Smells like sweet pickles

Tony is upstairs making batches and batches of pickles, and while I enjoy the smell of brine as much as the next gal, I am retreating to my blog (hello?  Anyone still out there? No?  Aw, bad bloggy Sarah neglecting her blog for so long).

Things that are happening right now:

1. I am nearly 14 weeks pregnant.  Yippee!  Hurrah!
2. There is only one jelly-bean fetus in there, as confirmed by two separate ultrasounds.
3. I have been having a pretty good pregnancy.  Not too much nausea, some fatigue, which seems to come in spurts.  My appetite is insane, and I am having a passionate love affair with 11:00 pm snacks, including, but not limited to, bologna and kraft singles sandwiches, two things I normally do not keep in the house.
4. Kees has discovered that he is a 2-year old, and should act accordingly.  Most of the time, he is still a good little boy.  Other times, however, I just want to put him in his room, close the door, and wait for him to turn 18.
5. Kees speaks in sentences now.  He is a truly bilingual child, and when he doesn’t quite know the right word, he just adds “ee-nay” (or for you francophones, “-iner” to the end of words he does know.  This is how we get sentences like: “Kees bonkiner pied again.”  What does this mean?  Kees bonked his foot again.  See, he does not know how to say bonk in French, but surely, since all French words end in -iner, adding that sound to the word bonk MUST be right!
6. Sacha is freaking smart.  The other day, he came up to me and said “Mommy, I have a hypothesis.”  I asked him what his hypothesis was, and he replied “My shovel looks like a grader shovel, so it should pick up rocks.”  When I asked him what the word hypothesis means, he said “a hypothesis is a word that you can test out.”  Not bad for a 3-year old!
7. Sacha still relies on Daddy to go to sleep and stay asleep at night.  Not too sure how we are going to get over this hump (again).  We had him broken of this habit, but then we were on holidays, and sharing beds in hotels, and now we are back to square one.  The only issue now is that we have to get him sleeping alone because Kees is getting ready to move out of his crib into a twin bed.  And where is this twin bed?  On the bottom of the bunk bed that Sacha currently sleeps on.  Kees sleeps all night.  Sacha does not.  Sacha needs to start sleeping all night so he can move to the top bunk and Kees on the bottom.  This must be accomplished well before the baby comes (I am due at the end of Feb) because baby will be taking over Kees’s room.  All part in parcel with having a 3 bedroom house and 3 kids.  I  have thought of putting baby with Kees, but that would involve buying another twin bed…LeSigh.
8. Tony is learning the art of home preserving.  He is currently making pickles, sweet pickles, and has already made pickled beets.  I, on the other hand, have made about 50 jars (those little 1-cup jars) of various jams and jellies.  Oh, and I waded into pressure canning territory and canned 7 quarts of spaghetti sauce.  Now, I am taking a bit of a break from canning until the tomatoes are ready and Operation Salsa kicks into effect.  I made roughly 30 pints of salsa last august, and I only have 3 left.  Salsa is a vital condiment in our house.
9. Sacha is turning 4 this week, and I have promised him a dinosaur party complete with dinosaur cake.  This will be a feat if I can pull it off…cake decor is NOT my forte.
10. We are  T-17 days from our New Brunswick trip! Just Tony and I.  No kids.  For 6 whole days. I am really excited to go, nervous about leaving Sacha (Kees will be fine) and so pumped to see my friend Lynn! I searched online today to see if I can bring my knitting needles on the plane, and I totally can.  YES!! I cannot sleep on planes, so I may as well make socks!
11. I am rewatching the entire LOST series.  In bed before I go to sleep.  I know, I am a nerd.  It really is better the second time around knowing how it all wraps up.  And yes, there WAS foreshadowing even in the first season.
12. I am in need of a good read.  Suggestions in the comments are appreciated!

Over and out, bitches.

Seeing is good

On our first night of our mini kid-cation, Tony and I decided to take in some wine tasting, compliments of our lovely hotel.  We tasted.  We liked.  We tasted more.  We discovered that we were allowed to taste two full glasses of wine free of charge.  And so we did.

We then went down to the lobby to decide where we would eat for the night, and I noticed that there was an optician shop attached to the hotel.  My glasses had been bothering me, as the arms were too tight behind my ear and known to give me headaches.  I thought it would be a good idea to get them adjusted.  He adjusted them, but pointed out to me that one of the arms was weak and a little too floppy in the spot where the metal was welded to the plastic.

“See how it wiggles here?  That means it is very close to snapping.  That is a manufacturer’s defect, so you should probably take them back to where you bought them,”

he told me.

“Oh?  Wiggly like this?” I asked, touching my glasses and trying to get a better look through the eyes of a drunk.

Snap.

Oh shit.  My glasses are in two pieces. My only pair for the entire weekend.  My other pair were at home.

“Hmm,” the optician said. “I could put some solvent on those to try and get them to hold together until you can get home, but you’ll have to let them sit flat on a table for a few hours.  Do you think you could handle that?”

“Well, I have my seeing-eye husband with me, so I think I will be ok,” I replied, with as much wit as a semi-intoxicated mother-in-hiding-from-her-children could muster.

So he solved the glasses, I brought them up to our room, and we decided to saunter down to our favourite nacho destination, Julio’s. Of course, I could see nothing.  I was a little off balance from the vino, a little blind from the lack of eye wear, and not walking too well.  Tony thought it would be funny to push me into things, just to test my blindness.  Or gymnast-worthy balance.

Seeing how I was already blind and unable to use my knees properly, I decided to have another drink at Julio’s, along with the most amazing nacho platter I have ever had.  We ate, we laughed, we belched, we plowed through a Mexican fried ice cream in less than 20 seconds.  It was pure awesomeness.  Other than being blind and stuff.  We paid our tab and decided to head over to Chapters, a rather large bookstore that we frequented a lot when we were poor starving students in university.

I walked into Chapters on Tony’s arm, then remembering that I couldn’t see anything more than 10 cm from my face.

“Hey, look at this!” Tony would say, showing me the book he was flipping through.  Ha ha.  I can’t see.  Dumbass.  What the heck was I doing in a bookstore when I couldn’t see anything on the books?  I could hardly make out the labels above the shelves that tell you what section you are in.  Oddly, I ended up in Women’s Studies and Military History.  Fun times.  Seeing how those are not really my passion, I headed to an area where I knew I could have fun: the Thomas train table.

Eventually, Thomas got bored with me.  I sniffed my way around the store, trying to follow the stench of Julio’s farts coming from Tony’s bum.  Eventually, we were reunited, and we walked back to the hotel.

Back in our room, I reached for my glasses, so eager to join the seeing world again.  I went to put them on.

Snap.

Frick on a stick!!

Alright, bring on the tape.  I can rock the geek look if I have to.

No sympathy from this corner

My husband is out of town for a work-related conference.  I am thus left with the boys: a 2-year-old who doesn’t know how to sleep and a 10 month old with a nasty-ass cough.

He called me yesterday, telling me how tired he was.

“Why?”

“Oh,  we were partying until 2:30 in the morning. Then we had to wake up at six.”

“Was the party in your room?”

“No.”

“Well, then you could have left and went to sleep.  No sympathy from me.  You want to know how my night was?”

“How bad was it?”

“Kees woke up at 11:30, Sacha woke up at 3:30, Kees woke up at 5:20, Sacha woke up at 6, then I slept in his bed until 8:00 when we all woke up.”

Then he told me he had to go  because the taxi taking them all to the dinner theater was leaving.

Bite me.  I feel so bad for you.

Happy Birthday, I’m Sorry

It was my husband’s birthday yesterday.  I may have let the ball drop a little.

I’m allergic to diets

Tony joined Weight Watchers a couple of weeks ago.  He has been wanting to lose weight for a while (he is about 40 lbs heavier now than when we met).  I, the amazing chef and probable cause for his weight gain, have decided to help him out by cooking less “good”.  A challenge for me, I know. Not to toot my own tuba, or anything.  I’m just that good.

I made some banana bread last night, following a lower-fat recipe and substituted Splenda for sugar.  I tasted the batter, and it tasted alright.  Then, I started to feel ill.  Vomity, even.  I waited for the bread to come out of the oven, then sliced some for myself.  I chowed it down, and still felt ill.  In fact, I was writhing on the couch from the nausea. It felt like I was pregnant with Sacha “I make my mommy puke” Adam all over again.

I told Tony I thought I was allergic to Splenda.  He laughed.  Said it was impossible.

I felt sick all night.

I felt fine when I awoke this morning.  I noticed that Tony and Sacha had enjoyed a couple of slices of bread and left a few crumb pieces on their plate.  I ate them up, not thinking anything of it.

Now, I feel like poop on a stick.

I think I am allergic to diets.

Aw, well.  Back to fried perogies with bacon for me!

Too much food on a tiny plate

Bloggers usually pour their lives onto the interwebs to release some tension in the hopes that someone will leave a comment telling them that they are not alone.  Right now, however, I am not really being a good blogger.  I have way too much on my plate, and despite the need for relief and some sort of sedative, I just don’t want to bore the netz with my seemingly insurmountable pile of poo.  I will let you in on powerpoint version of it, but not bore you with benign details:

1. Baby is due in 19 days.  It dropped over 2 weeks ago, making the carting around of a 20 month old a real pain in the ass/back/tummy/body in general.
2. Our house has been on the market for over a month and no offers.  All of the activity in our area is in the low-shitty-leaky-basement price range and the high-massive-driveway-parks-20-cars price range.  We are in the middle with a  beautiful home that is in move-in condition.  No one is biting.
3. We have to sell our house by mid-July, as we are set to take possession of our NEW home on the other side of the country at the end of July, and our down-payment for that house is sort of, well, THIS house.  Besides the fact that I don’t want to be paying 2 mortgages.
4. The little dude is in a total sleep regression.  Woke up 3 times last night, for example.  Fights us to the death when it is time for sleep and wakes up in the middle of the night convinced that it is day and wants to go outside and play.
5. The husband is having anxiety issues which I have never witnessed prior.  He has generalized anxiety disorder and did have panic attacks before I met him, but I have never witnessed the effects of this disorder until now.  There is so much going on in our lives that is completely out of our control and it is greatly affecting him.  He has been on the brink of a panic attack more than once over the past few days.  Good times.  I told him he needs to get laid, but then remembered whose job that is.

In conclusion, I hope this explains why my posting has been infrequent and blah (at best): too much food on a tiny plate.

I promise to post when the baby comes.

Caution: Wii Pregnant

We be Wiiing.

Despite the ridiculous difficulty in obtaining a Wii in most of Canada (anywhere you look, they’re back-ordered or out-of-stock), we got one.  Last weekend.  It was a great weekend.  I whooped Col. Mustard’s ass at everything, despite my being huge with baby.

I thought this weekend would be an easy victory.  HA!  Turns out the Col. has been practicing.  A lot.  Especially at tennis, which I have actually played in real life, while he has not.   I don’t know how many best-of-fives we played last night, but they all ended after 3 matches, and never in my favour.  He can hit those balls and make them go so fast, while mine just lob over the net with a nice pregnant arc.

The Col. decided to run on the elliptical after trouncing me at tennis, but I wanted to redeem myself at something, anything.  So I decided to take up a new sport: bowling. Nice low impact, not really cardio, I thought it would be great.  And it was. I am the MASTA of bowling.  I played until I racked up my skill level to 784.  Then I noticed that my butt really hurt.  I was using muscles I didn’t know I had anymore, so I decided to call it a night.

My ass thought otherwise.

My ass and lower back ached so much that I couldn’t sleep for most of the night, on top of the regular night-time wakefulness a pregnant women suffers in her third trimester. Luckily for me, the Col. woke up with Sacha and took him to church while I tried to sleep in.

They just got back from church.  Turns out there was a pancake buffet breakfast.  I ate Cheerios at home.  Serves my heathen-wiiing-ass right, I guess.

——-

I welcome any tips on how to play Wii tennis and spike those balls so I can beat my husband,  whose advantage seems to lie in the fact that he is so clearly accustomed to playing with his.