Bad Pregnancy Night

Tonight is one of what I like to call a "bad pregnancy night." This simply means that for most of the day or evening and now into the night I just don't feel quite right. At some point, I will become tired enough to sleep, but for now the sour stomach, or heartburn, or hormones, or lack of space in my mid section, or whatever you want to call it are taking over and upsetting me. And whenever I don't feel well physically, I don't feel well mentally. I worry. This is a gift I inherited from my mother: worry.

I've been worried for the last few months, since we booked this trip, that I would go into pre-term labor in Canada. Well, I made it through 3 weeks in Minnesota, 4 plane rides, now I have 7 more days in Canada and 2 more plane rides and I'll be home in Fairbanks. I wonder if I'm really only worried that Canada will soon be gone and then I will have nothing to worry about but the baby being born. What will I ever do with 2 children (even though most of the time I'm sure this is what I want)?

I love Canada so far and our condo is accommodating and immaculate and in a lot of ways nicer than our home. Yet, it is tough to be in a new place. I just have to find a way to calm myself no matter where I am. And keep telling myself: there's no sense worrying about things that you cannot control . . . and that everything will be just fine.

20 Days in MN

Usually, when I travel anywhere I am ready to go home after a week or two. However, home is dark and cold at this time of year and there isn't a lot to do there. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but I didn't feel like leaving MN at all during these 20 days. And the last time I've stayed here at my parents' house this long was 5 years ago and before that almost 10 years ago, when this was my home . . . even though we do spend almost a month here a year, it is usually spread over 2 visits.

Anyway, it's been enjoyable. I didn't feel like the visit was rushed or that I was being pulled between spending time with my parents and other friends and relatives. We were able to spend a good amount of time with everyone who made an effort to see us. The few people we didn't see, we spent time with just this last summer when we visited.

There were a few things that made this time in Minnesota different than the others:

This seems strange, being surrounded by 575 acres of mostly trees, but this is the first year in what seems like 20 that we cut down a real Christmas tree (I think only because it was threatened by a beaver dam). It was a balsam, but it was cute and served the purpose.

I was able to see my college roommates for the first time in 3 years. It's been almost 6 years now since we graduated from college. It was the first time I was able to meet Caroline's sister (after hearing about her for almost 10 years), who is due in January, the first time I saw Alicia's boys, and she is due in March, and the last time I will visit Caroline in Minnesota because after 10 years there she is selling her house and Wells Fargo is moving her New York City. I cannot wait until my husband and I are able to drop our boys in MN with Grandpa and Grandma and visit her there!

My cousin Jennie, who is the closest thing I have to a sister, and I are in the 3rd trimester and both due in the middle of February.

My cousin Christina had baby girl Katelyn in August. When she had Hailey, four years ago, I wasn't able to see Hailey until she was about 1 year old.

Gracious Grandpa Greg played Santa this year for the 57 guests at our family Christmas party. After about 10 minutes, my son recognized Santa as Papa, which was actually a good thing. Otherwise, he wouldn't have gone up to get his gift.

Jewelery was a big theme this vacation. It started one Sunday as my aunts, cousins, mom, and I went through my Grandmother's, who passed away almost 12 years ago now, old jewelery. It continued at the family Christmas party where an entire room was dedicated to showcasing the leftover jewelery so that the rest of the family could take what they wanted in remembrance of her. Well, as exemplified above, the boys both young and old had a fun time dressing up (mostly with clip-on earrings) during the party: my cousin Tony, his son Maverick, and my uncle Richard.

It seemed like on this trip, my son found necklaces wherever we went:

Playing at Auntie Laurie's House with cousin Jennie's old toys

Showing off Grandma Koecher's old costume jewelery at the Koecher Christmas

Playing at Grandma and Papa's with mom

Playing at cousin Hailey's house with a bug vaccum

Now, we're off to Vancouver to spend Christmas . . .

Favorites at Grandma and Papa's

Pulling items out of the office desk drawers. I remember finding tons of treasures in there as a kid too. Grandpa and grandma both work for companies that constantly hand out crazy pens and gadgets, like funky looking tape-measures, flashlights, calculators, etc

Filling the electric woodstove with crumpled newspaper . . . and then anything else my son can find that will fit. It can produce heat out of the bottom if turned on, but the door on the front only leads to fake wood so he can fill it just like we adults do with our real woodstoves

Reaching into the cupboards (the rubberbands don't stop him anymore) and even the top drawers in the kitchen and pulling out whatever he finds: spatula's, needle-nose pliars, tupperware, antiques, etc, and then either throwing them back in or stashing them with his toys, depending upon how interesting the object looks

Going outside to visit the horses, which he "moo's" at like they're cows, even though he knows the sounds for horses

Watching television (ie Sesame Street or Thomas the Train) while sitting on his rocking chair and telling us when the DVD needs to be skipped to the next segment

Refusing to eat everything but grandma's home-made organic applesauce from trees on the farm

Waking up at 4 or 5am and asking for "bopa," which is grandpa

The Vacation Has Begun

Me, my son, and my other son in my belly (3rd trimester now) took the long trip to

MN to spend 3 weeks with my parents (his grandparents). Here's my son in action:

Being a good boy, buckled up on the 5 hour leg of the flight,

killing some time with the new DVD player dad bought him

Making his "I'm a ham; laugh at me" face while eating craisens

Sitting in my old rocker, showing Grandma how Neil Patrick Harris

points to him while he sings about Shoes on Sesame Street

Showing off for Grandpa, sporting mom's new shoes

in front of Grandpa's home-made (aweseome) hearth gate

Darkness

It is getting really dark up in Fairbanks, and it isn't even Thanksgiving yet. The shortest and darkest day will be sometime around December 21st. Thanks to my husband having to travel out of state for work for a week, I decided to not only be gone for 10 days in December, but to leave for the whole month. My son and I will be in Minnesota with family and then we'll all travel to Vancouver for a short Christmas vacation.

I'm not really a warm-weather beach fan unless the trip is incredibly remote or expensive and I have an area all to myself and I hate traveling with kids for longer than a day, so vacations just a day south combined with family suit me well. After all, if it's -40 here in Fairbanks, it is probably at least 40, maybe even 80, degrees warmer in Minnesota or Vancouver. Plus, compared to Fairbanks, Minnesota has about 4 and a half more hours of daylight per day. I'd say that's a great place to visit!

Until my trips, I am dealing with the lack of heat and light as best I can. To say people up here are grumpy, sad, etc is an understatement. It's universal. Strangely enough though, I have had a burst of energy lately and have been trying to finish up a bunch of projects. Here's me yesterday in a rush to finish touching up our walls before it became too dark to see anything. The sun was starting to set already in North Pole, AK: only 2:00 pm. But, from 10-2, it was a beautiful, clear day at -30F . . . crystal clear blue skies, pink mountains in the background, and delicately frosted white trees.

Married to a Shiftworker

I refuse to have a long-distance relationship with my husband. Some people put up with being apart for years: military deployments, frequently traveling out of state or flying to other towns for a week or two or more at a time, or even just plain old shift-work close to home.

I don't think it's healthy to be apart from your immediate family for more than about 10 hours. I've done the long-distance relationship thing, done travel, my husband's traveled, we've both been 12-hour shift-workers. I've been the child of a parent who travels for work. It all sucks. There's a good reason you are paid more for that type of work. It significantly reduces your quality of life. And it is 100x worse when there are children in the picture.

Anyway, this only comes to mind because for the first time in years my husband is a shift-worker. He's actually salaried for 40 hours a week, but because of a crisis at work he is stuck working 16 hour days, even on the weekend. So, it's like he's gone. We talk on the phone. They've been buying him food (whoopee). I can't help but wonder if he'll get a bonus for this stint.

.

The Countdown Begins

I'm enjoying a quiet, what has turned out to be an hour, alone by the fire. My husband has assumed the role of "bedtime" duty tonight, which is quite long and lasts usually until 9pm since we started putting our son to sleep in his "big boy car bed." He gets out and wants to play, etc, and is quite smart. Sometimes he'll go to the door and hit it and then run back into his bed and pretend like it wasn't he who made the noise. Plus, he's been sick so the 5am awakenings and request for warm milk have turned into 4am and now 3am and every hour awakenings. I feel today like I'm dying and have a sore throat myself. Pregnancy the second time around, with this little monster at my feet 24/7, is really tough on me and the whole family.

It's November 6th. I feel like the countdown has begun for 1) the end of the semester 2) Christmas and 3) the arrival of our baby boy. Earlier this week, my calendar for November, December, and January was almost completely open, and by today, Friday, almost every week and weekend has something exciting going on. By exciting, I mean swim lessons, exams, a different type of play-date, a holiday party, a double date, a Saturday that grandpa watches his grand-toddler, travel plans for the holidays and for my husband's job . . . that kind of thing. Not really "exciting," but "stuff to do." I am grateful for these things to do, because it is very cold outside and daylight is a thing of the past. I need to socialize or things get hairy.

Anyway, although I like to be busy, the countdown and the plans kind of stress me out. I have my own agenda, which includes a long list of small household projects that I need my husband's help with, preparing the baby's room, redecorating my son's room, and finishing a project for my cousin's baby that has taken much longer than I anticipated. I'm making progress, but slowly. A friend who just moved up here took away a table and chairs and desk, freeing up some space in our house. Today, we replaced the smoke detector batteries, put doorstops on all of our doors, and puttied small holes (dents) in the walls. But, my son, keeping up our household, and doing my schoolwork always come first, so my list seems to become longer before it becomes shorter.

The Halloween Play Date

I actually think it's quite ridiculous to celebrate Halloween with children under 2 years of age. They hate wearing silly costumes and they're too tired at that time of night to go trick-or-treating. In addition, they don't yet know about the things they're dressed as and aren't really able to eat candy. But, one of my friends had a party for our kids, and I went in good spirit. It turned out to be a fun time. My son recognized one of his friends as a kitty (even though he was actually a wolf) and another friend as a duck, which she was. In addition, he had a good time playing with the host's markers, because we don't have any at home. It made for a good play date.

My best memory is of us making mud pudding with worms before the party

and a close second is my Charlie Brown, because he was so cute with his light hair. I sewed the stripe on his shirt myself, which was my first project with my new sewing machine.

Only in Alaska, . . . .

Well, there are A LOT of "Only in Alaska, . . . ." comments that are made in Fairbanks. But, this one I will share because it is applicable come October. Only in Alaska, do you have to wear snow-pants, wool socks, boots, hats, mittens when there is not any snow yet . . . and then a sun hat at the same time! It's cold, but the sun is ALWAYS in your eyes unless of course it is DARK, which is pretty common too!

P.S. Thank you, Grandma, for the book of us and the farm. I "moo" at it all of the time.

And, yes, mom took this while she was driving the car :)

It's Wood-burning Time Again

It's actually not that cold (30s-40s), but it feels every bit of the 40 degrees colder than summer that it is. We have a lot of cotton wood to burn. The other options up here are spruce and birch, which are both much hotter and longer-burning Alaskan hardwoods. Cotton wood is a fast - growing, very moist (until dried) and not very dense tree. It produces a type of cotton seed that blows through the air that can be obnoxious, so most people regard it a weed, a very huge weed, and cut it down. We did just that when we bought the land. We didn't cut a single spruce (well 2 by accident) or birch when building the house or making the driveway, but we cut probably more than 50 cottonwood. Most are buried in our front yard and a lot were burned along with brush down by the river, but some ended up in our wood pile. Besides the vast amount of ash they produce when burned, they are a good fall and spring wood, because they don't burn as hot and therefore don't sweat you out of the house. It's been nice burning the cottonwood. The 4a.m. stokings have already begun. Last year it was because our son was breastfeeding, would wake me, and I would feel obligated to refill the stove before the coals died. But, now I'm just waking because I feel it getting colder or because I'm pregnant. I don't know why, but I'm wide awake. But, it's kind of relaxing to reload the wood stove and wait for it to get back up to temperature when everyone else is asleep.

School Can Be Very Frustrating

So, lately I've been kind of irritated with the professor of the class I'm taking. For the first month, things were going great. But, then, he posted our homework in the wrong spot so no one knew we had any, but he didn't adjust the due date. Also, he is constantly updating our text, which is a unpublished textbook scanned into Blackboard that some professors at the University of Alaska Fairbanks wrote at some point. It conflicts with our notes sometimes, and uses different notation, which is very confusing. Still, I like this class and this professor. No one is perfect.

Now, Blackboard really screwed me over. The first day of class, we all wrote down our email addresses, so that we would get updates from the professor. I never got any, but only because I figured there wasn't anything the professor needed to tell us. Well, I just figured out that he disregarded that list and emailed through Blackboard instead, which uses all university email addresses. I've been using Blackboard for (going on) 3 years now at this University and have my mail forwarded to my personal email. I was unsuspecting that anything had changed. Well, the University sometime within the last 2 months switched from @uaf.edu to @alaska.edu or something like that email ending. Anyway, they use a free Google application now for their mail. When this happened, emails through Blackboard stopped being forwarded. On top of it, sometime within the last month, it was made official that I am a University of Alaska Anchorage student on top of being a Fairbanks student. Well, again Blackbaord didn't inform me, but my Blackboard-designated email address was changed to an Anchorage email account. Long story short, as a surprise to me, Blackboard has used 3 different email addresses for me in the past 2 months.

So, I had emailed my professor a question Wednesday night about our homework that is due Friday. He didn't respond. Turns out he had responded to everyone in the class Wednesday night through Blackboard. He in fact told the class the exact equations to use for each problem. So, after spending 2 days straight doing my homework without help, I just realized after checking this new email account that I did at least half of the problems completely wrong. Aaaaah, and I thought I had done so well! What a let-down. Better luck next time, I guess.

We've Had a Rough Week . . .

and it's only Wednesday!  

No, really, things aren't so bad.  We found out I'm carrying around a baby boy.  I'm happy our son will have a little brother less than 2 years younger than he is.  We also have most of the things we need for a boy.  A few of the newborn things that I had left over from our son I gave away to friends, but it's funny because all a baby's clothes for about the first 3 months can all fit into one drawer.  They are so tiny!  Anyway, it won't take much to get what we need.

I had my annual flu shot on Monday.  Because I'm pregnant, the risks are much higher if you don't get it, so they pretty much make you get it.  I didn't really get sick this time.  Also, my son had 4 immunizations including the flu shot on Tuesday during his 18 month appointment, and he didn't even get a slight fever (and he has a cold).  Anyway, this is all good news.  We've all been sick so much anyway in the last month and a half, who needs another illness to worry about!

My husband has been busy with school and work, and I have been busy with my work at home and school too.  There have been some frustrating things, like conflicting editions of books.  My professor posted our homework in the wrong place, so the class didn't know we had homework until 3 days later.  It's like impossible for me to study during the week if I can't get it done Wednesday, when my son is at daycare.  I didn't even get close to getting it done today, Wednesday.  I have so many questions and am only 1/4 of the way done.  

It makes me wonder how all of the student-moms at the College of St. Catherine make it through.  St. Kate's is like 100x tougher a school than the University of Alaska, and here there are few student-parents and still people drop out like flies.  When I was in college, if I didn't understand something I spent hours figuring it out.  Parents don't have that luxury.  If you can't get it in a short period of time, well then you just aren't going to get it.  I sure salute you student moms at tough schools!  I don't know how you do it!  

That said, I am at the toughest age.  When they're small, you can study a lot more easily.  But, at 12-18 months and for I don't know how much longer they really require your every minute of attention . . . or at least my son does.  He has to be doing what I'm doing or is asking my help with something or he is getting into something that needs supervision.  Sometimes I wish he would sit and watch television for just 1 hour, but he's not that type of kid and I guess that's a good thing!

My Son is Growing Up.

I'm so proud of my 17 month old son. He is getting to be so mature, so smart, but at the same time he can be such a baby. What makes me so proud today is that 3 days ago we cold turkey stopped giving him a small bottle of formula before bedtime. He asked for milk by saying "ma, ma, ma" and doing sign language for milk, but I just told him "No milk" and continued to read him a book. We haven't read him a book before bed until 3 days ago. The first night he cried 10 minutes, the second night maybe 2 minutes, and tonight just a wimper.

I think we as moms and dads think it's going to be so hard to take away a pacifier, stop breastfeeding, stop feeding a bottle, etc, but in the end it's really not that difficult. I want to be consistent and not feed him a bottle from now on, because in a couple of months I want to get him sleeping in his toddler bed. I want to do this ideally a couple of months before the next baby arrives. Friends have done this successfully when their children were my son's age, so I'm hoping it goes smoothly for us too. See, there I am anticipating it's going to be so hard, when in reality it probably won't. And I'm rambling.

It's just hard being a mom sometimes.

We're Enjoying the Perfect Weather.

It has been just gorgeous outside in Fairbanks again.  I can't explain this weather to people who have not experienced it.  It's the kind of calm I think you can only find in deserts, but there you probably see it in the winter, not in the summer.  But, I don't know.  Here, it lasts for a week or two.  These days, without a cloud in the sky, I feel happy as a clam.  It's like seasonal affective disorder, but the good kind.  

The boys put together some new furniture a friend ordered and shipped us from Seattle.

I walked around the yard and in 5 minutes photographed over 15 varieties of mushrooms.  I won't put them all here, but I need a book or a friend to help me identify which are safe to eat.

My husband mowed the lawn and weed wacked for the last time, picked up brush and logs in the woods, and burned a giant pile of debris down by the river.

Our son has the worst cold ever, but he won't nap.  He just wants to be outside too.  We found a new trail at the wildlife refuge in town and had a mother/son Taco King picnic by the lake, while daddy hunted by some bluff on the upper Chena River.  He didn't bring a camera, but I bet the colors were brilliant up there.  Tomorrow, we'll meet some friends at the Chena Lakes.