me & bobby mcgee

we've had a lot of rainy weather lately, and every time i was driving with the boys in the rain, i'd start singing the line from "me & bobby mcgee" about "windshield wipers swiping time." c started to request it, and then i'd actually sing the whole first verse & chorus. this has happened maybe 3-4 times in the last few weeks.

well the other night as i was putting him to bed, when i said it was time for songs, he REQUESTED "the bobby song!" so i sang it. :-)

i've since put it onto my iphone so he can hear the real deal (janis does a MUCH better job than i do), and he loves it.

but now the questions have started... "why are they waiting for a train, mommy? why did bobby sing the blues?" etc etc...

and i'm proud to say my boy can sing most of the song. :-)

100 days OP

this is from april 21, but i wanted it here to look back on. today i'm on day 28!

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i committed today to 100 days completely and absolutely on plan. that takes me through the end of july. which means i will be 100% on plan for a beach weekend, my birthday, mother's day, memorial day, independence day and our vacation to ireland.

if i'm going to be healthy, i need to do what it takes to get there. and that starts NOW.

well for me, for the purposes of this commitment, OP is going to mean tracking everything, eating no more than my total daily, weekly and activity points in any one week span, and doing my very best to get all my GHG every day. i know i won't be perfect with all the GHG every day so i'm not going to let myself get derailed over that.

i know that i CAN enjoy a big occasion by still being OP. i have done it before, and i can (and will) do it again. it will mean planning ahead, doing some exercise, making the best choices possible maybe even using all my weekly points at once. but it's doable.

i think that some folks on here (myself included) sometimes choose to consciously NOT be on plan. to feel that they have the freedom to eat/drink as much as they want to, without thinking, measuring, counting etc. and that's ok too. i just know that for me right now, that "freedom" has led me to gain 10 lbs in the last 2 months. and that trend CANNOT continue

3 years ago today...

here's a copy of the birth story i wrote after conor was born. happy birthday to my big boy! more to come for you later....

well, the fun started at about 2:30 in the morning on monday the 14th. i woke up to go to the bathroom and felt a lot of wetness - wondered "is this it?" but when it wasn't gushing or even trickling like they said in the books, i figured maybe it's a false alarm, maybe i'm just very sweaty. i put a towel on the bed under me, and went back to sleep.

woke up again at 6-ish. more wetness. this time it was actually dripping when i crouched down to pick something up. woke hubby, called the doctor at 6:30.

hubby and i started debating whether he should go to work. i told him to go, he wanted to stay. we decided to wait until the doctor called us back, which he did at 7-ish. first question he asked - "are you sure your water broke?" - to which i said NO, i'm not sure!! but he decided to have me come into the hospital just in case, to get checked out.

so the whole time we're thinking this is probably a false alarm, but we get the stuff packed up, i send an email to my boss, etc, and we left the house at 8. got to the hospital about 8:20, and got checked in. the lady at the check-in thought i was there for a scheduled c-section or induction, i guess coz i wasn't visibly contracting...

anyway, we went up to triage, got checked out, and the doctor at first didn't think it was amniotic fluid. i was only 1.5 cm dilated, and had no contractions. but he checked it out, and sure enough, it was, and he said "today's the day!"

because my water had broken a few hours before and i had no contractions, they put me on pitocin right away. i didn't want that, but the doctor said there was pretty much no option. so i went from no contrax to contrax every 3 minutes within the first half hour.

the next thing that happened was that the baby's heartrate was dropping with every contraction - down to below 60 bpm at one stage. so they put me on oxygen and hooked us up to a fetal monitor, and i was told i couldn't move more than 2 steps away from the bed. so i was doing all my laboring either in the bed or on the side of it. i had really wanted to walk and use the birthing ball, etc, but that wasn't happening. the doctor actually considered doing a c-section at that stage but decided to wait and see, thank goodness!

at about noon, the doctor came in to "rupture my membranes" for real - the little trickle earlier in the morning had not released the fluid, and they were hoping that breaking the water for real would help me dilate, because at this stage, i was still only 2cm.

at about 1pm, we asked the nurse how she thought things were going, as i was in quite a bit of pain, and she said she thought about seven or eight more hours, with the pain escalating. i decided i had had enough of being a super hero, and at about 1:30 or 2, we did the epidural. things felt MUCH better after that! and when the doctor checked right before the epidural, i was up to 4cm.

BUT they baby was still in distress, so they gave me an infusion of fluid into the cervix, to help cushion him. and they actually turned the pitocin off again to see how things would go. luckily i kept on contracting by myself, and at about 3pm, i was up to 8cm dilated. the doctor told me he had to go do "a quick hysterectomy" and would be back in an hour or two to check on me.

he came back at about 5:30 and said "guess what - time to start pushing!" they popped up the pitocin dose again, and got me ready. i pushed for an hour, and at precisely 6:30 pm, conor adrian was born. he was pretty quiet at first, which made me scared, but he was fully alert and looking around. he cried very shortly after that though!! they gave him to me right away, and i was able to nurse immediately, which was cool.

so he's two weeks old now, and beautiful. he has a head of thick black hair (no idea where that is from) and we still can't tell what his eye color is. he is back up to over his birth weight, which is great.

blackberries

blackberries may just be a's all-time favorite food. he pronounces it "ba-bees" and he will eat as many as he can get his hands on, shoving them into his mouth as fast as he can.

if he's about to pitch a fit or get upset about something, he can almost always be distracted with an offer of blackberries. he will dutifully go and climb into his booster seat when you tell him to, when it's time for blackberries.

no funny point to this entry now that i think about it - just one more thing i don't want to forget about.

"no!"

"NO!" is a's new favorite word. he answers "no" to just about any question you ask him.

the other night he was fussy right before bed, so t took him up and was cuddling him on his shoulder and walking around quietly with him. he was whispering sweet nothings to a, and at some stage said something like "are you daddy's boy?"

to which a responded immediately, by placing a hand on each of daddy's shoulders, pushing back, looking t square in the eye and saying "NO!"

now it's a big family joke - are you daddy's boy? NO! are you mommy's boy? NO! etc... he sees that we laugh at it so he just keeps it up, laughing right along with us.

play-doh

c LOVES play-doh. but he's not yet very responsible with it, so it lives in the "wayuphigh" kitchen cupboard, so he has to ask for it before he plays with it.

a couple of nights ago, he asked for the play-doh, and while i was getting a tub out, he said to me, "mommy, i only a little bit big, i not all the way big yet. when i get big and big and big (doing hand motions showing how big), i get the play-doh out the 'covered' (cupboard) all by myself!"

true story - birthday morning

most of the time my blog posts are about my kids and the funny things they say and do. but as this is also a place for me to record things for posterity, i figured i'd write down this TRUE story from my birthday last week.

i have a few quirky ocd-like tendencies, and one of them is a mild obsession with numbers. i subconsciously count things (steps, the number of times a car alarm beeps, etc.) i have a good memory for numbers. and i LOVE it when i see "special" numbers on the clock or odometer, for example (i actually took a picture when the odometer got to 12345).

we have in our bedroom one of those projector clocks that shines the time and temperature on the ceiling. i play a little game with myself, trying to predict when the time and temperature will "match" and if i'm awake in the night (as i often am), i like to see it happen - for example, when it's 42.5 degrees at 4:25 am.

well, on my birthday morning, i got one better! firstly i had a great sleep and the boys only woke me once - at around midnight. but then - i woke up and looked at the clock, and it was 5:07! and the temperature was 57.2!! magic...

flastop!

c loves planes and rockets and anything that goes fast. the other night as he was going to bed, he was playing with one of his little jet planes. he held it on the pillow then shot it up in the air, yelling "FLASTOP!!"

then last night in bed he was looking at the plane and said "mommy, airplanes have wings, right?" to which i answered "yes." then... "and butterflies have wings too." "yes."

"but butterflies dont have shootaguns on their wings."