We Are Still Married!

Five years ago today was really, just the best day. It was beautiful. I am so happy that six months after we met, we married. I love him everyday.

For your enjoyment, here is an awkward photo of us eating pizza and drinking Guarana at our wedding luncheon.

My {Almost} Provincial Life

32 Weeks Pregnant

I am nearing the end of my pregnancy, I only have eight weeks left, give or take a week. This is a different time in a pregnant woman’s life. Reflection and realization take over. Things become calm. Tiredness returns, though not much can satisfy this need, as I am wildly uncomfortable. I had a bad pregnancy day yesterday. There was a peculiar cramping in my back and into my hips. I was actually feeling this for a few hours. During a part of that time, I was under the ultrasound at my doctor’s office. He didn’t say anything about it. I had been overextending my body lately, and knew that that was what the pain was in reference to.

Before We Moved In

After I Removed the Old Plants

My garden has been a place of genuine enjoyment lately. Sure all I have done is moved the unwanted, untended plants and branches from the trees and ground to bags and piles that now litter my yard. I am going to need a trailer to take things to the Green Waste Facility, though I don’t know what I am going to do with the branches. I fear the time I have to get at the overgrown ivy pulled up. I am, however, looking forward to going to the nursery and picking out my vegetables for the season. As much as I can, I am going to try to operate a real kitchen garden.

Enjoying My Sewing Materials

I am almost done with the new baby’s quilt. It is actually so much more work than I could ever have anticipated. It is relaxing and therapeutic, but a lot of work. I keep thinking that I am going to finish it when I begin working on it for the day, and get no where close to it. Mae loves to help with it. She insists on climbing up a chair next to me and touching, grabbing, handing, and messing with everything I am currently working on. I used to let her sit on my lap, but a while ago, she reached out to the needle as it was in motion, so that was the end of that. I need to make the new baby’s bedding as well, but I have a fear that I won’t be able to get to it before she is born.

Mae loves the outdoors. We can hardly go a day without a walk, picnic, or just soaking up the sun. The part of my yard with the greenhouse and orchard is fenced off, so when I work back there, I just need to put the dog and the babe in there, and close the gate. It is monumentally convenient  Except while I was in the thick of it, I didn’t realize that Mae was curious as to what dirt tasted like. Unfortunately, I think she liked it. We will see how I tackle that fun new behavior.

I really love where I live. It makes staying at home all day enjoyable. This home was designed for a stay-at-home mother. My old house was designed for… to be sold. I had a nightmare about the people who bought our house; It weighs on my conscience to have loaded the home onto someone else. I really grew to dislike the architecture and design of my old home. It felt fake at the end. It felt like a poorly planned rectangle built with fake materials, made with a facade that was only meant to project a message that there was a house behind it, as though they couldn’t just make a house. I remember crying about it. I remember when Mae fell down the stairs in the split-entry design, and I could have just died right there. That was the moment that really projected me to sell. I could deal with its flaws for the most part, but not at the expense of my child. The yard was unusable, despite four springs I poured all my time, money, and energy to transform into a real yard. The land is unusable, the design is thoughtless, and the materials used to build it were all ideas of real materials fudged to work just OK. It isn’t a place to raise children. Where I live now is a place to raise a family. It is place to feel God in the earth, love in the home, and grow like the human beings were always meant to grow.

Spring is here, and I am happy everyday to live where I live.

The Many Adventures of the Smiths

I believe the world as I know is flipping upside down, and by whose hands you may ask? Ah, well, our own. Firstly, I believe my old position as Web Editor has finally been dissolved, and with that, the blimey egg-heads took back their equipment (I say in jest) that I unconventionally had been using as my own personal computer since my own personal computer went the way of the dodo. Well, with that sore news, we purchased a brand new, fancy schmancy Dell Inspiron laptop. It has Windows 8 on it, or as I like to call it, it has the stupidest OS in all the land on it. For reals. They took what I love about a PC, the fact that a smart person can do anything on it and made it into another Apple computer – dumbed down, watered down, give you one button so you don’t mess it up, now here is a cork for your fork go sit in the corner kind of design.

Oh, Windows 8…

Anywho, I will get used to it. In the meantime, I can blog again! Yay! Ok, back to worlds changing.

Let’s start with baby Mae. She has begun to actually understand what we have been saying this entire time. It is shocking. I am no longer teaching to what I felt was not being heard. She hears me. It is fascinating and great. It has made bed time like a dream. I simply need to tell her it’s bed time, go through a small routine, and place her in bed. She immediately spills a giant tear and turns red in the face, but I walk away and not even one full minute later, she has laid down, closed her eyes, and gone to sleep. She doesn’t even need me at night anymore. I still wake up, and not being needed, I just lie there and think of things to keep me awake longer, which is something I got to take care of. I wish I had a mom that would tell me to go to sleep.

Our second baby girl is due in about three and a half months. Oh lawrdy, I am scared.

Now for the big news. Adam and I, the Pretty Smitties if you will, listed our house for sale on Monday! We have been threatening it long enough! We just finally got a bunch of things done in the house, waited until after the holidays, and knew what the plan was. Well, we showed the house to a lovely couple yesterday (the first people to look at our house), and immediately following, got our first offer. Yep, listed Monday – offer on Wednesday. We don’t even have a sign up in our yard yet (which I am not happy about).

There is a theme that has been building by living where we live – you may have noticed it in this blog – we are constantly driving long distances to get to anywhere we gravitate to naturally. Our friends live in these long distances away. Adam works, goes to college, and practices art in these long distances away. We have been catering more and more to this idea that where you live must be functional to a way a human being lives. It must be beautiful. The walkways must be permeable. Well, my walkways are certainly not. The only things where I live offers me is a primary fill of shelter and water. Being a homemaker has made this sit directly in front of me and blow raspberries in my face. It takes my husband thirty minutes to drive home from class at 9:00pm at night. We are in an oil crisis and here we are choosing to function everyday with a godawful commute in our SUV! Just to go to the grocery store or even a place to be with people. It was all getting silly. There is more to us moving than that. There are the relationships – with the land, the general people, and the businesses out here; Those relationships seemed less and less something we wanted to pursue anymore.

We decided it was time.

Then for plan making. We looked into our future and saw that in no time at all, just a handful of semesters, Adam is applying for graduate school, and out of state. If we sell now, and invest our money in another home, we would simply need to sell again, and hope it actually sells, that is always a fear. So we played around with the idea of renting. It seemed backwards at first – to sell a house you own to then rent? But I don’t want to take my money, and root it into a ground we don’t intend to live for very long. If I learned anything from this first purchase is that you never know if the land you live is the land you want to live, until you actually live there. Renting first in a new place is the logical thing to do. We plan on living closer to our things, in a place we can call beautiful, and function as human beings.

It’s all pretty existential, and fun as hell.

So that’s it. We got 30 days to find this magical land, rent a lovely place, move our 14 month old into it, and get it ready for a newborn. Change is the scariest thing in the world, especially to propagate it myself, but it is essential, and right.

Wish us luck!

The World Spins Madly On

My days are finally slowing. For the longest time there I felt that there was just so much to shove into the times between the waking up part and the going to sleep part. There was housework, gardening, work work, college work, church work, and baby raising. In addition, this last bit of summer I was helping throw way too many parties. There was the baby shower for my brother’s girlfriend, the neighborhood block party, and there was (not as much on my part) my sister-in-law’s pampering party for her second baby.

But things are slowing, and mostly from my own halting.

I am losing time with my daughter. She is walking (like a champion)! Her language skills are right at the fount! She needs her momma. In addition, I am losing my free babysitting with my mom, she is done, and my wonderful neighbor doesn’t have all the room in the world to take Mae for as much as I would need her. Decisions have to be made, and will soon enough.

I am pregnant – again! It is weird to be pregnant a second time. One question that is becoming increasingly the first reaction people say when I tell them I am pregnant is, “Was this planned?” Really? I have already had a baby, I know how this works. Of course it was planned! I have been planning this from almost the moment we brought Mae home from the hospital. I wanted to give her a sibling so desperately. Thankfully, my husband was the voice of reason, and we talked through to the perfect time. We decided that if Mae and her sibling were 18 months apart that that would be ideal. I waited on pins and needles (and birth control) until August 1st, and as soon as it was removed – I got pregnant! Which is awesome considering the hardship it was the first time around. But our plans were perfect, because Mae and her sibling will be 18 months apart.

I will have been pregnant for two birthdays in a row! Pregnancy is no walk in the park, but it also isn’t something I would liken to a nightmare. Sure, I spent a great deal amount of time next to a toilet, unable to sleep or even walk for short periods of time. But there was Mae. Sweet lovely Mae. And I may talk about this another time, but I seriously think that I experienced acute amnesia at delivery. It felt like I had found out I was pregnant, blacked out, and nine months later there was Mae. I have told several woman this, thinking it was totally natural, but no one has been able to commiserate with me. Ah, the story of my life. 

This time around I am going to see a midwife. My situation with my doctor wasn’t ideal. I want to have a new experience, and I can, so I will. I meet with her in a few weeks. I plan to exercise throughout this pregnancy. I feel that stopping last time may not have been the wisest decision, but maybe it was my only, as I was exhausted mostly throughout. I will be halfway right at Christmas, so I am hoping to schedule my target appointment just before, and have the tech write the gender in a sealed envelope, then have a friend wrap us up a present with a gift that indicates a girl or a boy, so we can open it on Christmas. Won’t that be so fun??

I am thrilled to be having a second child. I want Mae to be increasingly close with her siblings, and age is one thing that will help that.

Lastly, let me mention how I am one of six people in my family that are giving my parent’s grand kids this year – this school year. They will all be starting school at the same time. Isn’t that amazing? Mae and her new sibling will only be one grade a part, as well.

Update

My husband has been bugging me about a post, so here it is. I have been making drafts! I was going to write a post about all the pizzas I have been making, Mae’s cry for momma that sound like she is calling out my name and it breaks my heart, my acting class where the teacher has made me the pet and it feels oh so good, how I have lost a bunch of weight by simply not eating breakfast, our family trip to the Natural History Museum or the opening day of Farmer’s Market, and a post about how I hate the terms “crunchy” and “foody” and why would anyone want to be called an adjective is beyond me. But I get to writing them, and then I trail off and bore myself into absent-mindedness and I don’t finish.

Maybe it is the heat. Perhaps it is the inevitable summer hiatus. Whatever it is, they just aren’t getting made.

Things aren’t boring, don’t mistake me. Things are great. I am finishing up school this semester. Mae is getting older and more beautiful every day. Adam is shooting for the stars and winding up in Hong Kong. We are starting a business! I keep thinking of our Christmas newsletter, and then I get giddy to show off my lovely family.

One Night in Vegas – A Great Anniversary

There were the ribs, coleslaw, and baked beans we had on fine china on our actually anniversary. Then bleeding hearts my husband bought me. There were my amazing friends at work who brought little Martinelli’s and cake to our meeting. And that was just on my actual anniversary. Not even anywhere close to the amaze-balls time I had the next day when we flew to Las Vegas.

I was mortally afraid of leaving my baby. I had spent months attempting to build a good storage of frozen breast milk in the freezer for her, but I had failed. She only had a few feedings. However, we had bought the tickets, prepaid our hotel, and had been planning this trip since before she was born, there was no turning back, because we knew it would be a good thing. I went to buy some formula for Mae, and it broke my heart. I couldn’t even do it. I had made such a resolve for myself to exclusively breastfeed her for the first six months and only do breast milk and food until she was a year. I understand that formula is a perfectly fine food to give a baby, it is however, in my life, simply an alternative, not the primary way to feed her. We all have our situations in life, and this is mine. And yes, my heart hurt. On Thursday, my anniversary, I went into Little Cherry Blossoms, this little baby shop in Ogden, to help me feel a little better and the shop’s owner and I started to talk. I told her about how emotional I was feeling about it, and her and I commiserated. She said she understood my feelings and after we talked I felt so much better. I went to Walmart, found the most regular name-brand super expensive tub of cow’s milk fat, cow’s milk sugar, safflower oil, coconut oil powdery concoction and purchased it. I resolved to just get over it, because my baby needed to be fed, and it was only one night.

On Friday we drove my baby and dog to Salt Lake to meet up with my dad who then took us all to the airport. Mae was passed out in her carseat as we kissed her forehead and parted ways. The airport was so freaking busy. We were running around like crazy people. With the sudden leaving of my first-born, the crazy hectic mess, and the TSA agents, it was no wonder that I began hyperventilating, and once I got done being screened, cried as my husband held me tight. At the gate, in all my gorious emotional mess and a chicken sandwich in hand, we ran into my old friend Rochelle who was waiting for a plane to take her to see her boyfriend. That was a fun coincidence and she helped ground my troubled heart.

My best friend, who is super cute and pregnant, picked us up from the airport and took us to New York New York where she works as their marketer (so we got a great deal) and we spent the night. The room was gorgeous (the guy at the front desk even upgraded us because we knew some Filipino and I think it made his day). I told that bed and sheets several times I was in love with it and hoped the airline would understand if I just brought it with us.

We walked the strip, ate catfish at BB King’s Blues House, window shopped, rode a cab, among other things. We were living on a high. I called my dad who had said Mae didn’t stop crying as soon as she woke up, but then called back to say she must have just been tired because she fell asleep for the night only a half hour past her bedtime. I felt at ease with her being away, though half of myself was miles away, always wondering and worrying, but that is fine.

I was so happy that the trip wasn’t about catching up on sleep or “just getting away from the baby”. One thing I didn’t think about was that I would still need to pump for every feeding otherwise I would be in so much pain and be fluish. Even night feedings. My little hand pump was not nearly as efficient as the baby so I couldn’t quite use it enough. But that is ok, we didn’t attempt to go to sleep until 3am (4am Utah time).

At around 2am we ate the single most delicious dessert I have ever had in my life. We really wanted a dessert, so we went to The America some restaurant in New York New York. After talking with the waitress about the selections it was apparent that the food quality was severely lacking and was just something frozen or ready-made, things we are quite against, especially in Vegas where pastry chefs make names for themselves gosh dangit! Adam grabbed the menu put it on the table with a little bit of force and declared, “We are not eating here, let’s go.” The waitress was a little put out, but I was with Adam on this on this one. We were drunk with tiredness (we don’t drink alcohol), our eyes were bloodshot from all the smoke in the air, and our stomachs churned with desire for great sweetness. We had no idea where our journey would take us, but Adam was resilient. We passed more and more mediocre places, or places that were closed (it was the wee hours of the morning), then we rounded the corner at the MGM Grand and there it was. A little white trimmed place with smiling waters and waitresses and finely dressed patrons, it was Wolfgang Puck’s Bar and Grille. We were seated and brought the dessert menu, and chose the chocolate souffle. The waitress said that they make each one to order so that it would take a while, and I just about gave her a kiss on her cheek for that comment. We passed the time pointing out all the people we suspected were escorts, because we are mature like that. The souffle came out and was more than enough to share. It was fluffy and beautiful, but before she let us have it, she cracked it open and poured chocolate sauce, dropped a scoop of hazelnut ice cream in it, and topped it with creme fraiche. It was the single best dessert I have ever had. No exaggeration. I am so happy that Adam demanded more from our evening. We decided it was a metaphor of life. And hell, it was only $4.50 more for the souffle than anything on the other guy’s desserts.

The next day we at a brunch buffet to be marveled at, rode the rollercoaster, saw more of Vegas, and swam at the MGM Grand. My pregnant cute friend picked us up, we ate Tapas with her and her husband, then flew home to shower my sleeping baby with kisses. We had to check my bag since 35 ounces of expressed milk probably wouldn’t pass security. Haha. My dad said she ran out of milk on Saturday and took the formula really well. When she woke up last night hungry, she was so ravenous and excited for nursing it was so nice to get our feeding relationship back, and I am happy to be back to regular today.

I loved our small vacation so much, it is cray-cray. 30 hours. Two one-hour plane flights. 5 hours of interrupted sleep. It was the greatest anniversary we ever had. I love Adam with all of myself. He is my husband, my best friend, and he is something I will never forget- he is my lover.

Dessert at the brunch buffet