I Love Cord-Uh-Roy

Kit: 'I love Cord-uh-Roy" by Sara Ellis & Connie Prince. Font: Angelina

!!! NEW Monday!!!! I Love Cord-Uh-Roy kit by Sara Ellis & Connie Prince @ Gotta Pixel.

What've I been up to lately?

Sherri Piegdon- "Urban Edge" kit, Shabby Princess- "promise" staple, & Loved by the King Font

Sherrie Piegdon- "This Girl" kit, joeshand2 font

Amie Collofello- "I Love Cupcakes", Font: Loved by the King

playing catch up. again. . . and again.

I have not been doing too hot with blogging lately. (As is obvious by the consistent drop in the number of posts per week and/or months.) But let's be honest, no matter how happy I am with my life right now, it just ain't that exciting on a day to day basis. Except maybe to me, but that's mostly because I get a big thrill out of trying to figure out how the baby is positioned from one moment to the next and feel pretty cool if I can almost "catch" her foot as it juts out of my stomach.

However, I have decided to start writing about the mundane-- and if you decide to read it and are bored, well I guess that is just your own fault.

First of all, Jeff started student teaching last week. This is pretty awesome because he is getting paid to do his student teaching where he was already working. The place sucks, to be honest. He is stressing out right now because he is supposed to teach a unit on basketball and there are only 7 basketballs for units (classes) of 21+ kids. And he is at a "youth treatment facility" but really it is just a warehouse for teens who have gotten in trouble and their parents and/or the state can't deal with it anymore. The majority are from california, were adopted, have gotten in trouble, their adoptive parents are sick of it, so they or the state pays $6,ooo per kid per month for them to be warehoused there until they turn 18 or graduate from the program (aka, turn 18). It's challenging teaching P.E. when there are kids in the classes who aren't allowed shoes because they are a "flight risk." So they are wearing slippers or slide ons. Real safe. Also, there are a couple of basketball hoops, but Jeff has already gone out and bought nets for them because they didn't have any and so far every attempt on his and the previous teachers part to get more equipment or current equipment fixed has been denied.
The ridiculous thing is that his University student teaching supervisor said that he would try and find some old equipment from one of the high schools in the area for them to use. How much sense does that make?! His work is bringing in $150,000 per month per class and they can't afford to buy a couple of basketballs?! So ridiculous. And there isn't any grass. Anywhere. Or a legitimate gymnasium.
But, on the positive side, it is a place that is making it possible for Jeff to get his student teaching done this summer, and he is getting paid to do it. So I am very thankful for that. But Jeff is a perfectionist-- so just doing the bare minimum is not an option and he is not okay with lazy teaching so he's spending a lot of time and energy worrying about how he is going to pull it off the next 55 teaching days. I'm just praying that his University supervisor will grade him within the context of the "school" he is teaching at and not expect him to pull some crazy rabbit tricks in his classes.
The other good news is that since Jeff will be used to working with classes made up solely of troubled kids who don't even have the motivation to do enough not to fail because most don't even need the credit-- teaching at a regular high school with only a few troublemakers and students who need the credit to graduate will probably be much easier for him.
One of the points I was going to make before I started ranting about Jeff's work was that his new schedule is fantastic. He leaves at 7:45-ish in the morning, I meet him with lunch from noon-1 and he is home by 3:30- 4 pm everyday. So cool. It's been a good adjustment to make because I was used to him being gone by 7 everyday and most days not home until 11 and then we was also working every other weekend-- 14 hour shifts. So now he is just gone for about 8 hours, M-F. I also realized that besides coaching games, he will never have to work a weekend ever again. Knock on wood.

So what have I been doing? Besides a whole lot of nothing . . .

I have started making tutus for little girls to sell on-line. I finally got a shop on etsy.com set up. It's http://tutusbytina.etsy.com . For those of you who have never looked at etsy.com, you should. It's one of the coolest sites on-line, I think. It's kind of like ebay, but instead of auctions, it's just stuff for sale. So every seller has a little "shop." AND it's all homemade stuff or supplies to make homemade stuff. There are some pretty crazy random things on there- I love it. You can also put up an ad saying what you want made and how much money you are willing to pay for it and people will bid to be the one you hire to make whatever it is that you're wanting.
Once we are in our house and settled in a bit, I plan to use Etsy purchases to decorate my house. Maybe some random artist selling their artwork on Etsy will be famous someday and then my grandkid will get to go on Antique Roadshow and find out that a painting I bought for $25 bucks is worth $25,000 fifty years later.
My goal is to start making all sorts of little girly froo-froo things to sell . . . but for now I am sticking with just tutus, if for no other reason than I just don't have any space to keep and/or make anything else. I'll probably start sewing and selling shoulder bags, etc. too, but that is more time and cost intensive so it gets to wait until we are moved into our house and the baby is born and a little older too.

Seriously, I am sitting here trying to think about other stuff to write about. One of the weird things that has happened lately is I am unable to sleep in. I recognize that "sleeping in" is relative. To me, anything before 8 am is waking up early. And for the past couple of weeks, I have been unable to sleep in past 8. Hence the reason I am blogging at 7:30 am on a Sunday when church doesn't start until 1. To put this in perspective: before this little biological sleeping clock upheaval-- Church at 1 pm on Sunday meant sleeping in until 11 am. If I was feeling full of "get up and go" then I would be up by maybe 9:30 am.
To be honest, I am feeling sort of ripped off by this wide-awakeness-as-the-sun-comes-up because I recognize that my nights (and days) of sleeping when I want, however long I want, are coming to a sure and speedy end in less than 10 weeks!

Jeff has an interview the first weekend in June with Mesa School District. It's just a preliminary screening interview with a randomly assigned principal in the district so we aren't expecting a job offer after the interview or anything because he'll need to interview with the specific principal with the job opening after he gets through that interview. Mesa school district doesn't post specific openings for positions. So for all we know, there could be zero openings or 15 openinngs. If that makes sense. He also has the Arizona licensure tests that weekend so we're going to go down to get a crib while we're there. I'm crossing my fingers that we'll be able to find a good one on craigslist that weekend! (Jeff isn't a big fan of the craigslist idea, but I'm hoping to convince him and save ourselves some $$). I'll be 35 weeks pregnant by then so Jeff is sort of nervous about me flying-- but really, the drive down is pretty crappy and I'll probably swell up like a balloon after 8 hours in the car-- so I think flying is a better idea.

Anyway, my stomach is growling so I'm gonna go eat some cereal.

Jeff just woke up and told me "Happy Mother's Day", I am sort of in pre-mom mode but it is still getting me out of helping cook and/or clean up Sunday dinner today so that is pretty fantastic. This will be the first non-awkward Mother's Day at church since we've been married. Yay for that. So HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY if you're a mom.

first digital scrapbook page

So I thought that digital scrapbooking would be a good idea for me because it takes me many many hours to complete one scrapbook page regularly. Well, digital scrapbooking still takes me a long time. Just not AS long and there isn't such a mess to clean up. So I'm thinking that when we move back to AZ I will just mix the two somehow. We'll see.

ultrasound pics-- 19 1/2 weeks

3rd ultrasound

I don't know if I have mentioned this, but I love my doctor. He is awesome. Yesterday we went in for the much anticipated appt. Of course, because we were so excited, it was the one appt. that we actually had to wait a few minutes in the waiting room! In the exam room Dr. Chalmers was asked how everything was going, and I said, "good." He asked, "Any complaints?" I said, "No, not really." He responded, "What?! Come on, you can't be one of those patients who go through their whole pregnancy without any complaints!" That's when I explained that I do complain, just to Jeff, so by the time we are sitting in the Dr.'s office I don't have anything left to complain about. After that he proceeded to list a bunch of complaints/symptoms that he gets a lot, each one as a question. Maybe he does that to help women who are having a relatively easy pregnancy recognize that they're having an easy pregnancy so far. Or maybe he was just killing time.

I thought that because he was running a little late that he might be in more of a hurry than his usual no-rush-time-for-anything approach- but he wasn't. So like always, he asked if I had any questions, I told him that my questions were more about the actual birth and that we have plenty of time to talk about that later but he said that if I was thinking about it he had all the time in the world to talk about it now.

So my first question was about actual labor and birth positions and that I had read that although flat on the back and reclining were the most popular in the hospital, they aren't actually the most conducive to giving birth effectively. He agreed and said that today, those positions are largely a result of women getting epidurals which make their legs unable to support their weight, therefore they end up on their back. So I asked if he is willing to "catch" babies being birthed in other positions and . . . he is! I shouldn't really be surprised considering how supportive he was about me not wanting an epidural to even be an option in the first place, and that he has done waterbirths before, but it still just makes me really happy because I've been worried about getting an OB who was close minded about how they deliver babies. Who knows, maybe more OBs are like Dr. Chalmers than I realize, but I don't plan on finding out unless I live in a different state the next time I'm pregnant.

My second, well I guess third, question was about monitoring the baby. I really don't want to feel stuck on the bed during labor so I asked his/the hospitals policy on monitoring. He said that the College of Obstetrics recommends monitoring once every half an hour, so that is what they'll do. In between I will be free to do what I want (for the most part). Who knows, I may have my first contraction, cry for my mommy, and want to be on the bed asap until the baby is born, but I am very glad to know that I'll have more freedom then that at the hospital.
I also asked him about what I had read regarding the epidural anesthetic crossing through the placenta and the baby getting some as well and therefore being less aware immediately after birth. He said that from what he had seen the epidural doesn't effect the baby because it is so localized and anesthesiologists have figured out the correct doses pretty accurately. He said that pediatricians he has asked that same questions agree. But, he did say that the drugs like demoral which are given through the IV, "just to take the edge off" do effect the baby and it makes them "loopy."

Finally, I asked him about the IV needle they put in, just in case. I couldn't remember the name of it, he said that it is called a Hep lock. I wasn't a fan of the idea, mostly because I have never had a nurse be able to get a vein on the first poke. Usually, it is a poke, and a dig, then a try again, followed by a couple, I'm so sorry, and then the process repeats itself until finally they give up and until they try the other hand and start from square one. Needless to say, it sucks. But he said two things. The first is that pregnant women are notoriously easy to get an IV in because they have so much extra blood in their veins, that is until they hemorrhage and all the blood rushes to their head and vital organs and then it is sometimes impossible to get an IV in. So that is one thing he doesn't mess around with. He said that he won't require it be put in the second I step into the hospital, but once everything starts progressing they'll put one in. Which makes a lot of sense to me. It was good to hear him put his foot down, basically, about something so that I know he isn't just smiling and nodding in agreement to my preferences just to shut me up, with a totally different attitude once we're actually in the hospital. My mom also informed me that once you're in labor you really don't give a rip what they stick you with- you just want the baby out.

So after all that and a discussion about Wicked, the play versus the book, we headed down to the ultrasound room. I am starting to wonder if I should use the term "sneaked" because this is the 2nd ultrasound that he has done, without charging us for it. This ultrasound was purely for entertainment sake, seriously. He did, however, find the heartbeat before anything else. Then he found the legs and what he thinks was "a pee-pee." Before he started the ultrasound he said that if he wasn't able to tell whether it was a boy or a girl, he wouldn't say. So then he says that he thinks it's a boy, but not to throw away any receipts. By the way, at the first mention of "pee pee" Jeff burst out laughing, so loud. After our experience last time with me being unable to stop giggling, I sat their doing a lamaze type pant, trying as hard as I possibly could, not to laugh. Whenever I did laugh, it moved the baby and he had to find him again. So then I asked if it was possibly a girl, she was just chubby down there, he said that sometimes that does happen but he didn't think that was the case this time. So Jeff laughed harder. Then Dr. Chalmers started cracking jokes, throwing out all the things that Dad's want to hear about their little boys. Then any composure I had was all over, we were all cracking up and the baby was moving around like crazy. In the end, he said that he was 90% sure it was a boy. So for Jeff's sake, I'm crossing my fingers until Feb 22nd, when he will do the official 20 week ultrasound.

Oh, I forgot to mention, he began the ultrasound with a story about a women who weighed 380+ lbs wanting to know the sex of the baby at 16 weeks which is basically impossible and I am not going to elaborate on the rest of the story, but I am sure you get the idea. I don't think Jeff really cares too much about how much Dr. Chalmers agrees with my ideas about birth or anything else, I think he calls him "our doctor" because of the jokes they exchange back and forth.

ultrasound 2 pic

Sorry, I don't own a scanner so I just took a picture of the picture and this is what you get. He/she has a big ol' head but my book (yes I finally caught up on my reading) says that is normal. Dr. Chalmers tried to get a picture with the legs showing too but the baby was moving around too much. I'm already failing in the organization arena as a mom to be because I cannot remember where I put the first tadpole ultrasound printout. When I find it I will post it too.

purse!

I finished the *swing bag last night. It took me longer than it probably should have- but it is done. And it's reversible, even though I probably won't ever actually reverse it. When I woke up this morning I realized that I didn't have anything to hold my driver's license, check card, etc. So, feeling adventurous, I made a little wallet/pocket to hold them with the fabric left over from the swing bag. It definitely isn't perfect, and I probably made it 10 times more complicated than necessary since I tend to make things difficult if left to my own devices. Regardless, I am pretty happy to have a bag/purse big enough for my book, notebook, camera, ID, keys, pens, chapsticks, and the bag of skittles I plan to have out and ready to bribe my niece Samantha with the second I see her at the airport on Tuesday.

*Amy Butler has some really cute stuff. I made the swing bag. It included a pattern for a sash/bow but let's be honest-- I'd never actually use it- so I didn't make it.