Maintainers Weekly Chat May 12 - May 18
 

Sunday, Mother's Day, was sunny, warm, and delightful. We took a tour of some local gardens - the kind where the owner does all the work and knows every plant's history. Was a fun, fun, day. DS and his SO made dinner at his house eaten out on the lawn as dark fell. Doesn't get better.

I'm still coughing; this has to end some day. DW is getting more impatient for me to go the doctor. I'm not a fan of going to the doctor anyway, but going to say, "I have a cold" seems an open invitation to hear, "Why, yes, you do - buy Cold Remedies at the drug store and come back some day when you're ill." I'm annoyed with this, but I'm not all verklempt about it. I don't have my bustenhalter in a twist.

:wave:

:rofl: Glad you had a really nice Mother's Day Bill. As for the cold I went to the doctor after having a cough for over a month and he gave me a prescription for a "puffer" (inhaler). The cough was gone after 3 days of using the inhaler. May have gone away by itself but I was tired of coughing and not sleeping.

Dagmar :dizzy:

Good morning everyone! We had a better Mother's Day this year than last year considering last year my girls were in the hospital still. :D Hopefully next year will be even better -- A is cutting a tooth and was miserable all day and they skipped one of their naps. DH made me a cute card from him and the girls though! Also both girls have figured out how to wave and how to clap, and this morning I got A to wave bye bye to me when I left for work. Hopefully this tooth will be in soon so that poor DH doesn't have to deal with a grouchy baby all day today.

I need to come up with something good to do for DH for father's day since he does way more work taking care of them than I do. Time to start googling craft ideas!

Bill, I went to the doctor for a lingering cough after a cold once and that was when I learned I had allergies -- I was in college. Until I did that and got a nasal spray for my allergies, I honestly did not know that it was physically possible to breathe through my nose! :lol:

Good morning!

We had a great weekend. Both kids were home. We golfed Saturday morning and it wasn't hot at all. We cancelled Sunday due to wind and blowing sand which makes for miserable golfing. We met our future SIL's father who is in town visiting his brother. We played games and MIL and DD and I went shopping to help DD find shoes for her wedding. Um, yeah, she bought cobalt blue shoes to wear with her white wedding dress. Interesting. We also found some nice earrings for her for the wedding.

Is DD a "Sex In The City" fan? Carrie wore a white suit with bright blue Manolo's when she married Big.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=manol...F%3B451%3B1225

Dagmar :dizzy:

I don't think so, but that's funny. Same color shoe but we certainly didn't splurge for Manolos! I think we spent $59 for the shoes!

Will the shoes show from under the dress, Allison? Very cool!

I also didn't know you could breathe through your nose until chronic headaches eventually led me to uncover severe sinus issues/allergies/asthma... After sinus surgery, I can breathe through my nose but I have zero sense of smell, and still have some other issues.

I'm trying not to panic with all I have to do at work this week. I'm barely staying above a panic at the moment. Probably didn't help that dd called me last night in a full blown panic attack. I wish I could help her more but her panic attack gave me a massive headache, I slept poorly, and now I feel anxious. Oy vey.

Hope everyone had a nice Mom's Day. Mine was quiet with no one home....

Today is my 28th birthday. We're not doing anything special, though I am getting a nice icecream cake tonight after my piano lesson. It turns out the homeschooling water park day is also today, so I'm taking the kids over and meeting my husband there at 4:00, then he'll stay with them while I drive up the road to the aforementioned lesson at 6:30. Busy night, but it should be fun.

I'll be so glad to get back on track with food. I've been in a funk for a month but the travel last weekend and then our anniversary, Mother's Day, and my birthday the last few days have caused me to bounce up HUGELY on the scale. I've not been doing great since March but this is ridiculous. So I'm scratching all my carbohydrate itches and will be back on a more controlled plan tomorrow. Which is good, because the only way I stay healthy during and in between pregnancies is by not going nuts and gaining fifty pounds. But I absolutely will if I don't get back on track. So today I eat cake, and probably plenty of it. Tomorrow, back to food sanity ;)

Hi everyone!

It's BEAUTIFUL here. I got my fishing license and pole/tackle over the weekend and am dying to leave the office and get out there. Had a lovely Mother's Day and found a lot of brazen fern fiddleheads in the woods - the general consensus seems to be that only ostrich fiddleheads are worth cooking and eating, but I might go collect some anyway and take my small stomach cancer/vitamin B deficiency risk.

Weight followed a normal pattern, spiked a little to reflect weekend eating more than usual, and is back down after a normal day + 7 mile run yesterday.

Happy birthday, Taryl!

Hi all,

Things have calmed down for me, at least for a little while. This weekend was the first weekend in a long time I didn't have to work or study (well, at least for an immediate test). I actually got to relax, woke up early to walk the dog, practiced my guitar, which I haven't done in months, even streamed a JM workout and worked up a sweat. It was nice to breathe a little bit. I did crack open my GRE study guide and have a lot of refreshing to do. My brain isn't 20 anymore.

BF and I celebrated last week because we bought a lot! (Just a lot, no house, can't afford the house right now lol). We live in a pricy area, but with prices starting to rise again, we know we won't be able to afford it at all in a few years. We found a nice lot that was a great deal and snapped it up. We hope to build on it some day, but if something happens with my job and we need to sell, it's a great investment too. I feel so adult. Actually no. I feel like a kid disguised as an adult. :dizzy:

Krampus, do you have a lake or river that you fish in? Sounds fun! I am curious what fiddleheads taste like. Have you had them before? I've only heard about them on TV etc.

Arctic Mama, happy birthday!!! And congratulations! Enjoy your birthday cake. :hb:

Michele, I hope you get more sleep tonight and DD feels better too.

Alison, well, your DD is just expressing her personal style. I'm sure she'll look beautiful!

Happy belated Mother's Day to all the moms here.

Bill, lol and don't get your lederhosen in a twist either!

Happy Birthday Taryl! Eat that cake today,and then be done with it. Ice cream cake is my favorite.

Megan, congrats on a break and on land! I don't know if anyone ever feels their age or like an adult!

Michele, nothing more stressful than a call like that from DD or DS. It is so common these days. Even HS kids are experiencing panic/anxiety attacks, too much pressure in this world. Hope you get some sleep tonight! I had a stressful night last week DD related and I work up at 2 and couldn't fall back asleep. I debated about laying in bed till 5:30, but just decided to get up at my normal 4:30 to exercise and felt so much better. But that night...went to bed really early!

DH's BIL (the one that's dying of brain cancer) just spent a week in the hospital. Doctors did a biopsy of his lung (cancer there too) and collapsed it in the process.A nurse identified the problem right away but they didn't believe her because, well she's a nurse and they are doctors. After 3 days of not being able to breathe at all they finally identified the collapsed lung and reinflated it.

I used to have a lot of faith in our health care system. Now that I'm getting to the point where I'll probably need more care due to age I'm getting pretty scared. I can't afford to pay for elaborate health care. I guess I'll try to stay healthy.

Dagmar :eek:

I'm never doing back-to-back dogsits again. I haven only done one yoga session in the last two weeks and man I'm stiff and sore without my almost daily yoga! I will appreciate it even more when I get to do a session every two days.

May 25 - going HOME day! :yay:

Dagmar :headache:

Dagmar, I'm with you. It makes far more sense to get educated about what it takes to stay healthy, and to exercise the discipline to do it. Sadly, getting educated requires a whole lot of effort and seems more and more to require going outside the mainstream sources. And discipline ... :lol: oh boy, there's a lifetime project!

Happy belated birthday Taryl! Boy you are young!! I thought I was young to have two children by age 27 (almost 28) and you will have five. Wow!

Sleep last night:mad::devil::mad::devil: UGH... Kids were okay this time. Was getting ready for bed and realized we may have an AC issue (of course-- it's a heat wave here with temps over 100). The AC is just clicking on and clicking off every few seconds. I troubleshooted with dh and got to bed late. Couldn't figure out the issue so I have a call into the AC guy. I will be :devil::devil: if I miss yoga for the AC guy. It is my fave teacher and the last time she was on the schedule she had to switch so I was disappointed. I was counting on going tonight.

I feel old, but physically I'm not. However I was in college by 16 and married just before my 20th birthday, so I'm not exactly like the live-with-mommy-and-daddy-perpetual-student types ;)


Back on plan today and glad for it, despite the leftover cake in the freezer. I'm willing myself to not eat it!

Happy late birthday, Taryl! :)

Mine is tomorrow. I'm pretty sure that with the work days I have going on the rest of the week that there will not be cake.

Happy birthday Shannon and Taryl! Mine is coming up on Saturday.

Lots of birthdays! Happy early birthday Becky and Shannon!

Congrats to Megan the new land owner. Is it legal to pitch your tent and spend the night?

And Happy Birthday to Becky, Taryl, and Shannon. With many more to follow.

First World Problem: My newspaper wasn't delivered this morning. Of course I've already learned the important news from the Web before it arrives. But the hard copy contains the dirt on the local politicians and the comics. Hard to start the day without the comics.

Happy belated birthday Taryl. Happy early birthday Shannon and Becky. And happy anniversary to me! 26 years today.

Amen Bill! I hate not reading my comics in the morning and then completing the crossword. The day just doesn't go right if I miss out on those.

Happy Anniversary Allison! Did you decide if you're going out tonight or not to celebrate?:)

We're going to go out for sushi during happy hour at a place we like. Nothing too much as we've got three nights of dinners out starting tomorrow. Thursday is the yearly gala for the YMCA, Friday is our monthly Wine Women dinner and Saturday we're going to a small bistro to "celebrate" with the in-laws as it's their last day in town.

Accidentally brought my roommate's Tupperware containing 8 baked sweet potatoes instead of my lunch today.

Decisions, decisions...do I want Subway? Indie sub shop? Crappy Chinese takeout? Drive home (10 miles round trip) to get my lunch? Grocery store?

I guess I'd better go for a long walk outside in the pleasant weather (67 and sunny currently) to decide. Days like this, I'm glad I have slow days at work...

And what will your roommate do for lunch? Curious minds want to know.

Happy birthdays Taryl, Shannon, and Becky! Taryl, lol, I also was surprised and thought you'd be older since you have so many kids. I got together with my DH when I was 18, but was 25 when we got married and 30 when I had my DDs.

Happy anniversary Allison!

Krampus, I have a hilarious mental image of you getting out your tupperware to eat your lunch and discovering 8 sweet potatoes. :lol3:

One of my girls has decided suddenly that she is afraid of climbing the stairs. :?: Both of them have been climbing the stairs for a long time now, but suddenly A has decided she doesn't want to do it. C is still crawling up like a champ. I wonder what happened to change her mind?

Happy birthday, Shannon! Bummer on the lack of cake. I always look forward to scratching that sweets itch twice a year ;)

Wow! That's a lot of years of marriage, how wonderful! I'm sorry about the missing paper, Bill - it's never fun to be thrown off ones routine.

I'd totally be doing the sub shop, but that's just me ;)

Jessica - I'm wondering why she doesn't want to climb right now? I have one kiddo like that and usually it's because he has fallen or had a bad experience - he is stubborn and marks things off his mental list for a year at a time if they cross him ;). All my other kiddos just get mad at the affront and try twice and hard, which isn't very wise if it is, say, the drawer that keeps smooshing your fingers (I'm looking at you, Holly!).

The scale says I'm officially a fat cow. Between travel, holidays, and hormones I am up TWENTY FIVE POUNDS since the middle of March. Some of that is water retention, sure, but a good fifteen of that is honest gain. I had a mental freak out and bounced right back up after my last weight loss round, to about the place I was at before (which was my original goal). The rest seems to be baby related.

So. Cake it done, I'm back on plan. It might be too much to ask for here as I'm exhausted and nauseous but I'm going to work at getting back down to my original goal (155-160) before earnest pregnancy gains begin. I'm not going to keep my calories artificially low if I'm hungry or having a blood sugar drop (a because that makes morning sickness ten times worse) but I'm sticking to my low carb food lists I usually maintain on and we'll see what comes of it. 1800-ish calories and 35 net carbs of whole food should help me slowly but surely drop the subcutaneous fat gain, even if the scale stays the same because of added baby weight.

I was successful with this the last pregnancy, so I'm basically rinsing and repeating.

Last night was crazy, as I had to prepare my notebook and end of year report for my contact teacher. It's a lot of paperwork but I'm always glad to have the record when I'm done, and the meeting today went very well.

Our state just implemented a STAR reading assessment for k-3 that is mandatory for all children, so my two oldest girls did that. The kindergartener scored quite well as an emerging reader and I found the assessment pegged her right where I did in terms of skill, which was encouraging both for me and the accuracy of the test. My first grader tested a smidge low compared to her reading ability, but her comprehension isn't nearly as advanced as her decoding skills. Still, she was firmly in the probable reading category and almost near the top of the assessment range, which isn't too bad since she's only seven. I'm glad to have that hurdle out of the way and know where they're at in terms of the range of their skills, though, as I don't have much of a standard of comparison besides my own curriculum goals for the kiddos.

The littler two didn't eat the puzzles or burn the office down, so they had a good day as well. We only had one diaper blowout on the way out the door and still weren't late, which is a HUGE victory ;)

Goals for today include storing away the winter gear, washing all my maternity clothes, and reading several chapters in a book I'm working through called "The Heart of Anger" by Lou Priolo. It is AWESOME. If, for some reason, I end up with LOTS of time on my hands I need to get a shawl off my knitting needles, too, as it is about two years late for the original date of receipt. Whoops.

That's the report here.

I'm more curious as to if your roommate eats eight sweet potatoes in a day! Must have been for the week! I love sweet potatoes and you've reminded me I need to cook some!

Lots of birthdays! Happy Birthday to everyone!

Jessica, that is strange that she doesn't want to climb. Is she wanted to be carried? My DD loved to be carried, by me! Yep, she was spoiled but I could never stand a crying baby.

Krampus, 8 - EIGHT ENTIRE POTATOES? How does that even fit in a Tupperware? And wouldn't it weigh like 4 pounds? Weren't you tipped off by the weight? Inquiring minds need to know :>)

Wow arctic mama! You are one busy chickie! Good for you for reigning things in and not usually pregnancy as an excuse for a free for all. We do lots of reading assessments at my school and parents are often surprised their kiddos don't score higher. You hit the nail on the head about decoding skills. Many kids can decode practically anything and can "read" high level text, but their comprehension of the text often doesn't match.

I forgot to congratulate Megan on being a land owner! You are so grown up!

I'm also curious about the sweet potato follow up.

Taryl, she hasn't fallen while I was watching her or while DH was watching her, so unless something happened while MIL was watching her I don't know what it could be. I don't think MIL usually takes them out of the play room at all so hopefully she wasn't letting them climb the stairs. C has nearly taken a tumble a couple times (where she's up on the second step, then suddenly decides to turn around and falls, and DH or I catch her before she actually hits the ground) but she has no issue with the stairs.

Maybe she does just want to be carried. Very strange! It's like when C suddenly decided she didn't want to take baths anymore. She came around when she saw A in the bath playing with new bath toys. :p

Megan, I also forgot to say congrats on the land purchase!

Unrelenting nausea here today. I've never had it this bad in any of my pregnancies, or this early. A crazy part of my brain is hoping it's twins, just to justify feeling so extraordinarily awful.

The downside of this is that nothing sounds goods and everything feels heavy in my normal diet. I'm on plan but by the skin of my teeth!

I was feeding the cats, brushing my teeth and putting pants on all at the same time! Yes it was a bit heavy but my lunches are usually heavy too (voluminous salads with a full serving of meat). We use really big Tupperware...

I went with the indie sub shop. My roommate fortunately had another lunch and had just baked the sweet potatoes to have on hand during the week for dinners and future lunches, so no harm, no foul.

Taryl - hope you feel better soon. At this rate it had better be TRIPLETS. Is morning sickness nausea similar to motion sickness nausea, where having a little something in your stomach makes it loads better?

Yes, it's definitely more like motion sickness than stomach flu. Very unsettled and low with a dizzy component for me, and eating frequently does help, which is not the greatest for diet. I just tend to reach for cheese and hardboiled eggs, even though I really want crackers, because protein always helps it abate and carbs generally make me feel worse.

It seems morning sickness is actually related to blood sugar swings, which makes sense given the biomechanics of pregnancy, so my goal is always to keep it stable. But yeah, right now I'm laying in bed feeling awful and what I need to do is get everyone up and eat something. It just sounds like a lot of work :)

Morning all,

TGIF. This afternoon we're going out for happy hour on the beach for a colleague who's leaving. I'm going to drink a beer instead of a hugely caloric frozen daiquiri, which this place does really well but... I've been streaming Jillian Michaels workouts from Amazon prime and skipping happy hours after too many last month and my pants are on the looser side of the pants-fitting spectrum. Isn't it amazing how that works? I don't want to blow it this evening. BF and I are hoping to take the sailboat out tomorrow and have a day "date". What are everyone's weekend plans?

Jessica, though my nieces are not twins and are two years apart, it amazes me what different personalities they have both had from birth. The older niece has never been clingy or wanting to be held much. You might think since she was an only child until she was two, she would have been spoiled by being held, extra attention, etc. and want it more once she had a sibling to share mom & dad with. But she is just off and running no matter what, even when she does want attention, and climbs on everything. The younger niece always wants to be held. "Uppa Uppa" constantly. Older niece is loud, younger niece is quiet. Maybe it's just different personalities of your girls. Do their personalities seem similar or different other than the climbing?

Taryl, sorry your morning sickness is so bad. As I am neither a doctor nor have I ever been pregnant I don't have any advice to offer by I have sympathy. Have you been to the doctor/midwife yet for your first visit? Maybe they could give you some insight as to why this pregnancy is feeling different than your others. Sounds like your kids are doing great in school, congrats!

Krampus, mmm. Baked sweet potato sounds delicious. There is absolutely nothing wrong with huge, heavy tupperwares full of salad! You're in good company.

Alison, you sound busy! Hope you've enjoyed all of your dinner occasions this week.

Happy belated birthdays all! Have a good weekend!