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This afternoon, on the phone with Daniel. He just finished telling me that Wesley’s Nana Tami and Papa Dave have taken him to the music store and wouldn’t be home when I got home from work:

Me: “Awh dang. Well… hm. I guess I can… partition my milk in peace?”

Daniel: “Hahaha!”

Me: “Thrilling, right? I didn’t get as much today as I usually do.”

Daniel: “Awh. We can have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow.”

Regardless whether it helps or not, I just love that he knew to offer.

Baby Appointment

Dr’s appointment yesterday didn’t offer a lot of great news – my blood pressure is elevated (140/90, up from 140/76 two weeks ago) so they want me to come back in Monday for another blood pressure check just to make sure it’s not continuing to go up.

I don’t seem to be spilling any protein in my urine or having any hand/face swelling or dizziness, so I don’t think I have preeclampsia, but they want to err on the safe side. Right now, I’m hoping for two things:

1. Blood pressure either stays the same or goes down. I really, really don’t want it to go up. This also contributes quite a bit (I think, anyway) to the foot swelling so any improvement here would be welcome.
2. I continue to not have protein in my urine. The midwife mentioned something about maybe doing a 24-hour sample collect, where you have to keep all your urine for 24 hours in a jug and then bring it in so they can test it. DO NOT WANT.

I keep joking with Daniel that he’s going to start feeding me only salads and gruel to try to keep my BP down. Somehow I get the impression that he is considering it.

They also wheeled in a terrifically ancient-looking ultrasound machine to verify Baby’s position, because at this point, they really should be head-down to prepare for labor. Just to be difficult, Baby was transverse. Argh.

Daniel gave him a pep talk to try to get him to turn, and I’ve been hanging out in Cat Cow to try to give him a bit more room. I have basically no torso so I don’t blame him for stretching out sideways across my tummy, but HEY. BABY. There is this thing called “birth” we have to go through, and best to not make it more difficult than necessary for the both of us. Head: down. Now.

Breastfeeding Class

This went well. I was surprised to discover that I knew several of the points the instructor made just from reading so many parenting blogs over the years. Internet win! We got a book to refer to and lots of handouts, and we practiced some nursing positions with plastic baby dolls.

I made the class giggle during introductions because we were supposed to mention a concern or fear we had regarding breastfeeding and I said I was afraid my boobs would suffocate my baby. And then I turned bright pink, because HELLO, the only person in this room I know is my husband and now I have basically just said hi! My name is Meggan and I have ridiculously large boobs, nice to meet you.

Sleep

I actually haven’t been doing too poorly in the sleep department, but apparently poor Daniel is being woken up by my outrageously loud breathing and/or snoring. Whoops. My nose gets kind of snuffly in the evenings so by the time I go to bed I can’t breathe through my nose very well and I guess I make a lot of noise? Occasionally I’ll wake up to him elbowing me but that’s about all I remember.

Lucky

I just wanted to mention how much I lucked out with Daniel as my husband. He will volunteer to squish my feet if they are painful, he does all our laundry and dishes, handles a lot of the grocery shopping, makes me dinner, and is great about cleaning the apartment.

He is excited about preparing for Baby and wasn’t a bum about going to classes or participating once we were there. This past weekend he told me he’s looking forward to carrying Baby around in a sling, and if I hadn’t already been sitting I would have keeled over from the cuteness.

OMG SO ADORABLE.

He turns 25 on Sunday and I am so pleased that I’ve gotten to share the last 9-ish years with him. Love you, Danbob!

Today, Daniel served Sam Elliott a cappuccino. TWO cappuccinos, since the first one was so delicious.

I am pretty sure this means he wins at life.

Yesterday, Daniel told me he bought us some M&Ms for dessert, and then asked if I wanted a treasure map to find it. We laughed about that for a bit, because really, how sad would a treasure map be for finding a bag of M&Ms in a decently-sized apartment? All you’d have to do is put “X marks the spot” and DONE! No fun at all. So he asked if I wanted a scavenger hunt instead and I nearly fainted with excitement.

Little-known fact about me: I ADORE SCAVENGER HUNTS. My mom used to make them for me when was little, and I love the fun of figuring out the riddles in the clues and running back and forth to find the next clue.

Daniel got started writing out the clues, and in about ten minutes he had me throw a random shirt over my head to block out my view so he could hide the clues. I was reading a book in the living room at the time. Amazingly, I didn’t hear him open any of the doors he hid clues behind. (Apparently I get really engrossed in my books.)

Photos of the clues and their answers ahead…
(more…)

• Scene: Yesterday evening. I am in the kitchen talking to Daniel. I happen to be wearing gray jammie-pants, dark gray tee, and his light gray sweatshirt.
  Daniel: You are awfully monochromatic.
  Me: Oh, ha, I–
  Daniel: “By the power of GREYSCALE!”
• Our friends’ save-the-date that came in the mail today:
  
• Impromptu crafts, especially ones that involve Harry Potter:
  
  (This is one of several. I don’t want to share them all just yet!)
• My birthday coming up on Sunday. Woo! I will be 24. And yes, my birthday this year IS Harry Potter themed, hence the crafts I am so spectacularly excited about. And the pumpkin pasties (as in, “Two pumpkin pasties please!” -Cho Chang) Daniel is currently making, and the butterbeer recipe I perfected yesterday.
• Our lovely visit with Daniel’s mom and sister this past weekend, wherein we ate a lot of wonderful food, celebrated Gretchen’s 30th birthday, had dinner for Kerri’s birthday, and generally had a very good time. Daniel’s mom brought our Christmas present with her, which was a hand-painted basket (she’s a basketmaker) painted with coffee! Rad!
  

Now, back to cleaning the apartment. I don’t usually think of myself as a very messy person, but YOW does the living room get filled with junk when I am not looking. Sweatshirts everywhere, half-finished craft projects all over, and piles of things waiting to be sorted…

Yes, yes, it’s true: our first wedding anniversary was on Sunday, May 24th! I really can’t believe it’s been a year already. It has gone by so fast!

I didn’t post about it the day of because we were in Newport, Oregon, hanging out on the (not-so-warm, very windy) beach and watching copious amounts of HGTV and I was coming down with a cold, but I wanted to commemorate the event here.

We stayed in this funny little Bed & Breakfast in Nye Beach that Daniel secretly picked out because it had a turret room! I love turrets and always wanted my bedroom to be one when I was younger, so it was a super-sweet idea. The lady who ran the B&B was a little nutty and once we got in the room, we realized that even though there was a bathtub, there wasn’t a shower, which would have been fine except the lady had mentioned the bathtub faucet was weird and kind of broken. So… we sponge bathed and washed our hair in the sink! HAHAHA. Oh man. I’m of the opinion that if something sucks, at least it makes for a good story. Hee.

The tub was this hilarious mauvey-purple color with forest green tiles and there were dragon stencils on the wall. I SO WISH I had remembered to take photos of the bathroom because it was hilarious. Daniel felt bad that the room wasn’t 100% awesome but I got a kick out of it anyway and loved the turret.

We visited the beach but didn’t find any awesome shells or jellyfish or anything. We also checked out the Yaquina Head Lighthouse (super windy) and saw some pelicans, and ended up going to see Angels & Demons at the local movie theater. (I could dedicate a whole post to how I thought the movie was great right up until the “Fire” scene where it all went downhill in a non-canonical fiery blaze, but I will resist.)

I came down with a cold on Sunday and Daniel succumbed a few days later, so we are still trying to recover. (Doesn’t that always happen when you go on vacation? Ugh. I think your body finally gives out once you relax and all the germs get invited in.) That said, overall we had a very good time.

Here’s to many more years of giggling about stylistically inappropriate dragon stencils!

Yes, the rumors are true: I was finally able to attend An Event Apart! There are so many wonderful things to say about this conference, but I will try to be reasonably brief.

Point #1: It is totally worth the money.

Since I was lucky enough to have my workplace pay my way to SXSW this year, I was therefore ineligible to have them pay my way to AEA. So… I used my tax return money. Daniel was kind enough to not be upset about this (YES, I cleared it with him beforehand, and apparently you can write educational expenses like this off on your taxes anyway) and I brought him along for the ride. He didn’t go to the conference, but got a nice little vacation in Seattle whereupon he managed to hit EIGHT DIFFERENT COFFEESHOPS in one day. That’s got to be a record.

Point #2: The swag rocks.

Most webby-type conferences seem to give you a huge, hideous tote bag plastered with some sponsor you’ve either never heard of or don’t particularly care about, and the tote bag is filled with postcards from other sponsors or vendors whom you also do not care about. It’s really wasteful (I just recycled all the postcards) and kind of annoying. You know what An Event Apart gave out? USEFUL THINGS.

I received:

A tasteful laptop bag:

A classy pen:

A nice little notebook:

And a much-needed USB hub:

THINGS THAT ARE USEFUL. And pretty! With a nice logo on them that I am not embarrassed to carry around!

Point #3: Everything is thought out

It was obvious that all the speakers spent a ton of time on their presentations. This was not a hit-and-miss, “fly by the seat of your pants” kind of conference – every single session was awesome.

I think AEA does a great job of picking people that are super relevant to the industry and that have a ton of knowledge to impart. They were all passionate about the industry and about what they do. It showed.

Overall, I was super impressed with the quality and thoughfulness throughout the conference. It’s only two days, but they cram stuff in and it’s all worthwhile. Plus, there are parties:

photo from dondondon

…and one of my co-workers won an iPod Touch. Jealous!

Conclusion

If your workplace supports learning and furthering your creative endeavors and is willing to pay your way, this is totally a conference to hit. There are ones coming up later this year in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. If they are not-so-willing, you might try writing a letter to the person in charge and suggest that they consider sending one or two people from the company as a way to keep on top of the industry and schmooze with other professionals. It will make you smarter and may therefore garner your company some more dollars, if they are concerned about that.

If you are saving your money for it and are not sure if you really want to spend a zillion dollars on it, DO IT. It is so worth it. It’s definitely a whirlwind experience (I didn’t feel like I got a lot of downtime) but you will come away incredibly inspired with new tips, tricks, and techniques that you can then use to become better at what you do. And who wouldn’t want that?

If anybody has any questions about a particular session or about attending the conference in general, just ask them in the comments and I’ll respond. I’m still giddy with excitement.

Edited to add: Jeeze, so giddy I forgot to mention that I got to meet both Jeffrey Zeldman (success!) and Eric Meyer (yay!). If THAT doesn’t convince you that AEA was awesome, I dont know what will.

Daniel scared me half to death this morning. I had fallen asleep in the living room (Yes, again. If you have any suggestions on how to quit this horrible habit, I will be MORE THAN HAPPY to hear them. It is embarrassing how often I fail to come to bed in a given week.) but my internal alarm clock is pretty good, so I was awake on time.

I rolled off the couch and noticed that our front door had been left unlocked all night. We live in a secured building, so really the only people that could have intruded would be our two downstairs neighbors but I still do not like to leave the door unlocked while I am sleeping. So I locked the door.

I made my way through the living room and as I was about to step into the kitchen, I heard a voice from the darkness growl, “HELLO, I–”

And I screamed.

It was more of a “WHOOOOooOOoOO!!! YOU SCARED ME HALF TO DEATH WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU DOING UP?” but I screamed nonetheless. I couldn’t see Daniel in the dark and he was standing at the other end of the kitchen, right after I had told myself that despite leaving the door unlocked all night, we probably did not have any intruders.

Turns out he had kindly turned the alarm on for me even though I had not actually made it to bed, and had been snoozing the alarm without me even in the room for more than a half-hour. Whoops.

Several months ago, Daniel started making pancakes on the weekend. Usually Saturdays. We went through about a box of pancake mix before we realized that, hey, most pancake mixes contain trans fats (I KID YOU NOT). Which, ew. He was pretty sure he could come up with a homemade pancake mix that would withstand our discerning tastes.

Our pancake requirements are as follows, and yours may or may not be different:

• Thin. I myself do not mind fat pancakes much, but the most delicious ones are thin, almost like crepes but not as flimsy.
• Taste good. So many pancakes make the right texture but are all off taste-wise. I like that tangy taste the batter has when it’s good.
• Texture. The pancake should not resemble a frisbee.

After much trial and error involving DM’d pancake recipes on Twitter, calls to mothers, and various tips gleaned from coffeeshop customers, Daniel came up with a recipe. These pancakes result in delicious tasting, thin pancakes that do not resemble a frisbee in either taste or texture. In case you are also on the hunt for the perfect pancake, I can wholeheartedly recommend these.

(I asked Daniel what I should name these, and he said, “Delicious Pancakes. You can add a ‘.net’ if you want.” So there you have it.)

Delicious Pancakes by Daniel

Just short of 1 C flour
3T sugar
3/4 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt (DO NOT SKIP THE SALT!)
3 1/2 T vegetable oil
1 egg
Just over 1 C milk

Mix ingredients until lumpy. Make pancakes. I think we each get about three 4″ pancakes out of this recipe, but you could easily double it if you need more.

(I was going to do an approximation of this recipe in the Metric system, but… I never really learned it and the conversion calculators confused me and gave weird units of measurement. Do you normally measure things like flour in grams? What about butter? Milk?)

If you try this recipe out, would you let me know what you think? Enjoy!

It’s so hard to believe that six months have already passed – it really does feel like just yesterday we were on stage, exchanging our vows.

We’re not exchanging gifts or anything, but we are going out to a nice dinner with a gift certificate I received as a bridal shower present. (Yes, way back in April!) It’s a restaurant that specializes in local food and it’s very popular – the menu for this week looks delicious, so I’m definitely excited.

I also wanted to give a shout-out to my online buddies Melissa and Bubs, two lovely girls who have gotten engaged recently. You have so much to look forward to – married life is awesome! Best wishes to you and your fiancés, and remember that the wedding is just one day in the grand scheme of your life and your marriage. It’ll help you keep your sanity in check.

Yesterday, Daniel and I got the wild idea to to grocery shopping at Safeway. We generally shop at Fred Meyer because it’s the closest, but the Safeway is accessible by public transit even though it’s farther away, and, well, we wanted bulk candy. Hee.

We hopped on our public transit method of choice only to realize one stop later that it was one of the “docking” ones, which means that it returns to its garage instead of continuing on the route. Daniel suggested we try out our new Zipcar membership, and I agreed – it seemed fun. Plus, it’d mean we’d have a CAR for grocery shopping, and who knows how much stuff we could buy.

We reserved the car by phone and walked over to pick it up. Zipcars are parked all over the city, so they are super easy to find. We had an uneventful yet fun shopping trip (I had forgotten how much I love Safeway) and drove back to where we picked up the car.

As we pulled up to the intersection, I thought, “Hey, that white car looks like it’s… WHAT?” Someone had stolen our parking spot! Zipcars have designated parking spots around the city that only Zipcars can park in. It’s supposed to be a perk of using the service – you always have a guaranteed spot to come back to, so no hunting down on-street parking. But someone had stolen ours!

We referred to the handy-dandy Zipcar Co-Pilot pamphlet in the glove box to see what to do. It told us to refrain from writing “CAR DRIVERS SUCK” in mud on the window, and to just call them and they would talk you through what to do. We ended up giving them the license plate of the car and they said they would issue them a parking ticket and have them towed. Eeep! I felt bad about that, but honestly? Those spots are very well marked as being for car-share vehicles only for ALL TIMES on ALL DAYS, and since other people need to use that particular Zipcar, you can’t just park it anywhere because nobody will know where to pick it up. I can just imagine these people coming back from their fancy dinner and realizing they no longer have a car. Ugh. Sorry, whoever you are! You still should not have parked there though.

The guy on the phone instructed us to just find another on-street parking spot and they would get someone to move it back to the correct spot for us. All in all, this interaction took a total of about seven minutes, we found another parking spot easily, and got our groceries inside.

I didn’t expect to have that sort of ordeal upon returning, but the Zipcar people explained everything really well and we got it resolved quickly. I checked out the parking space this morning on my way to work and it was empty, so either the car got itself moved in time or else they got towed, and the Zipcar people hadn’t moved the car back yet.

All that for a load of groceries! (At least I saved $30 with my Safeway card.)

He leaves me instructions for how to make my own food when he’s at work. No more failed omelets! He even measured out spices for me since I don’t know how to spice spaghetti sauce (shhh…).

This time they are not on our porch, but they keep showing up in the bathroom. We have killed three identical spiders in the past week and I AM NOT ENJOYING IT.

This morning’s spider was found on the inside of the shower curtain, so I tried to push the curtain closer to the front wall of the shower to get a better squishing area, but the spider fell over and I had to shake the curtain to get it to fall into the tub. Then I squished it with a Q-tip box. Gross.

The spider prior to that scared me half to death as it appeared on the OUTSIDE of the shower curtain, conveniently right by my head as I was rinsing my mouth out after brushing my teeth. Horrifying. It climbed its way to the back wall of the shower and then on to the ceiling, whereupon Daniel tried to squish it with a broom but it FELL and I screamed and somehow it ended up dead. I don’t really recall that part.

The first spider was spotted in the morning as I was getting ready for work. I saw its reflection in the mirror and couldn’t figure out if it was just a weird paint spot or something more sinister. I turned around and saw that it was sinister and on the move. It climbed all over the wall and the shower and our shower caddy and Daniel’s shampoo and generally violated everything cleanly in the general shower region. Ugh.

And then I lost it.

I had no idea where it was hiding. I didn’t see it on the wall, the shower curtain, the shower caddy, any of the bottles or soap things… It was lost. I HATE THAT. If there is a creepy spider in the room, as counterintuitive as it sounds, I would like to know where it is at all times. And I lost it. And I had to leave for work right then.

This meant that I had to leave a note. It was a horrible note, as no one wants to wake up to something that says:

BEWARE: Spider in the shower. Tried to kill it but it got lost.

Poor Daniel. He said he wasn’t sure if he appreciated the note or if he would have felt better discovering it on his own. I still maintain I could not have gone to work with a clean conscience if I hadn’t at least warned him. But he managed to find the spider and kill it, so all is well.

Semi-unrelated tangent: After dispatching the spider, I jumped into the shower and several minutes later had another terrific scare. You know how water sometimes makes weird noises on plastic shower curtains if it hits it just right? This made some godawful noise like a croaking frog-man growl and my heart flew into my throat and I jumped and generally had the everloving wits scared out of me. By water. In the shower. Where you are probably the most vulnerable ever. It was awful.

I just hate when mornings start out like that.

Today, I smelled blueberries in coffee. This may not sound like something monumental, but as someone widely known to be a coffee dunce marrying someone known to be a coffee fanatic, it is a big step for me.

Daniel is so passionate about coffee that it’s often hard for me to relate – I was not a big coffee drinker before he got into it and am only slightly more so now. He goes to cuppings often (sometimes multiple times per week) to develop his palate and learn more about the individual coffees, where they are grown, and what sort of taste profile they have. It is very much like wine tasting, which I am also crap at.

He has me smell all sorts of different coffees and asks if I can sense “berries” or “grapefruit” or “flowers” and I never, ever can. It all smells like coffee to me. I say this jokingly, like, “Oh hey, don’t even bother, it will just smell like coffee to me.” but it does sort of suck not being able to share it with him.

I mean, really, the guy knows why you should not use tables in website layouts. The least I can do is sniff coffee.

And today, TODAY, he was meticulously showing me how to make coffee with his pretty new Eva Solo full immersion coffeemaker, and had me sniff the Stumptown Hairbender Blend in his grinder and then sniff the Ethiopia Biloya we were using for our coffee and OMG IT WORKED. The Hairbender is a blend of several different sorts of coffee and that compared with the Biloya actually gave me a basis for comparison and I could totally smell the berry-ness of it. (The berry flavor, as Daniel so kindly just explained to me, comes from the way the beans are initially processed – they leave the bean inside the coffee cherry to dry, and then they take it out and process it, so the bean absorbs some of the sugars and other stuff from the cherry before it moves on.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I almost cried. Seriously. Finally being able to discern some sort of flavor in coffee was huge for me. Daniel never makes me feel like I disappoint him in coffee endeavors, but I always feel guilty on some level that I can’t manage to “get” any of it. Today gave me hope that I can not be so much of a coffee dunce in the future.

I am learning, slowly but surely.

To those of you who live with your significant others, especially if you are not married: How combined are your lifestyles?

I ask because I have recently noticed that Daniel and I keep an awful lot of things separated when it comes to cohabitating. For instance:

Grocery Shopping
We more or less take turns buying. That said, sometimes, 90% of the items are “mine,” as in, things for me to put in my lunch that Daniel doesn’t necessarily want or eat, and how is that fair that he has to pay for all that food he won’t eat? We usually compromise by having the offender pay for the groceries that time and then resume tradeoff the next time. This is obviously not a perfect solution, and I am curious how other people deal with it. Do you view it as a “household” expense that just gets paid regardless of who does the eating of the food?

Laundry
We have separate hampers and generally do our laundry completely independent of one another. Sometimes someone will ask, “Are you doing laundry? Can you throw in [blank] if you have room?” or whatever it may be. Is it more efficient to wash everything together? Are we just crazy?

Finances
None of our finances are combined. I’ve heard off and on that this is a smart move, as you don’t want too many things wrapped up “just in case” – whether that’s true or not, we’ve just never bothered to get a joint account. We handle most jointly-paid items by switching off who pays them. I might pay the cable bill one month while Daniel covers electricity and gas, or I pay rent and he pays me back half of it.

I suppose these questions could apply to roommate situations as well, but in that case I feel like you are less inclined to voluntarily cover someone else’s expenses if need be. How do you handle these things in your household?