In Memory - Carrying on the Flame

I want to carry the flame on from Stasy for the second day for Q, a beautiful, strong woman from the loss-mom boards we are all members of.  The boards took my breath away with their caring support for Q and her family as they recently went through a heart-breaking diagnosis of several abnormalities that were incompatible with life, and then as they went through the decision to set their baby boy free at 17weeks. 

They said goodbye yesterday...

I know there are no words that can sufficiently express sorrow at a loss like this, but I hope that this flame for Liam and his mommy, daddy and big brother can bring some peace.



Are you a bumpie?  do you blog?  Just want to share some prayers for peace during this difficult time?



from Stasy
to Kate

Carry on the flame...

Dreams and Dialtone....

So I had a nice day out of the office yesterday (at a seminar, so not quite "off" of work, but out of the office!) and got home 30 minutes earlier than normal - YAY!

So the dreams. 

Whoa.

I don't have remember a large amount of my dreams, but last night's consisted of:

1. hot sex with DH (which, dammit I wish the libido would transfer to real life!) after which I go to the bathroom
and have just a single wipe of bright blood, and dream-think, "Period's coming ok... WAIT - wasn't I pregnant?!"  ...(and I don't remember the rest of the dream...)

2.  I think Mr. Bean was my boyfriend?!   'Nuff said.

3. A little backstory before this dream:  In life B.E. (before E) I was taking a stretch limo to Boston (used to live in MA) with a bunch of friends.  I was drinking out of a beer bottle and the girl next to me swung her arms out wide, knocking into the bottle.  When I checked, I had a teeeeeeeny-tiny chip on a front tooth*, small enough that I considered it cosmetic - you could barely see it and I figured it was fine (didn't need dental attention.)  
*Not the "two front teef for Chrithmath" but the one next to them...*
Well fast forward about 4 years and lo and behold, that tiny chip caused some kind of opening and the tooth needed a ROOT CANAL.  So I have a crown on said tooth, and have kept an eye on teeth coloring because my natural teeth will color (over a long period of time) differently and the porcelain crown WON'T, so it's something I check on in the mirror (and in pictures) every so often...
So the dream - I was looking in the mirror and the tooth was PURPLE. like, eggplant purple! I'm all, WTF?!
After these teeth dreams (I've had multiple dreams where I start to lose my teeth in crumbles, and then I'm dreaming within the dream and dream-me wakes up and is like, WHEW! but then they start loosening again!*)
*Did you follow that? true inception style...
After these dreams (and after I've REALLY woken up for real), I just sigh in relief when I look in the mirror and all teeth are still there, snug and NOT eggplant purple...


And if I thought dream-me was a doozy, real-life-me seems to have abandoned her brain long ago...
When I got home from the Texas trip, somehow in the unpacking I remembered carrying around my tooth brush (in its hot pink travel case) while dropping stuff off at appropriate places around the house (like travel toiletries in the closet, but other toiletries down in the guest bathroom that we're still temporarily using until our bathroom is done...)

And then it vanished.  That very night, I go to brush my teeth and could. NOT. find the damn toothbrush (in its HOT PINK CASE) anywhere in the house.

I mean I checked kitchen cabinets (you never know lately) and the REFRIDGERATOR, but it's like the entire case got sucked into the void where single socks go...

I wrote it off.  Found a new toothbrush (which I actually like better than my old one!) and figured 1 - either some ninja came and stole it, 2 - the dogs got ahold of it (at least they'd have minty fresh breath!) or 3 - it would turn up SOMEWHERE.

So yesterday, after accidentally leaving the outside hose on the night before (and subsequently flooding out underneath our deck - it was fine, it's all rocks, but E wasn't too happy... I think his words have been "You CANNOT rely on your brain anymore!") I was getting ready to head out for the seminar, and was looking through my shoe pile (currently stored in the nursery closet...) and bust out laughing...

I spy....

Y'all - I FOUND MY TOOTHBRUSH!!!!

Oh Deer...

I wish weekends were longer...

We had a 1st birthday party on Saturday - NINETY PEOPLE were there.

I don't normally judge (ok that was a blatant lie, I just don't do it so obviously...) but c'mon...

NINETY PEOPLE?! Mom and Dad had invited people they barely knew or talked to - friends of friends!
whatev - free food, free beer (for E) and free soda (for me) and while it was slightly cheesed up with NY Yankees gear (and guests were requested to wear their favorite baseball attire) it meant loads of that yummy popcorn and crackerjacks....
"Take me out to the baaaall gaaaaame...."
then we went to our friends' place with a few other couples and played Farkle... (look it up, it's AWESOME... I may dedicate a whole post to it at some point...)

Sunday dawned beautiful - I stuck to my plan of yard work: raking out the beds, pulling weeds, trimming back the dead stuff from last year...

I LOVE the Spring Blooms! (perennials? annuals? whatever, they're so pretty!)
(Dead stuff still in the 2nd and 3rd pics, but the beds are nice and cleared out now!)


And, you know - I eat venison (rarely, but if it's presented - like our friend who hunts and made venison jerky at that one BBQ - I'll eat it...)   I eat veal, I love a good medium-rare filet mignon...

I also cried (hello, um - I guess spoiler alert?!) when Bambi's mom gets it... and cringe whenever I see the mangled deer in the middle shoulder of the highway...

But MOTHER F*&CKING DEERS - STOP EATING ALL MY SHIT!!!!

Friday Chuckles & Chapters!

Let's see if I can somewhat keep this going for Friday posts...

First, chuckles - because who couldn't use a good laugh at the end of along work week??

Go ahead, tell me you weren't already thinking the same thing!

That's all it takes??

And just in case you were contemplating, CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED:

CHAPTERS! I got this idea from a blogger friend Stasy, who frequently does GoodReads book reviews, and has defintely influended my reading list!

I am currently reading:
"Let's Pretend This Never Happened" (A Mostly True Memoir)
by Jenny Lawson

It's hi-LARIOUS.  I sat reading at the kitchen table last night and cracked up so much while reading just the first few chapters...

She curses.  She makes inappropriate jokes.  She spews story after story of:
...a whacked-out father, a TAXIDERMIST, who thought it fabulous to wake his daughters up with a Magic Talking Squirrel, which the author discovered was really a still-bloodied once-live squirrel-turned-hand puppet.
...high school memories that include artificially inseminating a cow, and nearly breaking her arm "IN A COW'S VAGINA!"
...a Czech grandmother who feigned ignorance of the English language, but knowingly prodded her granddaughters to make peanut butter and sugar smoothies for lunch.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, I really do think you'll like this book (I have the epub version, let me know if you'd like a copy for your eReader! *I don't think this version works on Kindles, unfortunately...)

Directly from the author's blog at TheBloggess:

I wrote a book and it only took me 11 years.  (Shut up, Stephen King.)

And it somehow became a #1 NYT BestSeller the first week out.  

 I have no idea how that happened either.

You should probably go buy it right now, because it’s filled with awesomeness.  And cocaine.  But only if you hollow it out and fill it with your own cocaine.  
I’m not buying you cocaine.  
Because I love you.
And that’s why you should buy my book.  Because I’m saving you from yourself.  And from cocaine.

YOU’RE WELCOME.

With Arms Wide Open....

Creed being on the radio this morning = me crying on the way to work while warbling out "With Arms Wide Oppuuuuuuunn..."


We're 26weeks today, baby boy - and I'm pretty sure you had hiccups for the first (noticable) time yesterday morning, your momma sure got a kick out of that!  And while I like cauliflower, I'm glad you've passed from that stage/size to an eggplant (which I do NOT like to eat, but it's such a pretty vegetable!)*
and upon further research on the Bump - you are actually a head of lettuce.  Hm.  I think I like eggplant better...

E's still plodding away on the bathroom:
The floors are down!

The view from the nursery....	Interior bathroom shot - the shower (and knee wall) are framed out!

The new nursery wall going up...	The shower durock (?! you'll have to ask E...) is up!

All that's left to do in the nursery is to spackle (smooth all the seams) and then get painting! (The turqoise is going buh-bye...)  

After all the work E's been doing, I've been (somewhat) sitting around and I'm ready to put on my paintin' clothes!

For the bathroom, we're ready for the tiling people to come in and tile the shower (floor and walls) and the bathroom floors - except I just realized, we still have to pick the tile out... oops!

Then it's time to sheetrock the walls, get those spackled and painted, and we're nearly there!

E's estimated 2 weeks... I had thought I was being generous giving us until April 1st, and I'm going to think realistically and push that back to mid-May...

I am so ready to have the toilet back on the same floor I sleep on!!

How did we get here?

"Here" being the place where I sat writing thank-you cards the other night (to all the Texas shower gift givers - they were so freaking awesome) and just watched baby boy move and dance around, not-yet-taught-skin swelling, sinking, and popping with punches from him...

So I arrived in Texas (after a bleeping alarm at 3:30am for a 6:30 flight and after spilling green tea latte on some poor helpless airline passenger) to the cutest and comfiest sleep shirt from my mom:

She'd found it at a thrift store - SO meant to be mine, no??

We had stopped for lunch at Olive Garden (ha - "Italian" food to those Texans, but to a girl from the north east??) and after a two hour drive, we settled in at the house to catch up on some Grey's Anatomy (love that mom's a fan).  I couldn't believe - after waking up at 2:30 central time, I made it until 10oclock that night!



Friday my mom and I left the house on a MISSION: maternity clothes (mostly bottoms, I only had one pair of jeans, no non-work shorts or capris!) and new bras (I think I was wearing the wrong size for even pre-pregnancy...)

OH.  MY...  GAWD did I hit the jackpot... I found bras - 2 for $8.50 and 2 for $10 and change.  THAT'S FOUR BRAS for under $20... GOOD bras! (I mean, they're not nursing or anything but compared to wearing the wrong size with bigger-than-normal boobs for 5 months - it was PURE HEAVEN...)

I was SO tempted to try these suckers on...

(and no - these were not a gag gift, can you believe these were in the regular intimates section?!)

And then the mother load.

Motherhood Maternity there had this section called "As-Is" where everything was clearance, and marked for an additional 25-90% off.   That's right, up to 90% OFF. (the manager told me that corporate had no idea WHY they had this section, they weren't supposed to... well here's to corporate's screw up!)

Without going into the boring details (like how the sales woman who was helping me had to use up TWO dressing rooms to hang up all my try-ons) here's the low down:

I got almost $400 worth of clothing for.... drumroll please...

$95.42

For this paltry sum I got:

white capris, grey cropped dress pants, 3 pairs of black capris (from work-dressy to casual), 1 pair of teal jeans, 2 long sleeved cotton shirts, one sheer sleeveless shirt, a solid white dress shirt originally marked for $78 that when all was said and done - I got for $6, a nursing tankini for $3, two swimsuit bottoms, and probably more that I'm not thinking of right now....

in otherwords, I got a SH*T TON of clothes... I had to stop my mom - she kept looking through the racks as I was checking out!

Mission: ACCOMPLISHED!

We also bought thank-you gifts for the shower hostesses the next day, and with a good day of shopping under the belt, we settled down for (another) early night - passed out on the couch by 10:30...

Saturday morning was the shower!  And this Northeast girl was all about the high-60s-weather - sun dress and sandals! So I thought it was quite comical when I spotted a woman who left the shower at one point bundled up into a PARKA... oh relativity...

To sum it up, it was awesome, the gifts were great and I got all the baby clothes packed into a carry-on to bring home - the rest will come with Grandma when she arrives for two weeks in July!

There were some larger items (a travel boppy, the boxed teddy bear you see above, some car accessories like the sunshades and large mirror, and some BFing paraphernalia) that definitely have to wait until July to make the trip... my mom's flying Southwest Airlines and they don't charge for checked bags, so we are loading her up!

Also, the hostesses got me the portable swing I registered for, and had it delivered directly to my house (as did a few other guests) so I had some gifts waiting for me at home too..

I can't even begin to imagine these outfits with my baby boy in them, it seems so surreal - I know I keep using that word through the past few months, but it is SO surreal... even when I watch him kick and squirm...

The rest of the trip was just bliss:
...sitting in the warm Texas sun with family friends (whose daughter used to babysit ME when I was a baby!)
...more shopping (where I found THREE MORE bras for around $5 each, bringing my grand total to 7 for under $30!)
...gazing at mini polo onesies and tiny little boat shoes
...crib-shopping with my mom (which was just awesome to do because, hello - with me in NJ and her in TX the whole shopping-together-thing is not very frequent, and it was so great to be able to do baby shopping with her...)
...enjoying Mexican food at our favorite watering hole (they've been informed to have the frozen margaritas ready and waiting!)

So that's it - the Grand Texas post (or a short version of an epic week...)

it's been back to real life: E working his butt off on the bathroom remodel, putting in his blood, sweat and tears (literally - he put the drill into his finger last night and dripped blood on the hardwood floor on his way to my infirmary... lol I can laugh, he's fine now...)

We finished our registry this past weekend, picked out The Crib (I thought this would be so hard!) and The Stroller (E needed to get hands-on testing done!) and are ready to start counting down the days - tomorrow we hit double digits!!!!!

GoodNews / BadNews

Good News:
  25W today! Baby is the size of ... cauliflower?!

*see the unpacked suitcase on the left? It's still sitting there this morning...

and pardon the travel-fatigue, it was 10:30 at night...

Baby Boy measures between 13.6-14.8 inches, 1.5-2.2 lb
While he's growing more fat and hair, he knows which way is up and down - we boogie regularly!

Bad News:

In case you missed that - that's 176 NEW EMAILS waiting to greet me this morning...

Good News:

One of the emails was all "KATE KICKED ASS!" for a 2011 cost report that drew a desk audit:



Bad News:

I left three very minimal assignments for assistant while I was gone... the first being to file some folders (I estimate under 15 minutes of work...)

See that pile hiding under a binder on her desk this morning?

The second assignment was to file a measly 15 or so invoices... Nope, those too are still sitting in the file tray behind my desk.

The third assignment was to copy a number of 2012 invoices for The Lawsuit that I intended to submit today... no CLUE what happened with that, because guess who chose to take today off??

Because "a Friend's Wife is having a procedure done and Friend asked a favor, that (she) sit with Wife because Wife can't drive herself."

I predicted, when she text me this at 10:30 last night, that I would come in this morning to find some (if not all) of the assignments undone...

So on top of catching up on my work, pushing billing out, covering assistant's work for the day and finding time to pee and eat, I will most likely be posting a job opening soon!!

*Pictures and Texas stories to come still...

Belly-up!

I'm sitting in my living room, feet- and belly-up.. suitcase is sitting in my bedroom floor, still packed.
I did get out with the dogs in the gorgeous weather for a walk.. but I was mostly distracted by a few straggler shower gifts that our ups man delivered today, namely some seriously cute clothes, and the swing from the shower hostesses.. I was so touched by all my mom's friends and their generosity, I promise lots of pictures to come! (Can't guarantee when, as I have a feeling the next few days at work are going to be a little hectic..)

A funny thing happened..

..on the way to Texas.
(Please tell me SOMEONE gets the reference.. lol)

Had my first baby shower this morning - a little early, yea, but almost the latest I could fly here to Texas.. will post massive amounts of pictures later when I get home of all the awesome stuff I got.. (the hostesses got me my Graco swing!!)

But I just wanted to post quick about funny/notable things that happened on the trip to Texas..

1. My mama bear instincts were tested for the first time when going through security- I requested a pat down, and the agents were trying to convince me to just walk through the scanner: "its perfectly safe.." and "its just a metal detector, you know, that right?"
To which I responded, "yes. I am well aware. Id still like a pat down please. Bitches."
Ok so I just now added that..

2.  The first flight, I was smart enough to pick an aisle seat at the front of the plane.
The second flight put me at the window, with a big huge biker dude in the middle who threw his arms out, fell asleep, and snored the entire flight.. *sigh* it sure was fun trying to wake his ass up when I had to pee..

3. At the end of that flight, the attendant comes around to collect garbage and I hand her a stacked cup with an empty Starbucks green tea latte, which she then bobbled and splashed neon green tea in the hair of the guy seated in front of me.
When he didn't flinch or notice it, the flight attendant and I just looked at each other, shrugged and started laughing.. he never did notice the green drops on his shoulder either. :)

I'm in Texas and detached from electronics and work until thurs so I will be back with loads of pics, loads to catch you readers up on, and loads of commenting to catch up on..
Have a great rest of the weekend!!

IReallyHateThisWeek...

I'm bulleting/numbering... cuz its just so crazy right now (at work) but I really wanted to get this all out because I go to Texas on Thursday (YAY!!!!) for almost a week...

1. Easter was great - we hosted for the second year, so I was POOPED sunday night, but it was a fun zoo with four dogs (my inlaws bring theirs every time they come over) and 11 adults.

The nests came out great (although it took a trial run or two to figure things out...)

So the nests held Reese's eggs (yummmm - there was a bunch leftover thankfully!), the blown eggs were set out (only two casualties all day and one was me dropping it when I was cleaning up at 9pm!) and we had our china and real-silver-family-heirloom silverwear:

And I even noticed our first bloom of the spring out front!!!

2. My job has an annual (unannounced) inspection by the state and guess who showed up at 7:30am on Monday morning.... so when I got that call (which woke me up at 7:45) it was RUN, SHOWER, GET DRESSED - GET TO WORK! (as a department head, I'm expected to be there whenever The State is there...)
So they're here until tomorrow afternoon, at which point they hold an "exit conference" and we hear how our building fared...

3. Because we were expecting The State to show up again this morning at the same time, I had to be at work by 7:30.  (I normally come in at 9...)
And what is waiting to greet me from my inbox, but an email from The Lawyer.

(loooooooong story short, the owner is being sued by his son for the business - the lawsuit's been dragging on for over 2.5 years with me somehow caught up in the discovery phase - they ask for "X Documents" and I procure and provide them.  It's been HOURS of work on top of my regular stuff, THOUSANDS of papers copied, 30+ huge banker boxes pulled from storage and sorted through...I hate hate hate it with a passion and thought that the last production was the light at the end of the tunnel...)
It wasn't the light.  It was some dumbasss waving a flashlight around... Because they (the son of the owner and his stupid wife) are saying there are still deficiencies in the production - guess who's responsible for making sure the deficiencies are met.  One guess is all you need, promise...

4. As I mentioned before, I'm flying to Texas on Thursday (at 6:30am... I guess I'll sleep never this week...) for a long, much needed vaca to visit ma familia. Also, my mom's friends are throwing me a shower on Saturday SQUEEEEE!!
BUT - traveling Thursday means I have 1.5 work days left to get my every day duties done, the duties for the next week or so to cover while I'll be gone, anything the building needs for The State, and all The Lawsuit crap.

add to that:
5. My 24w appt tonight (2 days early due to the whole will-be-traveling-thing) so I can't really work late (unless I come back after the appt - I hate that that's a possibility...)
and
6. I chipped a molar (badly) last night so I'm hoping and praying I can get into my dentist for at least a temporary filling before I head out of town for a week...

7. My lucky number... so one perk of getting up at the butt-crack of dawn - you get to see DAWN!

And I couldn't help but remember a damn near identical view that I stared out at as I waited for a Wondfo to show darker-than-yesterday lines on 11.15.2012 (the third straight day of testing)

11.2012 sunrise

I couldn't help but cradle my hands around Baby Boy and his bump, and whisper "The same sun is still shining, and here we are 4.5 months later...I can remember when you were only THIS BIG*, and look at you now..."

*I'm sure the first of many times I'll be saying that to him! =)