Before: If we dyed his hair black, he could look like an emo kid.

After: Now his hair fits his personality!

And the side:

Too cute!

Please note that it was my husband who did this awesome job even though it was his first time ever cutting hair. I wish I had that kind of talent!

Good news is the doctors don’t show any concern about my weight. It’s just that I’m concerned about it even though I’m also having a hard time not eating everything in sight from the time I get up to the time I go to bed. I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry throughout a pregnancy. It seems like the farther along I get, the worse the hunger gets. I can’t help but think about this baby coming out at 11 pounds by the end of this because of my eating. Robert was huge at 9lbs 2oz, but the way I’ve been gaining weight with this pregnancy, I really won’t be surprised if this one tops his weight. Not really a good thing so I’m really going to try to work on not eatng so much crap throughout the day. It’s so easy to grab a snack when the tummy rumbles, but I really need to focus more on healthier alternatives. I had some vegetables for lunch so I’m hoping that’s a start. Don’t worry about the fact that they were covered in a buttery sauce! It’s better than two PB&Js with cookies!

As far as the baby is concerned, he’s weighing in at 1lb 6oz right now and is very, very active. I feel little kicks and jabs all day and night. Right now, most of the kicks are centered around the bottom left of my uterus so I can only assume that he’s sitting in there feet-down most of the time. The ultrasound confirmed this, but he still has plenty of time to turn the other way so I’m not too concerned about it.

Even with my little experience, I can’t help but feel like my son is a lot more difficult than the typical toddler. This doesn’t really surprise me since he sure as hell was a lot more difficult than the trypical baby. Andrew definitaly is a toddler who has his mind made up. He wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it and there is no stopping him. No amount of saying “No”, removing him from the situation or ignoring him can stop him from doing what he wants. Saying “No” usually results in him laughing and proceeding to do whatever it was at an even faster pace so that he can get the next reaction out of us even quicker. He makes a game out of it and it’s So. Damned. Frustrating. He listens to no one and I feel like I spend all day trying to get him to not open kitchen drawers, grab things off of the counters, play with the remote, throw the pillows off of the couch, pull books oot of the bookshelf, climb on the bed, dump clean clothes out of the laundry basket before I put them away, climb on the drawers to his dresser, throw every toy out of his toybox even though he doesn’t want to play with any of them, etc. He knows he isn’t supposed to do these things, but after a year of trying to teach him not to with zero success, I really don’t know what to do anymore. It’s come to the pount where I feel like I can’t have anything nice anymore because he’s just going to undo or destroy it. Here are two recent examples:

I bought a cubby/toy organizer thing for Robert’s room (where they play) so I can keep the toys off of the floor. I use 3 of the cubbies for books and larger toys and 3 more cubbies have fabric bins with the smaller toys inside. First thing Andrew does after he eats breakfast is go into Robert’s room and throws every single book out of the book cubby then proceeds to dump out all the toys from the fabric bins. Sometimes he’ll even bring the bins out into the living room just to empty them all over the floor. Does he do this because he wants to play with them? No. He does it because he hates when things are in their place. He seems to thrive on chaos. So I end up tripping over toys all day because there’s no point in picking them up only to have them thrown all over the place again and again. This isn’t fun when you’re pregnant and trying to carry a 9 month old without tripping. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the apartment is going to be messy as long as there are babies/toddlers living here, but it does get to be a little ridiculous when I can’t even have things clean for 5 minutes without him making another mess. I don’t understand why he feels the need to do this every day, multiple times a day when he doesn’t even want to play with this stuff? Like the books – he doesn’t look at any of them, but those are always the first things that get tossed in a huge pile on the floor. He won’t even go in later and pick one out to look at. Am I supposed to just put the books and toys away for good to avoid the mess? I don’t want to do that because Robert actually likes to play with these toys and it’s nice to have them around in the off-chance that Andrew might want to play with them too. Or do I just let them be and learn to deal with it all the while trying to not trip every time I take a step?

Next example, we bought a new couch last week. I also bought some new pillows to put on it because, damnit, I’d like to have an adult-looking living room for once. Quite truthfully, after two years of this, I’m tired of living in a kids’ playroom. I like nice things and would like to be able to have nice things in my apartment. With our old couch, I was sick of trying to keep pillows on it so I never bothered with them. They came with it so I really didn’t care. No extra money wasted on my part. But with the new couch, I figured why not try it out again and since I didn’t like the pillows that came with it, went out and did the foolish thing – spent over $100 on pillows that he likes to toss right onto the floor. There’s one white one that he likes in particular. It has sequins and flowers on it, but I’m sure it’s more the fact that it’s white that attracts his dirty toddler hands more than anything else. I know, white anything plus a toddler equals a bad idea, but I liked it and figured maybe, just MAYBE I could teach him to not touch it so I bought it. So now I’m dealing with trying to get him to leave the pillows alone. It’s a huge task and to top it off, he finds it extremely fun to climb on the back of the couch to play with the pictures hanging on the wall. Not gonna happen, buddy. But just try to keep him off there…that’s also not gonna happen. Why can’t I just have a nice couch to relax on and enjoy? Why does it have to turn into a toddler play gym? Why does he have to make everything so much extra work?

What do you even do in situations like this? I guess I could put everything away that he could potentially get into, but that would mean our entire apartment would have NOTHING in it. I already did similarly with his dresser. I used to keep socks and clothes in it, but ever since we moved here a year ago, all he did was rip everything out of the drawers and throw it all over his room. I got so tired having to pick everything up, refold it and put it away time and time again. I tried to teach him to not touch the drawers and their contents, but like most things I try to teach him, it was never successful. So now his dresser sits empty and he uses it as something to climb on. He’ll pull the drawers halfway out and stand on them. I’m just waiting for them to either break so I can say this dresser was another waste of money or him to pull the entire dresser on top of himself and end up getting hurt How do you stop this kind of behavior? I feel like he is completely out of control.

I also can’t allow him in our bedroom unless I’m in there and even then, it can’t be for more than a few minutes. If he’s in there longer, he ends up pulling underwear out of my drawer, pulling the lamp off of the night stand, playing with the alarm clock or jumping all over the bed and mad that he can’t get back down by himself. It’s always something else with him. Why can’t he just NOT get into everything for once? I know toddlers have a lot of energy and have a tendency to get into things, but this is how he acts from the time he gets up to the time he goes to bed at night. He never really has moments where he’s calm and doing something productive. It’s always mess mess mess, destroy destroy destroy, chaos chaos chaos. It’s like as soon as he gets into one thing, he already has 10 more things to get into on his mind.

It really doesn’t help that I’m a neat freak and can’t stand when things aren’t in their place. Andrew is the exact opposite. I know it sounds ridiculous to say about a 2 year old, but I almost feel like we just have clashing personalities. I’m really struggling with finding a happy medium. I want to have a nice place and I want to have my things sit out and I want things to be at least relatively clean, but how do you negotiate that with a toddler who acts like a tornado? It makes me jealous when I see other family members who have girls around his age that have nice apartments and houses with nice furniture and nice things sitting around and wonder how they do that without their kids getting into it? Is it a difference between boys and girls? Or is it just my toddler? How do they teach them to not bother EVERYTHING? I really don’t want to have to wait 20 years from now to have things the way I want them in my own home! I seriously feel like I’m trapped by my 2 year old!

Basically, I’m really curious to know what other mothers of boy toddlers go through on a daily basis. Is behavior like this normal? How do you teach your boys to keep away from things you don’t want them getting into? How do you teach them to just be happy doing one thing? How do you let them get this kind of energy out in a positive, less destructive way?

So I guess I’ll write this entry about me reaching the halfway point in my current pregnancy. I hit 20 weeks on Christmas day, meaning yesterday I turned 22 weeks. I’m definitely in shock at how far along I already am. I feel like I was just peeing on a stick last month, when in reality, that was more like 4 months ago!

So far, everything with me and baby seems to be going wonderfully. I’ve gained 10 pounds thus far, which I’m not thrilled about, but I guess with all of the Christmas cookies I ate last month (come on, can you blame a pregnant lady?), that was to be expected. I’ve definitely cut back on the sweets since then so I expect the weight gain to slow accordingly. However, it doesn’t help that the second half is when baby really starts putting on the pounds. He’s already weighing in at exactly one pound so I can probably expect to gain at least another 7 pounds of pure baby. As long as I can keep my gain to about 10 more pounds total, I’ll be happy. I usually only gain about 20 pounds a pregnancy without really worrying about it so I hope the same holds true for this time as well. And since I told myself that I would take photos throughout this pregnancy, here’s the first photo to show my “progress”.

Up until now, I really didn’t look that pregnant. Just pudgy and fat, but no baby belly. There’s still a lot of pudge, but at least now it’s starting to round out. I already feel like a whale so I don’t even want to know what the next few months are going to have in store for me. Just glad that I’ll be going through this pregnancy in the winter again! I couldn’t imagine going through a pregnancy during the summertime down south.

Also, I felt the baby move for the first time! Right around 20 weeks was when I knew for sure it was baby and not gas. I still can’t get over how weird it feels to know there is something else growing in there so soon, but I really can’t help but feel excited about it!

someone please tell me why i keep working and dont apply for welfare or something and live for free……someone tell me WHY!!!! grrrrrrr

Just saw this on my Facebook news feed from a girl I went to high school with. It took a lot of effort to hold back my fingers from typing out a snarky response so I figured I’d do it here rather than start drama on someone’s wall who I don’t even talk to on a regular basis.

It’s statements like these that explain why this country is heading down the road that it is today. So to answer her question of why she doesn’t quit working and go on welfare to “live for free”, maybe it’s because deep down she really does know that welfare isn’t as glamorous as right-wing nutjobs like her claim it to be. Moron.

Let me tell you, though, easier said than done.

We had a pre-lit tree that we didn’t bring with us from Mass so we went out and bought another one from Target. It was a little more than we really wanted to spend on an artificial tree, but it had some life-like branches that we thought looked neat so we went with it. Well, I get it out of the box yesterday around 3:30 to put it together. The box was kind of smashed up when I bought it (the only one the store had) so I was kind of expecting to either have missing or broken parts. Yeah, that tree lived up to my expectations! I put the stand together, then the three pieces, plugged it in and then started to form the branches. It wasn’t until I got halfway up the middle section that I realised there were a few branches on which the lights didn’t work. This really didn’t surprise me. For the money we paid for it, we didn’t think the hassle to go through and check all the bulbs and fuses to make sure everything was okay was really worth it. So I took it back. Naturally the Target I bought it at didn’t have another so I had to drive to the Target farther north.

That was also easier said than done.

The return went okay, but I was mad that the customer service lady wouldn’t let me just even exchange it. She just put it back on my card and I figured, “Alright, they’re supposed to have a few in stock anyway so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Yeah, right. I get to the Christmas department and find that they do have one in stock and that it’s still on sale, but $25 MORE than we originally paid. “Here we go…” I thought. So I put the box on my cart and went back to customer service. I was at least happy that the box wasn’t as damaged as the one I’d returned.

Back at customer service, of course the lady who did the return for me wasn’t there anymore. So I told the new lady what my problem was, that I’d returned a tree, wanted to purchase a replacement and now it was $25 more than I’d originally paid and I wanted the sale price from last week when I bought the tree. It took her awhile to understand what I was even telling her (hello, not rocket science here!), but after a few minutes and two other customer service workers getting involved, she figured it out, voided the earlier return on my card and did an exchange.

“Whatever,” I thought. I had a new tree and since this box actually looked pretty nice, I hoped that the tree inside actually worked.

NOT!

After I got the new tree home, set up the stand, put all the pieces together and plugged it in, I noticed that the top half of the lights on the top of the tree were out. I had to laugh about it because the situation was that ridiculous. TWO trees now that have had THE SAME PROBLEM. We paid nearly $200 for the damned thing. It should not be this much hassle! Hopeful, Ryan and I changed the fuses and checked some of the lights. No luck. He was livid. I was ready to just throw on a small strand of lights that we had from last year, but he wouldn’t go for that. We paid too damned much for the thing to have to “fix” it. For $200, it should work out of the box.

So back to the store it went. And I was in no way coming back with the same damned tree! We opted for the unlit version and just bought some lights to put on it the old fashioned way. Lights plus unlit tree ended up being $6 cheaper in the end and this tree looked much more full. So even though the whole thing was a pain in the ass, I made money (not much, but still) and ended up with a much nicer tree. Oh, and by this time, it was after 7pm. That’s 3.5 hours of just trying to PUT UP a stinkin tree!

Moral of the story: I will NEVER buy another pre-lit tree. They seem to be hassle free, but at least if a light goes out on a normal, unlit tree, you don’t have to return the ENTIRE TREE in order to get it to work! You just replace a $5 strand of lights and voila. So no more of that hassle.

Anyway, for as much hassle as it was, at least it’s pretty!

The cats have taken a liking to the skirt and thankfully Andrew and Robert haven’t been too interested. Andrew pokes around at it every once in awhile, but he’s careful and Robert hasn’t even gone near it. Score! Let’s just hope things stay this way! I went into this knowing full well that I’d probably have to pick up a knocked over tree about 20 times before Christmas, but so far so good!

I know it’s still early to tell for sure, but at my appointment yesterday at 13 weeks, 2 days, both the nurse practitioner and specialist were pretty confident I’ll be having YET ANOTHER BOY. It was kind of like how we found out with Andrew. We knew early on he was going to be a boy, but not this early. As soon as the nurse put the probe on my belly, she knew immediately that we were more than likely looking at a boy on the screen. “Do you see what that is?” she asks. “ARE YOU SERIOUS???” I had to ask while in slight shock. Yeah, and from every angle, she could see it. At first she was telling me to not go and paint the room blue or anything, but by the end of the scan, she was pretty confident we weren’t looking at a girl!

Then the specialist came in to look at the baby quick before sending me off to do blood work. He asked me if I knew what I was having. I told him the nurse was pretty sure I was having a boy. “Well it’s still early,” he began saying as he put the probe on my stomach. Then he saw what was on the screen. His tone changed pretty quick! As soon as he saw the baby, he pretty much told me the same thing the nurse did – we were DEFINITELY looking at a boy!

And he was sucking his thumb!

That makes boy #4 for us. Although I lost the first because of miscarriage, he was still a boy and I then ended up with two more boys. And now a FOURTH? How does this happen? Ok, I know how it happens, but what are the chances of this? I’m happy the baby is healthy, but at the same time, I can’t help but be somewhat disappointed that I still won’t have my little girl to play dress up with.

On the bright side, we won’t have to buy anything new and we already have a name picked out from last time!

So…3 boys under 3 in my house. I had a laugh with Ryan last night because their initials are going to be WAR – William (the new one), Andrew and Robert. And a WARzone is exactly what I’m going to be living in shortly!

Believe me, you have NO IDEA how strange it feels to see another little baby moving around on the screen. I just went through this a few months ago! It doesn’t feel normal to be going through it ALREADY. AGAIN! SO SOON!

I really don’t know where the time is going. It seems like I just found out I was pregnant and now here I am, almost out of the first trimester. The fatigue is pretty much gone so now other than not having periods and feeling fatter than usual, I don’t really feel pregnant at all.

That’s because against my wishes, I have to gain 15-20 pounds from now until May. Now why would I need to do that, you ask?

Because we’re expecting. AGAIN. Yes, as in there’s another baby growing inside my uterus.

I’m starting to think my uterus has separation anxiety.

I’m also starting to think that no one really cares. It seems like I’m pregnant once a year whether I want to be or not. It really isn’t news when I have to announce the same thing 4 times in 3 years. I’m actually starting to feel like it’s expected of me to be, well, expecting.

As if popping a baby out 6 months ago after popping one out 16 months before that wasn’t enough; now I’ll be popping out a third little human in 7 more months. Somebody should have told me that babies come from losing weight. It seems as though every time I try to lose weight, I end up pregnant. What’s especially weird about this is the past two times I PLANNED to get pregnant, it took longer than this time which was unplanned and unexpected, as I was on birth control. Life will find a way…

And CVS had the nerve to call me for two months regarding my birth control pills being ready for pickup. You’d think after the first week or month of not going in for them, they would have assumed that I probably didn’t need them anymore for one reason or another. I guess the automated calling system doesn’t have much common sense.

We’ve known about this since the middle of September. I think I was about 3 or 4 weeks into my weight loss when I found out. At first, I was devastated. I was just starting to see good results and had lost about 10 pounds within the first month so knowing that I’d have to start putting on the pounds was a hard pill to swallow. I didn’t want to break the news to the Internet yet so I didn’t know what I was going to do with my weekly weight loss updates. Ryan suggested to just run with it and keep updating. Knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with it for months, I followed his advice, hoping to make it through to the time we felt ready to tell everybody. I was able to pull it off for two more weeks, but then I was hit with food aversions galore. Everything that I was eating in order to help me lose weight all of a sudden made me nauseous to even think about. Broccoli? Not with a 10 foot pole. Salad? Heck no. Greens were giving me the heebie jeebies and the only foods I could stomach were carbs. Not the best thing to want to eat when you’re trying to be healthy.

For the past few weeks, my weight loss came to a stand still and I started to feel guilty about my little lie. I couldn’t keep doing weekly updates saying that I was the same weight without any explanation or showing photos every other week where my stomach was sticking out more than normal due to pregnancy bloat. So I decided to just run away from the site and hope no one noticed that I’d abandoned my weight loss posts. Now, I don’t know if anyone noticed, but at least now I don’t have to feel guilty about it. I’m just going to say that even though I’ve been stuffing my mouth with croissants and mashed potatoes, I’ve been able to maintain my weight. I don’t expect that to last for long, but I’m happy that even though I’ve been guilty of indulging my cravings (Snickers? GIVE ME TWO!), I’m not noticing a difference on the scale. Of course, that’s no excuse to continue to eat like this, but once my aversion to healthy stuff subsides, I’ll cut back on the carbs. For now, though, it’s just a matter of me either eating or not and not eating is not an option.

Learning this news was a huge shock to me last month, but that initial shock has since worn off. Yes, I’m somewhat freaked out to not only be having 3 under 3, but 3 under 2.5, but that feeling was a lot worse when I became pregnant with Robert than it is now that I’m pregnant with a third baby. I’ve actually been pretty relaxed about it. I’ve already found a new doctor which I’ve seen once and am happy with so far. I’m going to see him a few more times before I decide if I’ll be sticking with him, but I’m happy for the time being. He seems to be pretty content with keeping his patients in control of their bodies rather than pushing unnecessary procedures on them. He also doesn’t think having MTHFR is the end of the world like the last doctor did. So those are two pluses.

Right now, I’m about 10 weeks along. I’ve seen the baby on ultrasound already and have heard the heartbeat. Everything seems to be developing correctly so far. I go back in another week and a half and I can’t wait! I’m crossing my fingers that everything goes smoothly this pregnancy, but there’s always that reminder of my miscarriage back in ’08, almost exactly 3 years ago to the day. But I don’t let that overwhelm me. If anything, I’ve been more relaxed with this pregnancy than any of the others. I think it’s because this could very well be my last (or at least last one in a long, long time) and I want to enjoy every moment of it while I can.

So what does that leave me with? Andrew and Robert being 16 months apart and Robert and this baby being 13 months apart. What have I gotten myself into??? Can I at least get a girl this time around for having to endure this sort of torture?

When he came back in, he said, “You’re never going to believe this.” I asked him what had happened. He then told me that a car had come through the fence from the outside and hit the covered parking structure along with three cars that were parked there – a brand new truck, a BMW and some other truck. What the heck? I had to get dressed so I could go check it out.

By then, there were tons of people outside and more people investigating the situation from their balconies. As you can tell, not much happens around here so we all wanted to know what was going on.

There were two oil field workers sitting on the hill on the other side of the covered parking, away from the scene. There was also a gaping hole in the fence and debris (wood and glass) all over the parking lot. Their car had come from the highway, sped through a humongous field, through some shrubs, up a bank, through the fence, into three cars and one of the beams holding up the covered parking area. We were in disbelief. I had to draw up a diagram so you can see just how ridiculous this whole thing was because words can’t even explain it. The red line is where (I assume) the car came from. To give you some distance perspective, this covered parking area, although it looks small here, fits about 10 cars across. I also forgot to label the fence, but it’s the black line.

How does this even happen? I could see if it happened up near the entrance of the apartment complex because that’s obviously where you come in from the highway, but how in the hell do you make it from the highway the whole way to the back of the apartment complex? And how fast were you going that a grassy field filled with shrubs and trees didn’t slow you down enough before you blasted through a fence and into three cars? What if somebody had been out there? There’s no way they would have survived.

The poor guy with the new truck had just bought the thing a few weeks ago and it was pretty much totaled. The entire back end was smashed and there were shrubs pushed up underneath it from the car that came speeding through the field. The poor BMW was smashed in between this truck and another truck and whoever owned it mustn’t have been home. Luckily, the third truck didn’t have much damage, if any, but the whole thing was completely crazy.

It wasn’t until we went to bed a few hours later when all the police, ambulances, fire trucks and tow trucks finally left.

I honestly don’t even know how the two who were driving that car made it out alive. I can only think of one of two things that possibly happened. Either one passed out and had his foot on the gas or they were drunk. Even if they’d swerved off the road from texting, talking on the phone or otherwise being distracted, there’s absolutely no way they would have made it that far through the field. I can’t figure this one out and would be very interested to hear what exactly happened. Nuts.

Had these guys came through the field at a slightly different angle, they would have been in our bedroom or living room. Kind of scary to think about, especially since Robert’s crib is on the outside wall of our bedroom.