Free Stuff for MEEE!!

We had a product show at work. I got some loot! Here's the best stuff (in other words, the non-paper/ad related stuff that I took home with me):

 

I just realized what the box of gloves says...um, yeah those are gloves. They don't give away condoms at product shows. At least not where I work....Also, the shirt says "For Research Purposes Only" across the chest. Hee hee.

Lots of Random and Baby-Related Musings

Three years ago tomorrow, I started the cycle that led to J.

During that cycle, I started my job. I got the flu and had a fever on my first day of work, but you can't call in sick your first day. Because I had the flu and other stresses, I didn't ovulate until CD28. You may notice (if you are familiar with Fertility Friend) that we had sex 5 and 3 days before ovulation, because I'd thought I ovulated already. When my temp dropped I turned to C and said, "Hmm. We may have made a baby this month." I was sort of joking, since the 3 cycles prior to that we'd had no luck with TTC. One month to the day after I started my job, I got this:

So much for taking a few months off from TTC (we were going to take a few months off so I'd qualify for FMLA). I am so glad we had J, even if he did arrive on his own timeline! He's the best kid I could have imagined. Even though I have a small bruise from the biting rampage he went on a few days ago. Grr.

Anyway. *If* C and I were going to TTC #2 this cycle, the timeline would be 2 weeks and 4 days off from my pregnancy with J. If we were successful. And if we were TTC, which we aren't. I refuse to be in my 3rd trimester at Christmas again. Deprive a pregnant woman of Christmas cookies? That's just mean.

We are planning to TTC this summer (HA! No more specific than that. I know it's just *killing* you, right? Okay, that's enough deluding myself). This gives us the following possible due dates, for all the potential cycles that I have estimated. Assuming ovulation on CD20 and an average of 32 day cycles.
4/11/2011
5/13/2011 (Yeah...as if we need more May babies in this family...Hmm.)
6/14/2011
7/16/2011 (Ooh, super pregnant in the summer with no A/C.)
8/17/2011 (Yeah. Same as above comment.)
9/18/2011 (Still super pregnant in the summer with no A/C. Let's hope one of the earlier cycles works, eh?)

Very Interesting!

Onions Made Pre-Human Ancestors Cry Too, Study Suggests

LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com – Fri Mar 19, 4:43 pm ET

The sensors in your body that make you tear up when you're cutting onions have been around for 500 million years, a new study finds.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100319/sc_livescience/onionsmadeprehumanancestorscrytoostudysuggests

So Not Feelin' It

PMS is a bitch. My temp is still up-ish (over coverline) but I feel all PMSy. Exhausted, sore boobs (though not very sore! Yay for the vitamin E working it's magic!), cramps, lots of lovely spots on my chest, etc. I am going to call them spots from now on, it sounds so much nicer than zits or pimples. I have made it to 13 DPO without a substantial drop in temperature, though my current temp is what it was when this cycle started, and I didn't take the B6 regularly this cycle. I took it rather infrequently during the FP, but mostly that was because I had the stomach flu for part of the second week of my cycle so everything was all off. Last cycle it made me so sick to my stomach starting like the day of ovulation, I can't say I was sad to take a month off. Next cycle I'll try again and see what happens.Update: eating my afternoon snack (almonds, yay for eating healthy again!) is making me nauseous. "Sweet." Progesterone sucks. Maybe one cycle of B6 was enough to get my body back on track or something. I never used to get nauseated during my LP. Having had a baby messes with your cycle.

Mentally I'm just totally dragging. I just want a vacation. Maybe I need more caffeine. I've already had coffee today. I think I need some more. Maybe I'll go walk the stairs for a few minutes. That would warm me up too, I'm cold. Yay for random whining!!

If it matters, my day yesterday improved tremendously after the morning mishaps. Until I got home and J decided it would be fun to bite me 5 times, consequences be damned. Yeah. I had a rum and coke before bed.

Free Coffee, anyone?

Recipe for a Shitty Morning

1.14" of snow.
2. Snow plow that doesn't plow within 12 feet of my garage, so I can't just pull out into the nicely plowed lot and go.
3. Snow plow that not only doesn't plow within 12 feet of my garage, but manages to push just enough snow into the already heaping amount in front of the garage that trying to pull out and go causes me to high center my fucking car, and I have to spend 20 minutes digging myself out of my own (tiny) driveway. Have I mentioned that we live in the suburbs and in an HOA controlled townhome complex that pays for snow "removal" so these things (theoretically) won't happen?
4. Shite roads all the way to the highway. Yay.
5. City bus drives past me as I'm walking into work, splattering my back (and front, somehow) with icy, shitty, dirty slush.
6. PMS. Just for giggles.
7. Really sore throat. I think it's chronic tonsillitis. I get it pretty much whenever I get sick usually.Anyway. It sucks.

I seriously almost cried when #5 happened.

Exhausted

J has a horrible cough. It's all that remains of the nasty virus he had last week (which included fever, cough, and copious amounts of green sticky toddler snot. Fun, right?) and I really wish it would leave. Like yesterday. J was coughing in his sleep all night last night. If you don't have kids (and aren't a mommy, though I only have my own dear husband for comparison on this issue) you probably don't "get" this, but there's this mommy instinct that kicks in pretty much the second you bring the kid home. When J was a newborn and sleeping in his bassinet next to me, I would wake up when he sighed. I would wake up when he sniffed. I'd wake up if he farted. You get the idea. This is one reason I slept so much better once he went to his own room at 4 months. I think it was 4 months. Maybe it was 3? Anyway, that's not my point. Even when J had moved to his own room, most of the little noises he made were picked up by his monitor, and I learned to tune out all non-urgent noises. We haven't used the monitor in at least a year (other than using his end as a night light... handy feature, that) but J's room shares a wall with ours. If he cries/sings/sneezes/turns on his music box, I can hear it from my own bed. If I am in a deep sleep and he coughs, I drift into a state of semi-awake and begin to assess the situation. One cough? He's fine. Crying for a brief second but stops before I'm fully conscious? Also fine. Coughing til he gags every 5 minutes all.night.long? Dear GOD. There's nothing I can do but I come up to full consciousness, realize there's nothing I can do (I've already given him honey and put vapor rub on his chest and since a bunch of moron parents OD'd their kids on medicine and nobody can give their sick kids a damn thing even though the overwhelming majority of parents and kids had no problems...but I digress. Also, I'm not counting any kids who broke into kid proof bottles. Those are clearly not idiot parents, but rather clever kids). I try to go back to sleep. I even got up twice last night to comfort him and try to help. Didn't work, although I observed that he is coughing while he's sound asleep, so at least he's sleeping. Gah. I have propped up his pillow tonight to a better angle, it seems to be helping. Somewhat. Of course, I have to get him up in about 15 minutes so we can go pick up C from work, but c'est la vie.

I just want to come home and sleep afterward. Hell, I would have gone to bed 30 minutes ago if I didn't have to pick up C. This is one inconvenience of having only one car. *Yawn* Any anti-coughing juju for J would be appreciated.

Snowing!

Downtown should be at the top of this picture. You can't see it. At all.

Wordless Wednesday- Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Argh, Damn Excuses

No weight loss since I hit the 10 pound mark. I just haven't been working on it. I haven't been eating great, I haven't really been exercising. Bad Tena!

A great motivator though? This picture from our Christmas cards:

And here is one I just took yesterday of J and I goofing around!

Ok, so maybe the difference isn't hugely evident, but I see it!

Happy PI Day!

Ah, 3.14. PI day. Sweet.

I plan to celebrate by making a strawberry rhubarb pie. From scratch. With rhubarb from my mom's garden from this summer (frozen, of course) and strawberries that I got for $1.50 a pound at Sunflower this week! Sweet. I love strawberry rhubarb pi. (Get it? PI!! It's Pi day!! Bwahahahaha.)

Books I've Read and Listened To of Late

I've read a number of books lately. Here are my reviews and so on, and such like. Enjoy! There are no spoilers, so read away!

I thoroughly enjoyed Outlander, I think that series could potentially replace the Earth's Children (Clan of the Cave Bear) series for my "need to read addictive books with lots and lots of sex in them" needs. Wow. I mean, I love me some Ayla and Jondalar but Claire and Jamie are much more fascinating to me. Perhaps it's the fact that they are only a few hundred years from the present, as opposed to several thousand. Seriously, though. Outlander. Well worth the read, lots of sex, some seriously heavy duty fucked-up-edness going on, but wonderfully written. The basic premise is that Claire is an English woman on a second honeymoon with her husband (whom she barely knows, due to the interruption of WWII) after the end of WWII. They're in Scotland, and she gets sucked through a rock to 200 years in the past. I highly, highly recommend this book. Added bonus? The author (Diana Gabaldon) is a scientist. What's not to love?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Amusing, but by the end I thought it was pretty stupid. It has inspired me to want to read the original Pride and Prejudice, though. I did enjoy the description of a man's junk as his "most English parts." Oy. I mean, if you really like zombies, and/or Jane Austin, you can read it, but it's really pretty childish. My copy has long since gone to someone else via PaperbackSwap.

The Heaven series, by Mur Lafferty. These are all podcast novels, available both in iTunes and podiobooks.com for free! You can't beat free, really. Let's see, there's Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, and War. The basic premise is that Kate and Daniel have died, they journey through heaven, hell, and everywhere in between and at some point become gods. It touches on many, many different religions and mythologies. I absolutely love Mur Lafferty, and this podcast series is no exception to her usual awesomeness. Heaven is also to be released in print, about which I have to say I'm pretty excited. Ooh, and in writing this, I have literally just discovered that you can listen to many episodes of her stuff on her website, murverse.com! Sweet.

Another podcast novel I've been listening to is Underwood and Flinch, by Mike Bennett. It's currently on hiatus, until April, but I recommend listening from the beginning (subscribe in iTunes and you can get all the episodes). If you start now, you probably won't even have a break between parts 1 and 2. I will warn that this does fall in the horror genre, and there is a fair amount of gore. Most of Mike Bennett's stuff is pretty weird, but thoroughly enjoyable. All of his content is available for free as podcasts. As far as I know, none of it's in print at the moment.

 

Oh, Scott Sigler. If you like serious violence and gore in your hardcore horror sci-fi, you will love Scott Sigler (or, as he is known among his junkies, the FDO). He has also made all of his content available for free as podcasts, plus several of his books are in print. C got me Infected for my birthday.  I re-read it (I'd "read" it as an audiobook about a year ago or so) a few weeks ago, and I have to say Sigler has a knack for making my guts twist into a terror knot. More for the violence than anything else. I was happy to skip one particular part of the book while I was reading it, because it was really just too violent for me to handle. Not all of his books are this violent. I really, really loved Ancestor (which is apparently not being made into a movie, sadness. Thanks for correcting me though, Scott Sigler! I am all like excited now that an actual real author/famous person commented on my blog! Eee!) and also Nocturnal. I can't decide which of those two is my favorite. I will warn you, they are violent, but they are not the same intensity of violence as that particular scene in Infected (really, I can't give it away without a spoiler). Ancestor absolutely chilled me to the bone. Alas, I have gone on a bit of a tangent. Infected is about some crazy infectious (duh) spores from outer space that make people do crazy things like butcher their whole families. One man, Perry Dawsey, fights them as only he can, and cuts pieces of himself out to stop the infection. That's really all I can give away. If you like horror and sci-fi, you'll have to read it yourself.

A Reliable Wife was okay. I was hoping for some fabulous sex scenes, but they really turned out to be pretty darn creepy. The book is a quick read, and an entertaining foray into the mind of a woman who has never known love. It follows her through a redemption of sorts in her misleading answer to a personal ad for a "realiable wife" and how she actually ends up fulfilling (or not, depending on your viewpoint) that role. It's worth reading, but I don't think I'll ever read it again. We read it for book club this month.

Ugh. Men.

C is mad at me because I didn't call to check with him that it was okay that I spent (ready?) $40 instead of $20 on a gift for someone. Really? REALLY? I almost never go over budget on anything, and NEVER double the budget, but it is only $20. Whoopie. He doesn't even mind that I spent it (well, he does but not too much), it's the fact that I didn't call while I was at the counter before I paid. Um, C? I'm pretty sure that until you make more money than me, I get to spend $20 extra on a gift for my friend if I want to. So bugger off.

Stupid men.

The Fitness Diaries

Not so much happening on the exercise front lately. I blame the following:

• Grandma died
• I went off my meds for a week (BAD TENA!)
• Awful AF
• Stomach flu

I think that pretty well covers everything for the last 3 weeks. However, I have still managed to walk almost 5 miles a week the last couple weeks (1.5 miles-ish about 3 days a week) and I have also been decently good about calorie tracking. The stomach flu really "helped" more recently, as ejecting all nutrients from your body in the space of 5 hours, and not really gaining any nutrition at all for 2 days as a result is a pretty damn effective way of losing weight. I lost 4 pounds this weekend as a result of that. Fortunately I gained much of that back (I think it was a lot to do with dehydration).

I did weigh myself this morning (since Thursdays seem to be my day for it) and I saw three lovely numbers: 132. I feel great, I've lost 10 pounds since Christmas! Yay me! I may at some point take some pictures and post them (a la Blair with her McFatty Mondays posts). Maybe I'll do that this weekend so it can chronicle the last 12 pounds I want to lose. I am so excited to be almost halfway there! It's a great feeling, really.

I need to really incorporate more protein and fewer carbs in my diet, I'm trying to work on that. So far I've had varying success, especially with the recent "flu" being incompatible with protein. It's a work in progress.

My doctor wants me to have a fasting blood draw to test my cholesterol (which was high last time it was tested, but perhaps that was because I was breastfeeding? I don't know if there's a link, but maybe there is) and also wants me to do a glucose tolerance test. I plan to do those in the next month and then have my "annual" checkup. I hope to lose at least 4 or 5 more pounds before my checkup. I need to get back on the exercise bandwagon though.

Let's see...oh, I've been taking vitamin E (for PMS breast pain) and B6 (for short LP). The E hasn't really worked much yet, I remember it took several cycles last time around to have any noticeable effect. B6 worked amazingly; not only did it lengthen my LP back to 13 days last cycle, it also shortened my FP (follicular phase, the phase before ovulation) to 16ish days instead of 20-something. Very nice. I was terribly nauseous during my entire LP though, perhaps due to increased progesterone due to stronger ovulation? I have no idea. I really hope that's not the case again. It's weird though, since B6 is supposed to help with morning sickness, so I'm not sure why it would have made me have problems with LP nausea.

New FiberOne Coupons!

There are coupons available for FiberOne Products! This could mean really cheap food (like the FiberOne Yogurt) when paired with a sale. Click here or here to get the coupons, and you may be able to print it twice. The link actually prints 3 $0.75/1 coupons, so if you go somewhere that doubles coupons they'd be worth $1 or more each!