Cheerio, Cheerios

I have been finding myself feeling more pregnant of late. You know, you're talking at a normal pace when suddenly a fog of nothing blankets your recollection. Questions like "what am I doing here?", "what am I talking about?" and "what year is it?" flood your mind.

Sometimes you go to get juice out of the fridge and you find a box of Cheerios. Okay, maybe you don't, but I do. I am just glad that I didn't find the milk in the pantry. Do you know the Far Side cartoon where the waitress goes to write down an order and says, "hmm...if my tampon is behind my ear, then where is my pen?" I know how she must have felt. Well, not literally!

I remember with Jimi the forgetfulness was much worse and it started much earlier on. Or maybe there is just less of my brain this time around and so the % is the same, but the bottom line is less. Perhaps now I'm accustomed to it, and it's still as bad, I am just accepting it better.

Last night I was talking to Dapo and I think he may have sat there for five minutes before gingerly asking, "Honey? You were saying?" First of all, I told him, don't wait so long to bring me back from the abyss next time! Second of all, I have learned that most "I forget" moments can be recovered from nicely with a request for ice cream.

Dreams are Back

It is funny how a word or a situation in real life can shimmy it's way into a dream. I have had a few of late that are odd enough to share. During church on Sunday, the person taking up the offering said the word, "tornado". I thought nothing of it until I went to sleep that night.

I dreamt that we were living in a two-story house that you envisage if you think of Midwestern towns in movies like Twister. Yellow, made of wood, with a chain link fence along a long, dusty road with two dogs out front. Our good friends the Dodges were paying us a visit and we got news that a tornado was on its way. At first they were like, no, it's not. Then when we could see it, I sent them all into the basement, and ran outside to get the dogs. It was really close and time was short, so I grabbed one of the dogs, the younger of the two. My rationale was that the other dog was actually quite old and going to die any day, anyhow.

If you can believe it, I realized after I got the dog that Jimi was still in his crib. Yeah, I got the dog before the baby...sheesh! I went and got him and all was well.

Speaking of Jimi in a crib, I had a dream that Jimi was in a crib with his little brother. Although, I don't give that much credit since I had dreams that Jimi was a boy and dreams that he was a girl.

Another dream I had was my family was going to a fancy gala in Longview, WA. Once we arrived I realized I had left Jimi in the car. Again with my memory! So, I hurriedly went back for him and my friend Heather had him and her little girl, Victoria. They were each in they're own stroller and she was walking them towards the event. ps, I have no idea why we left Heather behind, either! I asked her if she wanted help and she said this was not her first time pushing two children in strollers (she has 4 kids).

So we went back to the gala together and I somehow wanted to get to the other side of the rotunda, but there were too many people, so I decided to jump onto the chandelier and swing across to the other side. I grabbed a pie from someone, and hurled it down to the floor below while shouting, "Jesus loves you!"

Hmm...

Heartbeat

Today was my OB/GYN appointment. Dapo met me there and helped me with Jimi. He likes to support me and enjoys being a part of the tests and measurements and hearing the dialog.

I know this is not in chronological order, but my friend Nicole who's daughter is 8 days older than Jimi was in the waiting room of my Dr. when we got done. I knew she had an appointment today, but I didn't know it was at the same office. I asked who her doctor was, and it is the same as mine. We've known each other for over a year, and the conversation never turned to who is your OB? So, chalk up another crazy "we have too much in common" moment for us.

Back to the appointment, my blood pressure was 128/70 and I did not gain any weight. Probably because I was too busy sleeping to eat. When the nurse went to listen to the baby's heartbeat she couldn't find it, and told me not to be alarmed, because I am still early. We went into ultrasound, and Dr. Rushing came in to turn on the ultrasound. The baby's heart was healthy and beating...hooray! Always good news. I was amazed at how much the baby has grown in such a short amount of time. We call the baby she, and she was laying on her back and I know it is ultrasound, but I couldn't help but think that the baby just looked like me.

As we waited for our turn in the ultrasound, we remembered the same thing happened with Jimi on his 2nd visit. Not that it doesn't make you think crazy thoughts, but luckily we had Jimi's fridge DJ to distract us.

I read (I think in one of my pregnancy mags) that when your baby's eardrums develop, the three main sounds s/he hears is the amniotic fluid swooshing, the mother's stomach and the mother's heartbeat. It struck me as awesome that one of the first things the baby hears is my heart. Fitting, isn't it, since the first sound of theirs that I hear is their heartbeat?

Almost There

I am almost out of my first Trimester, and I am really looking forward to it. I have had zero energy and haven't felt well for most of it. Tomorrow I am 13 weeks, and am hopeful that all these miserable symptoms go away in the next week or so!

This child is definitely different than his/her big brother Jimi! With Jimi I felt so pretty and had that pregnancy glow. I also wrote in his baby book that the period of time I was pregnant with him was one of the best times of my life. And I MEANT it! Well, there's none of that this time. And I don't even like to kiss my roommate, I mean husband. Keep your hands off!!

I also tend to be really grouchy and have suddenly forgotten that I am a 33 year old Christian woman, wife and mother of a toddler and baby on the way. I seem to be picking fights with people (i.e. at softball games, drive thrus, telemarketers, etc.). I have not acted this way in probably 15 years or so. Hormones everywhere. Help me, Lord!

I do remember with Jimi I had the most energy in my second trimester, and so I am counting on a repeat performance!

Heavy Metal

Ugh! If anyone has ever had this happen to you, PLEASE comment on what you did to relieve it.

I get this taste in my mouth like I have been eating metal chards all day long. The strangest part about it is that where the metal taste is, there are dots on my tongue.

I have heard it is a common prego thing, but it is OLD. I also get sweet tastes STUCK on my tongue. I'm always chewing gum, or a Bnatal lollipop, or brushing my teeth to get it out of my mouth.

I'm drinking lots of water, and taking the same prenatal that I took while pregnant with Jimi (and in between pregnancies, also). So, I have heard it could have something to do with being low in iron, but my vitamins have that and I get iron from red meat. It is on my list to ask my Dr. about.

Proprosal

It has been a long time since I've blogged. I've had more strange "pregnant" dreams of late. One of them, last Friday, involved me and an all girls church softball team. Jimi's nursery teacher at church was the shortstop. All of the other girls weren't very good and kept on throwing the ball and not hitting their targets, letting more runs score. The catcher kept throwing to me, except they would either roll on the ground too far away from me, or go zooming over my head. I finally yelled, "quit throwing the [deleted f-bomb] ball!"

Two nights ago I had my third ex-boyfriend dream in as many months. The moms at our play group tell me it is a perfectly normal pregnant dream. This was was about Gary. He was a boyfriend of mine in junior high. He showed up, and asked me to marry him. He got down on one knee, and gave me a ring which was too small for my finger. I wound up wearing it while I "thought about" whether or not to marry Gary. At some point during my contemplation, the dream revealed that the baby was not Dapo's, but Gary's, even though Jimi is Dapo's. So, the plot thickened as I worried about explaining to Dapo that I had been unfaithful. I found a way to tell him, and I don't remember him being too upset.

So, I told Gary the next day I didn't want to marry him. He got all upset and told me he had already booked the church and I had to. I told him I didn't want to and what kind of idiot books a church before he knows whether the girl he proposed to is saying yes? He wound up threatening to sue me over the money he paid to the church. I laughed and told him to go ahead and try and that no judge in their right mind would judge in favor of him. He said, "are you going to accept the Fed-ex, then?" I felt trapped, because if I said yes, it might be papers that I was being served with, and if I said no, it could be papers that I needed access to. I just said, "we'll see" and left it at that. That really is the type of guy he was.

The whole dream was strange, but the weirdest part was that he wanted to sue me because I wouldn't marry him. I am really glad I waited the extra time and married a great guy like Dapo.

Two Beaches and Softball

Last night I dreamt about a girl on our softball team that had a cabin. Dapo, she and I went to the house. You had to walk on a narrow beach with a railing to get there (similar to the wall in Wipeout I watched before going to bed). Once we were there I noticed that the beach was beginning to get swallowed up because the tide was beginning to rise. We weren't going to be able to get home. I told Dapo about it, and by the time he would do something about it, we were trapped. I threw a harpoon (we just watched fools gold, where a guy gets shot in the leg with one) at a raft and anchored it so that we could have a mode of transportation to get supplies. Don't ask how the raft didn't become punctured and unusable.

So Jessica (the girl from softball) started making sandwiches and there were ants with kidney bean bodies all over. Yes, I made red beans and rice for dinner last night. The ants were just sitting on the prepared food, so I asked her why she was just letting them sit there and she said that there were so many of them that she didn't bother. I had Dapo come in and take care of the pests. That is his job in real life, too. I will never forget the time we were dating and playing pool at my old house and a rather large spider ran across the room and I shrieked and he caught AND killed it with his bare hands. He has been my hero ever since.

Then we started going through the house and the girl from softball turned into a girl from church, Cheryl, who has a son a couple of months older than Jimi. It was a seldom used cabin, so there were some dusty areas and things and when I realized I was going to have to sleep there I started looking for creepy things like dust bunnies, bugs, etc. It wasn't long before we decided to take the raft into the forest and that's when I woke up.

The next dream I had this morning, during a nap. My old friend from high school Brenda Compton (although she is married now, with a new last name which I can't remember) was the main character. She lived even further from town than I did by a couple of miles, and would give me rides. She was (probably still is) an AWESOME softball player. I find it interesting that I had been thinking about our softball game last night before falling asleep. In the dream, I went back to my parent's neighborhood, down to a house that used to be the owner of the Pro Shop. A bunch of my hoodlum friends broke into this house once in real life to steal the guy's liquor. I went along with it, and got into a fair amount of trouble as a result.

In the dream it was Brenda's house. I wasn't going there to see her, I was just going to see the house. As I got close to the door, I realized that Brenda was there, sunbathing topless. She hurried inside and said she'd be right out. Meanwhile, I noticed that instead of the house being at the end of a culdesac, it was at the beginning of a sandy beach. Eventually I went into the house, where she lived with her husband. That's all I remember about that one.

I think it is interesting that both dreams had beaches in them and both dreams have softball ties in them. I know I was thinking about softball, but I didn't know I was thinking about the beach!