Grown Up Love

e has been gone for nearly 3 months now. it's actually going beautifully, but it was quite the rough adjustment in the beginning and blogging was pretty far down n my list. somewhere after dishes, meals, laundry, diapers, baths, showers, groceries, doctors, post office, gas, vacuuming, medicine, diapers, cold and flu season, birthday, christmas..... you get the idea.

another one of our unit's lovely lady counterparts and i were talking this evening about that glorious time in your life called "youth".

i don't miss high school one bit. but e and i met when we were both essentially done with college, so we skipped a lot of those giddy phases that 15 year olds are so lucky to immerse themselves in daily. i joked about sending e a love note a la freshman year of high school.

and then i went ahead and did it. in a program on the iPad. via email. to myself. to post here. because if i sent this to him, he would stop talking to me. immediately. and i
am already hurting for adult conversation.

there are times when i feel like e and i were robbed of a lot of romance and the frivolity that comes with being young and poor and in love. our marriage is pretty much stellar and i wouldn't want to give up any part of who we are and how we came to be husband and wife.

but i'd be lying if i didn't say that i wish we had more stories to tell about getting drunk when we were 17 and nearly pissing ourselves because we thought our parents would notice the 2 missing cans of beer that it required for us to become totally wasted. (for the record, it still only takes me one can of beer.)

or memories of making out in the minivan after one of us got our licenses (yes, we both drove vans in high school. clearly we were made for each other).

or senior prom. oh how i wish i could have been his date so i could mock his gelled hair now. (there was nothing to mock about me. i was a glowing vision of elegance at my senior prom. just trust me, don't reference any pictures)

i wish i had 3-ring binders or folders full of notes scrawled during boring lectures about things that it turns out we actually did need in college AND in real life. i would like to sit on the floor of our bedroom during these lonely months and open a decoupage-d box full of origami fortune tellers, pressed flowers from the bush outside the school theater, pictures of us laughing in the stands in our band uniforms with braces and awkward physiology.

i would love to have those little momentos of a time when we were so unsure of who we were and where we would end up, when we were desperately clinging to every second, relishing in every hand held, every kiss shared, every hour alone together. i would love more memories of a time when we were careful with each other and passionate because we couldn't tell if the other would stay but we wanted them to so so so badly.

i would like more dried flowers hanging above my bed. more obviously staged photographs in more beaded evening gowns. more dates to dairy queen.

more metabolism.

instead i have all these silly tokens of love laying around here-- a washer and dryer, our first flat screen tv. a kitchenaid mixer, a couch with a chaise, a queen sized pillowtop mattress and sleigh bed frame. a minivan.

OH, two kids. we have two kids, forgot about them.

a house whose rent we can afford, as well as the utilities. student loans that have never gone into deferment or default. a savings account.

empty bottles of wine atop the refrigerator. a wine glass (or 2.... or 3....) full of corks. a few more glasses full of bottle caps from parties shared with friends that have remained such despite time and distance.

i wish we had a longer "crazy in love" stage in our relationship. don't get me wrong, we're crazy in love. and we were crazy, you can ask our families. but we weren't reckless and giddy for very long. we had jobs for heavens sake! careers even! and then babies! can't be frivolous and silly when babies come along! well, not with each other anyway. you can be frivolous and silly with babies all day long! they seem to enjoy it, as a matter of fact....

i'm not sure there's a point to this at all. i rarely have points, eh? simply put, it seems that already, in my mid 20s, i see the "grass is greener" pattern that all of the world seems to fall into. when you're 15 you just wish for permanent, grown up love--or at least your over-fantasized visions of it. when you're living out that grown up love, you yearn for the recklessness of your youthful escapades.

perhaps there's a happy medium somewhere. though, i sincerely doubt it involves neon crayola rainbows vomiting colored pencil hearts onto wide ruled paper.

but that's just a theory.

Parents Know How to Party

e and i have developed a harry potter obsession. admittedly, it started with my love for the charming movies. i forced e to participate in a harry potter marathon 2 weeks before the final film hit theaters. he was hooked.

since then we have both read all of the books and purchased the first seven installments.

we are nerds.

so two nights ago after jp fell asleep and calvin was resting as well, we decided to pop in one of the HP movies we now own and cozy up on the couch together.

calvin had other plans. screaming ensued for 1.5 hours. he was inconsolable. around midnight he finally went off to dream land and we firmly agreed that no sandman was going to destroy our cuddle plans! e went out to smoke before we started the movie again.

i was asleep before he got back inside.

i woke up an hour later, my head soaking wet. i was in such a sleep induced daze that i began panicking and interrogating my husband: "why am i wet? what happened?! why is my head wet!?!" i was even crying.

this night is going so well.

e finally explained: "when i came back in from smoking you were already asleep, but i knew you wanted to cuddle, so i got a hard cider and came and sat down on the couch and moved your head onto my lap so we were cuddling. but i fell asleep holding the cider... and i must have accidentally let it slip and pour out onto your head..."

college kids, you WISH you knew how to party like us.

And We're Back

i will not make excuses. we have had a rough 2 months and blogging was so low down on my list of priorities that i can't honestly even say that i feel bad about my absence. so i won't apologize either! :)

but we are 2 weeks out from e's first year-long deployment as an EOD tech and i think that this blog will end up being the place i can go to help find my sanity since my husband won't be able to fulfill that role as consistently as he usually does.

time has taken on a constant bi-polar quality. i find myself angrily marking the hours during the work day that e spends away from us, cursing the inventory, physicals, gear collecting and other tasks that keep him on post until dinner time or later. once he's home i begin the sleep battle-- how late can i stay awake with him before i forfeit tomorrow's functionality? and all of the hours between angry and desperate i'm trying to find joy in every moment that we spend in the same room, soaking in the feeling of his presence, the warmth of another adult in the house with me, relaxed and hanging out on the couch watching some stupid show that we love.

will this be the last bath he gives jp until he comes home for r&r next year? will this be the last time i make him tuna melts, one of his favorites? how can i make this time special, make it count? how much is too much to ask of him? how few disagreements and frustrated outbursts can we manage before he leaves? two tuesdays left together. two mondays. after today there will only be two wednesdays. possibly 3 days of football. six speech therapy sessions. 17 dinners. probably somewhere close to 30 loads of laundry ;) it's exhausting. but i'll have a year to catch up on sleep after the boys go to bed. if, God forbid, anything were ever to happen to him, i will never regret staying up later, working harder to create less friction, making more memories.

i'm overwhelmed with emotions and fears right now. however, there isn't much i can do but walk forward into the storm and press on. it's not mere strength that keeps military wives afloat, it's the acute knowledge of necessity.

so here we go, into the unknown, because it's necessary. because it's asked of us and refusal in this case would mean giving up on a husband, a father, a soldier, a marriage, a family and a way of life. we weren't ignorant of this part of the lifestyle when we chose it.

time to put our money where our mouths are.

At Least This Time I Have an Excuse

so, we got settled in to the new house. we got into a decent routine. i had a week of great cooking to include an experimental recipe that i was 100% prepared to blog about.

and then

calvin james was born august 9, 2011, 6lbs 14oz, 19.5in long, at 8:50 p.m.

labor lasted 8 hours with about 2 minutes of pushing. epidural free the whole way :) he's beautiful and we are all settling into life as a family of four.

Thirty Seven

time flies when you're having fun! or getting robbed?

it doesn't seem possible that we've reached "full term". today i am 37 full weeks pregnant. three weeks until my due date. if you passed me on the street you could still miss the fact that i am a human incubator. two moves in 2.5 months makes it pretty hard to gain excessive amounts of weight, and i carry small anyhow. you should see the looks on people's faces when they ask how far along i am. i'm convinced that most of them think i am either lying or exaggerating.

 

from the side

 

from the front-ish

as we're counting down days (and sometimes hours or minutes!) i find myself reflecting back to this point in my pregnancy with jp. the differences are so vast. there was so much anxiety with jp, and frustration. my pre-eclampsia was being all but dismissed by midwives who were so sure that their years of experience overrode my knowledge of my own body. i was bored and far too focused on the unknowns inside my tummy and the unknowns that surround a first time pregnancy and labor. i over-thought EVERYTHING. my hormones were wildly out of control (something i did not fully realize until a few months after jp was born. i apologized to e repeatedly). jp was a very strong baby who was not shy about letting me know that he had run out of what he considered adequate space. he bruised me from the inside more than once (that notion held true after delivery. we expected a typical newborn--always curled up, limbs tight. he began sprawling out in his sleep almost immediately). i was desperate to have him out, to hold him, to be his mommy and have our family. and 2 days from where i am right now, my wish came true through a nightmarish labor that was induced because my pre-eclampsia (you know, the thing i had been trying to warn the midwives about for weeks) had flared up to a level that a doctor considered "more hostile for your baby than life outside your womb". we began induction at 37w2d and he was born at 37w4d, measuring at about the size of a 36 week-er and not breathing at all. he spent the first 12 hours of his life under an oxygen hood. in recovery, after he was born, my blood pressure capped out in the 170s/120s. it was a bit traumatizing.

obviously entirely worth it though, don't get me wrong!!! and he was fine, just a bit traumatized from the birth as well. but it wasn't something i wanted to relive, ever.

so i've been nervous throughout this pregnancy, keeping an eye on anything that might have seemed strange or indicative of a rising problem. there were several things that caught my attention- uncharacteristically low blood pressure, high heart rate, dizzy spells. then i had the seizure and the glucose test and a simple diet change turned the whole pregnancy around. my blood pressure leveled out, as did my heart rate. the dizzy spells we all but gone. my mood seemed to even out as did my energy levels. the pregnancy itself, if isolated from all of the outside events of our lives this last month or so, has been absolutely amazing.

for the last 2 weeks i have complained about the discomfort (there's a lot!) but i have consistently said that i just want a little more time with him in my belly. not because i enjoy the feeling of being pregnant, but because i'm just not quite ready yet. a lot of that had to do with wanting to be sure we had internet set up before he came (i know that seems silly, but it's my easiest form of mass communication with everyone!). this week jp and i are both ill and that is my new reason for wanting some more time.

truth be told, i think what it really comes down to is this: may, june, and the first half of july were painful for us as a family. things were sort of falling apart at the seams. i felt as though i watched all of the dreams i've held on to for the last 3 years be stripped away from me, one by one. i turned into a monster, a person that i regret my husband having to live with and my child having to suffer through.

e will tell you it wasn't that bad. he's lying.

and then we had the "incident" and i went from being what i can only characterize as a royal bitch to nerve-wracked mess.

we have finally settled back into a peaceful, enjoyable routine. i feel creative again, and calm. i feel normal. jp has gone through a round of teething and now this cold, so he's been extra cuddly. i feel no need to change anything right now.

it's not that i don't want another baby, please don't misunderstand. i am so ready to welcome another sweet, precious boy into our lives, to join the leagues of extraordinary women surrounded by testosterone :) i'm curious to meet this little man and get to know him and his very distinct personality. i'm looking forward to pictures of all of "my boys" and watching jp with his little brother. i'm so looking forward to the bonding of breastfeeding again and the tender hold of a moby wrap. i can't wait to ogle over every developmental milestone.

but i can't lie: i'm enjoying every second of the life we have now with just the three of us. it's the love of this life that prompted us to have another child. we cherish being a family. i know my heart will swell and open wider than it is now and i will be even happier than i can imagine. but i'm in no rush for that expansion. it will come when it's supposed to, and no sooner. and i'm at peace with that. if it happens in the next few days i'll admittedly be upset- i don't want to be in labor with a cold!! but ultimately, this weekend or 3 weeks from now on my due date, it's really irrelevant to me.

which is good, because it's also not up to me!

what i've learned in this last trimester, amidst all the chaos, is that the best i can do is focus on my family in the here and now, giving them the best of myself daily and enjoying as much of them as possible before the sun sets. i will fail sometimes, but for the most part, this is a pretty easy goal. how could i want to give anything less than my best to people like this:

Another One of those Hiatus Things...

so, life got turned upside down. severely.

our house was broken into in the middle of the day on june 26. e was out of town at a training session and jp's godmother was visiting us. we had gone swimming and came back to find all of our valuable belongings piled up in our living room, some things stashed into one of our own duffle bags, and the master closet and dresser ransacked.

it was the 4th in a string of break ins that occurred in houses that all backed up to one area of woods. the woods, in our case, lined the side of our house, and they used the windows on that said of the house to escape. they had previously stolen gaming systems, a few other electronics, and most recently, guns.

we had, from what we could tell, interrupted them. their modus operandi appears to be that 3 of them break into a home, one keeps lookout while 2 pile everything into one place and then a vehicle comes for them to load into. we got home before the vehicle arrived and thus nothing was actually stolen from us.

except our sanity and sense of security. the knowledge that these people had broken into 4 homes that were all within .25 miles of each other, that it took police officers more than 15 minutes to respond to our 911 call, that no pictures, evidence, or notes were taken at our home by the police, that the perpetrators had stolen weapons a few days prior, that our house was chosen because of its attachment to the woods, and that they now knew everything e had worth stealing in our home added up to an irrefutable fact for me: we could no longer live there.

we checked into an extended stay hotel until e could come back home and began working out the possibility and logistics of moving. our landlord, sherry corona of remax prime realty in columbus, ga, was an unbelievable grace. she let us out of our lease and showed us another home that we could move into, one that she still managed and one that was miraculously VERY close to 7 other families in e's company. it was also a solid 10 minute shorter commute to work. we began moving in with the help of people we barely know on june 30.

we were moved in by july 4 and due to some difficulties and at&t's HORRIBLE customer service, we have been without internet until today.

the few times i've been able to haul a computer and my child to a place with wifi, the blog simply wasn't a priority!

so let's do a quick catch up- we have a new home. jp has been in speech therapy for a month and seems to be making some progress. he is still as happy and goofy as ever.

e is loving his job and his company and is looking at deploying some time between november and april. we shall see!

i am 37 weeks pregnant as of tomorrow and baby calvin is due any day now! we're ready and then.... well... not so ready haha! it's been an upheaval of a month and things are finally settling down. we'd like to enjoy the calm for a few more weeks if we can, but the baby certainly has a plan of his own :)

sorry this isn't longer or more explanatory, but i would like to cut my losses with the old house and move forward from here, so that's precisely what i intend to do with the blog as well :)

Labor of Love Part Deux

a trip to joanns for the perfect hospital gown fabric was OVERLY successful.

i ended up buying gown material in 3 different flannel prints.

in my defense, that particular section of goods was 50% off and, let's be honest here, who doesn't want options while in labor? if i'm going to be subjected to hours of pain and bodily malformation, i would like to have a say in at least a few things.

so i chose materials based on the possible mood i might be in while wearing them.

if i'm feeling cheerful, excited, or just plain loud, this is the print i'll be showcasing around my soon-to-be-missing baby bump:

if i'm all sentimental and weepy, this will be the winner:

and if i'm feeling beautiful and glowy and divinely in touch with my feminine powers of birthing, this:

if i am a miserable screaming woman, i may just opt for a drab hospital issued gown that i will later rip to shreds in a rage of fury. 

there wasn't enough of the fancy shmansy material left for an entire gown unless i wanted my classy look to include half of my thigh, so i found matching solid navy and had to piece together top and bottom pieces.

i knew that having to combine two materials would take more time and put my very limited skills to the test which is why i chose to do this gown first-- i knew all of the excitement about starting the project would carry me through to the end!

i was right! it DID carry me through!! and i love the result! the collar is a bit quaker-ish and tight, but i wanted to be sure that it wasn't too loose so i wouldn't have to worry about accidental lady-part exposure during picture time. i modified this gown quite a bit from the original pattern-- aside from the top being a different material from the bottom, i made the sleeves tighter, the neckline tighter, added ribbon trim to the collar instead of a plain hem, used snaps to close the shoulder and the back, added belt loops under both sleeves, and will be using ribbon to keep the whole thing looking fitted and pretty :)

the snaps are pearl-front hammer-snaps (so SO easy! SOOOOOOO easy!). i placed the inside snap (the bottom part that you don't see) about 1-2 inches over from the hem so that when the gown is snapped shut there's a nice little panel of extra material to block any view of my backside from sneaking through holes!

and this lil' beauty is a sort of prototype of the hairpiece that will go with the dress. jp kindly ruined a lace drape that i had in the kitchen a few days ago. my sewing machine is much too rough to be trusted to sew delicate lace, so i set the material aside to give my brain a few days to come up with a possible re-purposing project.

i should mention that i bought this set of drapes for $6 at a garage sale. and they are beautiful. and huge. and because of that i am determined not to let them go to waste!

thankfully, i won't have to! there is a row of these flower/leaf embroideries on each drape, so i decided to cut one of them out and see how it would look.

i'm both impressed and pleased with myself, yes.

my plan is to glue the lacy flower to a swatch of the same printed material i used on the fancy gown, and then iron that set-up on to a piece of interfacing for a bit more stability (i just discovered interfacing on my trip to joanns. it may change my life). once that's all said and done i will attach 3-4 hairclips to various points so i can use the hair piece to pull back more than one section of my hair and keep it firmly in place, all while looking uber classy.

again, the hospital gown pattern came from www.lazygirldesigns.com and was totally free! you print it out at home on plain old 8.5x11 computer paper and then tape it together. and you can give a donation for use of the pattern which i think is great :)