Alright people, do I look like freaking Clark Griswald? No. Will I ever drive a mini-van, a regular, big 'ole cargo van or a station wagon? Not on your life. My mom had a kick-ass black and silver astro van that she rocked pretty hard core and that all us kids loved and spent loads of time in while she carted us between here and China for all of our extracurriculars. That's my mom, that's not me. Why is it that as soon as you are impregnated, everyone imagines that you can't wait to get your swollen little hands on a damn Dodge Caravan? I know that lots of people have them and lots of people love them, but that's not me. It just isn't in my being, my fiber, my...anything. For the most part, the majority of people that know me, didn't expect anything different when I finally bought a car. However...the majority tend to keep their cakeholes shut and it's the annoying haters that can't quit their yapping about your personal decisions.
So, you may have heard that my little bambino's impending arrival prompted me to lose the 13 year old wheels and pick up the closest thing to a tank that could be purchased for under $1 million and was street legal. I was looking for the Porsche-designed German Panzer VIII Maus but my husband nixed the idea labelling it as a 'crazy pregnancy emotional fit' (as if) but I think he didn't like the idea because I wanted it in pink...with a sunroof. We compromised and picked up the most tank-like-but-still-pretty SUV to protect our little monsters. It's pretty and huge and safe and comfy and has an awesome stereo and sunroof and rides high enough that you feel like you're in a semi-truck and can totally eavesdrop on all the cars you pass, which is Will's new favorite game. 'Hey mama, guess what that guy was doing?' I love it, but am scared at the same time that he's going to have an early education on what people do when they think they aren't being watched.
But anywho, so we bought a car. No big deal, right? Unless you're one of those people who say 'congratulations' when you buy a car as if you've achieved something special other than procuring a mode of transportation, just like everyone else in this gas-guzzling nation has, it really is not a big deal. Oh wait. Also, unless you are one of those people who think that your opinion, A) absolutely must be heard by all, B) matters in the least to anyone other than you or your extremely fugly effeminate husband, and C) you simply lack the gene that allows you to be happy for anyone else when they reap the rewards of their hard work because your a jealous, hating little biz-natch and everyone knows it. Oops, was that out loud?
So maybe you're sitting there with two friends who have riden in the behemoth and are gushing about some of the cooler features. From across the room you hear, 'so you need this huge car for your one kid?' Um...thanks for the admission that despite knowing me for nearly two years, you are so egocentric that you didn't realize I already have one kid and so this one will make two. One plus one does not equal one. I respond to this unfortunate person stating that, "besides a minivan and station wagons (see above paragraph devoted to my hatred of these vehicles), SUV's are the only cars with the third row seating option and we plan on having another child and will have two in car seats and one in a booster so felt this was necessary."
A future MENSA president then commented, 'so you need a row for each kid?' Well no, genius. This I had to explain REALLY SLOWLY as I was acutely aware of the IQ level I was dealing with. "The third row means there are two rows in the back in addition to the front (adult) seats. There aren't three rows of seats in the back like a freaking 14 passenger van you can rent for a spring break trip." Thanks for playing. This is when the two turn to eachother and continue to whisper conspiratorially as if they are not sitting in a roomful of people who just heard that entire conversation and know exactly how immature they're continuing to be at this point.
To these poor souls and anyone else who feels the need to have an opinion on my choice of vehicle, let alone waste their own time forcing this upon unsuspecting listeners, I defer to one of the smartest women alive, Tina Fey. In her acceptance speech for her Golden Globe win for 30 Rock, she responded to some of the 'special critics' with the simple phrase, 'suck it.' (This can be viewed by youtube or googling Tina Fey 'Suck It' golden globe and is HI-larious, as is Tracy Morgan's speech later in the night.) So, there you go. Don't like my car...suck it. Think it's too ostentatious...suck it. Don't know how many kids I have or what a third row of seats really means in a car...really suck it. Because I've been told that sometimes these drag on, we'll end it here. Stay posted for updates following graduation and the first baby shower which should provide entertaining fodder in the weeks to come.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Quit with the countdowns already
You may or may not have noticed that I've been a little pathologic with the countdown's lately. Countdown until I'm done with work: 25 days. Countdown til Ollie arrives: 10w6d...at the latest. Countdown til I start work at my new job: 4 months, 25 days. I don't know when all this counting down business became the overwhelming driving force in my life, but I promise you all that I'm not starting anymore from now on...because I think my husband might leave me if he has to hear about the countdown to the diaper sale at Babies R Us one more time. Or the countdown til Will starts soccer or something else as un-countdown-worthy.
Anywho, it's been a pretty uneventful week in the lives of the Houle fam. The insanely quick weight gain has finally leveled off and we're holding tight at 23-24 lbs which sounds much more acceptable to me at 29wks, not so much at 26 weeks. I may or may not have been consuming enough for someone growing triplets and that may or may not have stopped since the whole 'failed then passed diabetes test debacle' which may or may not be the cause of my less than acceptable waistline expansion.
That and the heat. MN sucks 5 months out of the year, isn't so bad 3 months out of the year and then is the best place in the world the rest of the time...i.e. the summer. Warm weather, not too bad humidity, sunny skies, the cleaner lakes and abundant water sports when you have time to escape to them and aren't too pregnant to enjoy them. All of this would normally inspire you to be in the best bathing suit shape during those months, but even though bathing suit season is out this year, the heat definitely curbs the appetite for little debbie. It does, however, make you secretly hate your friends who sit around enjoying the warm weather with a 'rita or cold brew or glass of champy and your only part of this interaction is to play barmaid and keep everyone topped off with refreshing goodness. It's a good thing I'm craving super cold lemonade all the time.
Which, in case you didn't know this, an 'arnold palmer' is a mix of tea and lemonade (another fav is lemonade and root beer mixed) and is awesome and comes in a very large aluminum can when you purchase it at a golf course. It's the size of can that you would buy beer in if you were going to a pimps & ho's party and planned to drink it out of a paper bag. It's the size of can that, when seen from across the golf course, proves it can not be clearly determined that the 28wks pregnant chick is NOT drinking an actual beer and prompts the pedicatrician who bought the 'round' to come over and inspect. He does not find this funny when the 28wks pregnant chick yells across the 8th tee box, 'Baby Ollie said thanks for the brewski!' This is especially humorous when the golf outing is the all staff golf tourney for the hospital so you're surrounded by tons of other docs who hear this exchange and wonder why the pediatrician is buying the pregnant chick beer. Job security? Don't worry, karma got me back by giving me all kind of ligament and abdominal pain the next day since I haven't really used my golfing muscles (core) in a while. Karma also allowed the other chicks I was golfing with to not only mock, but record with their phones for future facebook torture, my 'pregnant chick golf swing' which involves an Elvis-inspired booty shake in order to get my swing on around my bulbous belly.
A couple of new items for the past couple of weeks have included the non-existence of more than 2 consecutive hours of sleep and visible movement on the belly that eerily resembles when the Alien is trying to eat it's way out of the people in the movie cleaverly titled, Alien. I don't know if it's Ollie trying to condition me to be awake every two hours to be a good little moo-cow or if it's my body saying 'quit sleeping on your back unless you want to harm your baby' that wakes me up every 2 hours or so. I actually got 4 hours in a row last night, but that's the longest stretch in the past 12 days...not that I'm counting. I think it's starting to make me a little crazy, which I think I'm successfully hiding from the man. I'm kind of on hyperalert all the time and have consumed 1-2 sodas per day to help with a little caffeine. Shush people, two is the limit for the preggers. It doesn't help that he's on call this weekend, so when he needed to sleep in a little longer after a long night, I got up with Will and had to entertain all day. Will enjoys my sleep-deprived state and hanging out with a pregnant chick who has introduced him to french fries dipped in ice cream from McD's & Wendys. Even with the tylenol PM, between the dreams of pre-term labor, dreams of my water breaking, restless legs, having to pee despite a dialysis like water restriction, or the feral felines that meow outside the door until we let them in, sleep still evades me. As a former professional sleeper, I feel like I will probably crash soon and sleep for 3-4 days. Hopefully this is before the delivery.
The new movement thing is also pretty creepy. It's lots of fun and even more distracting than the non-visible movement period (thank God I'm almost done with work and anything else requiring concentration...like driving) and other people can actually watch the munchkin flip and kick and push outwards on my belly surface when I'm sitting/standing still. It's creepy when one side of your belly sticks out a good 2 inches further than the other side or pushes out rhythmically when listening to the radio. Yes, he can hear, and yes, he likes pop music. It's pretty cool except when strangers see your belly moving, it takes them a second to realize your pregnant and not fat and then they decide it's totally appropriate to touch the moving parts on your belly...which is only 2-3 inches above your girlie parts...either way. He also tends to quit moving so ridiculously obviously anytime that his dad is sitting next to me which I'm sure is beginning to infuriate daddy-to-be. I'm like, 'oh, look, he's going crazy.' He looks and puts his hand on the belly and it's instant naptime for the munchkin. Oh well, he'll get to play with him in 10wks and 6 days. Damn, the countdown snuck in there again.
Another little helpful piece of advice. Lets pretend you're pregnant and, thus, have tender, enlarging breasts. Lets also pretend that you have a cute little mole on one of those funbags and it's been growing freakishly larger (prompting you to name it Max) secondary to the hormone storm otherwise known as pregnancy. So pretend you ask your husband to cut it off...of your larger, very sensitive, tata. This is not a good idea. Not only did your boobs kind of ache before, but imagine having non-buffered lidocaine infiltrated around the most sensitive part of the girls, that happen to leak a little milky substance while you're being prepped and then having a piece of tissue cut off. FYI, the lidocaine eventually wears off and because your pregnant, in case I didn't mention that, you can't really take any pain medication beyond tylenol to help with your hyper-sensitive, feedbag pain...that you asked for. Just wait. No matter how creepy it looks or if you wonder if the kiddo will be able to determine which is the actual spot to latch when trying to fishy lips on to the goodness. Just wait until you can be properly meidcated post-op. Idiot.
Okay, off to finish the registry with my little shopping assistant (poor Will) and to eventually return home and focus my sleep-deprived hyper energetic state on cleaning the house. Next up on the blogtastic agenda, a new coche is in the works and NO, it is not a minivan and it never will be.
Anywho, it's been a pretty uneventful week in the lives of the Houle fam. The insanely quick weight gain has finally leveled off and we're holding tight at 23-24 lbs which sounds much more acceptable to me at 29wks, not so much at 26 weeks. I may or may not have been consuming enough for someone growing triplets and that may or may not have stopped since the whole 'failed then passed diabetes test debacle' which may or may not be the cause of my less than acceptable waistline expansion.
That and the heat. MN sucks 5 months out of the year, isn't so bad 3 months out of the year and then is the best place in the world the rest of the time...i.e. the summer. Warm weather, not too bad humidity, sunny skies, the cleaner lakes and abundant water sports when you have time to escape to them and aren't too pregnant to enjoy them. All of this would normally inspire you to be in the best bathing suit shape during those months, but even though bathing suit season is out this year, the heat definitely curbs the appetite for little debbie. It does, however, make you secretly hate your friends who sit around enjoying the warm weather with a 'rita or cold brew or glass of champy and your only part of this interaction is to play barmaid and keep everyone topped off with refreshing goodness. It's a good thing I'm craving super cold lemonade all the time.
Which, in case you didn't know this, an 'arnold palmer' is a mix of tea and lemonade (another fav is lemonade and root beer mixed) and is awesome and comes in a very large aluminum can when you purchase it at a golf course. It's the size of can that you would buy beer in if you were going to a pimps & ho's party and planned to drink it out of a paper bag. It's the size of can that, when seen from across the golf course, proves it can not be clearly determined that the 28wks pregnant chick is NOT drinking an actual beer and prompts the pedicatrician who bought the 'round' to come over and inspect. He does not find this funny when the 28wks pregnant chick yells across the 8th tee box, 'Baby Ollie said thanks for the brewski!' This is especially humorous when the golf outing is the all staff golf tourney for the hospital so you're surrounded by tons of other docs who hear this exchange and wonder why the pediatrician is buying the pregnant chick beer. Job security? Don't worry, karma got me back by giving me all kind of ligament and abdominal pain the next day since I haven't really used my golfing muscles (core) in a while. Karma also allowed the other chicks I was golfing with to not only mock, but record with their phones for future facebook torture, my 'pregnant chick golf swing' which involves an Elvis-inspired booty shake in order to get my swing on around my bulbous belly.
A couple of new items for the past couple of weeks have included the non-existence of more than 2 consecutive hours of sleep and visible movement on the belly that eerily resembles when the Alien is trying to eat it's way out of the people in the movie cleaverly titled, Alien. I don't know if it's Ollie trying to condition me to be awake every two hours to be a good little moo-cow or if it's my body saying 'quit sleeping on your back unless you want to harm your baby' that wakes me up every 2 hours or so. I actually got 4 hours in a row last night, but that's the longest stretch in the past 12 days...not that I'm counting. I think it's starting to make me a little crazy, which I think I'm successfully hiding from the man. I'm kind of on hyperalert all the time and have consumed 1-2 sodas per day to help with a little caffeine. Shush people, two is the limit for the preggers. It doesn't help that he's on call this weekend, so when he needed to sleep in a little longer after a long night, I got up with Will and had to entertain all day. Will enjoys my sleep-deprived state and hanging out with a pregnant chick who has introduced him to french fries dipped in ice cream from McD's & Wendys. Even with the tylenol PM, between the dreams of pre-term labor, dreams of my water breaking, restless legs, having to pee despite a dialysis like water restriction, or the feral felines that meow outside the door until we let them in, sleep still evades me. As a former professional sleeper, I feel like I will probably crash soon and sleep for 3-4 days. Hopefully this is before the delivery.
The new movement thing is also pretty creepy. It's lots of fun and even more distracting than the non-visible movement period (thank God I'm almost done with work and anything else requiring concentration...like driving) and other people can actually watch the munchkin flip and kick and push outwards on my belly surface when I'm sitting/standing still. It's creepy when one side of your belly sticks out a good 2 inches further than the other side or pushes out rhythmically when listening to the radio. Yes, he can hear, and yes, he likes pop music. It's pretty cool except when strangers see your belly moving, it takes them a second to realize your pregnant and not fat and then they decide it's totally appropriate to touch the moving parts on your belly...which is only 2-3 inches above your girlie parts...either way. He also tends to quit moving so ridiculously obviously anytime that his dad is sitting next to me which I'm sure is beginning to infuriate daddy-to-be. I'm like, 'oh, look, he's going crazy.' He looks and puts his hand on the belly and it's instant naptime for the munchkin. Oh well, he'll get to play with him in 10wks and 6 days. Damn, the countdown snuck in there again.
Another little helpful piece of advice. Lets pretend you're pregnant and, thus, have tender, enlarging breasts. Lets also pretend that you have a cute little mole on one of those funbags and it's been growing freakishly larger (prompting you to name it Max) secondary to the hormone storm otherwise known as pregnancy. So pretend you ask your husband to cut it off...of your larger, very sensitive, tata. This is not a good idea. Not only did your boobs kind of ache before, but imagine having non-buffered lidocaine infiltrated around the most sensitive part of the girls, that happen to leak a little milky substance while you're being prepped and then having a piece of tissue cut off. FYI, the lidocaine eventually wears off and because your pregnant, in case I didn't mention that, you can't really take any pain medication beyond tylenol to help with your hyper-sensitive, feedbag pain...that you asked for. Just wait. No matter how creepy it looks or if you wonder if the kiddo will be able to determine which is the actual spot to latch when trying to fishy lips on to the goodness. Just wait until you can be properly meidcated post-op. Idiot.
Okay, off to finish the registry with my little shopping assistant (poor Will) and to eventually return home and focus my sleep-deprived hyper energetic state on cleaning the house. Next up on the blogtastic agenda, a new coche is in the works and NO, it is not a minivan and it never will be.
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