Diary -- June 2002

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Saturday, June 29, 2002

Adam's too funny. The connections he makes between things sometimes is amazing. For example, today I decided I'd feel better with a pillow behind my back. Adam just woke from his nap, and he dragged a pillow to the rocking chair, propped it up, indicated that his "tummy hurts" and he "needed breakfast". "How 'bout yogurt?" Dad responded, "You've already had yogurt today." Adam responds, "How bout cheese?" And on and on.

When I have strong Braxton-Hicks contractions that require some coaching from Mike, he often tells me stories about my "happy place". Basically, I'm somewhere in the Caribbeans, on a raft, crystal blue water, no sharks (I make him remind me sometimes that there are no sharks), palm trees, seagulls, and dolphins playing nearby. Adam has picked up on the dolphin thing, and now when I start moaning about a contraction, Adam says, "Daddy, nuther dolphin!" Today I had two contractions in quick succession and Adam said, "Two dolphins!"

I think the word "no" has replaced "nap" as the toddler's most over- and mis-used word. He often says no when he intends yes. Mike's much more patient with this kind of thing than I am.

Friday, June 21, 2002

Well, we have a truck seat in the extended cab. That's the good news. The bad news is neither of the carseats will fit in it. This means that any time we all four need to go somewhere, Mike will have to ride in the backseat and I will have to ride herd on the kids in the front. Obviously, this cannot be a permanent solution, but it's the best we can do right now.

Wednesday we had another doctor's appointment. Details about that on the Pregnancy Diary. Thursday we drove in to pick up a rental car and drop off the truck at the Ford dealership to have the seat put in and the oil changed. Today we picked it up. There isn't much else of interest to report, except that while we were having lunch yesterday at Denny's, I gave Adam my wallet to play with to keep him occupied. He took out my driver's license, and Mike asked who the picture was of. Adam replied, "Mommy!" Then Adam took out my American Express card, pointed at the helmeted man on the front, and said, "Daddy!" Made me grin, anyway. :)

Monday, June 17, 2002

I had the most amazing weekend. My friends Cher and Shelley came to visit on Thursday, and stayed through Sunday morning. The ostensible reason was to quilt, but it turns out they had ulterior motives. After dinner Thursday night (spaghetti), they did the dishes and unloaded Cher's car, then we all went to bed sort of early. Friday the three girls went into Endicott to have lunch at the tea house. It was a very nice time, although I still could do without flavored ice teas (pecan praline, in this case). They served a chef salad and croissant for lunch (I just LOVE croissants!), and a fresh strawberry sundae for dessert. It was yummy, but not really very filling.

Once we got home, it was time to turn around and go to the hospital. You see, Sunday night (the 9th), Adam fell and split his chin open on the coffee table. He got a nasty gash and we rushed him to the hospital, where he got four stitches. All the details are on Mike's site. Anyway, Friday was the day his stitches needed to come out. We put the carseat into Cher's car (it was hot, and she has A/C), then all piled in. It took almost no time for an intern to get Adam's stitches out, then we made a quick drop at the post office. Cher dropped Mike off at the grange to get a couple of things (including four new goldfish for Adam), and the rest of us went to the grocery store for groceries and snacks. Mike joined us, we paid for our purchases, then we all piled back into the car for the drive home, munching chocolate donuts all the way.

The rest of the weekend they cleaned and chatted and played with Adam and generally gave Mike and me a break. By the time they left, the dishes were all caught up, the laundry was all washed, folded, and put away, the bathroom was scrubbed, the bathroom floor had been swept and mopped, Adam had had nine kinds of attention and was feeling well-loved and loving, and I was very much-pleased. I highly recommend this kind of treatment as an appropriate maternity gift for any pregnant woman.

Best of all, on Saturday they had a surprise baby shower for me! Well, it was a surprise to me, anyway; Mike apparently knew about it all along. Our friend Liz came to visit from Cheney, and they even got my friend Cresta to come down from Spokane with her mother-in-law and two sons. There was party food and juice and lots of nice company. And presents! There were baby outfits and baby toys and baby shoes and even a changing table! It took quite awhile to open everything, since I'm really not a "rip-and-next" kind of person. No silly baby shower games, thank God, so they even spared me that indignity! I had a really fantastic time, and felt just like a princess.

Me and Cresta's youngest son, Jonathan	Daddy and baby	The shower cake - "Welcome Baby Kayla"
Mike, Adam, and Shelley	Mommy and baby opening a present from great-grandma Lowery	Adam, trying to abscond with the first half of Aunt Liz's present for Kayla
Cher, Dana, and Adam, displaying the gift from Aunt Liz	Mike and Adam, opening the boat from Aunt Shelley	Cher with Jonathan, me with presents from Cher
Alex, offering a snack to Adam	Adam, inspecting the presents from Aunt Cher	A group effort to open what turned out to be the changing table. That's Liz on the right.
A toy for Adam from Grandma and Grandpa!	The alphabet quilt made by Mike's mom	More gorgeous clothes, courtesy of MCP Magazine

Adam has done all kinds of adorable/amazing things lately, so if you're not interested, just skip the next two paragraphs. :) First of all, he seems to be really entering the phase of self-potty training. In the past, he had urinated in his potty, but only once. We made a big huge deal about it, praised him, and generally acted very happy. Since then; nothing. Well, last night I went to use the restroom and he came along. He asked to have his diaper off, and he sat down across from me on his potty while I sat on the toilet. Lo and behold, he made his first potty poop! Then this morning, he similarly sat across from Mike and made his second potty pee! Potty training isn't something we want to force, preferring instead to follow his lead, but it's nice to see him showing some interest.

I love my Shay!

In addition to the gifts Kayla and I were so generously given on Saturday, Adam received several gifts. Aunt Shelley gave him a Mega Blocks boat with blocks and a captain in it, Grandma and Grandpa gave him another boat that winds up and self-propels, and Aunt Cher gave him a Winnie the Pooh video. After watching it only once, he will now imitate Tigger's little giggle - "who-who-who-whooooo!" There's really no way for me to convey on this website how unbelievably ADORABLE this sounds, so you'll just have to take my word for it. In other language news, Adam has now reached the point of requesting certain songs be sung to him. This morning I asked which song he wanted me to sing, and he said, "Give the baby mockingbird." So I sang him "Hush Little Baby". Once we were done, I asked which one he'd like next, and he said, "How 'bout Itty Bitty Star?" So I started singing him "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star". I say "started", because when I reached the part where you say, "How I wonder what you are" Adam quickly appended "doing", then in case I missed it, he said, "Mommy, how I wonder what you are doing." I started laughing uncontrollably, so songtime was over. :)

Saturday, June 8, 2002

I am married to the most extraordinary man on the planet. He's everything you hope a guy will be when you grow up and imagine who you'll share your life with. He's kind but not cloying, intelligent but not arrogant, thoughtful but not sappy, masculine but not macho, generous but not indiscriminately so, loyal but not blind - I could go on and on. Through the course of our three-year marriage, he's already shown me that there are still people out there who are willing to just let you be who you are, without trying to change or mould you into whoever they want you to be. I can't tell you how refreshing that is.

As I type this, he's out mowing the grass. With the push-mower, because the belt broke on the riding lawnmower. Any other time, he might wait until the new belt arrives and just let the grass grow. But he knows we're expecting company next weekend and that the shape of the house and yard as they are/were are embarassing to me. So instead of spending this time away from his work tending his garden (which is his passion), he's getting our yard presentable. He's been spending the last week or so (since I've effectively retired from housework) spending a significant amount of his morning chore time doing dishes, laundry, and even sweeping! Don't get me wrong; he's done housework plenty in the past, but what makes all this so touching is that I know he's got deadlines kicking his butt. Even so, he's making the time to take care of things he knows are important to me, while I gestate.

Then, to top it all off, yesterday he gave me a present! If you don't already know, I'm a quilter. No, I mean, like vehemently. I run a website devoted to the art, and spend the majority of my free time working on quilts. "Working on" could be designing, cutting, sewing, or otherwise assembling (physically or mentally). One tool of my trade is a program called Electric Quilt. This is a great design program that lets you plan your own quilts and see how they'd look with various color changes, without the labor of drawing, coloring, erasing, etc. by hand. I love my EQ. Up until yesterday, I had been working with EQ4, but pining for EQ5, the latest release. I had asked Mike (who's now managing our finances, on top of everything else) whether or not we could afford it, and he kept kind of grimacing and saying, "We'll have to see when the next check comes in." Well, lo and behold, a month ago he took it upon himself to order the program for me! It was such a total surprise; something I wasn't expecting in the least, and the kind of secret only a person like Mike could keep for a month.

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

The Mall Crawl has been kicking our butt. Not that it's been *bad*. On the contrary, this launch has been the smoothest ever, especially considering that Mike rewrote all of the code from scratch, moving everything from ASP to ASP.NET. It's just that even when this thing happens perfectly (in theory) there's still a lot of email to send out and answer, prize winners to select and notify, shop and crawler inquiries to answer, plus the usual QI stuff. There were a few bugs early on that either we caught before anyone else did, or that affected only a small percentage of subscribers. All were handled with minimal (I hope) frustration for our participants and customers, so all in all I'm really very pleased. I still have a lot of automation I want to do on this Crawl (eliminating duplicate record-tracking, mostly), but that can wait until next time. We're definitely moving in the right direction. And the vast majority of the feedback already has been positive. That's good, considering we have about 20 more quilt shops this time than we did in January. (Three fewer than we did our first Crawl, but I suspect that might be because I shortened the sign-up deadline.)

Aside from the Crawl, it's just been the usual - chasing/entertaining a toddler, cooking meals, doing minimal housework. In the last week or so it's become even more minimal (for me) than usual, because my body seems adamantly opposed to anything like "strain". The other day, I did three loads of dishes, two loads of laundry, some fabric cutting, and lots of email. By that evening, my back went out. And I thought I was being so good, resting in between each of those chores! So I've effectively given up. Mike's taken on doing some chores in the morning, and without a toddler around he seems to get more done in one hour in the morning than I can do all day.

I went to two sessions of therapy before I gave it up. The main reason is that I had wanted to do some aquatherapy, and they weren't even offering it as a possibility. They were giving me little exercises to do, and frankly they seemed to make things worse. I'm in very late pregnancy, and my joints are all loose, so there's basically nothing they can do about a sacroiliac joint slipping around. Once the public pools around here open, I might get Mike to drive me to one a couple times a week, if he has time, so I can get the pressure off my back for awhile.

We had another OB check today, so you can go read about it on the baby page, if you're curious.