16 Weeks

When I first found out that I was pregnant, I didn’t want to let it stop me from running. I figured that I would eventually have to stop and wait until after baby is born to continue, but I wanted to keep going for as long as my body would let me. Morning sickness hit at about week 6, and the thought of running when you generally feel yucky, just isn’t appealing. But I found that getting up to run as much as I could actually helped my body feel good, even if I was feeling queasy.

I went in for my first prenatal appointment when I was about 12 weeks. We got to hear the heartbeat, and Valerie, my midwife, got my new chart all ready. I got to weigh myself and she asked what my pre-pregnancy weight was. My weight had gone down, as it always does. Kyle made a comment about my running and Valerie looked at me and told me to stop right now! Then she asked why I was running. I reminded her about Dinah being my little run away child, and that running just makes me feel good emotionally, and my body just feels good afterward. Valerie told me that I can run to catch Dinah, but that was it. I was not concerned about my drop in weight at first, because it always goes down before it starts going up. But looking at my records of my previous pregnancies I usually only lose 2-3 pounds. This time I had gone down by about 7! So I stopped running, and I started counting my calories. I figured that the only reason I had to stop was because I wasn’t taking in enough calories to support my usual activity, my running, and my body’s efforts to grow a baby.

I had my second prenatal visit today. I have gained 5 pounds! Valerie told me that I don’t need to count my calories but just to eat small frequent meals. I asked her if I could run once a week, and she told me that I can run (once a week), but no jogging. I am SO excited to be able to get out and run again, even if it is just once each week. That makes me very happy. 🙂

February

Well February has come and gone, and we didn’t have too many exciting things happen, although we were very busy. Every day seems to be packed with something. I’ve got girl scout meetings once a week, I babysit three days a week, Ethan has cub scouts once a week and Kyle has been subbing for one or the other leader every single week since Ethan became a bear in January. Dinah and one of the little girls that I babysit have preschool twice a week. Jeremy is in Kindergarten every morning until noon. Ethan and Tyra are in school all day, and of course Kyle goes to work every day. And this is just all the regular stuff that keeps us busy!

Ethan’s pack meeting for this month was the Blue and Gold Banquet on the 8th. They decided to have a fiesta this year and we had taco salads for dinner. They awarded the boys that had earned awards recently. Ethan hasn’t earned anything new yet, considering he JUST moved up to bears and hasn’t worked his way very far into the book. They gave gifts of appreciation to leaders that have been released. There were some skits performed and after all the eating was done, they let the boys pick either a sombrero or maraca to take home. We finished the night off with a pinata, which the scouts got to take turns whacking at. First they let the kids in the wolf den beat at it, and then the kids in the bear den. I think it busted before they got through all the bears though. I was kind of bugged that the pack meeting is supposed to be a family thing, and yet only the scouts got to hit at the pinata, while the siblings stood back and watched, hoping that they would get some of the booty.

On the 10th, Tyra’s class invited family to come to the school during school hours to come check out all the animal reports that the kids had put together. I always go to these things and see all the other projects and wonder if all the kids really did their projects all on their own. Some of them are always way too good to be the work of the child alone, that’s for sure. Tyra chose to study and do her report on foxes. This also fell on pajama day so all the kids were wearing their pjs. I let Dinah and Chloe wear their pajamas to school as well. I didn’t get to stay very long to look at many of the other projects however, for as soon as we got there and we were looking at Tyra’s project, I discovered that Chloe had a dirty diaper. Such bad timing. Also Dinah ran off, and then Chloe kept trying to sit on Tyra’s lap. Chloe also decided that since we were no longer traveling outside that that meant she could take off her shoes. I tried to get her off of Tyra’s lap and get her shoes back on which resulted in Chloe throwing a huge fit, crying loudly. I felt bad for the mom next to me that was trying to video tape her daughter telling her about her animal project. So I told Tyra she did a good job on her project and took Dinah, Chloe and Lydia back home!

Something else that happened this month, most people will probably think I’m silly for mentioning. I had a dental checkup, my regular cleaning and exam on the 24th. The thing that was different about this one was that when the dentist was done looking at my x-rays and my teeth, he seemed really surprised, and asked if this was a first. “A first what?”, I wondered. Then he said that I have no new cavities! I’m sure that to some people that’s no big deal, but for me that was the first time in YEARS that I haven’t had new problems when I went in for a checkup. Usually I have one or two cavities that need filling. At least once a year for the last couple of years I’ve needed a new crown (I’m up to NINE crowns in my mouth!)…just something new every time I go in. Now this doesn’t mean that none of my teeth have problems this time, just that there were no NEW problems to have to deal with. My 3 wisdom teeth that are showing all have cavities, but the dentist doesn’t want to bother filling them because I need to have them pulled anyway. One of those three cavities is more like a huge cave on the back of my tooth. But I already knew about the wisdom teeth issues (I’ve totally been avoiding going in to have them pulled), but am SO excited that there were no new problems. 🙂

And the last exciting thing worth mentioning, is that as the girl scout troop leader with a large van, I got to go up to Salt Lake City to pick up our troop’s girl scout cookies! I really wish that I had been able to take a picture of our stack of cookies, but our camera hasn’t been working properly lately. Our troop had two pallets of cookies, and almost filled my van (which we had taken the seats out of, to make more room). I was really excited to get to see how they distribute cookies to each troop. We did annoy some people from another troop that were waiting for us to get out of their way so they could start loading their cookies. But I promise we weren’t trying to annoy anybody. We had loaded the first pallet of cookies into the van and then looked up to find the rest of our cookies, but they were nowhere to be seen. We stood there and waited a few minutes to see if they would show up on the dock when one of the other pallets was moved out of the way, but they didn’t. So Amy (our troop’s cookie mom) went to go ask about it. It turns out that our other pallet of cookies was just sitting in the back of the warehouse all by itself totally unnoticed by anyone. So we brought it to the attention of the guys operating the fork lifts and they brought it to the dock for us. And now we have the fun joy of delivering all those cookies!

Christmas Jammies

A few months ago, I made the decision that I need to either start sewing, or get rid of the sewing machine that I have sitting in my basement. I decided to pick a project and see if the sewing machine that I have even works. I thought that maybe I would make the girls some nightgowns for Christmas, so several months ago I found and bought a pattern. Then a couple months ago I bought some material. While we were in California for the Thanksgiving holiday I had my mom help me get one started so I could see how to put them together and all that. In fact, mom and I pulled an all nighter trying to get the first nightgown mostly finished just so she could walk me through the whole process.

I came home feeling confident that I can do this. Then I pulled out MY machine and plugged it in and tried to get it threaded and going. I couldn’t get it to work. As Christmas drew nearer I started stressing out and really wanted to finish these nightgowns, but only had the first one almost done. A week before Christmas I expressed my frustration on facebook and a friend of mine offered to help. So she came over and showed me how to get my machine threaded, and yay it worked. Apparently I had just put the bobbin in backwards and missed one loop for threading the thread on top. I got all the fabric cut out and put the pieces together. Later in the week my friend came back again to show me how to attach the yokes of the nightgowns to the dress parts. And then I got all those put together. The only real problem I ran into with the machine is that EVERY stitch is microscopic and it wouldn’t gather for me, so I had to do all the gathering of the trim and dresses by hand. I decided to slip Lydia’s gown on her to make sure it fit, but her head wouldn’t go through AT ALL. So I made another yoke for her, and decided to test it before sewing it to the dress, that one was too small too! So I had to make yet another one. This time it worked.

Christmas Eve, I was almost done. I finished up the last of the nightgowns, and all I had left was buttons and button holes. I went to my friends house to have her show me how to do button holes and it seemed simple enough, but for some reason wasn’t working when we tried to do it to the nightgowns. So she called another friend and sent me over there, and her machine had the same problem, and she suspects that it’s just because the interfacing is slipping and therefore the thread was getting caught and the machine got stuck. I bought the most darling, blue flower shaped buttons to put on them so hopefully I will figure out how to get them on, but in the meantime here is a picture of the finished (minus the buttons) nightgowns. 🙂

DSCF1065

 

The New Girl Scout Leader

Tyra started Girl Scouts late again this year. Last year her troop leader had said that they were going to be meeting on Monday nights this year, and I kind of wanted to keep Monday night open so we can have family home evening. Even though we aren’t very good at holding FHE regularly, I didn’t want to sabotage it by having Tyra gone on Monday nights! So I asked her troop leader if she would get information for other brownie troops in the area for me. I waited all summer and she never got information for me. I called her in October to ask if she had ever gotten information for me and she still hadn’t. So she told me to ask the girl scout council if there are other troops around. In a way now was a good time for Tyra to switch troops anyways. She just finished Daisy’s, and is just starting Brownies. Last year wasn’t the best for her last troop anyways. Her leader canceled so many meetings in a row that I began to expect a phone call on Thursday afternoons to tell me that there was going to be no meeting that night. There were, easily, two full months of NO meetings and they weren’t all cancelled for the same reason. There was always a different reason: the leader is sick, leaders whole family is sick, leader is in school working on her degree and has a project due that she needs to work on, leader just moved and the house isn’t ready for a meeting yet….Getting sick happens, but really the leader should have done some better planning in the other situations.

Over the course of a few weeks, I called the girl scout council several times, before I saw a friend on facebook mention that she just became a GS co-leader and she gave me the contact information for the lady at the council that I needed to talk to. After that things picked up quickly. However there weren’t any troops around here that we could just join so that means that *I* am the new Girl Scout leader! The council gave me the phone number of someone else out in my area that was looking for a troop, and also just happened to be coming from the same troop that Tyra was coming from! She also knew some other people that were interested in girl scouts and so we got a troop organized! Honestly, I knew that someday I would join the ranks as a girl scout leader, I just didn’t expect it right now! I feel like my house is still very cluttered and therefore, it’s very easy for me to feel overwhelmed. But as I get more into this leader business, the more I think this has been a really good thing for ME. I am really having to come out of my shell to stand up and lead these girls.

We had our first meeting today. We made some bread, and then we made some cookie turkeys, and then we let the girls make butter. That was lots of fun. Each girl got a small container with cream in it and they got to shake it, until it turned into butter. We only had one major spill and one container sprinkle a little. Then we finished off the meeting by passing out the hot bread and spreading their butter on it so they could eat it. It was a fun little Thanksgiving activity. And talking with my co-leaders we decided we are going to have the girls help collect toys for Toys for Tots. This is going to be a fun group of girls, and an amazing year of girl scouts! (Not to mention the fact that I get patch happy and being the leader means I get to pick what patches the girls get to add to their vests. 😉 )

November and I’m Still Running

Well here it is November, and I’m still making an effort to get out to run as often as I can. Which it’s a lot less often that I have been going out all summer long. During the summer I would be out there either running or on my bike every day of the week except Sunday. Now I’m lucky if I can get out 3 times a week. Sometimes it’s only once a week. It’s not that I’m being lazy either, I WANT to go out more often. But now that it’s colder and it’s dark early in the morning, and it gets dark earlier in the evening, there seems to be no time for me to go out while Kyle is home to watch the kids, unless he comes home super early.

Last year, I was trying to go out and ride my bike as far as my legs would go 5-6 days a week. I had mentioned a need to take up running. I even tried running to the corner of my street and back a few times. But I could never make it so I spent more time on my bike. But late in August or early in September, when I woke up early for my usual 5:30am bike ride, and it was pitch black outside, I felt that it just wasn’t safe to go out. I didn’t want to get hit by a car, or crash into a curb that I didn’t see in the dark, or have some coyote or cougar be startled by my whizzing by on a bike and have it jump out and attack me, so I just stopped going out.

This year I started going out for walks and then out on my bike in June after Lydia turned 6 weeks old. Then I got started on running, and was more serious about it than last year. I also had a better plan than I did last year. Last year I just went out and wanted to run as far as my legs would go, which I could barely make it to the corner which is only 6 or 7 houses down (it’s really not far at all). This year a friend got me started by walking for a 10 minute warm up first THEN only run for 1 minute and then walk 4 minutes and alternate that all the way out and all the way till I got back home. I went out mostly by myself and slowly over time reduced my walking time. Now I have been able to go out and walk my warm up and then run the rest of my entire route! So exciting. BUT the changing of the season is throwing me some challenges. I was determined that when I woke up for my 6am run (or bike ride) and it was pitch black outside, that that wouldn’t be the end of my running for this year. I had to get creative. Basically I switched to going out in the evening, after the heat of the day wore off, but early enough that I could get back before dark.

Now it’s getting darker and darker earlier and earlier, so I don’t get out as often as I would like. But I do still get out sometimes. But I think running in the cold is also harder on my lungs. The most difficult part about running, for me, has been to figure out how to breathe! I always feel like I am breathing but I’m not getting enough oxygen. I think I have overcome that in the past couple of months. I think my breathing once I get running has kind of found a groove and it’s easier to get the oxygen that I need. But now the cold air makes it harder than ever to breathe. The air is freezing, which means my nose freezes and my lungs feel frozen too. So I still go out, but if I need to walk because I can’t breathe I allow myself to do so. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to keep up with going out for a run. Especially since we will continue to loose a little bit more daylight every day for at least the next month. Weather permitting I will be able to go out at least once a week (on Saturday when Kyle is home all day).  I just don’t want to have to start all the way back at the beginning next spring. But I’m glad that I’ve kept up with it so much longer than I did last year, and that in itself makes me happy.