I'm still pregnant. Dreadfully uncomfortable. Lots of lower back pain and pressure on my hips. According to my OB at my appointment on Wednesday, I'm ready to go at any time. Contractions on and off Thursday and today but nothing steady. There was some talk of inducing me at my appointment this week if I'm still feeling so much back pain and hip pressure, depending on what my cervix is doing (she hasn't checked it at all yet).
This morning, Mike and I went to see The Christmas Carol. I loved it. You should definitely go see it. And if my endorsement doesn't have you convinced already, you should know that Westley does some of the voices. Awesome.
I've generally resorted to jigsaw puzzles at this point, to keep me distracted and give me something to focus on. I finished one 500 piece puzzle so far. My apartment is a mess and it is driving me to distraction, I hate it so much, but apparently not enough to muster up the energy to do anything about it. Mike is keeping up with laundry and grocery shopping and cooking, and other than that, oh well. It'll wait.
Whew, it's been a little boring around these parts since that hilarious and disgusting tale of rotting meat in the baby's room. Which I am happy to report has been thoroughly cleaned and Rug Doctored by my dad, who came and spent an entire afternoon here doing that while we were at work. Our carpets look awesome now and the baby's room is now meat and bug free and we're working on getting the room organized.
But anyway, three weeks ago I came down with a cold that left me run-down and tired all the time. Over a week ago, that turned into a viral throat infection which I am only now getting over. I've been a tired and worn-out mess, and haven't been around here much at all.
You know what we need to spice this place up?
An adorable baby, ready and willing to be bragged about and photographed for the benefit of this here blog.
I am now past the 37 week mark in this pregnancy, and am officially considered full-term. So, kid, anytime now. Your public is waiting.
In the meantime, if anyone knows where I can find the seasonal flu shot and/or the H1N1 flu shot (NOT the nasal one) in Hudson County NJ or Manhattan, please share. I have been unable to get either one because of my cold and throat infection. Now that I have the OK to get them, my OB's office is out of the seasonal vaccine and never had, can't get the H1N1 vaccine. I've been on the phone with hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and dept of health on both sides of the river and nobody seems to have either one.
Our senior year in college, Mike and I lived next door to each other in on-campus apartments with friends. We always had parties in their apartment so that we could keep a nice neat place to live. It was a very convenient arrangement, and it meant that they were in possession of all the party stuff, including the liquor cabinet and an enormous piece of plywood that served as the beer pong table.
During the holiday season that year, we decided it would be fun to have a big holiday feast, prepared and hosted by the 8 of us living in the two apartments. We wanted to celebrate together, since the campus shut down and everyone spread out in all different directions back home during holiday breaks. The beer pong table was the perfect size for the feast, so we went for it. We used both kitchens, cooked a turkey and the entire feast to go with it, served it on the beer pong table, and I think we fed more than 20 friends. It is one of my favorite memories from college, taking time out to celebrate the holidays with close friends, since we would never be together on actual holidays.
A couple years later, when Mike was in law school, we earned a free turkey at the grocery store. We didn't know when we'd cook it, since holidays are always spent traveling to be with our families. Then we remembered how much fun it was to celebrate with friends back in college. So we picked a day, cooked the turkey and invited our... friend. We had begun to make friends in the area, but really had just one person we spent a lot of time with -- Mike's friend Joe, from law school. So the three of us had a holiday feast together. The following year, we did it again, with a few additional friends and it became a tradition.
When we moved to NYC, it was put on hold for a year, since we were living in a studio apartment with no kitchen to speak of. The last two years, we brought it back and served about 6-8 friends each year, including two friends who had been at the previous dinner and moved from PA to NYC around the same time we did, their significant others, and a few new friends. We held it a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, and it is now known as the Pre-Thanksgiving Feast.
It has become one of my favorite traditions, and I look forward to it months in advance. This year, we held the dinner in October, since our own Turkey is due two days before Thanksgiving! I wanted to be able to enjoy it, without being too uncomfortable or worrying that we'd have to cancel if the baby is early. We went all out this year, invited a lot of people and figured we'd just stuff everyone in, crowd around, and make it work! We ended up with 16 people, and we had such a great time. Good food and good friends made for a wonderful day and I'm so happy about it. Sadly, Mike's friend Joe, who has been at all our feasts except the one in college, and his wife Cassie recently moved to the west coast and weren't there this year. We missed you guys!
I already can't wait for next year when we get to do it again, and share it with our almost-one-year-old!
We were so busy having fun, we forgot almost entirely about the camera, so we have almost no photos. Here are just a couple, including this year's version of the invitation Mike draws every year:
I am starting to work on a playlist for during labor. If you have been through labor, whether you had music or not, tell me what worked or didn't work for you, or what you imagine might have been good music to have. If you haven't, I still want to hear your opinions and ideas.
I am looking for music that would be relaxing and uplifting, maybe motivating. I am going through my collection of music, deciding what might be good. But I also may download some new things, so anything is fair game.
Music is, of course, a very personal thing, and your suggestions may or may not inspire me. In fact, if it's too personal for you, feel free to comment anonymously. I'm not going to tell you what I'm thinking about including, because I don't want judgment on it. After I have the baby, I may share my playlist for anyone who might be interested, but definitely not before that.
I'm looking forward to some ideas to help me get this going!
It's time for another guest post from my husband! You may remember his others, which can be found here and here, but this time I think he has outdone himself. Here's Mike telling the story of how we are bad parents already and we don't even have our kid yet. I was going to write this myself, but he beat me to it, which is fine except that if I'd written it, you probably would not get quite the same tone of passive innocence on his part. Also I may have one or two things to add as we go along, in which case you'll find me in this handy purple font. So, you know, you can tell us apart. Okay, buckle up, ladies and gents, this is a long one:
About four weeks ago (Saturday, September 12th) I decided to clean out our small chest freezer which is in a small closet in what will soon become the baby’s bedroom. Originally, I was only planning dinner for the evening and looking for something to make. Since the freezer was disorganized and almost overflowing and I couldn’t find anything to make, I decided that I might as well clean out the freezer and organize as well. That way, I figured, I could see what we had and more easily determine what Amy and I would have for dinner. Deciding what to eat is more my territory these days, given that Amy doesn’t usually care what she eats, as long as it is food. She mainly just eats to survive and grow our child; she doesn’t seem to crave much food (at least healthy-ish food).
That's true. And I'm 33 weeks pregnant and I've only gained 14 pounds. Go ahead and hate me. I would too, if I were you. Though I probably would have traded some of the 20+ weeks of morning sickness for a few extra pounds.
I started pulling out all of the packages of frozen food and putting them on piles—chicken, hamburger, corn, bread, ice cream, etc…. Once I had all of the food sorted in the small closet where the chest freezer is located, I looked at the expiration dates, or dates when I created the packages of food (e.g., the date I bought the 15 pounds of hamburger at BJ’s and created smaller, usable portions of meat—for tacos, spaghetti sauce or hamburgers).
Since some of the dates were too old for what I still deemed an acceptable period of time in which to each such food, I threw some of the packages of food out the closet door, into the second bedroom, the room which we are in the process of transforming in to a baby’s bedroom. There was some freezer burnt ice cream, some hamburger past its prime, some really old bread, and numerous other things which had gone uneaten too long.
Once I was done being judge, jury and executioner for all of our frozen food, those foods which were deemed still edible were loaded back into the chest freezer in an organized fashion—hopefully to be eaten in the near future, instead of me having to throw them away the next time I get bored and decide to clean the freezer.
After reloading the freezer, I exited the closet to collect those items of food which were chosen to live out their lives in a landfill, instead of in our stomachs. I picked up the packages, dumped them in a garbage bag and dropped the garbage bag down the garbage chute, hoping to never see them again. For anybody who has ever visited us, you may know that this is an unlikely hope, given that our garbage men and containers are anything but clean. On Monday morning, as Amy and I walked to work past the garbage dumpsters outside our building, one of the dumpsters was not closed completely and after the garbage truck’s attempt to empty it, some of my meat was now covering the parking lot. Gross.
Around Wednesday of that week, Amy noticed a gross smell coming from the baby’s room. It smelled like it was coming from the bigger closet in the room, at the opposite corner of the room from the freezer closet. The smell was rather disgusting—it smelled like there was a dead mouse in the closet. I was highly annoyed at the prospect of removing everything from that closet in an attempt to find the dead mouse, especially since Amy, her parents and I had recently moved everything out of that closet, organized it and rearranged it so that we could fit all of the baby’s stuff in the bedroom. So, I did a half-assed search, smelling around, moving things, but to no avail—I couldn’t find the source of the smell. We hoped the smell would soon go away.
That weekend (September 18th-20th), Amy and I traveled to Connecticut for Amy’s baby shower. Amy and I were discussing the smell with Amy’s father, he suggested that it was probably just a dead mouse stuck in the wall somewhere, he has that problem occasionally, and after three or four days the smell should go away after the mouse has had sufficient time to dry up. This seemed like a likely explanation, so we continued to hope that the smell would go away soon.
The next week, the smell came and went. Some days you could hardly notice it, other days it was very much in your face. Every day when I came home from work the smell was there initially, at least at some potency, but usually it wasn’t that strong, so we got used to it. Around Wednesday of that week Amy sent me an email when she got home from work to tell me she was a super sleuth. She was near the bedroom window and notice that the smell was particularly strong near the window, when the wind blew in. She deduced that the odor was coming from a dead squirrel or something outside our open windows. To cure the problem, Amy turned on the air conditioner and closed the windows. This seemed to help, at least a little bit. Every once in a while over the next couple of days we could get a whiff of the gross odor, but for the most part it seemed to be gone.
The following Sunday (September 27th) I was drilling some holes to hang a few things on the walls of our apartment. When I was finished, as I was putting my tools away in the same closet as the freezer, I pushed a large box that was half-way off the shelf back to its proper location on the shelf. As I was doing so, I felt a plastic bag under the box. Picking the bag up, to my surprise (and disgust) the bag was a Ziploc freezer bag with half of a chicken in it. The chicken, if you could still call it that, was green, moldy and liquid. Apparently, when I was cleaning out the freezer the bag got pushed under the box and never found its way back into the freezer. Holding back vomit, I showed the meat to Amy and told her that I found what I was cooking for dinner that night, almost causing her to vomit in my face. I ran the juicy bag of poultry to the garbage chute and deposited the bag down the abyss.
I did almost vomit. It was unbelievably disgusting. I may have also done some yelling and swearing that Mike is never allowed to clean the freezer again.
The floor where the chicken laid didn’t particularly smell, but I blanketed the area with Febreze in an attempt to mask and hopefully eliminate the smell. The apartment continued to smell slightly, but we just attributed this to lingering odor that absorbed in to the carpet. We continued to spray Febreze and air out the rooms, and figured after a while, the smell would clear out.
Another week passed, but the smell never quite went away. On the weekend of October 2nd-4th we traveled to Pennsylvania for my cousin Brian and Sarah’s wedding reception. On the way we picked up our baby’s new crib and dresser/changing table. Upon returning to New Jersey on Sunday afternoon, after our friend Eddie helped me haul the baby’s furniture into our apartment, we sat down in the baby’s room to assemble the crib.
As I was laying out the hardware in the middle of the room, I noticed two or three little black cocoon-like bugs. I picked them up and threw them away, assuming they came in on my shoes or something—hoping that they didn’t come from the furniture or mattress. After assembling the crib, Amy said she wanted to go to Target to get a few things for the baby. At Target I decided to get some air fresheners/odor absorbers, hoping that they would also help to eliminate the lingering odor.
For the first day or so, the new air fresheners seemed to be controlling and eliminating the odor. When I got home from work on Wednesday, October 7th, I found Amy in what she has deemed “full nesting mode”. Apparently I married a bird, and since Amy is almost ready to pop her “egg” out, she feels the need to build a nest. Fortunately, not all of it is made out of sticks and leaves, although the crib does look as though it was made out of twigs—very expensive twigs. As Amy was re-sorting the items located on a cube-shelving system, she told me that the odor was particularly strong near the end of the futon.
Apparently someone (me?) neglected to tell my husband that all pregnant women nest, and that he hasn't seen anything yet. Should we tell him about how he should be prepared to remodel the entire apartment over the next seven weeks to calm my crazy nesting frenzies? Perhaps not.
I was getting fed up with this odor nonsense, so I ripped the futon away from the wall and gasped at the grotesque sight before my eyes. At the opposite end of the futon from where I was standing was ANOTHER package of what used to be frozen meat. This time, however, it wasn’t juicy chicken stowed safely inside an impenetrable Ziploc freezer bag, but rather a pound of ground hamburger specifically portioned for tacos, wrapped inside white freezer/butcher’s paper. Such paper apparently is not able to withstand the intrusion of little white bugs/larva. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a roll of paper towels and the garbage can. I tried to pick up the package of hamburger but it was stuck. STUCK TO THE CARPET AS A RESULT OF LEAKING COW BLOOD ALL OVER THE PLACE! Disgusting.
I pried the package off the floor, leaving behind a nice big, gross red and black stain on the floor. Also crawling around the creamy colored carpet were numerous black bugs/larva and also little white larva crawling around. They blend in easily and are hard to see. I picked up and popped—spewing pus/bug guts—all of the black and white bugs that I could see. I vacuumed the area multiple times hoping to collect those that I couldn’t see.
So now, I have the task of trying to get ride of a juicy beef blood stain from my carpet before our baby arrives. Hopefully I will find some free time to rent a Rug Doctor to clean the entire baby’s room. Amy also plans to re-wash all of the baby clothing and diapers which she already spent so much time washing over the past few weeks, since most of them were stored near the futon, and may contain all manner of absorbed reeking smell and/or bugs.
You can guess how my fingers were itching to interrupt the last few paragraphs, but I refrained, in order to allow you to take it all in. Let me just be sure you understood that in our innocent unborn child's room there have been two, count them, TWO piles of rotting foul meat. Not to mention the bugs and the reeking smell and the fact that we have to Rug Doctor the room and I can't lift a damn thing to help.
And all the baby laundry I have to do again because I can't live with the fact that any of it might contain bugs or reeking smell. Of course, I'd probably be a lot more upset about that fact if I didn't love doing baby laundry. All those cute tiny things to fold!
Ages ago, when we first found the chicken, I told Mike I was going to write the story here. He said, direct quote, "You're not going to blame me, are you?"
Why, no, honey, NO! Of course not. You sweet, innocent thing, where in this could I possibly blame you? YES OF COURSE I'M GOING TO BLAME YOU, WHO ELSE WOULD I BLAME?
And that, folks, was before the second pile of rotting meat was discovered. Ahem. This was supposed to be Mike's post. I'll just let him wrap it up.
The only explanation for how this package of meat got under the futon was that when I was throwing the meat to throw away out the freezer closet door, this particular package took a nasty bounce and landed under the futon. Either that or the cat knocked it around and pushed it under the futon, which seems unlikely.
We don’t even have the baby yet and we have twice created an unsanitary place for the baby to live once it arrives. Hopefully the odor will finally go away now—what are the chances that there is a third package of rotting, rancid meat in our apartment?
