Catching Up

Okay, so I FINALLY caught up with a lot of my online stuff . . .

-I finished uploading the rest of the pictures from Montauk on Facebook. Check them out if we are friends!

-Prepped the rest of June pics to be uploaded.

-Uploaded a pic for this weeks Wordless Wednesday (published retroactively, hehe).

-Caught up with my facebook networks--Dairy Queens (for nursing Moms) and Cutie Pies (my group of babies james' age).

-Caught up somewhat with my I-Village group (my online friends).

-Caught up somewhat on the blogs I read.

And to start it all off, I plugged in my computer and put it back in it's place in the living room. When I'm taking time off from online, a lot of times I just put the computer away and then I don't think of it . . .

Anyway, I think now I will probably be publishing a bit more in the next couple weeks in which we'll mostly be home during the week. So, look out for that!

My first Siggy!

So as part of the message boards I'm on, we have "signatures", a picture with our name (or just a name, sometimes) . . . I shared one before that someone else had made me . . .

Anyway, I used Picasa and Picnik to make my first one and I was proud of myself and wanted to share!!

A new place to complain

I have already complained about this on Facebook at least once, so I didn't want to "go there" again, but I needed to complain somewhere!

I-Village (my message board site) has been SO SO SLOW the past few days. I feel like I am picking and choosing which threads to read because it's like an hour long investment. I am the CL (community leader) of two boards and I totally feel neglectful because I haven't been able to post much at all.

Additionally, when I DO post something, it publishes it without paragraph spaces. Meaning I have to go back and edit it and put in the spaces manually using HTML. Meaning it takes EVEN LONGER.

I want to post belly pictures on my board(s) but I can't even be bothered with how long that would probably take.

IT IS SO ANNOYING!!! AHHHH!

Contractions Update

So I continued to have regular contractions throughout the whole morning. Around 6, I felt like they were just starting to being more "building" and significant, and I was having more pressure/sensation in my cervix. At 6:30, I finally admitted to a half-asleep James that I was having regular contractions (he definitely woke up quick)!

At 7/7:30 or so, he went down to get the computer and we started timing them again. They were generally coming every 2-4 mins and lasting 60-90 seconds. I was also having a lot of sciatica pain during this time (but not necessarily at the same time as a contraction). It was funny to be sitting there with James facing the possibility of being in labor. All I could think about was that my birth tub liner and my birth kit hadn't come yet.

"If this is labor," I said, "I just wish we were a LITTLE readier." James laughed at me.
"Seriously!"

However, as much as these contractions seemed by the book, I was a bit suspicious because while they had changed and become a bit more intense, they hadn't changed very much over the 4-5 hours I was observing them, and they still weren't painful. I was thinking of the marker of not being able to talk through a contraction--it wasn't anything like that for me. In fact, talking with James distracted me and made them seem even less intense and sometimes nearly unnoticeable.

We called our midwife soon after this and left her a message--then around 8:30 we texted her to ask if she'd gotten our message and told her I was having contractions (she called us right back after that)! James told her what was going on and she said that she was with another Mom in labor (out of town) and that false labor is really common for first time Moms. She advised us to stop paying attention to the contractions, don't time them, and do something distracting like watch a movie.

So James went to work and I started watching Notting Hill (I LOVE THAT MOVIE!!!). At 10:00 or so (in the middle of the movie), my exhaustion finally caught up to me and I fell asleep.

I awoke at nearly noon to James calling me. I was pretty pissed off at having been awakened.

"Are you having a contraction?" he asked.
"I don't know, I just woke up!" I complained.
"Okay, well, good, I'll talk to you later."

But then I was awake. So today has been . . . unproductive in any sense. The contractions haven't gotten any stronger, longer, or closer together. I was too tired to accomplish anything. I watched a lot of TV and attempted to post on I-Village but was mostly foiled by slow pages. Now it's 5:00 and I haven't made anything for dinner. ::sigh::

Hopefully tonight I won't have any issue sleeping. Tomorrow we have our home visit midwife appointment where we'll talk about the plan for the birth, I'll meet the backup midwife, and show everyone the house, bathroom, etc. I think I also have the Group B Strep test tomorrow (send me "testing negative" vibes!). Marilyn and Mariclare will be here since they are part of my birth team--Mariclare will be taking pictures and Marilyn will be videotaping and generally helping.

I think Mariclare will also be coming over earlier to take pregnancy pictures with me and James! I will have to post some of them on here.

Anyway, so maybe tomorrow I will get to see if I am dilated at all and we'll see what position the baby is in. I have a feeling he is once again transverse so I want to know for sure how he is laying so I can encourage him to go head down and engage and stick there.

So that's that. It's nearly time. Oh, and funnily enough, my birth kit arrived in the mail today! And my changing pad. So I'm a little "readier" now. ;-)

Overwhelmed

So I feel like my life is totally insane right now.

Some of the big things are getting worked out--I'm pregnant, I have a plan for what to do with school and career, I have a husband I love.

But it seems like all the details are water running through my fingers and I look around in a panic.

I wrote before about cleaning/organizing our bedroom and upstairs. I'm glad we got started on this immensely insane project (don't even get me started on why this is so difficult), but now, being in the middle is just making me feel crazy, that nothing is set--my books which may be connected to my soul are strewn in piles and I already know that we don't have enough bookshelves.

Okay, now I want to get into why this is so difficult--I have trouble throwing things away. There, I said it. I don't have as much of a problem "letting go of things"--when my sister moved into an apartment for the first time, I made her a care package with dishes, silverware, etc. I like giving things away--I like recycling broken things, I like donating to Salvation Army. But when I am staring at, say, a ribbon or an old CD, I feel like a WWII survivor is suddenly being channeled into me and saying: THINK OF ALL THE USES OF THIS ITEM!! DO NOT THROW IT AWAY.

I know that some men's trash is another men's treasure, but to me, everything seems like a treasure--if something is broken, fine, throw it away (unless it is electronic and should be recycled), but if it is simply superfluous, unwanted, unneeded, I just FEEL the fact that TONS of people around the world WOULD want or need the thing and the idea of filling up a landfill with it just turns my stomach. I've also been known to cry upon discovering, say, an over-ripe pineapple. I feel the waste echo through me like a sin.

James is no saint in terms of this either, and he as well as myself has things like: boxes of old notebooks, boxes of old CD's and video games and broken stereos, etc.

So when we speak of cleaning and organizing our upstairs rooms, these boxes of crap that are still leftover from my annexing of James' office (he could not keep it clean or even usable so now it is the guest room) need to be gone through and to do a proper job takes hours of concentration on ONE box of stuff. So I am significantly overwhelmed by this task, though I(we) already made a lot of progress, to be honest.

Other overwhelming things include:

Our cat emergency, which is badly deserving of its own post.

Our laundry. Nuf said.

Food: My stomach has been off for a few days. I'm thinking the oil or vegan butter I used to cook stuff at my Mom's house might be rancid. I can't think of what else it might be. But all I've eaten today so far is 1.5 apples. :-/ Hopefully I will start feeling hungrier soon.

My internet life/world:
- I am the CL (community leader) of two message board groups on i-village--so I'm responsible for responding to people and being "there", especially at the beginning of the month where I have to set up new buddy threads for people . . . details details, but considering I don't have a job, it is something I try to take seriously. One of the boards I CL for has about 20-40 regular members, the other one has over 100--so it is a pretty serious task to stay on top of them.
- I am pretty into reading blogs. This is something that obviously doesn't really matter to anyone else, but when I am behind on reading my favorite blogs (and writing in my own blog), I definitely get a sense of disorganization and as if I am behind/slacking off or something.
- Facebook. I try to keep up with my news feed. But I was so busy this week, I am not going to go back and read every SINGLE thing for an entire week.

I actually made some progress with this over the last two days and this morning. Yesterday I did most of the work I needed to do on the message boards (though there is always more to do, I did the essential "new month" things). I also caught up on Facebook. This morning, more catching up on Facebook, including going through all my notifications. I also went through most of my blogs this morning--I am almost totally caught up--plus I wrote one blog and this is my second.

So I'm actually feeling slightly less crazy because my internet world is getting a little more organized. Hopefully this afternoon I will be able to work more on the upstairs rooms.