Dreams

Last night my dreams were incredibly violent. I have never in my life had dreams like these! In one dream, I was with a group of people at night in a large grassy hilly field. I don't know what we were doing, but every once in a while some large bears would come try to attack us and we would have to beat them. It was so real feeling--the heavy bears that were smothering me under their weight and the almost useless thuds of me pounding on the bears to beat them up. Later, in a different dream, after a lot more violence, I was beating up some woman. And when I say beating up, I really mean like killing her. I was pulling on her arms and legs and trying to pull them at the worst angles so that I ended up breaking all of her bones. And of course, kicking and punching, and stuff like that. It was really disgusting. And strangely enough, there was no fear in any of this--I was just doing what I had to do for some reason. I didn't kill her, but she was completely incapacitated. For the record, all violence was in self-defense, but still, I think I went a little overboard. Weird, huh? That is so not like me!

Happy Birthday Amberguesa!

Whoa! She's a teenager! Crazy! When I met her the first time, she was just a little doofer...like 6 or something. Now she's a witty smart and cute girl, or something like that.

Happy Birthday Pinkleberry!

Yay! Pinkleberry is one! Purpleberry is trying her hardest to walk so that when she sees Pinkleberry they can run around together. That will be so cute!

Prenatal Care

The birth center closest to us, Sagefemme Midwifery, is located in San Francisco. That's anywhere from 30-60 minutes from us, depending on traffic, but we've been up to SF a few times, and it's always been more like 40-45min. I called them several times yesterday, but they never answered, and today I finally got a hold of them. The way they do things, you have to attend an orientation first before you have any appointments, so we have to wait to go to orientation, next Thursday, March 22 (from 7-10pm), and then we'll schedule an appointment for the following week. The cool thing is that they will help me take care of applying for Medi-Cal and everything, and by waiting to do it through them, it ensures that I'll be able to get care covered right away. They also help people get onto WIC and stuff like that, which I think is really neat. They really do a lot for their clients/patients/whatever they call them. So, I have to wait about two weeks for a real appointment, but, at least I have a birth center I can go to! I'll be around 15 weeks or so (give or take a week) by the time I have an appointment, but that's not so bad. With Little Chub my first appointment was at 20 weeks. And really, the only reason I really want to have an appointment is to hear the heartbeat and have some peace of mind.

All About Little Chub

I figure since this started out as a diary of sorts about Little Chub and her progress, I should pour out details about her with reckless abandon, with no regard for the interest or lack thereof of my pittance of readers. (That sounds like I'm insulting you, but I'm not. Maybe because pittance sounds so...spitty...)

Little Chub loves to:

*Dance--we put on her little dance tunes, or sometimes our own tunes, like Gipsy Kings or Brahms even, and she rocks out
*Play outside--she rockets down the slide, eats sand, plays in the swing, and holds little plastic shovels trying to get coordinated enough to actually pick up sand with the shovel
*Put things on her head and call them hats
*Play with clothes and put them over her shoulders and put them on her head and try to wear them, no matter what they are or look like, including towels
*READ--she spends hours every day playing with books, both for children and adults and turns the pages and looks at pictures and takes all the books off the shelves; yesterday she categorized all of the books into books that have birds and books that don't, on her OWN (Wow!)
*Watch her Your Baby Can Read DVD's and occasionally the Backyardigans; both have music she can dance to
*Point to parts of the body--so far she can point to toes, hair, and nose, maybe eyes; she has always loved to grab our noses and play with them
*Eat--she LOVES to eat! One day for lunch I had two small pieces of lasagna, and she had one! And she can eat 1/4 of a pizza! You should see her shovel popcorn into her mouth! She also loves fruit snacks, so I'm probably going to go to Trader Joe's today to see if I can find some healthy sort of fruit snacky sort of things
*Pound on the piano and bang things
*Open the fridge (sigh)
*Open and close the screen doors over and over again
*Go for bike rides or sit on her daddy's shoulders
*Type on the keyboard and hit all sorts of shortcuts we never would have known existed, and she constantly puts the keyboard on Caps Lock; she also loves to hold onto the mouse and move it and minimize windows and stuff--this is all standing next to the desk and reaching up to the mouse and keyboard, which are at her eye level or thereabouts
*Sit on my lap and push my head backward, and if I leave it back for too long, she'll pull on my chin to bring it back up so she can push my head back again

Little Chub hates:
*Baths/Showers (this is a recent thing)
*Things in her hair
*Being forced to do anything

Little Chub currently sleeps an average of 10 hours per night and naps about two hours every day (not much sleep for a 12 month old), and she wakes up 2-4 times a night. (Those two nights sure were nice a while back though!) When she does wake up, it is ususally shrieking, so I think there might be something abnormal going on. The few times she wakes up by stirring and then doing little cries, I barely notice I woke up to feed her, but when she wakes up shrieking, it really makes my heart race.

She takes steps every once in a while, but still won't actually walk. She still thinks crawling is more efficient.

She has lots of words, including 'hat', 'shirt', 'that', 'this', 'clap', 'dance', and 'hi', but I have never, that I can remember, heard her make the 'm' sound.

The messier things are, the happier she is.

Little Chub likes to stand up in the shopping cart, even when she has a seatbelt on. Somehow, she can get herself out of any seatbelts that are not a 5-point harness or similar.

Little Chub poops 2-3 times a day, to make up for only pooping once a week for the first 10 months of her life.

Little Chub is short and weighs about 20 pounds.

Little Chub is very cute.

Where's MyTry?

Anyone know? Are you there MyTry? I miss your blogs and comments!

Little Chub Esta Caminando.

Well, she's getting there anyway. She maxed at 10 steps last night, outside on our back patio. The cool thing is that she walked several steps repeatedly, both last night and this morning. So far, though, the most steps she's ever done without us coaxing them out of her is 4. She seems like she wants to walk, but she just won't let go of the chair, or my leg, or the couch, or whatever, for more than one step, unless we make her. BUT, yesterday was a huge milestone. She did an unprecedented (by her) amount of walking. Yay Little Chub! She's so cute!

Worried again, but more this time...

I had a little bit of bleeding this morning (actually red blood, mixed with mucus, sorry for TMI), and I feel crampy right now. I'm very worried. Less so than I would have been if the spotting hadn't happened several weeks ago. I was going to call today to set up my first prenatal appointment... Now I'm not sure if I should bother. It's funny. Every time I am set to call and make an appointment, something happens to make me change my mind. I wish I had my own doppler. It's likely I could hear the heartbeat right now, if there is one.

Hat!

Little Chub's favorite word right now is 'hat'. She wakes up in the morning, puts her hands on her head and says, 'hat' over and over again. Earlier today, as I was writing a different blog entry, I heard her say 'hat' and turned around to see her sitting on the floor with a book opened on her head. And I WISH I could send you a recording of her saying it! It is the cutest thing ever! We aren't very successful recording her on video these days because the second she sees the video camera, she immediately turns all focus onto it and forgets anything else until we put the camera back away. But I will try really hard! Trust me, you want to see/hear it!

Yet Another Clarification

By the way, in case any of you were worrying (because Peter did), I am not sitting here wallowing in my misery or anything like that. I don't hate myself. I would really just like to be a better person. Everyone has room to be better. This (post below) is the area I'm focusing on right now.

Nice vs. Opinionated

Back in the day, I used to be a really really nice, sweet person. If there was one word anyone had to pick to describe me, it was always nice or sweet. That was when I was a kid, up until about age 12. Then, something happened. I developed all these opinions. Sometimes I find myself saying things that astonish even me (actually, probably more me than anyone else), and I wonder, 'Where did that nice, sweet me go?' This has actually been the cause of a lot of my self-esteem issues. Not that they're major or anything. And that's part of the problem. I have this little package of problems called judgment and pride. Here's how it goes: First, you develop all these opinions, and you let them govern how you think the world should be run. Then, when someone or something comes along that doesn't conform to your opinions, your habitual opinions cause you you to pass judgment on the situation, which in effect is causing you to pass judgment, in a way, on the person in 'control' of the situation. When conversation comes up, instead of accepting how things are, you feel that you MUST verbalize your opinions and make them sound LOGICAL so that someone would be stupid not to agree with you. And no matter how normal you manage to make it sound, YOU know in your head that what you've just said is not as innocent as it sounds and that you are not a nice person. And that makes you sad. It hurts your self-esteem. But that doesn't matter. Your self-esteem is already so inflated that it could actually use quite a few more of these puncture wounds. Self-esteem=Pride, in this case.

My goal in life right now is to TRULY return to being that nice person I used to be. To stop letting my opinions govern who I am. Instead, I should strive to live by the wise words of Christ in his Sermon on the Mount. My goal is to be 'pure of heart.'

Virtual Donation

Please take a few seconds to go to this website and donate feminine products to women in shelters just by clicking a few times.

My Little Monster

Well, I really just wanted to mislead you... For the last two nights, she's been an angel! For TWO nights in a row, she only woke up ONCE to nurse! WOOHOO!!!! Ironically, the first night she did this, I was awake for an extended period of time twice, unable to fall back asleep. The second night (last night), I slept for about 7 1/2 hrs straight (with normal turning over rousings and stuff), and then I woke up for a few minutes, but managed to convince myself to go back to sleep.

For the past two weeks, Little Chub has been teething. Her 8th tooth finally broke through the gums a few days ago, and finished coming through and giving her problems 2 days ago. During that time, we thought she was sick because she had intermittent bursts of what seemed like really bad pain. We thought maybe a tummy thing or something. She slept really poorly at night, waking up many times. When I finally realized she was teething, the light bulb went off inside my head, and now I feel really stupid for not thinking of it much sooner. Unlike Real, I never notice the fleshy breath thing. I think I need to learn my baby's cues better though, all things included. So, now we'll see how she does in the future, but those two nights have been great, more for my sanity than anything. It's always nice to know that she has the ability to sleep, even if she doesn't do it very often. My goal is to have her sleeping through the night without nursing to sleep by the time #2 is born. That gives us another 6 1/2 months or so, maybe a little less. I think she'll be able to do it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

It's Official...

I can now say with some amount of certainty that my stomach is bigger. I'm not "showing". I don't think anyone would guess by looking at me that I'm pregnant, unless they would have thought so before, too, but when I look at myself, I look like I have a few extra doughnuts in my abdomen. (uh-oh...maybe that's what it REALLY is...) Really, though, I'm in that nasty inbetween stage where all my clothes still fit just fine, but my tummy looks nasty to me and kinda bulges in ways that make me very unsatisfied with my appearance. And I haven't really gained any weight yet, maybe 1 pound, so I don't think it's from extra doughnuts. Besides, I only had 1! (I couldn't help it, I really needed a lemon filled doughnut. Very bad for me, I know.) Oh yeah, and right now, I'm somewhere between 10-12 weeks. With Eleanor, I had gained somewhere between 6 and 8 pounds by now and I was starting to wear transition pants, so we're already starting off better! (Thank goodness!!!!!!! Those are pretty bad stats.)

Down to the Top 16...

Well, I got 1 out of 4 right for who was going to leave American Idol last night. To my complete and utter astonishment, both Sanjaya and Antonella remain. (Well, despite Antonella's lack of talent musically, everyone says she's hot, AND there are inappropriate pictures of her circulating on the web, so of course she's still on!)

So, last night we parted ways with AJ Tabaldo and Nick Pedro, and Alaina Alexander and Leslie Hunt. None of this really surprised me, except that ALL of them deserved to stay more than Sanjaya and Antonella. And I don't know who was more surprised, me or Sanjaya. He totally expected to go. At least he is really nice, so I feel bad wanting him to leave. It was obvious by watching Antonella's facial expression that I was infinitely more surprised than her that she stayed. She totally expected to stay. She is the complete opposite of some other contestants, like Jordin Sparks and Lakisha Jones. Those are some really nice girls.

Earthquake!

Yeah, don't worry, we didn't even feel it... How ironic is it, though, that the U of A men's basketball team was playing Cal last night, and THEY felt it? It was across the bay from us, though for some reason, news reports insist on calling it the "San Francisco area". It was across the bay and further east even, and it was only a 4.2. Don't get me wrong--I don't actually WANT to be in an earthquake. Earthquakes in the bay area were almost a big enough deterrent to keep us from coming to Stanford at all. We're hoping we escape "unshaken".

To Clarify on the IQ Test

To clarify about the IQ test, the scoring is baloney. Peter took the test, scored 127, and then we changed a lot of his answers to be wrong, and it still said 127. Then we changed a lot again and it scored lower. So, maybe they have a formula for how they score the tests, but it doesn't appear to have much to do with having more right answers...