i am grateful for the 30 minutes maggie gave me to write this.

apparently, all you have to do to get rid of morning sickness is to whine stream of consciousness style about it on your neglected blog.

about 15 minutes after i posted that, i guess i hit some sort of magical window (more than likely 13 weeks) wherein the epic nausea went away, replaced in favor of looking really fat (not yet pregnant, but definitely with what looks like an impressively earned muffin top--i don't know...) and feeling pretty achy and tired.  cue growth spurt, i suppose.

i am grateful.

maggie and i are sick again, which is SO annoying because we went 9 months with no sick, but daddy brought it home from the stupid music building, where apparently everyone just passes around the illness. mr. superimmunesystem succumbed himself, though not much, though when he gets sick i know it's going to be twice as bad for us mere mortals. 

so far, i'm not wrong.  maggie with a cough = she just gives up on sleeping by herself. i can't fault her. most of the time when i cough myself awake, i give up on sleeping too--and i have the benefit of pharmaceutical intervention, even while pregnant.  WHY CAN'T THEY COME UP WITH SOMETHING TO HELP BABY COLDS?!? i don't want them to ruin livers or anything, but come on. it's no wonder kids get like 3 colds in their first year or whatever the average is.  they never can bounce back fast enough to fight off the next one! poor kids.

so i don't know if maggie is trying to test my resolve, or if she's actually working on getting rid of her morning nap.  today was the third time, maybe fourth (though not in a row, i must add), that she has absolutely refused to go to sleep, preferring instead to party downstairs with her sick mom.  (party, here, being an entirely relative term, i hope you know.) she's a sneeze away from 11 months, which is pretty early for this, but she also crawled at 5.5 months, walked at 9, and is probably going to write her dissertation in molecular biology about the time that i was whining over geometry, so i shouldn't be surprised. 

part of my curiosity about it is entirely selfish. i don't think there is anything more frustrating that a kid who is basically asleep when you rock them, then up and partying in the crib.  feed them? same thing.  nap strikes are frustrating, so part of me wonders if it's just better for everyone to just decide that we're taking one nap and not two. i won't pull the trigger yet, but it's on the horizon. i've heard (i should really stop listening) that it's good to wait until they are consistently striking that first nap, but no one seems to have a definition for what "consistently" is. my kid is a crappy sleeper anyways, so i'm not sure it will really matter. 

i think i'm just deciding, little by little, that she's a big kid. like able to eat people food, go to the park, play with other kids, wander the halls of church with me tagging along behind her, take one nap, understand me when we have deep conversations big kid.  it's kind of cool. it's sort of amazing how she responds when i look into her eyes and tell her what's up.  she was fighting the 1 nap at 12ish today and i just looked into her eyes and said "i'm not holding you. you're feeling better. you can go into your bed. your bed is wonderful and comfortable. it's where you need to be."  and heaven bless her if she wasn't drowsy 2 minutes later and willing to go down in her bed right away. 

i don't get it. it's a weird sort of thing.  you would think that i would learn, then, that speaking to her rationally is what works instead of getting frustrated and being all "why won't you EAAAAATTTTTT?"  but no.

i blame this on what i have been thinking about for a while but finally crystallized in my mind when i was talking to my mom the other day on the phone. i am in total survival mode these days.  you know the drill--when you are operating on just what you have, with no real reserves because those get depleted when something else comes along (i.e. you get sick, your baby gets sick, you have a major deadline at work, your oven breaks, whatever).  periodically, you'll get your head above water and start renewing those reserves, but because of how much there is going on and pulling at you, you are never really able to renew them enough to REALLY renew them. 

i don't know if this makes sense to anyone else, but it makes perfect sense to me and it really helps me understand why things bother me now that never would have rankled me so much before.  things that aren't really any different now (though perhaps manifesting themselves in different ways) are just sending me into orbit sometimes. i know, when i can get the tiniest bit of distance, that it's me. i know that, in previous months/years/incarnations of me, i could have easily come up with some way to handle such situations with grace (or at least more grace).  but now?

i just have nothing.

everything i've got, every bit of introspective energy, is spent in trying to improve me in the right now: how can i increase my spirituality, even just a little bit, so that i make sure that i'm not leaving that by the wayside in the midst of the crazy of my daily life? how can i improve and streamline how things work around here so that they don't feel quite so overwhelming? how can i work diligently on work while also giving myself enough time to sleep and recover from my 14 hour days with the magpie? how can i make sure that i am connecting with and loving my husband the way he deserves? how can i increase my patience with my baby, who is growing so fast and is so exasperating sometimes.

(she eats books. it makes me nuts. everyone else might be zen about it. i AM A BOOK PERSON. it makes me nuts. i need to let it go. also, she's so tall that there is really no place that is safe from her. the dining room table really isn't anymore, unless something is in the middle.  also...i swear sometimes she knows when i'm saying no and just does stuff to see what will happen.  gah.)

these are the things that cause me to think, to ponder, to try to be better.

and once those are done, that's it. that's all i've got. i don't have the energy, literally, to consider anything else. 

maybe that's a bad thing. but i can't see how it could be, since it's reality for right now. and when i realize that, which it has taken me a long time to do (and before i did, i would beat myself up for not being able to do more, to think more, to contemplate more, to not be the me i was 3 years ago or the me i was even 1 year ago), i think that it's actually pretty dang extraordinary that i can still laugh, that i can still try to make every day pretty good, that i can still try at all.  in the midst of all of this really hard stuff, i can still be me.

that's pretty amazing.

but i am REALLY looking forward to the light that i see at the end of this tunnel, when my darling husband gets a job and i am not the only one responsible for working.  he's excited too, for lots of reasons, but one of them is, i am sure, that he gets to take some of the burden off of me because that's the kind of guy he is.

(i won the lottery with him. i really did.)

but until then, survival mode is where it's at.  and, for better or worse, it's what i can do.

that's good to know, really.  that's not to say i won't keep trying to make survival mode a bit better every day, but...it's nice to know that sometimes your best really is your best, even when it's not the best that would have been your best in previous times.

enough rambling.  that's where my head is at. 

pregnancy 2: ain't nothin' like it used to be.

i'm dying.

or most of the day it feels more like i'm dying than creating life (totally stole that from a babycenter comment, because it felt like truth). 

if i could stop eating, i would gladly do so. i would gladly just drink those disgusting chalky shakes three times a day that are supposed to keep old people from withering away or the kid ones that are supposed to replace the gaps in their nutritional sphere if it meant i never again had to think about what to eat, what might not sound disgusting, what i SHOULD eat versus what sounds remotely palatable, or had to deal with the inevitable consequences.

and i don't even throw up. so i don't even have that to deal with.

i just, with this pregnancy, have the most oppressive, long-lasting nausea i have ever experienced in my entire life.  i got pretty sick before i had my gallbladder removed. i think this is worse, though i remember the only thing i ever wanted to eat then was blueberry bagels and apple juice (both of which don't sound terrible now).  so maybe it's about the same. but at least then i could still go to school, make cogent and logical arguments, do my work.

right now all i want to do is sit around and moan.

not a viable option when you have a highly active (walking, getting ready to run, perhaps, climbing) 10 month old.  and a job. or a series of a jobs. and a house that doesn't clean itself.

but seriously.

SERIOUSLY.

when does it end?

like i'm praying for the 2nd trimester. in all earnestness. i don't even know what week i am. i think i'm in week 11 or 12. ISN'T THAT WHEN IT'S SUPPOSED TO END?

i'm sorry to whine. i know that my troubles are nothing in the grand scheme of things. i know that feeling moderately guilty for only wanting to eat corn chips dipped in plain sour cream is a totally first world problem.  i get that i am blessed. i totally get it.

but when you feel like you've been run over by the disgusting train for 12 hours a day (okay, maybe 10.  but seriously. it starts about noon and doesn't end until 10 or 11 at night), you maybe sort of enter the woe-is-me land. 

and then i had a stomach bug on top of it this weekend.

seriously. I'M NOT EVEN JOKING.

sometimes i just think Heavenly Father really has a whacked out idea of what i can handle.  but then i realize that, crappily as i might be doing it, i am handling it.

so maybe He knows what's going on after all.

this pregnancy is nothing like the last one. of course, i didn't have the 10 month old last time and i had the luxury of napping through the worst of the nausea (which has always, for me, been the best way to deal).  i get two naps a day if i'm lucky with maggie. she doesn't mind sleeping with me, and we at least sleep together for the morning nap. that usually gets me through. sometimes, if i'm entirely thrashed, i crash with her for the second one.

but mainly i spend the afternoon praying that my husband gets home soon so that i don't have to be jumping off the couch baby alert all the time and can lay down. or just moan in peace.

man. i'm a downer.

but this is straight up nausea-induced stream of consciousness stuff here.  gold, i tell you. gold. someday i'm going to look back and tell myself to suck it up, you whiny git.  that'll be a good day.

or else i'll look back and say "oh yeah. that was RIGHT BEFORE it all got better." (i hope. i hope. i hope forever and ever.)

this pregnancy is nothing like the other one.  which means either it's a boy or a girl who hates me.

either way, i'm in for it. 

back to grading things i couldn't possibly care less about. 

(you all totally want to hang out with me, don't you? i am a LAUGH RIOT.)