Saturday, April 28, 2012

New Bike, New Belly, New Blogger

Hmmm. Okay, Blogger, I see that you have made some "improvements" here, new dashboard, some new and fancy looking publishing options which I am too tired to explore right now, but let's get one thing straight. For the past few years, my entire blogging career to be exact, you have required me to upload my photos in reverse order so that they will appear chronologically on the blog. Naturally I cursed you for this many times early on in my blogging, but over time I learned to live with this bizarre quirk of yours. And now suddenly, it occurs to you that maybe JUST MAYBE photos should appear in the order in which they were uploaded.

And so you change on me. No warning. No courtesy email. Nothing. And now my pictures are all in the wrong order and that just MIGHT complicate this already loosely tied narrative.

Wait, I have no narrative.

Look! Sleeping Sawyer!


I'll admit that it is kind of cool to be able to easily change the size of my photos. I am pretty sure I could do this before, but you know, since I kept clicking my photos when I thought it would perhaps be worth the effort to copy and paste them into the right order, I realized just how easy it was to make this one a bit smaller.


And then I decided that we would all just suffer through the reverse order photos. Look, a bird!

This next bit is really for my dad, who is off strolling the streets of Paris or hitting up the nightclubs in Barcelona or charming snakes in Morocco or something along those lines as we speak. My point is, he is not here to see my new bike! New bike! Holla!


I have always been one of those "I don't buy bikes, I just wait for them to find me" types, and over the years a variety of bikes have found their way into my various garages. For the past 8 or so years I have been riding my beloved 1970's Schwinn Collegiate all over the place, often pulling two kids in a bike trailer. Let me tell you, it's a workout. And not a very fun one.

So the old man took pity on me and kicked me down some birthday cash for some new wheels and so I've been sitting on this bike money for awhile now. Once the sun started to shine, Brent dragged me out to the bike shops and I test drove many, many bikes and smiled and nodded and tried to pay attention as many, many bike mechanics explained to me in minute detail the features of many, many different bikes. In case you are wondering, the kids are not very fun to go bike shopping with. I think they honked every single horn and rang every single bell that crossed their paths.

But here she is!



 

And here is the belly bump at 12 weeks. Kinda looks like a beer belly to me, but somewhere in there is a peach-sized Felix. I have not started to feel better yet. Grrr. I am still super tired and VERY VERY nauseous and occasionally I vomit profusely. TMI? Let's all hope this passes soon. On the plus side, Felix must be a girl because I know I never felt this lousy when I was pregnant with the boys. I know this, because had I felt this bad, we would only have had Jack. Seriously. An interesting side effect to this pregnancy has been my total aversion to all things sweet. Cookies, cake, ice cream, chocolate- blech! I think this is very strange.

We are all soccer all the time around here lately. Between Brent and the boys, we are dealing with soccer 5 nights of the week. Jack's first game was last weekend and I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry from the sidelines. 5 year old soccer is pretty entertaining to watch, but also kind of pathetic. Jack did just fine, but some of the kids are picking their noses or sitting down or wandering off the field in search of snacks.


On the first day of practice, Brent got roped into coaching. He does an awesome job and as the other coach put it, "He's the only one of us who really knows anything about soccer." As you can see from his body language, he's also the kind of coach that you want your kid to be with. Some coaches (ahem) are a bit more standoffish.


And here we are with my opening shot in which I planned to tell you how we all dragged ourselves out of bed early on a Saturday morning to march into battle at Jack's first soccer game. But thanks to Blogger's updates and my laziness, this is now the end so I'll just have to say that I hope I can remember to upload the photos correctly next time despite years of Blogger brainwashing me to do things counter intuitively. Pregnancy brain is a wee bit frazzled these days.


Saturday, April 14, 2012

Farmers Market, Family Soccer, and Felix

First farmers market: first chard pizza! A fresh, crusty baguette, and a fridge filled with colorful veggies. There is so much to love this time of the year.

Easter was our opportunity to honor my grandma Catherine. It was an afternoon of giggling kids, a delicious buffet as only my aunt Karen can do, soccer, sunshine, and homebrewed beers. There were no tears and lots of laughter as we all sat at a long table in the backyard. I hope that someday my life will be remembered like that.




We have a budding musician in the family. I am pretty sure Sawyer will be our comedian and our performer.


Oh, and there's something I've been meaning to tell you...

Meet Felix!
He will be joining our family sometime in late October. There is, of course, the possibility that Felix is a girl (!!) but for the time being Felix is Felix.

We took the boys out to dinner to announce the big news and their reaction was just as we thought it would be.

Here's how it went down:
Me: "Guys, Dad and I brought you here for a special dinner because we have something important to tell you."
Silence. Intense coloring. Totally ignoring me. I hand them the strip of ultrasound pictures.
Me: "Here, look at these pictures and tell me what you think this is."



Jack: "Is it a puppy? Are we getting a new PUPPY?!"
Sawyer: "Yeah, a puppy! I love puppies!"
Me: "Uh, no. We're not getting a puppy. We already have a dog, remember? This is a picture of something growing in my tummy..." Confused silence. " What grows in mamas' tummies?"
Jack: "Puppies?"
Me: "This is a picture of a BABY growing in my tummy. We are going to have another baby!"

Jack: "What?! We're going to have three kids in our family? No way. Are you guys just kidding?"

And from there the conversation devolved into when our food was coming and who was getting grapes with their meal and who had ordered applesauce and other epic, life-changing topics. Brent tried to steer them back to the subject and Jack launched into this long-winded explanation about how much of an inconvenience babies are when it comes to Legos and how the baby will put Legos in his mouth and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE! DID YOU NOT CONSIDER MY LEGOS?!

I think they are warming up to the idea. I hope they are. They have unanimously decided that this new baby had better be a boy and will not even entertain the possibility of having a baby sister.

You probably have some questions, right?

Three kids? What are you guys thinking?
We are thinking that we have two great kids and why not throw another one into the mix? Besides, Sawyer has always seemed like a middle child type, if you know what I mean. Brent was happy with two, but I'd been having this feeling for awhile that something (somebody) was missing. So here we go again.

But you'll need a bigger house! A minivan!
I am so over the McMansion thing. Much of the world lives in much smaller housing than we do. We have plenty of room for now and when we grow out of this house, hopefully we will be able to move. And our Volvo has three seats in the back. People make it work with a lot less than what we have.

You're hoping for a girl, right?
Hell yes, we are hoping for a girl! I read the book and counted the days and all that, so we'll see...

But what if it's a boy?
Then I guess the kids will be happy. And we will love him and know that it was meant to be.

How are you feeling?
Terrible. Well, actually better in the past few days. The first trimester is usually a bitch for me and the morning/all day long sickness has definitely been worse this time around (maybe it's a girl!). I am gradually coming out of the haze of nausea that has had me stumbling around for the last few weeks. Thank you, Kate, for making me ginger tea when I've been too sick to walk to the staff room and for retrieving various important items like my purse and my planning book from random locations around the school. And Brent has been letting me sleep as much as I have needed, which has been a lot, and taking care of the boys so that I can dry heave in peace and quiet. Like I said, I think the worst is behind me. I haven't thrown up at all today!

Are you still running?
I was running in the mornings until week 8 when I started barfing my brains out. After a few weeks off, I ran again today and felt great. We'll see if I can keep it up.

Will you really name him Felix?
I dunno. Maybe. What do you think?