Responses to meme sent by Poppy

Thanks for the tagging by, Poppycat at Eeney Meeny Miney Mommy…

I have never done one of these before but will give it a go, I am tagging and would love to hear responses from: the ultimate gift girls seeking gabber A tale of two future mommies farmer femme and lucky little 13

Our answers as follows:

1. What is the color of your toothbrush? L: Green and light blue  / J: Pthalo and teal blue
2. Name one person who made you smile today. Both: Each other and our happy morning dog, Luna and our grumpy sleepy morning dog, Tara
3. What were you doing at 8 am this morning? L: Making J breakfast for her last weekend working at her soon to be old job / J: Getting ready for work (Very slowly)
4. What were you doing 45 minutes ago? L: Dishes / J: Driving to work
5. What is your favorite candy bar? L: Musketeers / J: Anything with dark chocolate or a Daim candy bar from IKEA with crystallized ginger on a wafer…
6. Have you ever been to a strip club? L: Nope / J: Yes… Before L came along
7. What is the last thing you said aloud? L: “Back up!!!” / J: “See you tonight”
8. What is your favorite ice cream? L: I don’t really like ice cream but I do like the candy that comes in it! For example peanut butter cup / J: Home made vanilla bean
9. What was the last thing you had to drink? L: Currently drinking Coffee with Sweet crème /N: Coffee to go with hazelnut creamer
10. Do you like your wallet? L: Not really but I hate shopping for items like; purses, wallets, shoes, bras etc. / J: Yes, its fine

11. What was the last thing you ate? We both had L’s breakfast specialty… A Mc-sandwich: Consisting of, an everything bagel with fried morning star fake sausage, scrambled eggs with melted white Mexican cheese and mayo… YUM

12. Have you bought any new clothing items this week? Both: No
13. The last sporting event you watched? Both: Tennis U.S. Open
14. What is your favorite flavor of popcorn? L: Butter w/ nutritional yeast and Parmesan cheese / J: Kettle
15. Who is the last person you sent a text message to? Both: We don’t text… I know embarrassing …
16. Ever go camping? L: Yes J: Not officially… Unless you call our cabin that no longer has working water… Camping. In which case we were up not to long ago
17. Do you take vitamins daily? L: A chewy gummy bear vitamin, folic acid, b, d and primrose (Can’t vow to daily though)  / J: Too many to count
18. Do you go to church every Sunday? Both: No… We have never been in/to a church together
19. Do you have a tan? L: Um, I wouldn’t say I have the ability to tan / J: In the summer after a few weeks of gardening
20. Do you prefer Chinese food to pizza? L: Almost always Chinese… Especially if its a Chinese / Vietnamese combo place… Common in Minnesota / J: Pizza always!
21. Do you drink your soda with a straw? Both: Never
22. What did your last text message say? Both: Again with the texting … we are already ostracized for our lack of cooperating with the texting! However J’s new tech job will require her to get a blackberry… Oh the adventures are yet to come.
23. What are you doing tomorrow? Both: Unfortunately we will both be working. But the count down has begun and J’s last day is Wednesday!
24. Favorite color? L: Sage green / J: Pthalo blue

25. Look to your left; what do you see? S: Tara sleeping on top of the couch

26. What color is your watch? L: Never worn one / N: Silver
27. What do you think of when you hear “Australia”? L: Gum trees / J: Koala bears
28. Would you strip for money? L: Not a chance / J: Not happening!
29. Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru? Both but most of the places we go don’t have drive thru’s
30. What is your favorite number? L: 7 / J: 10
31. Who’s the last person you talked to on the phone? Both: Each other
32. Any plans today? L: Finishing one of my last school projects J: Working and then watching our Sunday night T.v. Programs together
33. In how many states have you lived? L: 2 (Minnesota and North Carolina / J: 1
34. Biggest annoyance right now? L: Little Tara’s fierce growls when I shift on the couch/ J: Having to take a break at work, when there are only 2 of us working! I just want to leave early!
35. Last song listened to? L: “Gold Lion” The Be Good Tanya’s: In Spite Of All The DamageChinatown / J: New Tori Christmas cd
36. Can you say the alphabet backwards? L: If I went slowly, Maybe? / J: Most likely

37. Do you have a maid service clean your house? Both: Not even close, I can post a picture to confirm…
38. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time? L: Brown suede Rocketdog clogs / N: Brown Birkenstocks
39. Are you jealous of anyone? Both: Not that we can think
40. Is anyone jealous of you? Both: possible

41. Do you love anyone? Both: A lot, A lot …
42. Do any of your friends have children? Both: One couple has a child from a previous relationship and J’s irresponsible brother has a 2-year-old
43. What do you usually do during the day? Both: Work
44. Do you hate anyone that you know right now? Both: Not that we can think of

45. Do you use the word hello daily? Both: Yes
46. What color is your car? L: Red/ J: Teal
47. What size wedding ring do you wear? L: 5.5 / J: 7.25
48. Are you thinking about someone right now? Both: Not right now
49. Have you ever been to Six Flags? Both: Never
50. How did you get your worst scar? Both: Life experiences

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Our week in bullets

So I haven’t done this before… but I am posting in two parts. One bulleted due to feeling like crap since yesterday but still having some exciting news to share and the other password protected, so please email/comment if you would like to view the second post.

I am not entirely trying to exclude by passwording… I am just trying to save myself from some embarrassment… and more specifically I am attempting to save those in my family who have been keeping up with this blog…

Ultimately I am trying to save those who know me well but who would like to continue to keep me in an effervescent light… You know who you are.

Proceeding with bullets:

• Weekend started with some exciting job news for J, who has been with her current company for 5 years. I had previously posted about how challenging meshing our schedules has been with her on 2nd shift and me on first… Well not anymore!
• She was offered and accepted a position in the IT field on Friday. She will start the Monday after Thanksgiving!
• The only unfortunate detail is her new job doesn’t offer health insurance for the first year. So now we are scrambling to work this out before next week!
• In other TTC news… It seems my cycle and health insurance effective date are coinciding nicely. Allowing for us to begin our first insemination either the last week in January or the first few days in February!
• I am now just ironing out a few other details like short-term disability coverage etc. We have decided if we can’t get that to work, we will be alright paying out-of-pocket. We lucked out because my insurance will cover 100% or birth/labor, so we can just use the money saved from that to cover any remaining maternity leave costs. I know I am ahead of myself but I am a planner!
• House projects are coming along… Still living in disarray but progress is being made. Insulation goes in this week and then maybe I can finish the painting I started over a year ago!
• Lastly… We took J’s brother out for his birthday on Saturday which I survived but did battle through. This sounds horrible but we just have some very pivotal differences that become intoxicating when we get together. I am going to break down a few of the issues solely for my own benefit. Bottling them in just isn’t working…
  • Her brother and wife have a beautiful toddler, who we love but rarely get to see. This is an underlying wife issue which involves her not trusting the gays…
  • Second they have constant financial issues which at an extreme has caused them to move back to their parent’s houses more than once. It also took them nearly a year of our convincing to get them to apply for food stamps because they couldn’t afford healthy foods for the little guy…  
  • One of them works very part-time and the other has been unemployed for over a year… This wouldn’t be an issue if they could responsible afford to do this… But they obviously can’t. AND NOW…
  • They want to have another child! WHAT… They can’t afford their first child. Please don’t judge my insensitivity… I am stopping before I get too out of line

Thats been our week…

Life as usual

Things have been a little hectic in our world lately and I haven’t had the brainpower to compose a real post. I have been reading and following along with everyone else but just didn’t have the motivation to post… But I thought I would give it a try today.

I will be graduating in a matter of weeks, an accomplishment I have been working on for years! Recently it has been three consecutive years, of evening and weekend classes, multitasking and sleep deprivation.

I don’t plan on changing careers at this point, I really like my line of work and gradating for me is more about finishing something I started.

The completion of my education also means I will finally have the time to do the things I haven’t been able to do over the past few years. Like:

• Taking a yoga or art class
• Reading a book of my own choosing
  • I can’t wait to remember what reading for fun is
• Writing something creative that doesn’t require a direction sheet
• Having my evenings and weekends back
  • Over the past 3 years most evenings and almost all weekends; have been composed of either classes or homework
• Going on weekend trips to Duluth or Chicago…
• Being spontaneous

In other news, our home is in slight disarray.  We have begun many of the projects that we bumped up to complete before beginning TTC.

This week began the upstairs renovation of sorts… We own a 1912, 1 ½ story home and have dealt with drafty windows for over 5 years. Well… finally we are toasty warm and enjoying the increased soundproofing that has also been a benefit of all new windows.

We already miss some of the charm of our old windows but the baby to come and us will be happy and warm in the winters to come.

Next week… Blow insulation, window trim and window treatments.

A few pictures or our progress…

Weekend Activities

This past week was crammed full – including a late night birthday celebration for one of our wonderful friends, a dance infused Halloween party that was preceded by a full day of thrift store shopping for costumes and ended with a full day of couch recovery and pizza delivery… All in all it was a busy couple of days.

 

Halloween is J’s favorite holiday… so we usually go all out but for many reasons this year the festivities have been a little overwhelming and I am actually happy for Monday to come. With how hectic everything has been with our opposite work schedules, my final semester of higher education and J’s intensifying IT classes, I needed Sunday to recover and regain composure. I think we both appreciated getting back to some normalcy; as we were out till 4am Thursday, 3am on Saturday and I had class on Friday evening.

 

The Halloween party for me was unsettling and sobering. No one else in our group of friends is thinking about having children soon and no matter how excited they are  for us, I am extremely aware of the off balancing nature propelled by the changes that are to come.

 

J and I are the youngsters of our friend circle, being about 10 years younger than the rest of the group but we were also the first to buy a home and now the first to begin trying to start a family. This weekend succeeded in reminding me how scared I am of loosing this amazing community. How scared I am of becoming disconnected from the family we have been apart of for years and have grown to love and depend on.

 

These feelings are juxtaposed with how sick I am of the late night partying, excessive drinking and an overall lack of substance… I deeply love my friends but for some reason the night was overwhelmingly depressing for me, as I felt old and disconnected. I believe the oldness is being propelled by the realty that my biological clock is ticking and unforeseen conditions are forcing us to not progress with the process as quickly as I would like.

 

This whole experience is capitalizing on my motivation for change and solidifying how excited I am to experience Halloween through the eyes of a little person. But at the same time this weekend brought clarity and forced realizations that things are going to change and we need to be ready.

A Photo Post: Busy Saturday

Because I work M-F days and J works Sun-Thurs 2^nd shift, we really only get Saturday’s together. So they are usually packed full. Seeing as we are on a short TTC waiting period, I thought I would share some photos from our busy weekend.

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Saturday started with our traditional visit to the dog park and after an hour Lune and Tara were exhausted.

We piled in the car and headed to the Midtown Farmers Market for apples, onions, squash, carrots and garlic. We are down to only a few more weeks before it ends for the winter…

Once home we made some delicious spicy squash bake. With peppercorn cheese and Mexican corn. Yummy. Along with some fresh veggie cream cheese pinwheels.

Puppies spent the rest of the night resting after a long day…

December Delayed … Before it began

So this past week has brought good and bad news for us. It has taken me a while to process and readjust my thinking but I am finally ready to blog about it all.

 

To start, I haven’t talked about this yet on here but I was laid off this past February from a job I loved but a place I had grown to hate. This was a traumatic change that took adjusting to but eventually the layoff became a positive event.

 

We adjusted to unemployment once my severance ran out and we found the forced situation allowed us to refocus our life. This being said our baby timeline was put on hold and we focused on other things.

 

Just as I began to get sick of working fulltime at finding a job, one fell into my lap and it has turned out to be wonderful. Until Friday: To break it down:

 

Things I love about my new job:

• Small office (4 people)
• Casual dress (Jeans every day) It’s construction…
• Great pay a 30 % increase from my last job in construction
• Great insurance once hired after contract period (Covers birth at 100%)

 

Things I found out on Friday:

I was hired as a contract position but they have decided to keep me on after my contract expires, which we thought was this last Friday (3 months from start date) …  

• But no… It’s a 640 hour contract… So that was the first piece of bad news… It won’t end until mid November
•  Second, There is a waiting period for the great insurance mentioned above… 60 Days… So we will be waiting again. I thought it started immediately…
• The good news… I asked for a 7% raise upon hire and they countered with an 11.5 % raise. Overall making my devastating layoff/forced move a nearly 45% increase in pay!

 

So we spent the weekend adjusting to not trying this December… Instead we decided to bump up home projects we had put off till next spring. We picked out new windows and started having insulation quotes for our second story.

 

J also indulged me with encouraging some fun home purchases in order to get my mind off the baby stuff.    

 

Sorry for the long post. I know to most this all seems like good news but for some major reasons its very disappointing for me. I am however trying to get excited about February… Most likely our first try…

Let the process truly commence

It must be the colder weather creeping into Minnesota but the reality of just how close December is has arrived. If on schedule I should ovulate in the very beginning of December and so we are now in the process of figuring everything out. We have moved past the daydreaming part of figuring this all out and are now in the actual concrete part of this process.   

 

We have been settled on a donor for a while but for some reason I still continue to visit the donor site? I am not entirely sure why this is but I think it has to do with how awkward the process of selecting a donor feels to me. For me, the process seems so formal and overall it holds deep connotations to sadness.

 

I don’t doubt one of my own personality quirks contributes to making this process so challenging, as I am someone who thrives off processing and gets excited to analyze information. However this whole adventure is overwhelming because I want to make the best decision; while using all the provided details. (I won’t lie in the early stages I was not so far from creating a spreadsheet)  

 

Ultimately I find it hard to decide what qualities are most important and what features are most pronounced. These are details that most couples don’t think about unless experiencing this unique process of planned parenthood. I guess overall it feels like a disconnected process which forces you to select on reasons utterly unrelated to emulating the person you love.

 

Anyway, after browsing on the donor site today, I confirmed pricing for the insemination procedures with the clinic we will be using. I feel like prices have gone up since I checked last but I am still waiting to see if my insurance will in deed cover 6 inseminations. If so the monthly price is reduced by about 420 a cycle. Overall making a huge difference!

 

All of our paperwork is submitted, our selections are made, and our clinic is on notice. This is really going to happen. December is coming and we will be ready!

Clearblue Easy… Actually complicated … Most likely user confusion only!

I knew we were in for an experience with the lofty purchase of this nice little ovulation tracking machine… It is now official confusion has set in.

 

For the last few months I had been simply tracking my cycle without the use of the machine but now with our plan to have the first try in December we have begun using it. I am not technically savvy; luckily my wife who is an IT student is…

 

To prepare for using the fancy Clearblue machine I started using an online ovulation tracker… Being anal I checked the results I received against many other online sites and I found it to be seemingly accurate. Surprise this morning maybe it isn’t… I am thankful we didn’t plan on starting this cycle because we would be unbelievably unprepared.

 

I have a longer cycle lasting around 30-32 days and therefore we didn’t expect the little machine to have an egg diagram until the 6^th of October… Instead it was there this morning. Me: What all my months of paper tracking were wrong?

 

Yesterday we were excited to see my bar spike from low/no fertility (1 bar) to medium 2 bar fertility. But we didn’t expect to see it spike to egg level fertility in just 1 day. All of this makes me question my own normality.  

 

To be honest, probably for the last year, I have had a pit in my stomach; because of family history I feared I would be infertile. Therefore anything that takes me off my nicely charted course, at least initially scares the crap out of me. At the present moment J has more faith in this little machines ability to track our progress, where as I am prone to trust my calendar system, which I color-coded and followed for the last few months…

 

We have planned for the start of this process for such a long time, as all of you out there have. I guess I didn’t expect the pressure I am feeling. In one of my favorite singer’s words, “So I’ve been making a place for you. Not with a cradle but with each thing I do. To make myself a better woman, I hope I can become her” (Anne Heaton: Momma To You)

 

It’s hard for me to relinquish control over to this little machine… I just have this overwhelming desire to do everything right and a huge part of me didn’t anticipate the learning curve involved with the process.

 

I admit that have been a lurking blog reader for a while now and you ladies make the technicality part sound so easy. I expected to be emotionally challenged but not so process challenged. A part of my naive self thought the work we put in to prepare for this part of our lives to begin would be the hardest and most challenging part of the process.

 

I guess we are learning… And I need to accept that it’s all a little complicated.

Shopaholic or excited TTCier…

I think my psyche is having a slight overreaction to finally beginning the TTC process. It’s been years in the making and I think the realization that this process has truly begun is starting to become a reality.

 

Over the past few weeks it seems the easiest way to validate the process is through shopping. Proof can be found in viewing our dining room table which is acting as a resting place for loads of crap. Adorably cute crap… Crap that I have thought about being able to purchase for years. And now I finally can – But shouldn’t be – for so many reasons.

 

The place where J and I use to sit and eat dinner now looks like an aisle from a retail maternity/baby store. I can’t take the sole blame but I think I started the ball rolling and it may be time to work on some redirection activities.

 

Being a self-proclaimed non shopper… I didn’t really expect this to hit as hard as it has. I am a horribly crabby shopper, who avoids it at all costs. I am someone who purchases items in bulk, just so I can make it though another season. Usually I buy items in each of the available colors…and leave it at that. J has learned over the years that if I need to replace a vital clothing item – coffee must be included.

 

Therefore I am looking at this as a learning process and I am hopeful that balance will be restored shortly… But for the moment I am excited to get home from work to open packages that arrived from last weeks eBay wins…

 

L