Binkies and Briefcases

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Maternity Photos

By: Stephanie1 Comment

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a dream of letting my weight balloon to almost 200 pounds, then posting half-naked pictures of myself on the internet, stretch marks and all. (kidding. sort of.) We keep it real, people.

My amazing talented friend, Satoko, took some maternity pictures for me over the weekend and I’m so excited to share some of them with you.
I’m officially in my 9th month, so I am HUGE. It probably would have been a better idea to do the pictures a few months back, but since this is probably the last time my body will be growing a new life I wanted to commemorate it.
I am really happy with the way they turned out, I just wish I would have scheduled an appointment when I had a few less stretch marks. It’s all good, though.

and because I told you we keep it real…

Mommy Guilt Is Dumb

By: Stephanie2 Comments

This year I’m kind of a Grinch. Not in a bad attitude sort of way, but in a rob innocent little children of decorations and experiences sort of way.

In the past 12 days, we’ve had a gas leak and I’ve been hospitalized twice for preterm labor issues. (Don’t worry, everything’s ok, I just started having contractions and some other gross labor-y symptoms at 34 weeks and since that’s too early to deliver they put me on a special medicine to stop them.) I’m at 35 and a half weeks now so we are getting really close to the point where it will be ok if she decides to come a little early.

Christmas Mom Guilt

So we (I) decided that this year we shouldn’t really bother doing much decorating for Christmas. We put up our pre-lit tree and that was it. No ornaments, no outside lights, no wreaths, nothin’. Nick was upset about the lack of ornaments, so we made a deal with him that any ornament he made at preschool or Sunday school could go on the tree. Then he started talking about when the Elf On A Shelf was coming. Geez, kid, you are 4. How do you remember that from last year? So I guess we might need to dig that out too, but I am not doing any of the adorable ideas from Pinterest. He can sit on top of a cabinet and stay there for 3 weeks.

I wanted to have apple butter canned to give away. I didn’t do it.

I wanted to have over a dozen heating pads made, I’ve only made half.

I wanted to make applesauce ornaments for the Sunday school teachers. Haven’t gotten to that yet. Not sure if I will.

I wanted to crochet a few scarves to give as gifts. I’ve made none.

We’re not making Christmas cookies. (Unless they are already decorated with the reindeer face slice and bake kind.)

The Christmas event at Dutch Wonderland (a local amusement park) and the ride on the train with Santa at the Strasbourg railroad? Not happening.

Neither is my tradition of going outlet shopping with a girlfriend.

We might not even wrap the kids’ presents to go under the tree. (Eddie & I debate this every year. I came from a family where Santa didn’t wrap presents because that is a lot of extra work/mess, but Eddie prefers Santa’s presents wrapped so that the kids can concentrate on one gift at a time and because it looks nice.)

I spent way more money buying store-bought gifts this year for the kids than I did last year when I made almost every single one.

My kids have hardly had any vegetables for the past several weeks because I’ve been feeding them Chef Boyardee and frozen chicken nuggets. (Well, they aren’t frozen anymore when I serve them.)

But why is it so hard to give yourself a break? Nobody’s expecting me to do anything. Lots of people have even asked if we were planning to even attend family holiday traditions because they would understand if I just wanted to stay home.

When Eddie comes home from work and starts cleaning up around the house because I didn’t do it I feel guilty.

When we look across the street and see the neighbors’ house all decked out and pretty I feel guilty because we’re certainly not giving them much to look at right now.

When I have to call and ask people to watch my kids for an indefinite amount of time because I’m being sent into the hospital again I feel guilty.

When I know the awesome plans I had to make people gifts this year and what they will be getting instead, I feel guilty.

Knowing my sister is spending her last college vacation ever staying at my house to watch my kids and cook and clean for us while I’m having my c-section makes me feel kind of guilty.

I know I shouldn’t because it’s really, really stupid.

I know everyone is happy to help and that I can’t do everything, but I also wanted to make this year extra special for Nick & Abby since they will be feeling left out when the new baby comes.

It’s dumb to think that they even care.

We try to focus more on Jesus’s birthday than the commercial side of it, but Santa will still be coming with every toy on their list, plus some. (Lucky for us all they asked for was an airplane and a Dora doll.)

There will still be cookies, although they might be Oreos. When you are in preschool a cookie is a cookie.

My family still gets fed. (And Nicholas still tells me, “Mommy, you are a good chef-er.” when I feed him frozen pizzas.)

They like driving around at night looking at other people’s Christmas lights.

They’ll probably look back at this year just like all the others, but I still know it’s different.

And at the end of it we’ll have one of the best Christmas presents ever, another one of these:

 
 
 

Our Little Scare

By: Stephanie2 Comments

First, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving holiday!

I wish I had a picture to go with this post, but it was pandemonium here for a few hours yesterday & I didn’t even think of taking one in all the chaos.

So…Sunday we were out of town visiting with our parents. When we came back that night there was a faint, weird smell in our house. Eddie & I looked at each other and were like, “What is that? Is that gas? We’d know if it was gas, right?” Like I said, it was very faint, we figured it was probably just because the heat had kicked on while we were out and you know how the heat smells a little funny the first few times it runs for the season?

Then yesterday (Monday) I took the kids out to meet my grandmother for lunch. When we got back as soon as I walked in I noticed the gas smell was much stronger. I called the gas company and they told us to get out of the house right away, leave windows open, and not to touch anything electrical. They said they would be responding immediately and that I should stay close to the property, if possible because they would need a homeowner present when they got there.

Gas Leak

So the kids and I waited outside. I grabbed a few toys from the garage on our way out and I had some candy canes in my purse to entertain them with. I called Eddie to let him know what was happening.

The gas company took forever to respond. I literally waited for almost two hours outside with a toddler and a preschooler and me being 8 months pregnant, just waiting & hoping our house didn’t explode in the meantime. The kids were terrible because it was supposed to be nap time & they were exhausted. At one point Nicholas tried to sleep in a pile of leaves in the gutter. It was not fun. At all. But I was very thankful that we’ve been having unseasonably warm weather for this time of year because it would have been a lot less fun if it was cold & icy.

Eventually, I called Eddie & my in-laws (my father-in-law works for the Baltimore gas company) to see how long it should be taking to respond. Eddie got annoyed & called the gas company again to ask how much longer it would be and they said they were very busy with emergency calls and they had no idea how much longer we would need to wait, so he called me back and said to call 911 and ask the fire department to come shut off the gas.

So I did.

About 5 minutes after that the gas company truck pulled up. I had a fleeting thought to call the fire department and tell them never mind, but we could already hear the sirens.

A lot of them.

And the next thing I knew, there were 4 fire trucks and an ambulance lining our street and lots of curious people looking on.

One of our neighbors ran over and offered to take the kids and the dog until things calmed down.

For 20 minutes or so there were about 20 uniformed men swarming our house and our yard, then the fire trucks started to disperse to respond to other emergencies, I’m assuming.

At this point, I was actually praying that there was a gas leak because I felt really guilty about taking all that manpower away from other actual emergencies, especially if it was going to turn out that I was just some crazy pregnant lady who thought she smelled something. Plus, it was super embarrassing that our house kind of looked like an episode of hoarders because we’d been out every day since Thanksgiving and hadn’t even finished cleaning up from that.

I’m not crazy. The guy from the gas company said he found two gas leaks. He showed me where they were after he’d shut everything down and it was safe to be in the house again. The bad news was that they don’t fix them, we’d need to get a plumber out and he thought it would be a while before that happened because apparently there were a crazy amount of emergency gas leaks in our area yesterday. (?)

I called Eddie back to update him & he was able to get in touch with a plumber, but they didn’t know when they’d be able to get out and they said that if the furnace was affected they might need to order parts and it could take a few days before they could fix it.

That meant we’d have no heat, hot water, or use of our stove indefinitely. That’s not a situation that’s ideal for a very pregnant lady with very young kids, so I started making calls trying to find a place I could take the kids. We were fortunate enough to get several offers but decided to go to my grandmom’s house.

I had already loaded a suitcase in the car and was on the way out the door with the kids when Eddie called and said he was on his way home early, the plumber had called and said he could be there in 45 minutes. The kids and I stayed put, hoping that the plumber would be able to fix it and we wouldn’t have to go anywhere after all.

And he did! Yay! The plumber, Charlie from Haller Plumbing, was very nice. He could only find one of the leaks, which made me very nervous since the guy from the gas company had shown me two spots, so he ran 3 separate leak tests to prove the other leak the gas company found had been a false positive. Then before he wrote out the bill he asked if we had a printer and told us that we could print a coupon off of their company website to save us $25 off the bill. AND when Eddie asked him about a totally separate issue we’d been having with the furnace giving off too much condensation, he went ahead and fixed that for free.

If we had to have a gas leak, I’m glad that this was the way everything went down because everything turned out fine.

Guess what the problem was?

One of the nuts was loose at a joint.

I think Eddie was a little annoyed that it took an entire day, the gas company, 4 fire truck crews, an ambulance (I still don’t know why they sent an ambulance, but they did, maybe in case there was an explosion while they were here?) a plumber, and a $200 bill to fix something he could have done in 30 seconds with a wrench, but once you smell gas you don’t have much of a choice.

Gas leaks are really serious (as in your entire house can blow up if you do so much as turn on a light switch) so if you ever smell the sulfer-ish rotten egg smell, get out of your house and call your gas company or the fire department right away.

The other thing I learned is that I should probably keep an emergency kit in the car with extra clothes, diapers, dog food, toiletries, etc. in case something like that happens again because the whole time we were stuck outside I was thinking “What I am I going to do if we can’t go back in at all today?” “I only have 2 Pull-Ups for Abby and a change of pants for Nick in my purse…” “Shoot. I should have grabbed the sippy cups…” and making a list of stuff I was going to need to go to Target & buy just so we could get through the night. It would have been much easier if I hadn’t been worrying about that too.

Lessons learned, I guess.

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