Seriously this is June!!

This one won't have lots of info in it - just a quick minute to say something to Mother Nature: It's June 12th!!! I'm all for not-so-hot weather, but couldn't we stick to the 70s and 80s as opposed to rainy and low 50s?!? The sun hasn't peeked out all day long and as soon as I let the dog out this morning I realized it felt more like February or March instead of June. Seriously?!?

That said, it was a nice surprise to be cost contained (too many nurses scheduled, not enough patients) this morning and I have spent a very lazy day in the house. It was especially nice because I was scheduled for 5 days in a row so I broke up my stretch right in the middle. Mike is working on a design for his 2nd paying job with a 3rd on the horizon and I have been catching up on reading and researching on the Internet. Now off to run random errands I probably don't need to do but it's time to get out of the house. I was about to head to the Y until I realized that they all close at 7:00 on Saturdays. What, doesn't anyone want to work out on Saturday nights? Or am I just a weirdo?

I hope everyone is having a fabulous weekend. I'm off to work in the morning!

Summer work projects

OK, so I have been away from the blog - again - for a long time. But it's been because we have been doing crazy things to our yard! Well, that is what is was recently at least. We have a list of things we'd like to do and the biggest of those was to expand our back yard. If you remember a year ago we sodded the backyard and seeded the side yard. Well this year, we decided to enclose the side yard up to the front porch so 70% of what we seeded last year is now part of the back yard. These are not the best quality pictures because I took them with my iPhone (the battery in my good camera died so this was all I had) but this will give you a good idea. Click on the links I put in for previous entries to remind yourself what the yard looked like before.

Looking from the side yard at the new fence

From the backyard along the new fence looking back towards the garage

From the patio looking at the new fence - you can appreciate the meadow grass and wildflowers the best here, I think

Also I have gotten my garden up and running for the year. I don't know how it will do but we are going to try to put a sun blocker up that will filter out 30% of the sun since it gets SO hot on the back concrete pad. This year I have planted 4 types of sweet peppers, 3 types of hot peppers, parsley, 3 kinds of tomatoes, sugar snap peas, broccoli, 2 kinds of lettuce, and cucumbers in the back raised bed. I'm also trying some container planting for my herbs - cilantro, basil, rosemary, and thyme - as well as a pot for strawberries. I'm not sure if you can appreciate in the pictures below quite how the basil and cilantro have taken off, but basically I'm giving it away to people at work because there is so much of it.

I won't bore you with what is what, but just know it's a lot that may or may not actually survive

The cilantro is in the right and left corners and the basil is in the back corner

My strawberries!!

So as we do more projects, I'll post more pictures. But for now just be content with the fact that I promise I will have more to post soon - and I think I'm going to change the name of the blog in the next month or two so be on the lookout!!

Amazing what I don't know

You'd think that as a previous childbirth educator and newborn care educator I would feel 100% ready to be pregnant. It's amazing how many things I find myself asking though. What can I eat, what's safe to do, can I still ride my bike to work occasionally like I have been, should I just walk on the treadmill instead of run, what does my baby look like right now, how will I know if something isn't right, how much water should I be drinking... my thoughts, needless to say, are going crazy right now. And I'm not normally a morning person yet I have been up early every day thinking of all the things I need to think about and I haven't been able to get back to sleep. So either this is my body preparing me for no sleep as a new mom or my mind really needs to calm down - otherwise it's going to be a LONG 9 months. And yes, it is almost a full 9 months - my due date is February 17, 2011!!

Cat litter

I said I would use this as a way to share little things that we are feeling throughout the pregnancy and this is one of my favorites (actually, it's what gave me the idea in the first place).

I didn't clean the litter box on Saturday - I meant to, I just didn't have the time. Then Sunday rolled around and here I am officially pregnant so now I can't clean the litter boxes. Mike knew that once I was pregnant I couldn't clean the litter boxes so he told me he'd take care of it Sunday. Tuesday morning rolled around and I asked him if he had cleaned them yet and he said no but that he was going to do it right now (which he did). I went down to ask him something and he was about to start cleaning the boxes but told me I had to get out of the room because he didn't know what it would do to me and the baby if I was around while he cleaned them. I just thought it was so sweet and cute!

I'm so excited that he is so excited, too. He is definitely feeling different things than I am right now and I think he believes it more than I do because he's not waiting for symptoms and morning sickness like I am. I really will feel more pregnant once those things come to pass.

Here we go!

We found out on my birthday that we were going to be parents. Actually, we "faintly" found out on my birthday but we officially found out once I bought the digital test to check the next morning. I have started this blog to talk about the little things that are going on for us right now and to record some of what we are feeling at the moment even though we won't open this to family and friends for a couple months. Either way, here's the story of how Mike and I found out we were going to be parents.

Knowing that we hadn't been trying specifically but had not been preventing getting pregnant, and knowing when a positive test may show up, we decided to, on a whim, take a pregnancy test on my 31st birthday. And when I say "we", the conversation went more like, "Wouldn't it be funny if I were pregnant right now? Maybe I should take a test just to see. There really is no way that it would show positive this early but heck, it's my birthday, what do you think?" At which point Mike said, "Sure, why not?".

So three minutes elapse (I set the timer on my phone) and I go look at the test which showed a VERY faint second line. Between the two of us, we must have looked at that test about 50 times that day trying to decide if we were pregnant or not. On the advice of a good friend, I went to the store and bought the digital "Pregnant"/"Not Pregnant" test and had it ready to take on Sunday morning.

I spent my birthday downtown with some friends at People's Fair and then Mike and I went to dinner with a couple who we have gotten to be good friends with over the past year or so. We made no mention to anyone (well, maybe I said something to a friend because I HAD to ask what a faint line meant) and just went on with our day.

Sunday morning rolled around and I took the test and there was no question it said pregnant - as you can see below:
Again, we must have looked at the test at least another 50 times. We left it in the bathroom all day until after about 24 hours when the digital screen goes blank just so we could go see it again. Not to fear though, on Monday, just to be sure the first two weren't flukes (because at this point I had come to believe the one on my birthday was a positive as well), I took one more. So for a point on Monday we had two tests sitting on the back of the toilet saying "Pregnant". That's something I should have gotten a picture of but by the time I thought of that the first test had gone blank.

To say we are shocked wouldn't be completely true, but it would be a little bit true. It's not like we didn't know it could happen, I'm just still not believing it because I don't feel pregnant by any means. But I have been told to just give it time, soon I will feel pregnant. I guess I should just be happy with how I'm feeling now and read all these books I checked out from the library.

Crazy Cat Antics

Behind the armoire used for food storage in the dining room is a vent that we have yet to finish and yet to put a register cover on. Did you ever think about what may be down this hole??

Here's a clue...

Can't figure it out?? Here's a closer view --

Still can't figure it out? Well here's a funny story...

We were on our way out of town for a New Year's up in the mountain when it occurred to me that I had not seen my pager for work since the night before. I knew exactly where it was when I last saw it and when I asked Mike he said the same thing - on the table in the dining room. We didn't have enough time to look really hard for it but I look in all the places I could think of and I still couldn't find it. So I did all I could and decided I would send a text to people at work so they knew to get me on my cell phone if they needed me and I would get back to looking for the pager when I got home.

But before I could even let them know where to find me, I got a text saying "Going on ECMO". For those of you that don't know, I am training to be an ECMO Specialist as part of a new program we are starting in the PICU. I will look for a good link soon but a quick overview is that ECMO (extra corporeal membrane oxygenation) is used for patients as a heart-lung bypass to give the heart and/or lungs sufficient time to heal when they are too sick to function on their own. There are 5 of us going through training right now and up until this point, we have only had theory and practice circuits to train on. So the fact that there was an actual patient was very exciting. That said, there was a case going on and I was up in the mountains trying to enjoy my new year's weekend. I spent well over a day trying to figure out if I would need to come back early and if so, how I would make it back since we carpooled with a friend to get to the mountains... and let's not forget that my pager (which received a page at the same time as I received my text message) was still MIA.

So, I assumed when I got back to Denver (after deciding to not come back because the 24 hours wouldn't gain me much and I'd get just as much experience later in the weekend and week since the patient would probably be on pump for a few days at the least and there would be many people vying for time at the pump) I would hear my pager periodically beeping to tell me I missed a page. So we get back to Denver on Saturday and I proceed to tear the house apart looking for it. I went so far as to go through the trash and the recycling just in case it had gotten thrown away... to no avail. I had made plans to work Saturday night so I needed a nap Saturday afternoon and just as I was falling asleep I thought I heard a chirp... but it never came again.

I paged myself again from work that night (now that I knew my pager number... yes, I didn't actually know it, I had to look it up) but didn't think much more about it until I was sitting at the table when I got home this morning and thought I heard a chirp again. This time, I remembered my pager number and decided that I was going to page myself to see if I could hear it. I wasn't holding much hope since I had looked and looked, but it was worth a shot since I kept hearing these "mystery" chirps throughout the house.

Lo and behold, the pager went off!!! It sounded mysteriously like it was coming from my armoire so I opened it and looked behind all the food... not there. Then I paged again and I was certain it was coming from my bedroom on the other side of the wall... nope. One more time and I just knew it was coming from the mechanical room downstairs just under the armoire... still couldn't find it. All at once it dawned on me as I paged one more time, pulled out the armoire, and listened at the open vent cover..... So take one more look at the picture and see if you can see what I'm trying to show you:

The best I can figure out is that either Oliver was walking on the table while we were out one day (because honestly, Moose doesn't walk on the table but Oliver most definitely does) or Trucker knocked it off when he stole my cookies from the table (that's another story, of course) and then one of the cats, Moose, I think, was playing with it like a toy and knocked it down the vent. I still don't know exactly how we will get it from there, but Mike assures me when he gets home from work today he'll figure out a way. Until then, it's off to bed - and to laugh at silly cat antics. They sure are lucky we love them!!

Happy New Year!

Hi all. I know that we have been lax at keeping this up for the past few months, and I'm sure there is plenty to update you on, so one of my New Year's goals is to be better at updating my blog. As I have mentioned before, it's hard when there is nothing cute to talk about that kids are doing, or no more house projects to update anyone on, but even if I update twice a week, that will get me in to the habit for the future when we do have more interesting fun information to share.

So from Mike and I to you, happy holidays and a joyful and healthy new year!