What Tess does when we are doing school....

Today she has----

---gotten the dregs out of an empty peanut butter jar she found in the trash and schmeared it all over her legs and head.

---emptied a new container of baby wipes.

---emptied an almost new case of diet pepsi, carrying each can carefully from the kitchen to the living room couch.

---stashed all of her playdishes in the giant stock pot that lives under the kitchen sink.

---emptied the recycling can so many times that I finally moved it behind a baby gate.

---tossed a hamper of clean laundry all over the dining room.

She's a busy girl!

bedtime fun

When Kain went to bed, we found that Jack, who had already been in bed for an hour, had unwound most of a double roll of toilet paper. It started down the hallway and then criss-crossed back and forth across the room many times. He said, "I'm building a toilet paper road."

Nothing new under the sun

I. Feel. Like. Crap.

There, I said it. I always feel bad being all gripey and pissy when I'm pregnant, because I know it is a small cross compared with the blessing of carrying a healthy baby, and a couple of very sweet online friends have had miscarriages recently and so I feel completely ungrateful and ridiculous griping about something they dearly wish they were still dealing with,,,but there it is. I'm sooooo nauseated and soooo tired and everything is sooooo behind, schoolwork is behind, the house is trashed, I'm sooooo sick and tired of cooking food for these people that insist on eating EVERY DANG DAY, wah wah wah, would you please give me your hankie, "PHHHHHHHHTTTTTHHH", thank you so much.

This afternoon I was thinking, "This is way worse than I felt last time. Way worse. It's gotta be." And so I went poking back in my blog and found this post. And this one. And this one. And this one. So I guess not. Also, I am a big whiner, apparently. So, I hear by promise, with this post, to stop all whining about this first trimester and all its assorted unpleasantness. Besides, I can't offer it up if I whine about it.

And now...I'm off to fix dinner.

Six more weeks to the second trimester! Come on, week 14!

midwife visit, #1

We made our first visit to the midwife today. Here's a recap----

--My tentative due date is April 14th. I'm not terribly certain of my dates. In fact, the more I think about it the more I think this may be a bit early. Which is too bad, because it always is lousy to "be late", even when you know you probably aren't even really late...by the time that due date comes, you are ready to go!

--I've lost two pounds. Which is just dandy, cuz I've got it in spades to lose. Still, I'm tired of being nauseated. It's pretty bad this time, compared to the last two.

--I'm a bit anemic already...need to get some more vitamins.

--Otherwise, everything looks good. Fairly uneventful visit...too early to hear the heartbeat or anything exciting like that. My pregnancies always feel a bit surreal for me until I hear that heartbeat, like someone will say, "Well, we've made a mistake, you aren't really pregnant after all."

Now I've got to go fix dinner...My nausea really hits in the evening, so cooking dinner is a special kind of sacrifice. :)

making room for baby

We co-sleep in our house. We have a king-sized bed in our bedroom with a crib-turned-co-sleeper (by taking one side off the crib) bumpered up against it. Tess sleeps in the co-sleeper, and by early morning she will travel into our bed to nurse. Jack sleeps downstairs in a bedroom he shares with Kain, but by morning he has also traveled into our bed and snuggles up between me and John. Now that we have another baby coming, we have to start thinking about how to manage our sleeping situation. Frankly, my preference would be to get my hippy on and throw down a bunch of mattresses on the floor. Groovy. But I don't think my husband will go for that.

I'm thinking of putting a toddler bed in our bedroom and trying to get Jack to sleep in that when he comes upstairs. Then Tess can sleep between John and I and the baby can be in the co-sleeper. But honestly, most of the time we don't even wake up when he comes into our bed. And he's not really capable of understanding what we want him to do if we discuss it in advance. If we do wake up during the night and send him to the toddler bed, he is likely to start crying and wake up Tess. He will fight it hard, because he fights all change hard and gets very upset when things aren't like they are "supposed" to be.

Another option is to wait until closer to time and train Tess to sleep in the toddler bed. This may actually be easier. Even though Tess is younger, she is more flexible and a better sleeper in general.

Or we can do both...make up some kind of bed for Jack on the floor and try to get him to eventually reach the point of going there when he comes upstairs, and then also put the toddler bed upstairs for Tess and work on training her to sleep there.

Or we could go ahead and move Tess into the bedroom with Maria. The difficulty there is that they have very different bedtimes and I'm not sure how Tess would sleep through Maria settling down for the night.

Anyway...if you've made it this far, thanks for reading my rambling, barely coherent thoughts on the subject!

those bookshelves in the school room

Two people have asked about those white bookshelves attached to the wall in my school room pictures down there...I meant to mention those! So cool! Those are rain gutters! haha! Like the super long pieces of vinyl rain gutter that you can buy at Home Depot? I bought a huge piece for something like $4, and they cut it into pieces for me at the store. My husband screwed them into the wall. Make sure you find studs, because they will hold quite a lot of weight with books in them. I love them! I wish I had more wall space to put in more! I got this idea from The Read-Aloud Handbook.