Tuesday, January 06, 2009

This made me laugh out loud.

We have just 90 days until our due date with this baby. That is so hard to believe. What it really means is that we actually have less than 90 days since this baby will arrive about a week earlier by scheduled c-section.

I’m feeling the misery of the third trimester - mostly in lack of sleep and general aches and pains. I actually feel pretty good generally, but I’m really tired all the time and I ache at the end of most days.

On the happy front, I love feeling the baby moving around in there. This baby is as active as Jesse was, most often in the middle of the night. That is the best part of pregnancy, if you ask me.

I have the glucose test on Friday and I’m going to ask for a note to clear me for my travel next week. The airline probably won’t ask about it, but I’ve been told I look huge often enough that I don’t want to take any chances of being rejected for my flights, especially after the lady gave birth over the Atlantic last week. What I wish is that I could upgrade to business class for a bit more legroom, but government regs don’t allow for that. So I’m just praying for no delays and a smooth flight both ways. And maybe an open seat near me so that I might be able to stretch out a bit. Something to help the almost certain discomfort.

We still need to finish prepping the baby’s room. Mostly that means clearing out some junk that accumulated in there when we moved Jesse to the other room. And we need to set up his play area in the dining area so that’s in place before baby arrives. With another 4-day weekend coming for me (thanks to the inauguration), we should have a good chunk of time to work on those things and then we can sail to baby arrival. That’s my hope anyway.

We’re still working on names. I have a feeling we won’t have a final decision until the baby arrives the way the debate is going. And that’s OK with me. 

Monday, January 05, 2009

Since I’m moving my shop, I decided that rather than relist the old inventory in the new shop, I’d offer a huge moving sale.

If you’ve had your eye on anything in the past, now is the time to buy. Prices are definitely bargains!

Our 24-hour trip to West Virginia was much fun. We hit the road at about 3pm on Friday and arrived at Beau’s friends’ farm just before 5pm. Jesse managed to sleep only about 45 minutes - that was the extent of his nap for the day. Oops.

Anyway, the evening was relaxed - Jesse took to “Uncle” L and “Aunt” M like a champ. We had a nice dinner and then spent most of the night chatting and laughing. The jilted bride, A, arrived just before 10pm, so we got the scoop on the canceled wedding straight from her. Turns out the engagement is only slightly broken - the groom freaked out a bit and wanted to just postpone their wedding, not break things off completely. They’re working on reconciliation so we’ll see if a new (smaller - this one was going to be 250-300 guests) wedding is scheduled in the future.

Jesse did pretty well in his tent again, although we think the new surroundings and lack of nap threw him off. And I made the bad decision not to bring his blankie. Fortunately, they had a similar blanket on hand (their grandson’s) that Jesse latched on to when we put it in the tent with him. But he had a restless night, which meant that Beau and I had a restless night. I think Jesse finally settled into deep sleep at about 3:00am or so. The last time Beau reported the time was 3:30am. Jesse then woke up at 7:30am, so we think we got maybe 4 hours of sleep that night.

Saturday morning was more of the relaxed. It was a bright, sunny day and they live in a really lovely area with beautiful views from their windows. After breakfast, they all went out for a walk around the farm. They have beef cattle and one horse and just started to expand a pond into a lake. They took the two dogs (Australian shepherd and St. Bernard) with them and had a grand time. I stayed behind, drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying the quiet. A eventually came out and we chatted a bit until the others came back.

Jesse then went down for a good nap while we continued just chatting. Beau and I decided we were interested in buying 1/4 of beef. They have about 5-6 steers currently (Angus mixed with Hereford and/or some other breed that I can’t remember), 5.5 of them are spoken for already. We thought we’d ask my parents if they’d be interested in splitting the last 1/2 steer of beef. L&M have a local butcher they work with since they sell the beef themselves rather than selling to a larger operation or sending them to a slaughterhouse. So the appeal of truly organic, reasonably priced beef is too good to pass up. We do have questions about aging (that we didn’t think to ask at the time), but I think once we know about that we’re pretty much going to buy. Now we (and my parents) just need to figure out how we’ll store the beef from 1/2 of a steer. Fortunately we both have separate freezers, it’s just making the room when the time comes.

Anyway, we hit the road for home at about 3pm, with a quick stop at Hardees to appease my burger craving and got home at about 5pm. The whole first 30 minutes Jesse said, “I see cows!” and various other stuff related to the trip. We think that’s his first whole sentence. It was a good visit - easy and relaxing and much needed. Now it’s back to the grind of normal life in Northern Virginia.

We watched Traitor last night. I was a bit nervous that it would get preachy, but it was actually quite good. We both liked it and recommend it.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Friday, January 02, 2009

The wedding we were supposed to go to tomorrow was called off, but we’re heading to West Virginia to visit Beau’s friends this weekend anyway. So I’m working a half day here at home and then we’re loading up the car and heading out in order to beat the bad weather (there’s supposed to be a wintry mix in the lowlands, but his friends live on a mountain) and dark. It’s a short visit - we’ll head back home tomorrow evening.

My parents get back from London this afternoon. I’m looking forward to hearing all about their vacation.

My new shop is up and ready to go - BeadWire.etsy.com. I have my new logo/branding and everything. I love the new logo a lot. Now I just need a bit of dough so that I can buy new business cards and product tags to switch out the old. Most of my inventory is still in the old shop, but I’ll slowly be moving things over for the next few weeks.

Then it’s time to work on taxes. Fortunately, I managed to keep up with the accounting each month, so it won’t be a marathon like it was last year. I’ll be curious to see what the bottom line is from this year, especially since I basically took the summer off from the business all together - no sales and no new inventory in that time. I think I’ll end up in the black, but you never know until the numbers are all crunched.

Speaking of crunched - that’s the word that put me over the top in points to beat Beau in Scrabble on New Year’s Eve. We were playing with 9 tiles to speed up the game, so I didn’t get the bingo bonus points. But that word netted me 51 points. I actually ended up with the Q, X, and Z as well, which helped with the points.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Happy anniversary, my love.

It has been an amazing and wonderful three years of marriage with you. I know our future years together will be as blessed.

I love you!

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

I wasn’t going to tell this tale on the blog at all because the whole thing was supposed to be a surprise for Beau and he reads the blog, of course. But then the surprise was ruined with a couple ill-timed phone calls, so here it is for your enjoyment. Or whatever…

It all started when Beau’s cousin, who is a talented artist, send out cards to the family after the reunion. She had painted a lovely piece that featured the family homestead and included images of Beau’s Dad and Dad’s brothers with their parents when they were young boys and meaningful texts to correspond. The card itself was really lovely, on textured paper, and I thought it would be a nice thing to frame for Beau. I casually mentioned the idea to him at the time that we received the card (in the late fall) and he seemed to like the idea.

Click the link for The Rest of The Story…

Monday, December 29, 2008

You may remember this post from last week about the job possibility/promotion with a new unit in our agency.

I arrived at work this morning to find an email from one of the ladies that the former chief mentioned in our conversation. She basically just sent a reminder about the job postings, which I found encouraging. This lady does not know me at all, but the chief’s comments to her about me must have meant something to her to generate an email to me.

I finally found a few moments to check the online application. I love the new format that the government (at least our agency) is using for online applications. No more KSAs, just a simple questionnaire. And then a simple upload of the required documents. Even cooler, if you have uploaded documents previously, you have the option to reuse them, which I did since I didn’t need to do anything to update from when I applied for the potential promotion in my office during the summer. The position titles/descriptions are the same. The only document I would have updated is my performance appraisal since that was done in November, but with my boss out until Monday and the deadline for applying this Wednesday, I opted to just reuse the previous one. It was just as good.

I opted to accept only the next grade up as the lowest grade and I’m hoping that doesn’t screw my chances. It shouldn’t since I have the time in the current grade well covered (2+ years). So I’m all applied and now I wait.

I love a craptastic action movie when the mood strikes. Take The Transporter movies. I love those things and they are really not that great. So I expected to like Wanted, especially given the buzz it got when it was in theaters. I was disappointed.

A frustrated office worker learns that he is the son of a professional assassin, and that he shares his father’s superhuman killing abilities.

About 20 minutes into it, I turned to Beau and found that he had his mp3 player earphones in his ears.

“You aren’t liking it?” I asked.

“Not really, but I’ll give it bit longer to improve,” he said.

For him, it never improved. I didn’t hate the movie, and I thought the special effects were pretty cool. But I didn’t care about the characters at all, which made it hard to care about the weak plot.

“Can you curve a bullet like that?” I asked Beau at one point. He laughed and said he was lucky to hit the bullseye straight on.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen Wanted yet, don’t waste the time on it. I give it 1.5 stars out of 5 (for the effects).

It was really hard to come back to work this morning. At least it is another short week. I’m thinking about taking Friday off to make another long weekend. More on that in a second.

My parents flew to London on Saturday. They were originally going to go to New York City for the weekend, but then realized that it would be about as much money to spend a full week in London. I’m totally jealous. And I miss them, which is sort of silly since I rarely see them during the week anyway. They get home on Friday.

It’s hard to believe our 3rd wedding anniversary is on Wednesday. We have no plans for that night, other than to hang at home. I may see about ordering in dinner rather than cooking. I guarantee that we’ll be dead asleep well before midnight. We’re such an exciting couple.

We were supposed to attend a wedding this Saturday. I asked Beau to call the parents of the bride to double check that they were OK with us bringing Jesse along. If so, we were planning to get a hotel room for that night and then go visit his former church on Sunday morning. If not, then he was going to the wedding alone (it’s in West Virginia). Turns out the groom broke things off on Christmas Eve. I’m so sad for the bride. But the bright side is that we’ll still head to West Virginia to go hang with Beau’s friends (the bride’s parents), whom we haven’t seen in more than a year. He’s going to call them to see if us coming down on Friday-Saturday will work for them. If so, then I’ll take Friday off. If not, then we’ll go for Saturday and come back that night.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Just a few of the cutest from Christmas 2008…

Peeking through the It’s a Wonderful Life village.

The enormous tree and miniature person.

Feeding daddy Jelly Bellys.

A huge grin while playing with Daddy.

You must wear your paper crown when enjoying a traditional British Christmas dinner. This was taken before Jesse managed to kick his chair backwards to scare the crapola out of everyone.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

We have a full Christmas Eve ahead and will be at my parents tonight and all day tomorrow - no blogging for a couple of days.

I pray that you and yours have a wonderful Christmas and that you have a chance to really reflect on Whom we celebrate.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

I won’t go into details, but our former new Chief is the head of a new operational division at our HQ and has a boatload of admin slots opening up.  Two slots opened up this week that I feel are a good fit for me, so I emailed the Chief yesterday. He called me this morning to encourage me to put in for either one (they’re pretty much identical) - he called the person who would be the boss to put in a good word for me as soon as he got my email yesterday. He said he won’t be the ultimate hiring decider, but that he would have influence over the decider(s), so my chances at getting the job are great. He pretty much told me that he’d love to have me on board with his team.

There is huge promotion potential with this new position. Initially, it may only be a lateral, but I think I stand a good chance at actually starting the position at the next grade up and there’s growth from there as well.

I’d be an idiot to pass it up and my one hesitation about it is the location. I have been swearing for years that I would never work at HQ. For now, the team would work at HQ while they negotiate for separate space. And even if they manage to get the space they’re looking at, it would only be two buildings over. It’s not my favorite location in the area. But the chance to work for this guy and for this particular group is very appealing.

The timing could be interesting. Depending on when they make the decision on the candidates, and assuming I get the position, I could start before my maternity leave. He knows I’m pregnant, so he knows I’ll be out of pocket for a couple of months in the spring. I’m wondering if we could work the timing of my start to after my maternity leave ends. But that’s putting the cart before the horse...I still need to actually submit my resume.

And now I’m really nervous and excited.

So I was on my way out the door this morning and yelled up to Beau that I was leaving. He yelled back for me to wait so that I could see Jesse, who had just woken up. They came down the stairs and I got a great, warm grin from Jesse. He gave me a nice headbutt and a zerbert (at Beau’s prompting). Then Beau and I kissed and on a lark I asked Jesse for a kiss.

*hold on a sec, I’ve got something in my eye*

He leaned toward me and touched his lips to my puckered up lips.

I asked for a repeat and without hesitation he kissed me again.

I got my first kiss from my son this morning and my heart melted just a wee bit. It’s a great day.