really hard to remember things now. It’s hard when you’re pregnant.

I finally got my windshield replaced! I got a letter from Babies R Us corporate, asking for two printed estimates to get the work done, so I sent those off and got a check back from them a week or so later. So I got it replaced, about 3 weeks after the damage was done. Not too shabby!

The next day, I went to the dentist and it was not nearly as bad as I feared.

Cub Scouts has started up again for the year. We now have 4 den leaders, which is good because we have a large den and, of course, I’m going to be out for a while. We’ve got our year all planned, though, and I think it’s going to be great! I’m in charge of keeping track of the boys’ progress, though, and it’s kinda tricky sometimes. The power of spreadsheets will get me through!

I was scheduled for jury duty on Sept. 1 (actually, that was after one 6-month postponement b/c they wanted me to report while we were going to be out of town), and I was really not looking forward to it. I very much did not want to drag my 8-months-pregnant self out to Oakland. But it worked out: I didn’t end up having to report at all! Score.

I’ve had a couple more doctor’s appointments since I last blogged, but everything still looks great. The baby is measuring right on schedule, and I’m doing really well (though gaining too much weight—ugh!). I love getting a clean bill of health for both me and the baby! (Which is not to say that she’s not causing me a fair amount of pain and discomfort, but if she’s healthy, I guess it’s worth it. Too late to change my mind now anyway, right?) I have one more ultrasound scheduled for 9/21, and hopefully it’ll show that’s she’s growing just right and is in a good position. I’ll be almost 36 weeks then. Oh, but get this: I have an appointment set up for 9/28 (with a midwife, not my OB, since if everything continues to go smoothly, it’ll be one of the midwives doing the actual delivery, not an OB), then my next one is 10/17…and then my due date is 10/21! Gah! Only two appointments left before my due date? This is coming up fast!

Our apartment manager called last week to say that a 3-bedroom apartment was coming available! Yay! Except that it’s upstairs and facing N Livermore, a very busy street. So my unreliable knees and I would be lugging baby & gear up and down stairs all the time, and we’d never be able to open our windows because of the street noise. And although we really want that additional bedroom, we’ve decided we don’t want it that badly. So we passed on it, which means that…

…we spent our Labor Day holiday doing more work in the nursery-to-be. We got two of the bookcases out of there a few weeks ago, but the other three still needed new homes, and the remaining furniture needed rearranging. For a while there it was a game of musical piles of stuff, but we did it! All the bookcases have been ensconced in various corners of the apartment, the printer now lives atop Kyle’s desk (which is still in there), and the crib, changing table, and awesome glider my parents sent are all in their places. We even left room for the dresser we do not yet own (well, sort of—there’s currently a pile of miscellany in its place, but we hope to find homes for that stuff soonish). So everything that we have for the nursery is in its place; we just need to get that dresser and figure out where things are going on the walls. Oh, we also did those minor touch-ups on the used furniture we bought and got the crib side all immobilized and stuff. (Kyle also finished repainting our kitchen table and chairs, and they look so much better now!) I feel so relieved to have that room organized. Phew!

I think that’s enough for now. Also, I can’t think of anything else.

So, I’ve heard that when you’re pregnant, you shouldn’t wear heels because the hormones that relax your tendons and ligaments all over cause your joints to become less reliable. But I like my heels, and I have a hard time finding flats that I feel are dressy enough for church, so I’ve still been wearing them. Specifically, today I was wearing these. Now, for the record, these are apparently devil shoes. They were fine the first few times I wore them, but then they started giving me blisters on my toes. I’ve been determined to either break them in or toughen up my feet, though, so I wore them this morning. They have upped the stakes now, though, by bucking me off.

I twisted my ankle pretty badly. Just walking down the hallway from sacrament meeting to Sunday school, of course—nothing fancy. I even had my arm around Kyle’s waist at the time (fortunately), which kept me from actually falling. Well, that and the wall. But I completely rolled my left ankle off that shoe (all 3″ of it!), and it’s not in fabulous shape now. I haven’t hurt my ankles that badly since I was dancing!

Fortunately, like I said, Kyle was there, and my friend Sarah. And then my visiting teacher walked by and hailed her husband to assist Kyle in getting me to the foyer (while Kyle pulled the car around) and then to the car. I iced it for a few hours after we got home, and the pain is a lot better. It’s not very swollen, either, which is great. So hopefully I’ll be able to walk normally again in a few days? Sarah says I can’t wear heels anymore, though.

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.