33 week update

I've officially hit the is-this-over-yet stage now. I'm quiet excited to meet this baby, but my feelings stem more from the fact that I can no longer sleep very well. I am keenly aware that once she comes, sleep will still be elusive, but at least when I lay down to catch some zzz's after she's born, I won't feel like someone is squeezing my hips together in a vice. All of the other pregnancy symptoms are usually pretty tolerable, but once you can't sleep very well, everything else seems magnified about a hundred times!

Just had a doctor's appointment this morning and everything continues to look and sound good. We'll do one more ultrasound in 3 weeks and hopefully she'll still be head down. My doctor said she would consider inducing me around 38 1/2 weeks, which sounds great as far as I'm concerned. That would put a potential induction date sometime around November 1st, whohoo!!!

The other wonderful thing she did today was to prescribe some Ambien to try and help me sleep a little better through the rest of this....let's hope it works because I'm running out of options (couch, glider, pillows don't seem to be helping) and walking around like a zombie each morning with a toddler just isn't that much fun!

On a more positive note, it is absolutely wonderful to have power again!

Not quite home sweet home

Well, over the last week we've now stayed at three different houses waiting for power to come back on to our house after Ike (big thanks to Elizabeth, Kami, and Lisa for taking us Ike evacuees in!). Jack enjoyed playing with his buddy Ryan (and of course, Ryan's toys) for a few days. We're slowly making progress back towards the homestead in Houston after spending over a week in Austin. Unfortunately our house remains in one of the few sections in our neighborhood that doesn't have power, so we're not back to home sweet home just yet and instead are staying in a different section with friends who do have power. At least we're back in the same zip code now! Reminds me of the phrase "baby steps" from the movie "What About Bob?"

Got to survey the damage first hand today and we were incredibly fortunate not to have more damage to our house after seeing some of our neighbor's roofs. A number of people had bright blue tarps stretched over their houses after large panels of shingles were blown off, along with large dumpsters in front of their houses with ruined carpet piled inside. We had maybe 8-10 shingles off one of the ridge lines in our roof and a piece of hardiplank siding down, but that was it.

We missed the worse of everything, including the very long gas lines about a week ago just after Ike struck. The grocery stores now appear to be back to normal for the most part, for us it's just waiting until our power comes back on to be able to re-stock the refrigerator. I'm looking forward to that as eating out has really gotten old lately, though we enjoyed getting to go to our favorite Austin restaurants while we were away (can we get Kerbey Lane and/or The Salt Lick in Houston anytime soon people?)

So at least we've got one more evening of air-conditioned, internet-connected bliss. Hopefully that will buy us enough time to get power back to our own house tomorrow, but after seeing how much worse a lot of other Houstonians have things, we're not going to complain if it's not on.

Bye Bye Ike

Being the weather weenie that I am, of course I was glued to the models yesterday projecting where Hurricane Ike will go and how strong it will become. What I didn't like to see was that the track was getting closer and closer to the Houston area. Bob and I briefly talked about whether we should evacuate last night, but decided to see how things were going this morning before making a final decision.

Unfortunately, things didn't look much better this morning. After chatting with my dad for a while about what things were like around the Houston area after Alicia (a Cat 3 hurricane) came through back in 1983 (I was 3 at the time and couldn't remember), we decided the possibility of going at least a few days without power sounded positively miserable for a 20-month-old and almost 32-week pregnant woman with the achy joints of an 80-year-old. In fact, it's pretty miserable down here for anyone without A/C for an extended period of time.

So with that in mind, I began to run (or waddle) around getting ready to head to Austin as early as possible to stay with some friends for a few days. We remembered seeing the awful traffic jams that occurred on Houston highways when Rita was threatening to move in, and certainly didn't want to find ourselves stuck on the highway for hours on end not moving anywhere. Luckily 290 traffic was moving pretty good when we left around 12:30 this afternoon, but we both remarked that we were glad we left as early as we did. I suspect rush hour traffic was downright awful as people left town once their kids got out of school.

We're not sure exactly what we'll return home to, probably a lot of downed tree limbs and hopefully not too much in the way of damage to the houses in our neighborhood. Unfortunately the current projected track takes the center of storm just about right over our house, which could mean some very strong sustained winds...not good! On the one hand I'm just the teeniest bit bummed that we left, because I do find all types of severe weather fascinating, but I think the high wind would get old in about 10 minutes as soon as our power went out, so it's best we left.

Nasty Little Critters

There aren't many things I dislike about Texas, though I could do with a little less heat and humidity (which I will take over a long cold winter), but I was reminded of one thing I sure don't like the other day: fire ants!

Bob's parents came down for a short visit this weekend. They were outside along with Bob and Jack sitting in our backyard while I was sitting inside trying to beat the heat and prevent my ankles from swelling. They set up Jack's water table and rocket (the one that gets pushed up in the air by a stream of water from your hose) and he was happily playing by himself for a while before he came running back to his grandparents whimpering a little bit.

Not too long after that I heard something to the effect of "Get the hose, he's got ants all over his feet...quick, quick...", to which I promptly rushed outside, at least as fast as a pregnant woman can waddle. Apparently there was a small mound of fire ants under the rocket and those buggers wasted no time in working up into the sandal on Jack's left foot. Luckily Bob's parents moved pretty fast too and were quickly dousing him down with the hose and stripping off clothes to get the ants off. He was crying pretty good by this time so Bob took him upstairs and put him in the bath for a while to try and ease some of the itching and stinging.

I had forgotten how mean fire ants are from my childhood days down here. They swarm out of their mounds amazingly fast and leave painful little welts (more so than your typical black ant) that eventually develop little blisters in the center over the course of a day or so. They itch and burn like crazy and can make life miserable for a few days if you get enough of them. For only getting about 10-15 bites, poor Jack's left foot looked a lot worse than it really was since the bites swell up so much. Thankfully, after an hour or two the swelling went down considerably and Jack had forgotten all about the bites. We were expecting them to bother him a lot more, but I guess since he didn't get too many he didn't seem to notice them very much that evening. I also think he was exhausted from playing with Grandma and Grandpa...

The little blisters have come up this evening, so we'll see what happens tomorrow. I know it could have been MUCH worse and that some kids can have life-threatening reactions to those ant bites. I always think about allergic reactions to things like bee stings and peanuts, but fire ants were something I had forgotten about. This was just a good reminder to us to inspect our grass a little better before we set something down for him or any other child to play with!

MBS strikes again

I wrote a post awhile back talking about symptoms of MBS, or Mommy Brain Syndrome, and how every mom comes down with this at some point in their journey through motherhood (especially the sleep-deprived months). Well, it's hitting me again big time, and it just occurred to me that this is coinciding nicely with the downhill trend in restful sleep I've had over the last few weeks as the third trimester progresses....

Yesterday we were running out the back door of our house to grab a quick bite to eat before our small group. Guess I got some wires crossed in the ol' noggin again, because I quickly became puzzled by why our van suddenly started making a fairly repetitive honking sound as Bob was putting Jack in his carseat. Then I realized I was aiming the keyless entry remote for our van at the back of our house, hoping to lock the back door. Let's just say I wore my hair color proudly yesterday, folks.

At least it made for a good laugh. Now that I think about it, perhaps it's the next million dollar idea...wouldn't it be great to have keyless entry for the back door of your house too when you have groceries on one arm and a toddler on the other arm? I'm sure someone has already done it somewhere. Oh well.

Hitting and Licking

In a way, times haven't changed much from this picture of when Jack was about 3 months old...Haley still licks him (along with anything else that moves, and even some things that don't) at every opportunity she can find. The only difference is that now Jack loves it and thinks it's a game to chase Haley hoping she'll come lick his face. I know some of you moms are cringing right about now with the thought of a dog licking your child's face, and believe me I did at first too! For those of you that know Haley though, you know this is a battle we will never win. She just loves to lick...apparently this is an OCD tendency in some dogs according to a veterinarian we spoke with!

Anyway, the problem now is that Jack is older, and hasn't learned how to be gentle with her yet. Hitting equals petting in his book, and poor Haley often runs under the bed now when she sees him coming. She's a very sweet dog and extremely tolerant of him, but we're really trying to work on the no hitting thing hard right now so that it doesn't ever provoke a stronger response from her. We attended a class led by a veterinarian at the hospital where Jack was born about how to introduce your pet to your baby, and she mentioned that if you don't already have a pet when a baby arrives, it's best to wait until that child is at least 5 years old before getting a pet. I'm beginning to understand that now! It's hard for a little kid to distinguish between being gentle and being rough. We're going to try some time-outs for hitting now since "No hitting!" obviously isn't getting through. I'm not against spanking when other discipline options have been ruled out, but it does seem a little counter-intuitive to spank him for hitting the dog...?

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On a totally unrelated note, the weather here is fantastic today. Had a weak cold front come through that dropped the humidity down to a very comfortable level, which is a rare treat in these parts. So this is how my hair would look if I lived in California...