countdown to last day of work

Yay, only 5.5 more days of work and then I will be a full-time mommy. :) And the days will go fast, too... Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays are VERY busy (although my supervisor said that this Friday will actually be unusually slow), Tuesday I am training a new person on how to do one of my assigned tasks so that'll take up a good bit in the afternoon, and then hopefully Wednesday and Thursday will just fly by. :)

We gave Tuxedo to hubby's parents... he never did stop pooping on the floor here no matter what the litter box(es) arrangement was, plus he would always pick on Rainy, biting her to the point of bleeding, etc. Hubby's mom said that he is fitting in well there, and Rainy seems SO much happier now that she is alone. She is "lonely" too though and wants lots more attention than she used to.

I had another prenatal appointment yesterday and everything is going fine. I'm still not having any swelling or other late-pregnancy discomforts and my doctor says that the baby is still head-down. Only 2.5 weeks until my due date, so probably about 4 weeks until it's born, given my family history of going late. I'm not even going to get anxious about all the projects and things that I still want to finish before the baby arrives yet, and I'm definitely not going to get excited about an impending birth until my due date. Too much excitement will wear me out, lol.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow and since I'm so far along, hubby and I aren't going out of town. No family or anyone is coming here, either, so we'll just have a "mini" Thanksgiving dinner with just the two of us. We'll have turkey, green bean casserole, pumpkin cornbread, brown'n'serve rolls, sweet potato casserole, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes. And hopefully tons of leftovers for the next several days. :P

home stretch plus holidays equals new priorities

Wow, today I am 36 weeks. Only 4 more weeks until my due date, so baby will be here anytime from 2-6 weeks from now. I'm definitely in the home stretch, and counting the days until my last day at work. (13 working days and about 18 calendar days). Today I'm trying to get caught up on some things around the house. After I wash my sheets today, when I remake the bed, I'll put a painter's drop cloth over the mattress and mattress pad. I also want to do some more sewing. I still have that fleece coat that I want to cut out (it is one that also has an extra zip-in panel so I can wear it around just me or around me AND the baby). Plus my sewing things in general need to be organized. Then after I do that coat, I'll see what I have fabric-wise and try to make some nursing clothes.

At Thanksgiving I'll be just under 38 weeks, so we're not going very far out of town. A family from church wants to do something together with us but it might not be right on that day. Whatever we do, it hopefully will be fairly mild. In Thanksgivingses past, I would always look forward to making food and eating and having leftovers for days. But this year the food just doesn't seem that important to me. It's definitely a year to focus more on the "thanks" in Thanksgiving. And then Christmas is shortly after that, and I've done no shopping. DH and I are going to do that on Monday morning, but have already decided to get our siblings gift cards. Kindof lame, I know, but adult siblings that you hardly see or talk to are very hard to shop for. But we'll get something "real" for our parents, and also spend a little time pointing out things that we ourselves like so we can go back later and pick out gifts for each other.

Childbirth classes are going fine. Our teacher skips around in the curriculum, and last week we went over the newborn care lesson, which is the last one in the book. She said in the past that if she went through the book front to back, her couples would randomly go into labor at 36 weeks and miss the newborn care class, so she puts that one in earlier. And of course she made that comment within days of ME reaching 36 weeks. :P But it just made me excited for this little one to come. Our hospital tour is Wednesday evening. I can go to classes and read books and talk online about having a baby, but the labor and delivery tour will really be a wake-up call to me, and make this baby feel even more real.

My appointment yesterday went fine. I'm still not having a whole lot of late-pregnancy discomforts, BP is fine, weight is fine. I measured a week behind, but I have yet to have an appointment where I measure right on so that's pretty normal for me. Because of the weird schedule, I'm not having another appointment until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I did have my GBS test yesterday and she said they culture it for 48 hours and then will mail me the results. So hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday I should know those results, and start to plan for an IV or not.

Our male cat is still going #2 outside the litter box, but our in-laws want to take him. When DH goes down there in a couple of days he'll take Tuxedo with him. I think he'll do better there with the change of scenery, and when DH and I move again it'll be a lot easier to find an apartment that will let us have one cat than it would be to find one that would let us have two cats. (What the big deal is between one cat vs two I'll never know, but some apartments have a limit of one pet.) Plus now there will be half as much hair and half as much cat food and litter to buy. Going down to one income, every little bit helps.

is it january yet?

We had to take our cats to the vet yesterday, just for their routine annual shots. This was a new vet that they hadn't been to... and with the shots they had to do a "pre-vaccination" evaluation (basically a physical). Well I didn't know that they would be taking their temperature for that! Neither cat had had their temp taken before. Tuxedo allowed them to do it with very little complaining, but Rainy threw a FIT. Then after that she hid under the little chair for the rest of the time and would NOT be put back up on the table for ANYTHING. To give her the shots, we had her go into her carrier (which she did with no trouble) and then the vet and his technician just took the whole carrier to the back to give her the shots. They came back only moments later and said she did good and that they just gave her the shots through the carrier. And of course, once they were home and back in familiar surroundings, both cats were happy and purring like they hadn't been on a little road trip at all.

As for asking if it's January, I finally did ovulate around Sunday, so I'm now in my "official" first two week wait. Back on the 9th and for a couple of days after that, every time hubby and I were alone together I would ask him "What if I get pregnant???" and he would smile and say "Then we'll have a baby" pretty calmly. But I didn't want to obsess over the whole thing so after a few days I stopped talking about it so much. Hubby hasn't brought it up very much either. He gets to preach a little sermon on Sunday night the 1st, and I don't want to spring the knowlege of a pregnancy on him before then and make him too nervous for his speech, so I'm going to TRY to hold off testing until the 2nd. But I'm only 3 DPO (days past ovulation) right now, and the 2nd seems like a long way away... so we'll have to see how I feel late next week. :P I do already have a small stash of pregnancy tests ready and waiting in my bathroom cabinet... I bought them when I bought my basal thermometer to make my order total high enough to have free shipping. LOL.

I'm not really expecting to get pregnant right away with the first cycle trying since statistically there is only a 15-20% chance, but if two lines DO show up then it would be a very nice surprise. :)

visit interrupted my organization

Wow has it really been 10 days since my last entry? I need to get on the stick.

Work has been busy with callouts and mailouts and faxouts and stuff to promote our new catalog that comes out every March. I am pooped when I come home.

Still plugging away at toilet training the kittens. June 24th I'll have to stop calling them kittens for they will be "grown" by then. I have transferred them to a different kind of litter which is completely flushable, so now I don't have to scoop so often, I can just use my scooper to kindof urge the clumps into the toilet and then flush them away. I have saved the mixing bowl though, in case I need to regress. I have also taped up about half the hole since that or something has been discouraging Tux from going #2 in the potty. He picks the tub so at least that is fairly easy to clean up. And last night he did go in the potty so hopefully that will continue. I try to be very encouraging to him about that.

The visit that interrupted my organization was my mom and sister. They came in to my aunt and uncle's house over the weekend to watch a gynmastics meet on Friday night. Saturday I just did my normal errands (laundry and grocery shopping, etc) and then spent the afternoon and evening over there visiting. (They live in one of the next towns over). I got to feel my sister's baby kick and move several times so that was neat. :) I can't wait until he's born in July. And my sis looked great. Mom made me some flipflops while she was here, too. She took some normaly flip flops and crocheted some fancy yarn around the straps and now I have big feathery poufy straps. It is very cool.

pic of the kitties

Nothing news-wise to report today, but just thought I'd post a picture of Rainy (on the left) and Tuxedo.



Sorry it is kindof digitized... it was cropped from a larger snapshot. Here in a few weeks or so I hope to have a series of pictures of Rainy playing fetch that possibly will be a bit better quality.

four days in a row

Well, I managed to get up and do my walking video for four days in a row (Tuesday through Friday). I am taking the weekends off but may add them in later. I noticed that this walking started making me feel "crampy" (but it wasn't even that time of the month). Hopefully that will get better as I get in better shape and my body gets used to exercising. I know that when/if Tim and I are blessed with children, that being in shape will help me to have an easier pregnancy and delivery so I am using that to help motivate myself too. We still aren't planning children for quite a while yet, but no birth control is 100% so I need to keep that in mind.

The Big Organization Project is going fine. Today I'm going to go through the books, which won't take very long, and then probably do a room-by-room sorting instead of a project-by-project sorting. I'll need to work on the living room and dining room a tiny bit today b/c Tim's parents and brother are coming over for lunch tomorrow. When I did the paper sorting that helped a LOT but there are just still a few tiny things to put away. Tim's parents are also going through a Big Household Sorting and we are probably going to have a mutual yard sale in June.

The cat's toilet training is going OK. Right now I am a little discouraged. I had water in the mixing bowl under the sitz bath last week, but "something" (not sure if it was that water or not) made Tuxedo want to go in the tub instead of the litter. So I went back a step and took out the water, and so far I've caught him twice in the past two days going where he is supposed to, and praising him for it. I just hope they will let me put the water back in there someday. I know this will all be worth it in the end when my cats will go right into the toilet and I don't have any litter to clean up from being spilled or tracked around the house, etc., but my light at the end of the tunnel feels like a dim pinprick right now and the tunnel feels like it's 5 miles long.

kitties accidently had a self-training day

I have to leave every morning to go to work before Tim does, but then he gets home after I do. So I get home this afternoon from work and find that Tim has left the litter arrangement (the mixing bowl/sitz bath combo) out of the toilet. (We have to take it out when we need to use the toilet since there is only one toilet in our apartment). Sometimes when it's on the floor the kitties will try to walk in it, but since it is top-heavy they spill it. There wasn't very much spill which means they probably only tried briefly to walk in it and instead gave up. I found something else in the bathroom too... in the toilet was a yellow tint. Since Tim and I ALWAYS flush after using it, I just knew it had to be one or both of the kitties. :) I was excited, but I went ahead and put their "rig" back into the toilet for now. The kitties used the potty. Woohoo. :) And they didn't appear to fall in, either, because there wasn't a big area of water where they had splashed around trying to get out or anything. So exciting. :)

litter hole about the size of a potato

Just a quick update before I leave for work. Last Thursday I finally cut the litter hole in the sitz bath a little larger. But immediately before that it seemed like there was no hole at all, because in the mixing bowl there was a TON of litter that had been spilled and scraped into it, so that covered up all the space between the bottom of the sitz bath and the bottom of the mixing bowl. So anyway on Thursday I cleaned all that out and made the hole about the size of a small potato now. I haven't had any poop on the toilet seat all week which probably means that both kitties are putting at least their front paws on the seat consistently. But I was watching one of the cats in action and she had her foot through the hole and was standing partly in the mixing bowl, partly in the sitz bath, and partly on the toilet seat. I was sad about this because I was hoping to delay putting water in the mixing bowl for another two cuts or so, until I had about half the sitz bath left, but after this Thursday's cut I'll have to go ahead and start the water in the mixing bowl. Oh well, just makes me closer to my goal I guess.

cat bathing experience (not as bad as you'd think)

Our kittens are 8 months old now, and despite collars and spray and those little drops that you put on their neck, they still scratch and I still see fleas on them on occasion. So I decided to give them their first bath. I was going to do it this evening after church, when Tim would be home to help me (he is working this afternoon). But we got reminded this morning that there is "Teen Talk" tonight (an additional little Bible study geared towards college-age kids). So I impulsively decided to give them their bath this afternoon... alone. I figured that I would go slowly and be patient with them as they got used to being wet, then being shampooed, then being rinsed off.

Side note here. You know how adrenaline gives you that "fight or flight" feeling? Well our cats are very much "flight" animals. They sometimes fight with each other and roughouse, but usually they do their own thing. They are non-confrontational over all and want to remove themselves from a bad situation. Like when I took them (in turn) over to my aunt's house. She has a grown dachsund (spelling?) and a little puppy dachsund. I took the cats over when I visited her last and they did not want anything to do with that puppy or its mama. They would slink away and try to make themselves small and wanted nothing more than that crazy little bouncy thing with the floppy ears to leave them ALONE. The puppy, of course, just wanted to play and didn't understand why her new friend kept trying to leave and ignore her.

Back to today now. I got everything assembled first, and the cats were both very curious as what was going on. I had two buckets of warm water in the bathtub, a plastic cup, the little bottle of shampoo, and a towel. I decided to bathe Rainy first since she is a little more skittish than her brother. Her claws went out when I set her into the (dry) tub, but I had my hands on her and petted her and tried to help her calm down. As soon as I started pouring water on her though, she decided that this was a very bad situation indeed and kept looking for openings to try to escape. I found that if I kept my hand on the back of her neck she was less likely to try a flying leap out of the tub. I wanted to stop her escaping also so she wouldn't get hurt. I found out that wet cat feet are a little slick when she and her brother slipped in the tub a couple of times. The most rebelling she did was when it was all over and she was rinsed, and I wanted to towel dry her slightly. As bad as the bath situation was, she thought that being briefly confined in a towel was MUCH worse and so I didn't get a lot of drying done. She shook herself off and started to put her hairs back into place as I started in on her brother.

Now Tuxedo is generally a milder cat, but he is much larger and has much thicker fur than his sister. I started to put him in one of the buckets to help me get him wet, since when I just poured water over him it ran off his thick long hair. I got him in maybe as far as his back legs and he would go no further. I relented and put him back into the tub. I didn't want him to thrash around and get stuck underwater and drown. Whenever I would hold my hand on Rainy's back she would stay pretty still, but Tuxedo kept moving around, always looking for a way of escape. When he was rinsed off I towelled him while he was still in the tub, then let him escape to groom himself too.

They are both doing OK now and I think they'll forgive me for this indignity I made them suffer. I went to let them out of the bathroom a moment ago and the came right out like it was no big deal. Tuxedo was still ruffling his feet with every step, but Rainy purred when I scratched her still-wet neck. I am surprised they came out of the bathroom at all since I left the heat lamp on in there to keep it warm. They've never been soaking wet before and I thought they would be cold. But maybe they were just trying to get as far away from the bathtub as possible.

Before today they LOVED to go play in the bathtub and drag their little balls in there, etc. It will be interesting to see if they continue to play there or if the trauma was too much for them. :)

the litter pan hole is now more than an inch

I cut the sitz bath hole a little larger this afternoon. Now it's a little more than an inch all around. I am still not ready to put water into the mixing bowl though. The hole is still too small for it to really have any effect. Things could get interesting here in a month or so because Tim and I may take a few days off to go see some dear friends in Alabama. They lived in Oklahoma for a while and I got to meet them. The husband even is the one that married me and Tim, but they had moved back to Alabama by the time of the wedding so we haven't seen them since then. Our best man, who currently lives in Texas, is going to be in Alabama when we plan to also... he is a preacher too and is going to hold a gospel meeting there. Some of you out there may call it a "revival". We would be gone about 5 days, and Tim's brother would come watch the cats for us while we were gone. I may or may not be ready for water at that point. Probably not. I probably will keep taking the "hole cutting" very slowly and then go a tiny bit faster after we get back from that trip. That would probably be easiest on all parties involved.

litter, little e-baby, lasik

Well I haven't had any trouble with the cats (except for the occasional miss because of their positioning, not them being obstinant and aiming badly on purpose), but I also haven't been enlarging the hole every Tuesday and Friday like I had planned. I did enlarge it tonight though and am thinking that once a week or so is probably a better rate for them. I did have to sit the sitz bath in a metal mixing bowl in the toilet since our litter technically isn't flushable even though it is paper. Right now there is no water in the mixing bowl. I am waiting until the hole is a little larger (it's about quarter-sized right now) until I add the water so I can still reuse the litter that falls through for now. Once I add water I will be going through litter much faster. Maybe I can start off with just a little water.

My "Nano Baby" is now 23 lbs, and 1 1/4 years old. The instructions said that when the first baby turns 3, you can press two of the buttons and a sibling is born. Then you raise THAT baby to 3 also and the game has its sucessful ending of a happy family.

Over Christmas, Tim called one of the LASIK facilities here in town because they were giving away some discount gift certificates. He wants me to have my eyes done. We'll have to use part of our tax refund to get a jump start on the payments. At least they have a 12-month interest free option. Anyway I had my initial consultation on Tuesday, to make sure my eyes were in the right condition to be eligible for the surgery, and they are. I am nervous now and excited. The surgery is 20 days from now. The countdown is on.