Monday, January 26, 2015

i want it now

this will be a whiny rant.

i have been dreaming of girl scout cookies lately. because it is girl scout cookie season, and i should be able to get some. but i can't. because girl scouts are nowhere to be found. seriously, it's like they have all gone into hiding or something. i suspect my doctor is behind this. i want thin mints and samoas and tagalongs and trefoils. and i want them really, really badly.

i get that selling cookies is supposed to teach the girl scouts a bunch of things, and if the company just sold them online no one would learn anything. or something. but, really, most girl scouts aren't actually selling the cookies these days. their parents are. they are using facebook and pinning up order sheets in office break rooms. and because the cookies are crack, people buy hundreds of them. and the scouts get to take the forms back to their troop leaders and get whatever prize they were working towards. so they should just let people order online is what i'm saying.

the booths won't start popping up until the end of february. the first one in my area will be at four o'clock on february twentieth. yes, i checked. that's like, a month away. and i'll be at the very end of my pregnancy and who knows if i'll want to venture out to get the cookies then. i want them now. and i know that even if i order from a girl scout now i won't get them until end of february (because the world is cruel) but at least i'll know they're coming.

sigh. first world problems.

*I Want It All - Queen

Saturday, January 24, 2015

can't complain about much these days

the third trimester is i think my least favorite trimester of this whole pregnancy thing. (the vague queasiness of those first few months was not great, but it was also less regular than my complaints at the moment.) but i am still so so super grateful about how this pregnancy is progressing, because i look around and know that it could be so much worse.

the third trimester to me right now means thirst. i drink about one hundred and seventy five ounces a day  on average, oftentimes more. if i drink any less then i feel dry and dehydrated and i can't make a fist and start to get dizzy and even more irritable than usual. of course, drinking that much is no fun either. and do you know how many times a day you have to pee when you're constantly guzzling water? it is nearly impossible to get anything done these days because as soon as i really hit a groove in whatever it is i am doing, i need to get up and run to the bathroom. again.

it also means back pain. constant and painful. there is this one spot on my back that just never stops hurting. (well, mostly never. thankfully stretching out in bed seems to help and the first hour after i wake up i'm usually fine.) i'm sure it has something to do with my posture, and i'd be more than happy to make adjustments, but i'm just unsure how i should sit or stand or whatever it is i'm doing wrong. i wonder if google would help.

it meant a period of really bad acid reflux. after some experimenting with my diet, i found that the main culprit was chocolate which should have been an easy enough fix, but i love  chocolate. i cut down my intake significantly (which also helps when i need to defend myself whenever my doctor claims i'm gaining too much weight), but there are still days where i am willing to put up with the reflux for some good chocolate. (i have heard a lot of people complain that they cannot sleep from heartburn/acid reflux and i thankfully never got to that point.)

but most of all, the third trimester to me right now means ridiculous emotions. and stupid commercials that make me tear up every single time i watch them. even though i've seen it before. even though i know what is going to happen. even thought it is really not that emotional of a commercial. case in point, this similac commercial gets me every time:



but like i said, even with the things that i moan and groan about, i know how lucky i am and have been for the past seven months. i turned thirty-three weeks yesterday which means there are seven weeks left of this. (could be as low as five or as many as nine.) and then hopefully cricket will prove to be as easy a new newborn as he was a fetus. (the newborn stage has been freaking me out the closer i get to it, while toddlers are my absolute favorite, i have quite a bit of experience with kids of most ages. i have zero experience with newborns. i have seven weeks for my "natural instincts" to kick in.)

*Be Okay - Oh Honey

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

i am making changes to my blog. i felt like it was time. (plus, procrastination!) i want to clean it up, get rid of all the clutter, make it lighter. so there will probably be a lot of messing around in the next few days. the changes may be temporary. i have my old code safely stored for reverting back to and may decide to switch it up completely again in a few months. but for now, it will probably just be some variation of what you see. (i decided to go with a blogger template instead of building something from scratch because of laziness.)

to tie up some other loose ends, i wrote about one hundred twenty thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven (120, 367) words last year - not counting any form of correspondence or anything that didn't have my "voice" or anything that i forgot to add to the total count. that's only a little more than twelve percent of what my goal was (one million words) so... i guess i failed? i wasn't trying too hard, though, to be honest. and one million words is way more than it seemed like in my head. i have become very zen about failure lately. (okay, maybe just when it concerns failing pointless self-made goals.)

the number of posts i write a year seems to be declining every year, so my new goal this year is to write at least a hundred posts. i'm hoping that at least half of them will be more than thoughtless rambles. (in two thousand and nine i wrote over three hundred posts. i was ridiculous.) 


Sunday, January 18, 2015

it's haunting me

does everyone remember the twits by roald dahl? i actually don't remember the plot very much at all, but wasn't there a part where someone glued all of the furniture to the ceiling so they thought they were upside down? hardly an unheard of prank these days, but to young elementary school me, it was the the funniest and smartest idea in the world. aside from the furniture on the ceiling part, which i'm not actually sure was from that particular book in all honesty, there was one point that got lodged in my brain and never really left it.

there's a part in the book that says that if you have ugly thoughts then they show on your face and you get uglier and uglier until people can barely stand to look at you, and if you have nice thoughts then you get prettier and prettier because they shine out of your face. that idea used to haunt me.

now, i had an amazing childhood, but i was a slightly weird little kid with a fondness for melancholy. i remember being in fourth grade and laying on my bed with my windows open, there was a cool breeze blowing in just a few degrees too warm to make it chilly and birds were chirping just outside. my sisters were somewhere in the house or yard playing, and i just stayed in my room listening to music that made me sad. because apparently i was always like that. and to this day, whenever there are clear blue skies and a breeze and chirping birds and solitude, i am transported to my nine year old body laying on my bed, staring up at the canopy, and enjoying that particular satisfaction of digging yourself into a hole of sadness.

anyway.

when i was still really young (think first or second grade) and first read that line, i one hundred percent believed it. if a single thought that was anything less than pleasant crossed my mind, i was terrified that everyone around me would see me getting uglier and just know. i eventually grew out of that, but the echoes of the fear still lingered in my mind, and once i hit fifth/sixth grade, it kind of came up again. i knew that whatever thoughts i had were not changing my physical appearance, but i also knew that there was nothing hiding in the dark to kill me and that didn't stop me from turning on every single light on my way upstairs and flying into bed when i turned the light off in my room at night. (it also didn't exactly help that i was entering that lovely awkward stage lol.)

that went away, too, after a while, but the excerpt still sticks with me. and at random times i'll suddenly remember the twits and how they got uglier because of their thoughts. usually it's just a passing thought or a one-liner in response to something someone said/did, but today it stirred up the other memories. there are so many bits and pieces from books that i can barely even remember anymore that have stuck with me my entire life. a lot of them seem pretty pointless, like a scene of picking up baggage at an airport or gluing a napkin into a scrapbook, and i start to wonder why. why my brain decided to store that little snippet but lose the rest of the plot. what was the point?

and those are the deep introspective thoughts that have kept me from working on my dissertation. i should've chosen a topic related to children's literature. maybe then i could have at least pretended i was doing work.

*Everytime - Britney Spears

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

goodbye my friend. you have been the one, you have been the one for me

jasper is dead, and i am heartbroken. a few months ago (possibly longer), he started to have some issues. the main one was that he would sometimes just restart out of nowhere and then get stuck in a reboot loop where he would almost finish restarting but then decide to just restart from the beginning again. these loops would only last a minute, though, and usually if i took off my phone case they'd finish even faster. another very frustrating issue was that he would get in these moods where, whenever i would go to take a picture, he'd just turn off. like the take a picture button was a power button or something. he would also do this thing where he would turn off out of nowhere, and when i turned him back on, the battery would be mostly drained. my husband (and most other people in my life) told me to buy a new phone. but i loved jasper, and he was still perfectly usable most of the time, and so i stubbornly refused.

fast forward to a few weeks ago. i was at target with my husband having a text-conversation with a friend about whether or not she was going to another friend's dinner when jasper decided to restart. and restart. and then restart some more. i took off the case and waited, but he just kept trying to restart. i took out the battery for a while, but the second i put it back in, the restarting just continued. i tried everything, but all my efforts were made in vain. and then, after about twenty minutes, right when i was ready to call the time of death, he was finally able to finish a restart and everything was back to normal. 

now, a smart person would have heeded the warning signs and made some sort of preparation for the inevitable end. i am not a smart person, though. i am a person who apparently believes deeply in denial. "he's fine," i said. "it was just a weird one-time thing. i'll never have to buy another phone for the rest of my life."

and then monday happened where any time i touched a button i would send jasper into freak-out restart forever mode. he always came back after a while, though, and so i still did nothing. come tuesday, jasper was getting stuck in restart loops that lasted hours, draining his battery completely in the process. and now here i am on wednesday night, still unable to use my phone because he will not stop trying to restart and pulled rudely from the lands of denial. 

i am not ready for my phone to die. i never synced my candy crush with facebook so none of my progress is saved. nearly up to level five hundred, and for what? i have pictures that i have not saved to a computer or backed up in any way yet. there is so much stuff on my phone that i want and/or need, and now i cannot get to it. and i am sad. plus, buying a house is expensive. furnishing a house is expensive. having a baby is expensive. buying a phone is expensive. i was not prepared for that last one in the midst of all the others. 

for the meantime i am using my husband's old phone. and i am grateful to get to use it, but it has none of the apps i use (which are basically only four: whatsapp, instagram, candy crush, and babycenter), an awful background, all the wrong notification sounds, none of my alarms, the wrong layout format thing, and is not my phone. adjusting his phone to look like jasper just feels like defeat, and i somehow refuse to accept that. i am still carrying around jasper trying to get him to start up again, but so far have had no luck. sigh. 

it's been a good two and a half years, jasper. (it's actually been two years and seven months almost to the day.)

*Goodbye My Lover - James Blunt

Sunday, January 11, 2015

babies are expensive. everyone knows this. and every company wants you to spend all of your money on their products instead of their competitor's. once again, not news. this means that, along with a baby, pregnancy gets you a lot of free samples. everyone wants you to get hooked on their particular diaper, bottle, pacifier, and formula, and spend the next four years handing them your paycheck. let's talk about this last one for a second. you leave the hospital with a bunch of different formula samples, that i knew. but i don't think i was fully prepared for the amount of formula i would get before ever going into labor. as of this moment, at thirty-one weeks, i already have five different eight oz containers of different formulas (different brands, ones for gassy babies, ones specially designed for newborns...). now, at a little less than fifteen bottles per container, this isn't a ridiculously huge amount of formula, but it is definitely nothing to sneeze at. and it is making me anxious. 

because i am hoping to exclusively breastfeed. but, as i have been told over and over and over again, breastfeeding is hard. and frustrating, and not some natural, instinctual thing. (though it really should be. i mean, come on.) i am not great at failure. i have the tendency to quit when i suck instead of working through until i get better. i can only imagine that sleep deprivation and crying babies will make my resolve weaken even more. and having so much formula in the house will certainly not help. 

i know how to make a bottle. i have fed babies formula more times than i could ever count. i know how easy it is. how fast. i do not know how to breastfeed. i have never done it before. cricket has never done it before. i am preparing myself for a very frustrating learning curve. for both of us. and the formula is already mocking me. tempting me. whispering sweet promises of ease and more sleep and a million other things. 

and suddenly, the free samples don't just seem like an obvious marketing strategy. they seem evil. like some big corporation is trying to change my mind about something that i really don't need people trying to undermine me about because i am already worried that i will not be able to do it. i don't know what will happen two months from now, but at the moment, i want you formula companies to know that i think you really suck. 

(similac at least gave breast milk storage bottles and a really helpful guide on breastfeeding with its formula. so there's that.)

Friday, January 9, 2015

shortly after finishing that last post, darcy jumped up and his ears started moving around like antennae. and then a second later i heard a great gushing sound through the walls. like an ocean had opened up in my living room. my first thought was, of course, oh crap a pipe burst. but i ran upstairs and nothing seemed to be leaking. the noise was even quieter up there. so i ran down to the garage/front door area (down too many stairs. the joys of living in a stacked townhome), and looked in the garage. nothing. then i glanced out of my peephole and felt like my house was transported to the back of niagra falls. i always kind of wished i could stand behind the wall of water at a waterfall, and now i can say that i have. sort of. (and then i did something stupid and opened my door to try and see where the water was coming from. it only took a second of water coming inside for me to realize how stupid of an idea that was.)

anyway, long story short, the pipe for the fire sprinkler system outside froze and broke in the cold weather and there was so. much. water. coming down. both ours and our neighbors' welcome mats were washed into the street down the new river that formed surprisingly fast. then the firemen came and almost broke down my door because i didn't immediately apparate down the two flights of steps when they knocked. and now the nauseating smell of sulphur (you know the one, that smell of running through sprinklers or playing with the hose when you were little) that was confined to the front door area has floated up to our living areas (gross) and i was told that there would be a weird guy in a car basically parked outside of our house for the next few days like a brazen, creepy stalker until the fire sprinkler system (which i have always hated and now have a reason to) is back up because our house was put on fire alert watch or something.

ugh. 

we've got a fantasy affair

you know when you take a baby to get his/her shots and then they are cranky for the rest of the day because ugh, shots? that was me last night. i'm not even sorry about it.

today marks the start of my thirty-first week of pregnancy which means that we are officially down to the single digits, people. nine weeks until my estimated due date. sixty-three days. (i'm still undecided about whether counting the days makes it seem shorter or longer.) and that urge to deep clean the house that people keep telling me about has yet to kick in. i'm starting to think that it never will. i did get halfway through another baby's blanket last night (when i stupidly ran out of yarn and now need to leave the house today and risk the cold to get more) so i mean, some nesting is going on i think.

but this post is surprisingly not about babies or pregnancy. without further ado, i hereby present to you my extremely embarrassing list of books read in twenty-fourteen. (i would like to preface this list by saying that i am the kind of person that turns to lifetime movies and chick flicks i have seen a million times when i am stressed.) oh, and it's in whatever weird order that goodreads likes to remember things in. i thought it was alphabetical until we hit number eleven and then realized that goodreads is just weird.
  1. Cryer's Cross by Lisa McMann
  2. The Code Witch by Sarah Sterman
  3. The Great Greene Heist by Varian Johnson
  4. The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness
  5. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell 
  6. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
  7. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
  8. Landline by Rainbow rowell
  9. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
  10. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
  11. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart 
  12. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephenie Perkins 
  13. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
  14. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
  15. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
  16. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
  17. Wings of Fire: The Hidden Kingdom by Tui T. Sutherland 
  18. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
  19. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
  20. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
  21. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
  22. Ranger's Apprentice: The Siege of Macindaw by John Flanagan
  23. Ranger's Apprentice: Erak's Ransom by John Flanagan
  24. Ranger's Apprentice: The Sorcerer in the North by John Flanagan
  25. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh
  26. Wings of Fire: The Dark Secret by Tui T. Sutherland
  27. Ranger's Apprentice: The Battle for Scandia by John Flanagan
  28. Ranger's Apprentice: The Icebound Land by John Flanagan
  29. Crazy Comes in Three by Elizabeth Barone
  30. The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
  31. The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet by Kate Rorick
  32. Ranger's Apprentice: The Burning Bridge by John Flanagan
  33. My True Love Gave to Me by a bunch of authors that i'm not going to type out
  34. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling
  35. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling
  36. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling
  37. What To Expect When You're Expecting
so i didn't make it to the fifty books that i wanted to read, but oh well. and to cap off the book failures of twenty-fourteen, i spent around $60 dollars on new books over the year which is ten dollars more than i said i was going to spend. (although to be fair, i bought the great greene heist to support the diversity in books movement. they were trying to get enough people to pre-order it to show the publishing companies that books with non-whites on the cover and as the main characters can sell just as well. if it wasn't for that, i wouldn't have bought it. so it kind of doesn't count. and if i don't count it then i came in under fifty dollars so yay me.)

*Wrapped Up In Books - Belle and Sebastian

Monday, January 5, 2015

people keep talking about this whole new year thing, and so i figure that it's important enough to warrant a blog post, but really, i have very little to say about it. most years on this blog enter and leave with pretty much zero fanfare or even recognition, and i was perfectly content to let this year come in the same way. i mean, birthdays were always the "new year" to me filled with resolutions and reflections. january first was just, well, january first.

i'm not sure when my complete lack of interest in new years started, but i am going to attribute it to the first year that we were old enough to stay up to watch the ball drop, and it was the most anticlimactic experience of my life. i felt cheated and lied to and was filled with regret that we hadn't spent those precious four hours when were should have been asleep watching cartoons. plus, my family was just never big on it. so these days i just let it pass by and basically ignore it and everyone's attempts to make it into a thing.

but then i went on goodreads and saw that i had failed my book challenge for the year (i think. they don't count rereads and that's pretty much all i did this year. i'll have to recheck.) and i remembered that last year i did a book post and was shocked to realize that an entire year has passed since then. and then i came on here to write a book post and saw that "write one million words" tracker and thought, great, another failed challenge.

i will update the tracker and compile my list of read books this week and then put twenty-fourteen firmly behind me as one of the weirdest years of my life. i failed almost every goal i set for myself at the beginning of the year, but i also checked off some big milestones in that checklist of life thing, so... success?

fifteen is my favorite number, so maybe i will get superstitious all of a sudden and believe that that means there are good things in store for me. it will (hopefully. if everything goes right) be one of those defining years that will separate my life into before-kids and after-kids which is weird to think about. time is flying.