Okay, this is going to be a random post full of random details about my life.

Unless you haven’t read anything on my blog lately, I am pregnant. Working on month 4 now. I’ve been bad and haven’t had any prenatal check-ups yet. But I figure at this point, I’m not too worried. It will be easier to deal with that after we move next month. That, and I’m procrastinating trying to find someone who is covered by my insurance who will do the prenatal care knowing that I am planning a home birth with a midwife. The one place I tried said they wouldn’t do it. They referred me to a birth center, and I haven’t asked my insurance if they cover that. But I’ll do it. Soon. I promise.

Morning sickness is almost gone. I still get queasy moments, but I don’t have to eat before breakfast anymore, and I haven’t thrown up for at least a week, so I know the queasiness will disappear soon.

I bought some wheat grass recently. It was on sale, and I figured that it would be good for the baby and me. I need all the nutrition I can get. (Speaking of which, did I take my second dose of prenatal vitamins today? I don’t remember.) For two days, my son loved it. I’d put it in his milk, and he would drink it as if it were chocolate milk! Then he decided he didn’t like it anymore. And I haven’t found a way to disguise it yet. His meals are too plain for that. Oh well… It was nice while it lasted! I, on the other hand, love the stuff. In juice or a smoothie. Especially a smoothie. Tonight I had it with a banana and blueberries. Mmmmm! That was bliss!

I wish it would stop raining. We are supposed to be out of this house by February 20. Since that’s a Monday and a holiday, we are having things picked up from here on the 17th. They have done some work, but it’s been raining so much that the contractor hasn’t been able to get as much done as would be ideal. That, and the other contractor who said he could do the septic, well, it turns out he isn’t licensed to do septic systems, and he didn’t know what he was doing, which meant he stalled and wasted two weeks. Because he isn’t licensed, we were able to void the contract, and Rafael got his money back last night. Thankfully the guy has an account at the same bank we do, so he was able to verify that there were funds for the check and the money was transferred instantly. This is good, because he needs to write a check tomorrow to the new contractor!

The long and short of it is that we may end up taking a neighbor of ours up on his offer to sleep in his tiny camp trailer. We spent a couple of weekends there this last summer. Rafael will take the bus to work (it’s cheaper than gas and will give him time to study that isn’t being interrupted by noisy children) and I will have the kids and the car. We have our freezer at his place already, but I hope we don’t have to stay there long, because the fridge in the camper is super tiny and Manny’s special diet requires that we cook double. But it will be nice to be back in the country, where the kids can run wild and explore and play outside. They are tired of our back yard here. It’s just grass, nothing else, unless you count the puddles from all the rain, and they just don’t seem interested in it anymore.

We are also filing suit against some of the people involved in the purchase of our home. I won’t go into details now, because the suit is just about to be filed, but let’s just say, I hope we win at least part of it, because we really need the money. Extra, unexpected costs, such as a more expensive septic system, have drained every last bit of money we have, except our $1,000 emergency fund (which is almost nothing for a family of almost 5). We even had to use the money we got to replace damaged goods like furniture and clothing to pay contractors. Which means we won’t have anything to replace those things with. Which means we can’t afford to buy them. Which means we lose the depreciation. We have lost so much money on this place, because we didn’t know a few things that we just didn’t know about knowing, being first-time home buyers. If we had known even one or two of them, we wouldn’t have made an offer! And I haven’t even begun to talk about how the stress has affected our family, and especially my husband…

But on the bright side, we do have a good lawyer. Honest lawyers are hard to find, but this one really seems to be. She bent over backwards to help us on the first part of things, getting a reasonable amount from the insurance company, for less than pretty much any lawyer would accept. So even if not for us, I hope we win something out of this lawsuit! I mean, 3 or 4 times she came to our home on her way home from work (she lives near us) to discuss details of this or that related to what we were doing, thus saving us the trouble of finding a babysitter and making a trip to her office (about 20 minutes away). And she’s always been on top of things, very prompt and assertive in dealing with each aspect of things. I can’t recommend Sandy Webb enough!

Something else I’ve been trying to do lately is be a bit more organized. Flylady has been helping me with that. If you’ve never heard of her, you should go check her out.

Which reminds me… it’s late and I need to go shine my sink and then go to bed. Manny was congested last night and didn’t sleep well, resulting in Mom and Dad not sleeping enough. So I need to go to bed earlier than I did last night and pray he sleeps peacefully all night!

Good night!

If you are familiar with the Flylady, you are probably familiar with the phrase, “You can do anything for 15 minutes.” Obviously, there are limits to that. I mean, unless you’re single, you probably can’t–and wouldn’t want to–limit your shopping to 15 minutes per store. But the idea is that if you don’t think you can do something, or simply don’t want to, you can make yourself do it for 15 minutes.

That’s how it was with me this evening. I had an orthodontist appointment in the late morning, but it’s an hour’s drive away and my husband needed to go somewhere else, so he dropped me off half an hour early. So we ate breakfast, packed a lunch for my son, and didn’t clean anything before we left. I ate lunch after the appointment (before the soreness set in) and took the train & bus back home–about a two-hour trip. It was 3:00 pm when we got home. And I was tired.

So instead of tackling the dishes and the laundry and such things, I sat down in a recliner and tried to nap. When my son decided to join me (but wouldn’t sit still), I put in a nice video for him to watch, turned the volume way down, and went to bed.

I got out of bed a little before 5:00, and was feeling rather groggy. Morning sickness had been mostly nil all day, and I still didn’t notice any, but I was tired and sluggish. Then my husband got home about 10 minutes later, and brought a whole bunch of fruit that he had gotten either free or cheap on the way home. I ate one of the oranges, feeling that I needed to eat something, and almost instantly my tummy began to complain. I moved away and sat down, hoping the feeling would go away like it sometimes did, but it just got worse. So I browsed facebook and tried to ignore my stomach for an hour or so, until I just couldn’t ignore it anymore.

I’ll spare you what happened next, but once I did what I needed to do and was feeling better, I ate a granola bar and decided that happy tummy or no (I was still not feeling 100%), I needed to do some shopping or we wouldn’t be able to eat cooked cereal in the morning (I’m hoping it will be gentle on my sore teeth–the orthodontist really tightened things up this time). So off I went to the store around 7:30.

When I got home at 8:30, I was feeling better, but I was also tired and didn’t want to face the kitchen. My husband had been very busy with things related to our house, so he wasn’t able to clean up–at least he had fed Manny while I was feeling so sick, so I didn’t feel it right to complain. But I didn’t want to clean up either. It looked like about a half hour of work to get the kitchen in order.

Then I remembered the Flylady and her favorite saying: “You can do anything for 15 minutes.” Yes, I told myself, I can clean the kitchen for 15 minutes. I’ll set a timer, and whatever is left when it goes off can wait until morning. After all, if we’re just having cooked cereal with nuts and fruit, there won’t be a lot of dishes after breakfast, so adding in a few from the day before won’t be a problem. And having some clean counters and a cleared-off stove will make breakfast so much less stressful.

So I put a cup of water in the microwave, set a timer for 15 minutes, and got busy. When the water was hot, I added a tea bag and left it to steep while I worked (I like to steep my tea a long time).

In 10 minutes, I was well over half way done. I stopped washing and rinsing  to clear and wipe the counters and stove, then washed a few more. When the timer went off, I took and extra 15 seconds to rinse the soapy silverware, and then took a look around. All that was left was my pressure cooker and a frying pan, neither of which I will need first thing in the morning. Everything else was done and the counters cleared and wiped.

And my reward? A nice cup of raspberry zinger tea. Mmmm!