…Recovery Week! I have been sick for nearly 3 weeks now, and enough is enough. My eye is all better (praises both to antibiotics and speedy access to them), and the cold is making very slow progress. By next Sunday, I shall be healed! So there!
Also, this is going to be an awesome week because the weather is going to be cool and rainy (fall may finally be here!). I was really starting to worry that I only have long-sleeve clothes for the baby, but the weather may have decided to behave.
I have a couple theories about why I am still sick. What say you?
My new birth certificate arrived today! That was completely unexpected—I assumed it would be weeks at least. But it’s here. I am once more valid. Huzzay!
Fun fact: It was issued on my birthday (of this year). How very cosmic.
P.S. It lists my name as Jessica Holly Johnson Olsen. That’s not a problem, right?
Monday was my 31st birthday. It was a pretty good one, too! Kyle hung up the birthday banner for me before he went to work, and when he came home for lunch, he brought me flowers and balloons! I spent a couple hours that afternoon with some friends (one of whom I share a birthday with). When Kyle got home, he finished up my cake (funfetti with cherry frosting*) and we went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. It was good, but I think they’ve increased their portion sizes—it was a ton of food! We relaxed at home for a bit, then had cake and opened presents. It was a fun day, and the best kind of birthday—one that made me feel special.
*You may recall that for my first birthday after we got married, I requested a white cake with cherry frosting. And that even though Kyle drove all over Livermore, he couldn’t find any, and we had to make do with cream cheese. Well, the next year, he made me a cheesecake, so it wasn’t an issue. But this year, Kyle got online and found that the Target in San Ramon carries it! Now, San Ramon isn’t super nearby, but I was having my final biofeedback appointment out there in just a couple of days, so I stopped in a picked up 3 cans (you never know when you’re going to need some!). Kyle seemed really surprised by just how pink cherry frosting is, and it is his opinion that it smells more like cherries than it tastes like them. I just know it’s yummy. OH, and I almost forgot: I talked Kyle into buying these candles that we saw at the grocery store with colored flames. How cool is that? Pretty cool. Granted, the flames are not as vibrant in color as the box indicated, but they still looked awesome.
In other news, I had another ultrasound yesterday to check the baby’s growth. I’ve been getting worried that she’s breech or something and huge, so it was good to find out that she’s head down and measuring right on schedule. And she kept sticking her tongue out at us! So cute. And her due date is just 4 weeks from tomorrow!
I have had a cold for a little over a week now, and it sucks. I had been feeling a bit better the last few days, but today it is killing me again. My throat hurts, my head is all stuffed up, and I am so tired. I don’t like this regression.
Also, in case you were wondering, yes, being pregnant during the summer sucks. I completely realize that it could be lots worse than it is here in California, but it is still true that it has been an unusually warm summer for us. Way too much time spent way too close to 100 degrees (or more). I am not coping well.
Well, this blog post took kind of a nosedive here at the end, didn’t it? Don’t worry; even though I can barely breathe and feel like I haven’t stopped sweating since May, life is pretty awesome. 🙂
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!