February 27, 2010

IS NESTING THE SAME AS TWEEKING?

Husband:  I think you'll make a wonderful mother.
Sarah:  You do?
Husband:  Yes, and so does everyone else on the internet. Then again, everyone on the internet thinks Ron Paul would make a good president so...we'll see.

My husband is getting impatient.  He wants to hold her and be with her.  Me, I just feel nervous.  I have begun to get frightened of the pain.  I am in a cranky mood and want to be simultaneously left alone and completely taken care of.  I hurt a lot of the time.  I want the hurt to turn into labor, so I try to stoke it.  But it doesn't; it's just pointless pain.

I am not nesting so much as freaking out that I have wasted the past eight years of married life.  Why didn't I clean the garage or finish that quilt or sort through worthless old college textbooks?  What if today is the day and I still haven't gotten the oil changed in my car?

I don't feel like a good mom.  I feel like I'm already starting out on the wrong foot.

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February 24, 2010

UP AT 6 WITH NOWHERE TO GO

When my husband has been home for a while, I get used to sleeping with him. I can sleep through his movements and even his early departures. But I'm not used to him yet, so his 6 AM wake-up is now mine.  Fortunately, I'm not having any of the insomnia problems that I had when he returned last year.  I pretty much want to sleep when he wants to sleep.  But I'd just like to sleep a little longer in the morning while I still can.

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February 23, 2010

I MEAN, THE MAN HAS HIS OWN CURVE

If you love Art Laffer the way I love Art Laffer, might I recommend watching his ideas for how to fix the ecominy?  He laid them out on Glenn Beck last week; check out clips two and three here at Glenn Beck Clips.

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SORRY, MOM, THE MOB HAS SPOKEN!

We interrupt my boring posts about not having a baby yet to bring you this...



OK, Republicans, take a deep breath. Or at least I need to take a deep breath, before I slap you senseless.

Scott Brown? Really? Really?

Hey, Obama sucks because he wasn't vetted and he'd only been in government for five minutes. He just won because he was charismatic and had some good slogans during the campaign. Hey, I know, let's do the exact same thing on our side! Let's get behind the flavor of the month!

I don't even think it's possible to type the amount of sarcasm I want this post to be dripping with.

Maybe Scott Brown would make a fine president someday, I don't know. But not now. Are you people insane? Does the entire electorate just get distracted by something shiny and lose their everlovin' minds?

I can't help but feel lately that we're all as dumb as the people of Springfield. We're all set to spend our money wisely to fix potholes when the flashy monorail salesman promises us hope and change.



And then we just follow like lemmings right off the cliff.

Well, except we don't even have the fix-the-potholes plan.  42% of us have no idea who we'll support next.  It's a pretty barren field.

But not Scott Brown, for heaven's sake.  Just let's kill that idea right this instant.

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February 22, 2010

NOT QUITE MENTALLY PREPARED

The good news is the bed rest worked.  The bad news is the bed rest worked.
I am stuck at the same dilation and effacement that I was at two weeks ago.

And really, other than the fact that life is exponentially more painful now than it was then, I guess I am OK with that.

Last night I had a bit of a freakout.  I somehow feel like I am still not ready.  I don't feel anxious to get the baby out (other than because of the pains) because I am still scared to death of having to take care of her.  I feel like everything I've read about labor and newborn care is not enough and I still feel overwhelmed and unprepared.  I am feeling the weight of the awesome responsibility that is motherhood, and I am OK with postponing it for another week or so. 

Plus we still need to paint her bookshelf.  And a million other things.

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February 20, 2010

A FAMILY AGAIN

My husband laughs when he touches my belly.

I stayed in bed until the very end.  He was supposed to arrive late Thursday night but ended up here Friday morning instead.  I passed many excruciating Hours In Between dreaming crazy things like that his flight had been diverted to Cincinnati or that he had to hitch a ride on Noah's Ark to get home.

When I saw him, I thought his beard looked a lot nicer in person than in pictures.  He thought my belly was much smaller than he imagined it would be.

He likes getting kicked.  But he says he's ready to meet our baby on the outside already.

I got out of bed after two weeks, and my legs are weak.  The baby also seems a lot bigger and heavier than she did previously.  I can't believe how much she's grown while I was just lying there.

And I now officially understand lightning crotch.  I wish I didn't.

But I promise I won't complain.  I got everything I wanted: a healthy baby, a safe deployment, and my family all together again before baby arrives.

I will remind myself of that when my legs go numb with pain.

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February 18, 2010

TICK TOCK

FYI: Tick Tock
I only have to hold out a little longer...

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BROKEN WINDOWS

I think the broken windows fallacy makes perfect common sense once you hear it.  Frankly, I don't understand how one could argue against it.

So why do we continue to base policy on it?

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.

The White House says the $300 billion spent from the stimulus thus far has financed as many as 2 million jobs. Maybe. However, the private sector now has $300 billion less to spend, which, by the same logic, means it must lose the same number of jobs, leaving a net employment impact of zero. But the White House’s single-entry bookkeeping simply ignores that side of the equation.

Even Washington’s transferring money from savers to spenders doesn’t create demand, since the financial system already converts one person’s savings into another person’s spending (as I detail here). A family might normally put its $10,000 savings in a CD at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $10,000 to the local hardware store, which would then recycle that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that the family instead buys a $10,000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill. Washington spends that $10,000 in a different town, supporting jobs there instead. The stimulus has not created new jobs. It has merely moved them to a new town.

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SMART WOMEN

Some recent reading that has made me excited about the task before me and happy that I will finally have a job towards which to apply my meager thinking skills.

I really feel this is the task I was born to undertake.

First, Smart Women

This isn't a politically correct thing to say, but I knew - even at 18 - that I wanted to marry and have children. What's more, I wanted to raise my children myself. It made absolutely no sense to me to place a home and family last on my "to do" list when it was first or second on the list of things that were important to me. And it made no sense to me to spend years and years prepping myself for a high powered career I would have to give up almost as soon as I attained it.
[...]
I raised two fine sons and ran a household well and efficiently. And my support enabled my husband to have a family and concentrate on his career. A lot of folks sneer at that sort of thing, but I always wondered why society would want only the "stupider" sort of women to raise the next generation.

Second, at The Thinking Housewife (a site I might need to read more of).

Teach your daughter that grades will not be the most important factor in her future. It is important for her to learn for the sheer pleasure of knowing too, not just to win approval. Someday she will be a woman and engaged in the project of loving a man and starting a small society together. This is primary. All she learns can be put to use in this task. Every interest she has and every scrap of knowledge will be of value. Let her know how exciting it will be for her.

And thirdly, from an anecdotal history of Abigail Adams:

How could America produce "Heroes, Statesmen, and Philosophers," she wanted to know, if it didn't also produce "Learned women"?
[...]
Abigail never doubted that women were men's intellectual equals. ...  Unlike the radicals, she believed that women found their highest fulfillment within marriage and the family.  With a better education, she said repeatedly, a woman would be a better wife and mother and contribute more in the long run to the well-being of the new nation than if she were uninformed.  Well-educated women, she insisted, could help their husbands safeguard republican liberty; they could also rear boys qualified for leadership in the young republic and girls who in turn could become the devoted mothers and wives of patriots.

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February 17, 2010

ONE STRESSED PUPPY

Apparently the dog likely has stress-induced colitis.

I must be putting out some major vibes, because I've stressed the dog out so much he got sick.  Poor thing.


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OF ALL THE TIMES

At SpouseBUZZ we like to joke about "deployment gremlins," all the little things that go wrong as soon as your husband leaves for deployment.  Well, I have been having bed rest gremlins.

It started with a broken garage door.  Two days before bed rest started, the garage door decided it likes going up but not down.  And then I ended up in bed before I could fix it.  Luckily I haven't needed my car in two weeks.  Unluckily, the door is still busted.

Then my mom arrived to help me.  My mom with the broken foot who moves at half her normal speed and has trouble getting up and down stairs, which is the whole reason I needed her help.  She's still doing it, bless her.  I am not picking on her, just stating a fact.  Of all the times for her to break her foot...

And then the dog.  The first day my mom was here, the dog ate her meds.  She had to induce vomiting.  And now, the dog is mysteriously sick.  We can't for the life of us figure out what could've made him sick, but he has had diarrhea and vomiting for three days.  The first night, I tried to take care of him, but after going up and down the stairs six times to let him out, I knew I had to relinquish the chore to my mother or else the baby was gonna fall out on the stairs.  So now the dog wakes me and then I wake my mother so she can let him into the backyard.  And he probably needs to go to the vet by now, but that means sending my mom with him.  Of all the times for him to get sick...

And you know, I don't remember having any moral qualms about letting my mom take care of me when I had my wisdom teeth out at 18.  She fetched and comforted.  But it's a whole different game for me as an adult.  I hate asking her for help.  I hate it.  I hate waking her in the middle of the night so she can wipe my dog's bottom with toilet paper to make sure he doesn't soil my bedspread again...since it's had to get washed twice already in the past two days.  It's one thing to have her go make me a sandwich -- and believe me, I don't like asking her to do that either -- but it's a whole nother thing to make her take care of my dog's vomit and poop.

We're both exhausted and stressed out.  And unfortunately, this story won't end with a nice vacation and a long nap; it will end with a crying baby who needs even more attention than the dog.

I can't believe this is how I'm spending the end of my pregnancy.

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February 15, 2010

TEN YEARS

Ten years ago today, this happened:

I loved my husband's qualities before I ever had any inkling he would become my husband. In fact, he had declined my suggestion that we date. Weeks later, he came to me with his mind and said that he had made a mistake and we should be together. We figuratively shook on it, and that was that.

Effectively, our love was transacted like a pound of butter on a grocery counter.

My husband earned my love. I too had to earn it from him, and it took him two weeks longer than I to weigh the merits of it.

We sat there in his dorm room, and he said that after much thought, he agreed that we ought to be together.  And we looked at each other shyly and said, "OK then, I guess we're dating."  And that was that.

Today he finally got access to a webcam and skype.  For the first time since July, I got to see him.  His appearance was shocking; I am definitely not used to the beard.  Or the muscles.  And on the flip side, the size of my belly blew him away.

Ten years.

And I get to see him in person soon.

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February 14, 2010

WHAT, IT WAS? HOORAY!

Six years ago my husband was leaving on his first deployment on Valentine's Day.  Now I am anxiously waiting for him to come home.

Even though we're apart, I will still participate in our traditions.  And look forward to tomorrow, an even better day for us to celebrate.

And soon we'll do all our celebrating in person.

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February 13, 2010

BACK PORCH UPDATE

Jonah's back porch is more impressive, but I had to laugh at the meme when my mom took this one of my backyard this morning.  We've got a few inches piled up.



And here's Ol' Dirty Charles, exhausted after playing in the snow...


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February 12, 2010

YOU SUCK, MSN

Dear MSN homepage,

You have an article up called Famous February Birthdays.  Above it, you have the completely forgettable actor who played a werewolf or something in the Twilight movies.

Shame on you.

February birthdays should be highlighted by Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.  Or Ronald Reagan.

Not some dufus no one will remember in five years.

Even more shameful, these three men are not even listed at all in the MSN famous February birthdays.  But of course Ted Kennedy was.  Plus Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jerry Springer.

MSN, you're ridiculous.  February competency FAIL.
Sarah

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BARACK OBAMA HATES BLACK PEOPLE

R1 sent me a story that tears me in all directions: Freeze on HIV spending sparks concern in Africa

On the one hand, when we're borrowing so much money from China and we don't have any money of our own, we need to cut spending.  And cutting philanthropy to other nations ought to be, in my opinion, one of the first things to go.

On the other hand, I think Pres Obama needs to take some guff for this.  You know, because George Bush hates black people...even though George Bush did more for Africa than anyone else ever has.  And apparently more than the first black president plans to do.

So part of me thinks this program needs to be cut (though I am unclear if they're really cutting it or just diverting the funds in another direction) and the other part of me wants someone to slap Kanye West in the face with this article and force him to eat fishsticks.

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TOUCH ME, BABE

Still here, still full of baby.

I had another appointment last night and this doctor was much calmer. She thinks my body is not reacting like a first-time mom because I have had to be induced three times already to have my miscarriages.  So taking that into consideration, she thinks I can easily make it until my husband gets home.  Thus I'm just going to keep taking it easy and hopefully can hang on to baby for one more week.

And then my husband will be home...

I have given almost no thought to the fact that the deployment is almost over. I have been so preoccupied with the baby that I haven't let myself get too excited over my husband's return. But he should be here in about a week or so.

I can't wait to lie on the bed with him and let him feel the baby kick. I want him to walk in the door and never take his hands off my tummy. I am so excited to finally experience that together.


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February 10, 2010

SURFACING

I'm still here.  I have ideas for posts.  But typing is a pain in the neck when you're supposed to be lying flat on your side.  I did manage to write Perspective, Revisited on SpouseBUZZ.  And that's about it.  I've been reading The Corner still, but even reading and scrolling sucks while lying down.  My kingdom for a Netbook right about now.

Anyway, a link about what a bag Obama is: Turnabout Is (Hilarious) Fair Play

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February 08, 2010

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

Nothing has changed from Wednesday until now, and yet it feels like everything has changed.  I keep having to remind myself that nothing has...

The same symptoms I had on Wednesday are now magnified and making me paranoid.  I feel exactly the same and yet now I am IN LABOR and getting freaked out over every twinge.

But I have kinda gotten over the freakout hump and feel better today.

Except I've lost three pounds since Wednesday.

And it starts all over again...

I am still in bed.  My husband is snowed in in Afghanistan, which would be hilarious if it weren't so surreal.  My mother is hobbling around on a broken foot after driving 21 hours straight in a snowstorm to get to my side.

And then the dog ate her blood pressure meds.

It's been a heck of a weekend!

Posted by: Sarah at 01:35 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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February 05, 2010

BABY UPDATE

I am OK; no baby yet.

I slept decently and haven't left my bed today for anything other than bathroom breaks.  I have intense pelvic pressure when I stand up, but at least no contractions today.  And so Charlie and I lie in bed and wait...

My husband called this morning because of the casualties.  He hadn't yet read my email and had no idea what was going on.  He said he would try to cash in some favors and get on an even earlier flight if he could.  We'll just see.  Now watch, the baby won't come for another month.

I told my husband that all that matters is that he comes home to us.  I said I will either welcome him home with the baby on the inside or the baby on the outside, but all that matters is that he's safe.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:20 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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