Another Phone Dump

Hanging out waiting for Frankenstorm to show its whole wrath. Right now it's just breezy and lots of rain - no different than a regular rainy weekend. I didn't buy milk before this fiasco because it doesn't get used fast around here, and we didn't want to lose power and then waste it. But now I'm wishing I had some because I could bake some things for breakfast. Thinking of going to Royal Farms to just get a small container....

The library all set up and ready to go for the first day of school! Nothing stays in one place for more than a few minutes, especially those green chairs. Everyone wants them in a different place. I don't sweat the small stuff.

Seen at St. Joe's Hospital when I was there for our 12 week NT scan... a real actual payphone! 50 whole cents - ouch!

Mike Mussina HOF game night - Yay!! There he is on the jumbo tron!

I made this one bigger for identification reasons. The whole ceremony is going on there on the field. On the left of the crowd, you can see lots of kakhi pants and dark jackets. But in the middle, there's one person in white pants. That's Brady! And Mike is the one in all kakhi in the middle above the camera guy on the baseline. (Silly iPhone pictures!)

And there's Mike giving his speech. Not one of his best qualities, but that's ok. He looks pretty doing it. :)

Phone Dump!

When we got our new phones, I transferred over the old pictures that I never posted. I'm not trying to figure out dates, I'm just posting a few at a time.

I never took a picture of the sinks my mom installed while she was here! Last year we did Mike's bathroom because had issues. This year she did my bathroom and the powder room because they're prettier and use a lot less water.

At some point in August when we were visiting Jeff, we went to his new Lonestar Steakhouse for dinner. I had bacon crusted sirloin. Steak, wrapped in bacon, sprinkled with bacon. It was heavenly. And then my cholesterol went up 40 points. Worth. Every. Point.

The other thing we indulged in while visiting Jeff was this delicious piece of fruit. I promise, there was apple in there somewhere. Even with the 3 of us eating, it was hard to finish.

This Jim Abbott autobiography was super interesting. Every other chapter was an inning in his no-hitter and the opposite chapters went through his life chronologically. I know he was never really a superstar, but I was always impressed by him when I was younger. Every year my dad would make sure that one of our O's games was against his team in hopes of seeing him pitch. The year our tickets finally fell on his pitching day, I was in Florida with a friend and my parents got to go without me. I am very said that I never got to see him or Nolan Ryan pitch in person. (My dad and brother got to do that one!)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar in person!

New Favorite "As Seen On TV" Product

I used to love infomercials. It was a good thing I didn't have a credit card and 800 number privileges as a child because I would have put us in the poor house. (I'm still mad I never talked my parents into getting Color Coat 2000, but that's another story for another day.) One thing that particularly fascinated me was the "If you call in the next half hour..." I always wondered how they knew when the commercial was on! It was years before I started assuming they just always had that special deal.

Ok, so you see, my body has one serious issue. I'm VERY short in the shoulder area. Everything I own that has shoulder straps has to be adjusted to the smallest size possible, and sometimes even that's not enough. It has kept me from getting cute dresses for years unless there's a way to pin them under. (I'm not talented enough to unstitch, deconstruct, and reconstruct clothing.) If I get tank tops, they have to have the adjustable straps or I am indecent. A lot of times I buy petite tops because even though I'm not short, I'm short THERE. (That trick doesn't work for long sleeves, unless it's something that could realistically be a 3/4 length sleeve. My arms aren't short.) This has been a serious problem as I started looking for maternity wear. I don't know if it's just the style this year, or if it's the fact that maternity clothes only really come in S/M/L but almost every shirt I've tried on has been too big of a V or scoop. Some to the point where not only the top of my bra is showing, but the bottom is as well! This is compounded by the fact that I spend much of my day bending over and helping children. It's harder to find a shirt that is work-appropriate than play-appropriate, but I've never really been comfortable hanging out anyway. :)

I saw this product on a TV commercial last year, but since I'm trained to avoid them and intellectually know that 90% of that stuff is junk, I ignored it. Then I saw them on the "As Seen On TV" rack at Rite Aid, but since it was $10, I kept walking. With my current situation, maternity tops are being more and more necessary every day. (I've been in the pants for 6 weeks, but they were slightly easier.) I decided to hunt these down, and they were on sale. Score!

So yes - they really work. It slid down as the day went on, but never slid so low as to not be helpful. Even when it gets to the juncture where it can't go any lower, it was covering me enough to be decent at school. I might need more colors now. :)

http://camisecret.com/

Link

Since 2010, I've been keeping a periodic journal blog of our journey to where we are today. At one point, I completely forgot the user name and pw that I created so I had to restart. (I didn't want to be able to be found out via google, so I made a new account and I totally couldn't remember!) But the old blog was still viewable online, so I cut and pasted and the whole thing from 2010 til now is in one place. Caution - lots of medical jargon and health stuff is contained. But I wanted to keep track because I was often googling for personal stories along the way. It's interesting to see which posts get hit frequently because of infertility buzz words.

Recently a friend of mine blogged about invisible illness week. I think of my fibro as an invisible illness, but it's been 17 years and I'm used to dealing with that one. Infertility is also an invisible illness and definitely has messed with my head more than fibro. With the fibro, I don't have daily visual reminders of other people being "cured" and me still being broken. I thought that I would be cured once I was pregnant, but I'm not. It's a journey I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy but it's one we took anyway. Luckily my husband is the greatest person on earth, because he didn't know he was signing up for this. He never made me feel bad about it and he held my hand for all the yucky stuff. He was even (sometimes overly!) willing to jab needles in my body. We learned 2 important things early on. 1 - We couldn't make the journey the center of our universe. We still planned vacations, had a life, and purposely didn't make it part of daily conversations if it didn't have to be for a logistical reason. 2 - If we didn't laugh about the absurdity of certain things, we would have gone nuts.

So anyway, if you ever want to read about the journey, it's out there. http://jlsh935.blogspot.com/

Apologies

Recently, my life has become much more busy. Most of the states throughout the country are rolling out a new curriculum and Maryland is included in the craziness. It's good change, but it is SO MUCH change. We honestly feel as though we are an entire school of 1st year teachers at times! When I'm not working, I'm doing nothing that requires brain power. :)

On top of that, we happily found out on June 29th (our 4th anniversary!) that I am pregnant again.  I had a ton of doctor's appointments to monitor the progression of the pregnancy over the summer and it was consuming a lot of my brain power. I've been lucky in the sickness and exhaustion departments - it would appear that having fibromyalgia for 17 years trained my body for the 1st trimester! I have had some issues along the way that have made the last 20 weeks more stressful than I would have liked, but today marks the half way point so I'm starting to finally feel like this will be our "take home" baby.

I have been terrified to verbalize this pregnancy all along. We waited longer than the traditional 12 weeks to even say it to some of our families. But with the issues I've been having, my life has consisted of going to work and coming home to sit still. That didn't lead to very many exciting pictures to post. I realized there wasn't a lot I could post of my classroom or view from the couch. I didn't want to explain away my boring pictures, but I didn't want to say anything either. My solution was to pretty much ignore the blog. So I'm sorry about that. I'm also not interested in making it 365 pictures of my stomach or a thousand baby things, so I'm not sure what I will do going forward. I'm leaning towards just posting when the mood strikes like my friend who posts about things that make her happy! I have some random things saved from the last couple months that I might post about too.

We'll see :)