I saw this series of statements somewhere today and thought it would make sense to write them down here.
This year, I want to learn how to needlefelt. I want to make little animals! My mother-in-law knows how and maybe if I ask reaaaaallly nicely, she might teach me.
I want to read all the books we pick out for book club. I’m already side-eyeing this month’s pick as it’s not something I would have chosen myself (On the Road by Jack Kerouac) but I will soldier through.
I want to make friends! I know I grew up here, but I honestly don’t have many in-person friends where I live. I joined a mother’s club and have been attending their monthly book club to try to make this happen. We shall see! Wish me luck. Friend-making is hard once you’re past, like, age eight.
I want to visit Portland! But I always want to visit Portland. Maybe if we win the lottery we can go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter because I neeeeed to go at some point in my life. I finally logged back into Pottermore the other day and then spent two days HOOKED to the website going through all the moments. Now I’m thinking about having another Harry Potter themed birthday because I will turn 30 in 2015 and what better way to celebrate than dressing up as a fictional wizard?
I want to change my career path. I have GOT to find something else to do. I have been out of the professional web development loop for so long that I don’t even know how to break back in anymore and frankly, the thought makes me feel exhausted instead of excited. I’m still really interested in becoming a lactation consultant, so maybe I will do some more research. Seems dumb to switch careers and possibly go back to school when I haven’t even paid off my student loans for my first degree, but doing client web work makes me feel super panicky in a way that helping people breastfeed does not and I think I should follow my instincts.
I want to be better at finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place. I want to have a living space that won’t make me cringe on a daily basis. I’ve put this book on hold at the library and I’m excited to read through it. I’m an inveterate packrat and I’m desperately trying to change that so I’m not wading through junk all the time.
Most of all I want to not worry so much this year. Things will work out.
Yesterday, I went and picked up my medical records from Thora’s birth. I was really nervous to read through them, but happily, there really weren’t any surprises. The official post-operative diagnosis was “fetal intolerance of labor” and “fetal malposition with asynclitic position,” and I was diagnosed with atypical HELLP syndrome. In short, I appear to grow crooked babies who panic during labor. And my placenta tries to kill me.
I still want to go over my lab work with my mom (an L&D nurse) to better understand what all the numbers mean, but for the most part nothing stood out as being “not how I remembered it” or anything. One operative note mentioned “adhesions noted to the uterus,” which I assume is scar tissue from the first surgery? I’ll have to ask about that too I guess.
There weren’t any tears involved in reading through the notes; I think mainly because nothing came as a surprise to me. I knew why we transferred, and even though I hated to do it, I knew that it was a legitimate reason to transfer. The midwives’ notes from my labor are all very positive and show that I was handling everything well and I feel a little more at peace with everything now that I’ve read through all the notes.
Thora
Thora continues to be a delight. At seven months old, she doesn’t fall asleep by herself anymore, and wakes up at 2am to nurse (it used to be 5am) and nurses every two hours thereafter, but if those are my only complaints I HAVE IT SO GOOD. Rocking her to sleep is a small price to pay for a baby who actually sleeps long stretches at night.
She’s got a super-quick army crawl and is already working on pulling up to stand on things like laundry baskets and the couch and our footstool. She is so much more active than Wesley was at this age. Keeps me on my toes.
We’ve introduced solid foods, but like Wesley, she’s not super interested in actually eating anything for real yet. (Except paper she finds on the floor. She will happily eat any and all paper garbage.) I’m completely fine with her intake; it’s way easier to just nurse a baby than try to figure out what and how much solid food to feed them. She hates bottles and I had FIVE OUNCES of pumped milk go to waste recently because I couldn’t get her to drink it after it was thawed. Argh!
I started calling her “Beebee” a while back (like “baby” but with more Es) and that devolved into calling her “Beebz” and “Beeberton.” I make no excuses. Nicknames are dumb and hilarious.
Wesley
He loves preschool and asks me if he can go three days a week instead of just two. (Would if I could, but his class only meets 2x/week.) I love hearing him talk about what he learns at preschool. This past week, he made a walrus out of a paper lunchbag and it was so funny to hear him explain stuff about his “rahl-wuss” to me.
He is finally mostly over his bad behavior phase; he doesn’t throw things at me in anger anymore and only has occasional tantrums. I knew it was just a phase, but man, that was a rough couple of months.
He’s pretty conscientious of not leaving stuff on the floor for Thora to grab/eat/choke on, and we’re currently working on making sure that if he has something he doesn’t want wrecked (like a train track or block tower) it needs to be in his room because if it’s in the living room, she’ll Godzilla it immediately. He’s a great big brother and really likes her company.
Secret Quonsar!
My third year participating in Metafilter’s annual SQ gift exchange was the best yet. My recipient gave me a lot of info to go on which was very helpful. I ended up getting her a Jane Austen-related book from her wishlist, plus a Graze box, two chocolate bars, some paper clips shaped like bunnies (she said she liked office supplies!), and a Tattly tattoo of a rainbow riding a skateboard.
The gifts I received were amazing. Trader Joe’s chocolate caramels (two different kinds!), a little birdie letter opener, a letterpress postcard from San Diego, the gift-giver’s favorite book (The Secret History by Donna Tartt), and a cute little notebook with feathers on it that was personalized with my name. I actually didn’t even notice my name at first, and when I saw it a few days later I was like OMGGGGG because I never get to have stuff with my name on it and it made that gift so much more special. Thank you, SQ!
Christmas
I’m pretty ready for Christmas, actually! I got most of my shopping done before the end of November, and I even managed to get some family photos of us so our Christmas cards are all ready to be stamped and mailed.
When I took Driver’s ED, it was at a time when the only requirements were that you had to be 14.5 years old and pay the $200 or whatever it was to get in. After the 8 or 10 week course, provided you were 15 by then, you could get your license. Just like that. No probation period or “drive with your parents until you’re 27” sort of rules. Just a driver’s license.
I got my license… *counts* …19 days after I turned 15. My dad had this old pickup of his, one that he bought with his own money when he was about 17 or so. It was a 1976 Ford F-100, and it was his very first vehicle. He decided that since I had my license, I should learn to drive it (it was a stickshift) and it would be my pickup. He took me out for [an absolute maximum of] fifteen minutes to teach me, and determined that I was ready to go out on my own. I never trusted myself driving that pickup, and I inevitably did something stupid that would make it lurch and jump and go wonky all over the place EVERY TIME I DROVE IT. It was a pain in the ass. But, it was a vehicle, and I was allowed to use it, so that was great.
After a few months of driving that wretched thing, in April, Star and I decided we wanted to have a movie night. We begged and begged my mom to let me drive into town, but she said I couldn’t because she and my dad and brothers were going away for the night and wanted to be sure that we were safe at home. I threw a fit and yelled and begged and annoyed the hell out of my mom until she finally gave in. She was really pissed off said something ominous like, “Don’t come crying to me if something goes wrong.”
We ran some errands downtown and hung out with Daniel a bit (this was before we were going out) and rented movies and got some food at Wal*Mart. On our way home, we took a road that I don’t normally take on my way home. It’s just an alternate way of getting to the same place, but it was a wind-y dirt road that I wasn’t used to driving.
Along the way, I was driving faster than I ever should have been, but everything was great. The sun was shining, we were listening to Rammstein and we had the windows down with the wind in our hair. Then I went around a corner. The truck fishtailed a little, and Star and I gave each other nervous looks, but we laughed it off. The next turn, we weren’t so lucky.
The truck fishtailed more, so I tried to correct it and totally overshot. I remember seeing fenceposts and thinking, “If we hit those, we’ll be skewered!” so I turned the other way. About that time, everything started happening in slow motion. I instinctively knew we were starting to roll (don’t ask me how – I didn’t feel or see anything that would have told me that we were starting to flip) so I closed my eyes and ducked. The only thing I remember seeing for the entire duration of the wreck was sparkly whiteness. I assume it was when the windshield shattered, and I opened my eyes for a split second.
Fortunately, we ended up right side up, but we were facing the opposite direction from where we came, and the truck had done a full barrel roll in the process. This is the aftermath:
Star ended up having to get thirty-something stitches in her shoulder, and eleven or so in her elbow. She had a horrible case of road rash from her window being open and her arm hitting the gravel. She also broke a rib and had awful seat belt bruises that occurred before hers broke. Me? I got a cut on my head that cut a piece of my hair, and a one tiny cut on my hand that I had to fight with to get it to scar. My elbows were both bruised so badly I couldn’t rest them on my desk for a good two or two and a half weeks afterwards – the doctors said I didn’t damage them though. Bleeding and crying, we had to walk for over a quarter of a mile to find a house that had a phone so we could call for help.
My parents were 45 minutes away from home this entire time, and my aunt and uncle happened to be driving into town on the same road we wrecked on. The fire truck, police, ambulance, and towing company that provided tow truck services had arrived by then. My aunt said that the truck looked suspiciously like my dad’s, so they slowed down. They saw one of the paramedics, whom they knew, and the paramedic told them “the girls are all right.” My aunt and uncle didn’t know what they were talking about since they figured my dad would have been driving, but they finally realized that it was probably me who was in the truck. They drove the 45 minutes to find my parents at this boy scout camp-out thing to tell them the news.
I can’t even imagine what they were thinking when my aunt told them.
I think my dad was genuinely freaked out (I would be too, I don’t blame him) and he looked like he was crying when he was standing by my hospital bed. I felt so awful. The first thing I thought when I got out of the wreckage afterward was, “OHMYGOD, my dad is going to KILL me.”
My mom was the one that wanted to kill me though, I think. She was crying when I first saw her and I’m sure she was relieved that I was alive and more or less unhurt, but I know she was mad at me because she didn’t want to let me take the truck in the first place. She told Star’s mom that she wanted me to have to sit and watch the doctors scrape gravel out of Star’s shoulder so “I could see the damage I’ve caused.” She’s weird like that.
Since it happened on a Friday in April, I didn’t get to miss school or anything. Star missed most of that next week because of her rib – it made walking, sitting, breathing and existing very very painful. I wore a sling to school for a day or two because of my elbow, but I stopped wearing it because it seemed more of a hassle than it was worth.
I became absolutely petrified of gravel roads after that, and I drive like a little granny when I’m forced to use them. Even now. I’m also a lot more afraid of pickups than I ever used to be.
The truck sat dormant in our shed and then our barn for many, many months. My brother, Carson, decided that it was going to be his truck and that he was going to restore it with the help of auto body repair and auto windshield repairexperts. I told him it was a stupid idea, but no. He goes and does it anyway:
More views:
Compare and contrast:
It looks like a completely different truck. I almost don’t believe it. Good riddance to him though, that thing gets like, 10 miles to the gallon.
