Homefront Update

Because there isn’t much else going on around here….

So, the One On The Way seems to be doing fine. I have to get back to the doctor, but that’s a strange thing here. The ObGyn doesn’t actually want to see me until I’m at the end of my second trimester. With Amelia, they measured my stomach, weighed me on a proper doctor scale and took my blood pressure. Here, they never measured anything, weighed me on a bathroom scale, and took my BP at the end as an afterthought. I’ve had some normal blood tests, but have never seen the results. If they sent them to me, I couldn’t read the language anyway, so I’ve got that going for me.

My appointments are to be made at the lab so I can get ultrasounds. At home, I only had three. I think they like to do a lot of them here but I’m not sure what kind of appointment I should ask for so I’ve kind of put it off. Do I need more blood tests? I have no idea.

In any case, I seem to be gaining ‘bump weight’ at the same pace as with Amelia, maybe even a little faster as the ab muscles are shot from having them fairly close together. There are occasional twitterings and punchings now and everything feels right.

As for Miss SquirmyPants, she is learning more new words (poop!) and becoming a bit more communicative. She is very mobile, crawling/half-walking stairs at a good clip, squirming off the couch, and running around in circles. She likes pouring water down the front of her shirt, eating massive amounts of Teddy Grahams, and going to the park. She dislikes sitting still to get her shoes on, finishing her breakfast, and being threatened with the naughty chair (noooooo!). She sits in the chair about once every 4 days for about 3 minutes at a time when she is in full melt-down and says ‘all-done’ when she’s finished having a good cry. I suppose we all have to get let it out sometimes.

She is less a baby and more a little kid everyday. Some people claim they wish they could be babies forever, but not me. I like that she is growing up and I get to see more and more of the person she is becoming. Perhaps at 14 I will wish she stayed 4 forever. Mostly I am looking forward to the cooler toys I she will get to play with. And she’ll be able to make her own lunch.

We frequently discuss poop and I know this makes me a ‘mom’ and no longer someone that you’d call to go to the pub. Please realize that I KNOW this. I don’t want these kinds of conversations to become the main topic of my day. It seems I live in the hope that talking about these topics after dinner will speed up the process of having her deal with them on her own so I won’t have to. And I can go back to being a normal person. Maybe in another couple of years. By then I’ll wonder what the hell I ever talked about before. If I still think that Bush is the president don’t hold it against me. I’ll catch up.

On the home front, we’ve had some small annoyances which, though small, are a pain in the ass. Because of the lack of winter rains here in the past few years, the maintenance people came by this winter to shut off the sprinkler systems. This was fine with me as we regularly live with dead grass at home and the less it grows, the less I have to listen to the lawn mower right next to my head while I’m in my little home office. We had no sprinklers at our house in Boston and I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste my time watering something I’m only going to have to spend hours cutting down. The only thing that REALLY irked me was that we seemed to be aware of water conservation. Everyone around us has green lawns, lush flowers and the massive amounts of water being wasted on the active sprinkler systems on the side of the public roadways – let’s just say if I were an Israeli wondering whether or not there would be enough water to drink 3 years from now, I’d be pretty pissed.

ANYHOW – they came to turn back on the sprinklers 2 days ago. Normally, they are supposed to run once sometime in the middle of the night. They are currently set to run every 3 hours. For about forever at a time. I have no idea how to set the timer so, sorry Israel, but this lawn is single-handedly emptying the Sea of Galilee. Hopefully they will be by soon to fix it.

We also were dog-sitting the beginning of this week for a cute little dog temporarily named Izzie. She was found as a stray by friends of ours and they were going away for a few days. The dog was house-broken and spayed and cute and good with children. She was very gentle with Amelia and very sweet. She liked to play ball and curl up next to us on the couch. She also puked on the office rug, peed on the dining room rug, pooped in the hallway, and got blood on every couch in the house and on our bed. She was not, in fact, spayed. Suffice it to say that the cushion covers are in the wash and while she was very well-behaved, I was not entirely sorry to see her go. Sorry, little dog, but my caretaker dance card is full.