Things

Didn't I just get done saying that I was going to try and stay on top of this? I can't keep promises. So I try not to make them. I don't think I promised. I think it was all in my head.

Especially lately, I have trouble keeping my word in terms of things unimportant. For example, if I say, "Oh, definitely I'll post like every other day," it probably won't happen. I think I've always been like that to a degree. Like that one year when I bought a diary (before blogging was an option). The first day, January 1st, 2005: "Dear Diary, I promise to write in you every single day!" The next entry was October 15th: "Sorry."

It has been exactly one month and one day since my miscarriage. And I haven't gotten my period. Naturally, wishful thinking sets in. "OH!! I must be pregnant again." Not just for me either. I think my friends are sort of rooting for me as well. I peed on a stick today. No such luck. That's okay. Come to think of it, my period hasn't ever really been on the dot regular. Damn. I wasted another pregnancy test, and now I don't have anymore. Now I have to wait until at least payday because we're kind of broke. Oh well. Finding out 10 minutes ago that I am not currently pregnant, I went ahead and took the cold medicine I have been looking at longingly for the past 3 hours. I feel like crap. It started yesterday with a dry scratchy throat which made me cough. Today it's sore, swollen slightly, and more coughing. I took some codeine cough syrup last night along with some generic Nyquil. It didn't help. All it did was make me feel like I had downed 2 martinis when I woke up in the morning and as a result I had to ask my husband to drive me to work.

My cat makes out with her bed. I can't explain it. She purrs and kneads the cushion and licks the side of it when she gets ready to bed down for the night. What kind of cat sleeps at night? She does. She sleeps during the day too. She's getting fat.


I think football is stupid. I guess I have nothing against it personally, but I just don't care. My husband watches it, but not religiously. He's not going to die if he has to miss it and he doesn't expect me to make food for him while he watches it. That's nice. To show my appreciation for his lack of expectations, I do take it upon myself to make him a snack once in a while. This past Sunday I made him some Buffalo Chicken Dip. It was good. Even for me, being a vegetarian, I thought it was good. It was kind of spicy and gave me heartburn the next day though. I tried to convince myself that the heartburn was an early pregnancy sign, but after peeing on a stick, I now know that's most likely not the case. In any case, you should make this. It's really good. But if you get heartburn the next day, just know it's most likely due to the dip, and not that you're pregnant. Especially if you're a guy. I don't want you to worry now.

You'll need a few things.

1 cup of hot sauce
1 cup of ranch dressing
1 package of cream cheese
1 package of crumbled bleu cheese
2 large chicken breasts (whole ones, not just the halves)


First off, I didn't use chicken breasts. I bought a package of chicken tenderloin pieces, and it was about 1lb total. Secondly, I used Frank's Red Hot. It's the best kind. I also used the whole bottle. I also bought the Amish bleu cheese, because it had a horse & buggy on the package. I did buy generic cream cheese though. Please do not judge me.

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees. Place some parchment paper onto a cookie sheet (or a pizza pan, like I did). Unless you want your chicken to stick to the pan, which I didn't. I did this because I didn't want to use any oil to prevent sticking. Put some ground pepper on the raw chicken. Bake in a pre-heated oven for 20 minutes. Remove from oven, and use a fork to shred the chicken while it's still hot and easy to shred. Like this.


You can be like me and drop the camera while you are trying to take a picture of it, making a huge scary noise which causes your husband to run up the stairs with a concerned look on his face, like this.


Temporary side-note... prior to embarking on this journey to make the dip, I had purchased some fall leaf garland to hang above my cabinets. I was standing on a chair, and having a difficult time doing it. He thought that I fell.


After you have it all shredded and you have assured your husband that you are okay (and that the camera isn't broken), you can set the chicken aside and move on with your life and proceed to finish making the dip.

In a microwavable bowl, heat the cream cheese so that it's soft and creamy and not a hard block. Once this is softened (I don't know how long..do it for 30 seconds at a time until you are happy), transfer it to a large microwavable bowl which will be big enough to hold everything.


Add the chicken, ranch dressing, and hot sauce. Cover it and microwave it for a minute at a time, stirring in between each time, until it's all melted and heated through. This is a hot dip, by the way. Once everything is nice and mixed together, add the container of bleu cheese and mix again.


That's it. See, even a man can make this. Eat it with chips. I bought those blue corn chips and they were super good. Voila.

Oops

Oh wow. Has it really been that long? Sorry! I've been all "woe is me" and forlorn and I didn't want to have a daily post about how miserable I have been feeling. Nobody likes that. Unless they enjoy misery...in which case, I wouldn't want to entertain those people, because those people are creepy and probably own scary clown costumes. Phew.

I've taken to projects. I have two pieces of crappy furniture that I am refinishing. Did I mention I have never refinished furniture before? I don't think I've even ever painted a table. And these are just that. Tables. I will not post pictures of them though. Not until they are done. That way if I never get around to finishing them, nobody will be able to judge me. That's assuming people read this, and they probably don't. Whatever.

I've also hung up most of my art and pictures. For a while they've been packed away or simply leaning against the wall on the floor. Not anymore!! My townhouse looks like a person lives here. YAY!

Know what's good? Ben & Jerry's Cookies & Milk ice cream.

Also, vegetarian delight pizza from Papa Murphy's.

My plants are doing well and have been doing well all summer long. It's getting to be fall now though, and it's getting chilly. I have to figure out what to do with them. They can't remain on my patio because I live in the upper midwest and it gets cold here. They'll die, and my 40-year old cactus is too special to me to let it die of hypothermia in the cold Wisconsin winter.

I've been trying to get out of this rut and find myself over the past couple of weeks. I have been doing a lot of driving. And taking pictures of pretty things. Here are some of the things I've seen that have made me happy.

BLAHH!!!

I wonder how other people deal with grief. I seem to get through the stages pretty quickly.. What are they...? Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. And then I add another stage at the end called Loathing and Bitterness. Let's review.

Denial. A normal response would be, "This can't be happening to me..." My response: *silence and internal death* paired with waking up in the middle of the night convinced it didn't really happen and that it was all a bad dream.

Anger: A normal response would be, "Why?!" My response: "I ate too many Oreos. That's why. Because I didn't drink enough water. A gallon of water a day and it wasn't enough. It's because I'm fat, isn't it? It's because we had sex. It's because I didn't take vitamins several months leading up to the pregnancy."

Bargaining: Apparently normal people try to bargain with God. I think that's insulting to God. I don't recall bargaining with God. I don't know if I did any bargaining, to be honest. To me, that just seems desperate and sad and should really go along with the denial stage.

Acceptance: I don't know how normal people go about this stage. I've accepted it though, but am trying to find ways to not dwell on it so much. I also think about it a lot and look back (it seems like forever ago even though it was only a week) and see that even though it was awful, there are worse things in life...like losing a child you've had the opportunity to raise. When I miscarried, I thought that nothing could feel worse. But thinking about it now after some time to calm down a bit, I realize that losing a child after you've bonded and raised it would be much MUCH worse.

Now I'm just bitter. I get mad when I see pregnant women. I get even more mad when I see that they are happy. Because I'm jealous and I don't think it's fair. I want my own baby. I'm happy for my friends, don't get me wrong. I love my friends who are having babies and I'm excited to share in their joy. But I'm jealous and it's horrible! I've told them about this to their face. They are aware of it. I assured them I would not steal their babies. I know that I will get past this and feel differently eventually.

My husband is mad at me. I ate all of the Phish Food ice cream. He also turned me down for sex because he wanted to eat a sandwich instead. FML.

Miscarriage

I thought about going back and deleting everything, but that wouldn't necessarily change anything anyway. I did that on Facebook...deleted all of the pictures of the ultrasound and as many of the comments and status updates related to my pregnancy.

I lost my baby this morning. I woke up this morning and had what appeared to be my period. I knew that's not what it was, for obvious reasons. I was feeling weird last week - had some brown spotting, so I called my clinic and had them do an ultrasound. They saw the heartbeat. They said it looked normal, except that the baby didn't appear to be the size it should have been based on how far along I was. I didn't think too much of it though since the doctor didn't seem too alarmed. I saw the heart beating and figured that was a good sign. They had me in and out in 20 minutes. Then today happened. And, this is gross - while I was on the phone with the clinic and my midwife getting an appointment set up to come in and have them look at me, it just came out. The whole thing. It just....came out. Fully intact, still in the little amniotic sac. Completely together, like it was just fine, sleeping in this bubble.

I went to the clinic. I took it with me. What else was I supposed to do with it? It was clearly a baby. You could see everything the way it was supposed to look, only the entire thing (sac and all) was about the size of a grape. It wasn't even as big as it should have been for being 8 weeks and 2 days along.

Everything has been confirmed. They don't know why the baby died. A battery of blood work on me showed that nothing was out of the ordinary. They say it happens a lot. I just don't know why it happened to me.

We were so excited. I felt as though I had already bonded with it, even though it wasn't much. We had names picked out. We were starting to put the nursery together. We were planning ahead, for the rest of our lives. And now we're back to square one. It's okay though. My husband and I have each other and we have a wonderful relationship. And we'll grow from this. There is nothing that I did to cause this to happen and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. In a few months maybe we'll get pregnant again. Until then, I'm just going to try and come to terms with things and move forward as best I can.

Headaches and Naps

Last night I went to bed with a bad headache. I think part of it is that I'm not drinking enough water and part of it is that I am not getting enough sleep. I'm trying to drink enough water - but it's hot out. So I'm hot all the time, and I have to drink more than normal, and I just can't. I will feel so bad if my kid has some weird deformity due to my lack of water. Like no face or ears.

I was craving Taco Bell tonight. I normally don't crave anything that bad, and I tried to ignore it. I was actually craving a cheese quesadilla from there a couple of days ago. I ignored it and opted to make my own healthy quesadilla at home rather than eating junk. It was actually really good:

Yummy Quesadilla. Healthy.

Red Bellpepper, julienned
Button Mushrooms, sliced
Organic Black Beans, canned (drained)
Organic Fresh Baby Spinach
Monterey Jack Cheese, shredded
Organic Flour Tortillas

Put some of each ingredient on one side of a tortilla. Fold in half, place in a non-stick skillet and brown on both sides. Eat with sour cream. Yum. :)

So I made that and actually ate it two days in a row, but my Taco Bell craving still didn't go away. I broke down tonight and asked my husband to take me over there. He did, and now the craving is gone. Good.

Another thing that I have been craving off and on is avocado. Good thing is, that's actually good for you. Maybe not the way I eat it, but there's still some benefit. We have these small Roma tomatoes that we're growing in a large pot on our patio. I ate those too:

Yummy Avocado Sandwich

Two slices of bread (go for healthy bread if you don't want to feel too guilty afterward)
Cream cheese
Mayonnaise (I never said this was healthy)
Roma Tomato, sliced
1/2 Ripe Avocado, sliced
Fresh Organic Baby Spinach

On one slice of bread, spread a small amount of mayonnaise. Place a few spinach leaves on top. On the other slice, spread some cream cheese. Place sliced tomatoes on top, and then sliced avocado. Then put the sandwich together and eat it. For breakfast. At 4am. While you check Facebook. YUM.

In any case, I still had a headache this morning. But I went to church as planned, and then went and visited a friend of mine in the hospital. She had a scheduled c-section yesterday so I got to meet her dinosaur. Cute little baby girl. :)

Afterward, I came home, and the heat had exacerbated my headache by this time, so I decided to take a nap. I hate that I can't take ibuprofen. I'm not taking any medication, even though Tylenol is safe, supposedly. I'd rather just stay away from all of it. So, I put an ice pack on my head and slept for 5 and a half hours. I'm still impressed by that. And I'm still tired. I read that during the first trimester, your body is using all of its resources to build the baby, leaving you exhausted. Apparently, while at rest, I am actually working harder than an athlete competing in some event. Yet I'm still gaining weight. And it's normal. I'm so confused.

And I would like some icecream.

Dinosaur!!

The dinosaur is coming along fine. I had some spotting and I'm paranoid, so I called the clinic and they brought me in for an ultrasound. Here it is. That thing that looks like a head isn't actually a head. It's the yolk sac. Yes, like a chicken egg. That sac will help provide nutrients to the dinosaur as it grows. The other smaller piece by the yolk sac is the dinosaur.

The on-call doctor I had to see was kind of a bitch. Not gonna lie. I think she felt like it was a waste of her time to read my ultrasound because there was nothing wrong. Granted it is a bit early for an ultrasound but I was worried. It made me feel better to have that reassurance that everything is okay. I got to see the dinosaur's heart beating. It looked like a little blinking light. 124 beats per minute, and they said that's normal for around this time. It was great. :)

7 weeks

I am 7 weeks along today. And I've felt car-sick all day. But we all know that's not what it is. I had some oatmeal for breakfast. I had a cheese sandwich for lunch. I felt sick later, so I had an orange popsicle which was pretty good at settling the nausea for about 20 minutes, and then it was back in full force. Drank some water...felt better....then was hungry. For avocados. I made an avocado/tomato/cream cheese sandwich. It was divine. Then I had some Oreos. Is this what my life has come to thus far? I'm trying to eat healthy and make everything count for the most part. The Oreos didn't do much good but everything else could have been relatively worse I suppose. In any case, here's where I'm at today. Actually, here's the week before today:


And now here's today.




Both last week and this week, it appears that I am carrying a dinosaur.


See the tail?? So cute. I love my dinosaur. <3