I Dreamed A Dream...

...or maybe a hallucination.

Last night sometime in the middle of the night I woke up from some kind of brain lightning storm with the perfect name for the baby: Jared. I remember going through the reasons why this was such a perfect name in my head, but I can't remember them now. I was so excited about this revelation that I almost, almost woke Jesse up. Every time I woke up after that I would repeat the name to myself so I wouldn't forget before I woke up.

Predictibly, Jesse hates the name Jared. For some reason I don't love it either. I have no idea why I had this dream. I think when I woke up I thought it was some kind of revelation.

I'm Nervous For Labor

But oh, so excited to be able to sleep without having to take bathroom breaks.

I had a c-section with Ian because he was breech, and this time I hopefully won't need another. But c-sections are nice in one way--you know what to expect. You check in, you lay there a while, and then you have a baby in your arms.

Not having a c-section means there are a lot of unknowns. And that makes me nervous. I'm nervous to get an epidural (I did NOT like it when they gave me a spinal for the c-section), but I'm also nervous not to get one. I'm nervous I won't recognize when I need to go to the hospital. I'm nervous we won't have anywhere to bring Ian. I'm nervous the baby will get stuck. I'm nervous labor won't progress fast enough (for me, I mean. I want it to be over very quickly. We'll see if my genes help me out there, as I'm hoping they will.), and I'm nervous Jesse will try to take pictures of me during it. If that camera is anywhere near my hands...yow. Watch out. And I'm not even going to go into what's going to happen if it's snapping away elsewhere. None of us want that thought in our heads.

I can definitely see how someone might, having almost forgotten how painful a c-section is, just want to schedule another because it takes away a lot of the unknowns. I read somewhere that if your first delivery is via c-section, you're more likely to opt for that the second time around, but if you've had a normal delivery as well as a c-section, you're more likely to opt for a normal delivery. I just think it's interesting that most people know c-sections are harder, but they tend to choose what they know.

Anyways, I know all this is normal, but I just wish it were all over. Then I could get on to adjusting to a new baby, and stop making plans of what to do in every possible scenario. Oh, and if I have your phone number I'll probably be calling you to get the scoop on labor. I've read a lot about it, but I need to know what really to expect.

Oh, and I'm making Jesse go over with me how to deliver a baby in a car. Just in case. We get really bad traffic here. What if I need to leave for the hospital and it's around five p.m.? It's not going to happen for another hour and a half or more.

What Does That Say?

Maybe it's a personal problem, but oftentimes I can't decipher what those word verification things say. Usually it's a random chain of letters, but sometimes they actually mean something. Just now I got "Josephus", but the second one was really hard to tell what it was. There was a line right through a letter that could've been a "t", or a "d", or maybe an "f" or "r". I'm not even going to get into what the last letter looked like because it looked like nothing. That really decreases the chance you're going to get it right, when you can't narrow down the letters. And when the two words actually mean something usually they correlate, so I feel like I'm on some kind of game show where the contestants have to pick two words that fit together best.

Anyways, I put on my thinking cap and I chose the second word to be "Seth" because Josephus was a scholar around the time the Romans sacked Jerusalem, and Seth is a biblical name. And I won!

Usually what happens is I just get it wrong and hope they give me an easier one the next time around, but it doesn't help the situation when I have to try three or four times, and each time my comment gets deleted. That's when I give up trying to comment, because I'm obviously too stupid to figure out the word thing, and I start to question if my comment is even good enough to post.

Sometimes I do try clicking on the wheelchair next to the words to see if I can get an audio version of it, but it never works. That's when I feel really dumb.

Baby Prep 201

This time around there is a whole lot less I have to prepare for. We've started out by buying a Crock-Pot so I can prepare meals in the morning when I have more steam. We got a really good deal on it--only $21 for both!

Does anyone have a good Crock-Pot recipe book they can recommend?

The last time I went to my doctor he asked if I was still making Jesse dinner. I told him, yeah, I was, but that it was no big deal, and he went off on how nice I am to Jesse and how good he has it. I thought it was pretty funny, and told Jesse when I got home. You know why. Maybe he doesn't know how good he has it. It's my duty to make sure he does.

All we really have to do is clean out some of the drawers so we have room for baby stuff and get some kind of sleeping arrangement arranged. Oh, and pack my bag for the hospital. But I still have a week or two before I need to do that.

Also, I am seriously considering cloth diapers. Before you think I'm crazy, listen up. With cloth diapers nowadays, you don't have to pin, and you don't have to scrape poop into the toilet or soak your diapers. Trust me, I have a healthy disgust for feces. I wouldn't consider it if I had to get too involved. But they have these liners you can put over your cloth diaper and when you have a dirty diaper, you just take it out and flush it--it biodegrades in eight days. And the diaper covers they have now are more cloth-like and velcro or snap in place and also hold your cloth diaper in place, eliminating the need to pin.

I looked at the numbers, and assuming this baby uses as many diapers as Ian (eight a day until four months, five a day after four months), we would be spending almost the same amount of money (give or take twenty or so dollars) including laundry costs, and we could reuse them on the next baby.

Plus, a disposable diaper takes 500-1000 years to biodegrade, if it has enough light and oxygen. Imagine Ian's 5,827 diapers (if he continues using diapers as he does now and is potty trained by three years) sitting in a landfill, being all chemicaly and taking up all that room. Ridiculous. I think cloth is worth a shot. I'll tell you if it's terrible or not. I'm going to start Ian out before the baby is born, so we'll see.

I've sat down several times and looked at numbers for things--you know, comparing an Air Force officer's benefits to what we're currently making, or the cost of grad school minus a teaching stipend to what we're making, etc. and every time I do it, I think, "Man, I should've been an accountant!" Not that that's what I think an accountant does, but that I just feel so organized and scholarly crunching numbers like that, and thinking of every little thing I need to include.

Sick!

All of us. Sick with the flu. Ian also got an ear infection. I've spent the last week and five days either nursing Ian back to health, nursing Jesse back to health, or laying on the bed, wishing I could lay on my stomach so I wouldn't get bedsores from laying on my side all day.

It was kind of nice that Ian was so cuddly when he was sick, though. I'm going to miss all the undivided attention I can give to him. He can be so sweet and cute.

Facebook Hero! Oh, and the Inauguration

Maybe I'm lame, but when I get a friend request on Facebook, I love suggesting friends of mine that the new friend may know.

It makes me warm inside to see all the friendships blooming around me.

Oh, and I love Allison's post about the Inauguration. I wholeheartedly agree with everything she said, and hope Obama does a great job. I also hope he can find his birth certificate, since it seems he's lost it. (Sorry, my underscores for links are not working properly; sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. There is a link if you click on "Inauguration". And my sarcasm doesn't start until Obama's birth certificate comes up. I really DO hope he does an excellent job.)

Things here in town were pretty crazy. REI sold out of their hand/foot/body warmers about five days before the event, got an emergency shipment in, and then sold out of all of those. Plus, they sold out of their long underwear, women's gloves and hats, and any kind of layering thing available.

Jesse went to the Inauguration along with his stepmother Janice and a friend from church. I drove them to the Metro a little after 5 a.m. and the line getting in to park at the Metro was backed up about four blocks. We're one stop away from the end, so I can only imagine what the lines looked like in the city.

That's all I'm going to post for now since Jesse will probably want to talk about the awesome experience he had.

Sick Again

Ian is sick again. Let's recap the last few times he's been sick:

1. When we first got to Seattle, he had a very high fever and was almost comatose for a few days.

2. The last night in Spokane he puked all night, and then was fine the next day.

Fortunately, both of those times I avoided getting sick. But he's been sick three times in the last month! That's too often.

This time, he's got a fever, a terrible cough that hurts him, and a really runny nose. So I let him do whatever he wants, within reason, and eat whatever he will eat whenever he'll eat it.


This time, I'm probably going to get sick. At least, being covered in snot and spit for the last two days makes me think I will.

Home Remedies For The Stay-At-Home

Or one home remedy, anyways.

Red permanent marker (and other colors, too, I assume) can be removed using hand sanitizer and a toothbrush. It takes some of the paint off, too, but whatever. That can be reapplied easier over a blank wall than over red marker.

Other things that may work are: a paste of Ajax and dishwasher soap, daily clarifying shampoo, an aerosol of some kind (deodorant, bug spray, etc.), or bicarbonate soda. I've also read that these remedies work on other wall decorations, like tattoos and ink.

Now I can save my heart attack for a bigger problem. Like labor.

Post-Christmas Disappointment

I know it's already January 12th, or whatever day it actually is, but I have to say this about Christmas. I LOVE Christmas music. Not just listening to it, although I love that, too, but I love singing it in church.

Unfortunately, my Christmas song needs did not get filled this year. We sang a few hymns in sacrament meeting, of course, but we don't sing opening hymns for gospel doctrine, and we sang crazy songs for Relief Society that had nothing to do with anything. Then, when we went to Washington the sacrament meeting conductor conducted the music sooo slowly that I couldn't enjoy anything we sang. I couldn't even sing I was so annoyed by the pace. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the organ started out at the right pace and then had to slow way down for the chorister. I wanted to buy her a metronome for Christmas. Or take her aside and explain that every song isn't supposed to sound like a dirge.

And, in an effort to NOT sound like a downer, I'll point out the positive to this situation: I get to listen to Christmas music until I'm ready to move on to the New Year, courtesy of Pandora, where I can listen to any type of station I want to, even if it isn't the season anymore.

Christmas in Washington (State)

Of course I mean Washington state. Like I would want to blog about a Christmas in DC. That would've sucked.

We left for Washington early early on the 16th of December. Our plan was to fly to Seattle and see some sights while my dad was there on a business trip, and then drive with him back to Spokane.

We just got to Seattle before most of the snowstorms hit. We were lucky to not have been delayed, but on the flip side most of the things we had wanted to see were outdoors and the weather was below freezing and the roads were really bad the whole time we were there. So, we didn't get to see much. Plus, Ian got sick and was like a zombie, unless he was crying, and then he was more like a banshee.

We did get to see Pike's Place Historic Market and buy some fish from the famous Pike's Place Fish Market where they throw your fish around...watch them throwing my Dad's fish (Dad in foreground):

Of course, the Space Needle is always included in on a Seattle trip, even if it's a drive-by:

We also went to the Seattle Aquarium.



Check out how huge the REI Flagship store is:

And that's not even the whole width.

While Seattle was getting all the snow that closed down the city, Spokane also had a snowstorm that closed the airport. My brother Brent ended up flying in to Seattle and driving back with us to Spokane.

This is what it looked like at my house.

Our picnic table, covered in snow:

One of the cars that never got shoveled out, covered in snow:

This picture didn't turn out well, but it was supposed to illustrate how thick the snow was coming down this one day. Double click if you want to get a sample.


Once we got to Spokane we mostly relaxed. We rented some snowshoes and cross country skis from REI and had fun in Spokane's snow. Here are some pictures from the rest of our trip:

This is my new haircut. Usually it's a littel perkier.


Jesse's self-portrait, taken while he was shoveling snow off of the roof:

The best face of the whole vacation:


Picture I most regret not getting: one of the Christmas tree. While we were in Seattle, my mom called my dad in a state. She had sent the kids out to get a tree from the forest and instead they chopped down not one, but two of the dwarf Douglas Firs that grow in one of the abandoned gardens. Then they left them outside leaning against the house while they went inside to get yelled at. The whole time they were waiting to see if my dad was going to kill them, Joel's dog kept walking by and marking the trees. Their master plan was to lash the two trees together to make one full, beautiful, short tree. It did make a full, beautiful tree, but also a tree that was heavier on one side and leaned at a fifteen degree angle. The angel managed to stay atop by some Christmas miracle, but we ended up taking the tree down in record time due to the danger it posed. The good news was that it was such a pokey variety of tree that Ian ignored it the whole time.