Did you miss me?

It's been over a year. Wow. Oops. Sorry. I know you missed me. Blogger looks entirely different.

So, what's new, Internet? I have a toddler now- a beautiful, wonderful, brilliant child. Life has been wonderful, although very, very different than it used to be.

I'm busy. Before The Kiddo popped out, I was unemployed/underemployed/or a student. My life was my own. And now it's... well, it's most definitively NOT my own.




I have thoughts on gun control. But really, so many people have said it so much better, and when it comes to this blog, I've always had a problem with not trying to say things I know very little about. But I'm angry and I'm frustrated with half my Facebook friends who seem to think it's ridiculous that private citizens can own semi-automatic weapons when our own police force only has "small handguns." (Yeah, someone said that. Seriously.)



Next month, I'm upgrading my carry gun. I'm not sure to what- something smaller than what I have. I was all set to spend the money, and then realized that another gun means I have to get a bigger safe, and a new carry holster, and lord help me if it's in a caliber I don't have, I'm not even sure where to find ammo in stock right now. It adds up.

(Was going to upgrade last month, but our cat got pretty sick, and the money for vet bills came out of my Gun Fund. I'm not sure it was worth the money, but you do what you gotta.)







So what else? I haven't touched my spinning wheel in a year. I sewed half a quilt during nap times, I hope to actually finish this one for once! I hardly ever go to the range. My life has gone from "slightly boring" to "child-centric and even more boring". But I'm happy, and that's what matters.

My Moments

About once a week, I drop BabyCakes off at her grandmother's house so I can get some "me" time. I tell my mother-in-law that I'm running errands or going to the grocery store or going back to my house to mop the kitchen floor. And sometimes I do that.

But sometimes I go eat sushi.


I drive to the nearest sushi bar, about twenty minutes away, and I sit alone at the bar and order a spicy tuna roll and a beer, and I sit quietly for an hour and enjoy the silence. Usually this occurs at about three in the afternoon, so the place is deserted. I think the staff may think I'm insane. I don't really talk, I don't do anything at all, just slooooowly drink my beer and eat my food in silence.

My husband doesn't even know I do this. I don't know why I don't tell people. I'm afraid that my mother-in-law will judge me, I'm afraid that all of my free time should be spent rushing around trying to get the million things done that inevitably get left undone when all of your time is eaten up by caring for and ensuring the survival of a tiny human. I feel guilty- we're not hurting for money too badly, but this is totally an unnecessary expense, and we're saving up for a million different things- college, vacations, renovating the bathroom. The kitchen floor really does need mopping, and I've got a hundred tiny errands to run that are much easier to do when I don't have to lug around fifteen pounds of angry, hungry baby.

But I do it anyway. I need the reminder.

It reminds me of a time when we had the disposable income to grab sushi lunches. It reminds me of a time when I had the time to go out to eat lunch. It reminds me of a time when I was closer to twenty than thirty, when my time, my attention, my effort, my life was all about me. It reminds me that I am a person and sometimes I need to take care of myself.

Mostly, it reminds me that my child, as amazing and wonderful as she is, is not the center of the world. Sometimes she has to be the center of my world, and that's how it should be... but I get lost in all of the diaper changing and shoving a breast in her mouth and soothing and bouncing and holding and shushing and singing and dancing. I need reminders that life goes on around me. I need a reminder that someday this will all be over and I'll be able to go out and grab lunch by myself. That someday all of this swirly, crazy, rushing hurricane of infancy will pass, and it's all going to be okay.

Back in the game

I have a gun on my hip again.

Damn it feels good.


I haven't been shooting in over a YEAR. I abstained during my pregnancy. And once Miss Baby Cakes came along... well, I haven't had a shower in three days. Where the hell am I going to find time to go to the range? There's a reason I haven't posted in a month in a half. Time is something I am severely lacking. (I realized today that I haven't vacuumed any floor in my house since the baby was born. I am disturbed.)



I am also conflicted about breastfeeding and shooting- I think there may be lead issues. I am having a hard time finding ANY information about lead and breastfeeding. I want to know what kind of risks are involved, how much lead will pass through breast milk, etc. But I just don't know. I stupidly forgot to ask the pediatrician at Miss Baby Cakes' appointment this week.




Oh, I should mention- this holster feels amazing. I have a Fugly from Dragon Leatherworks (whose new website is astoundingly well put together.) I reviewed it a while ago, and I stand by what I said. The only problem I'm having right now is that the leather had contoured to my body- and now that I've had my abdomen contorted and tortured in order to make a human, my body isn't exactly the same. Turns out my hips are a little wider, and things aren't shaped the same. I think a few days of wear and the leather should meld itself to the, ah, "new" shape of things.




I never ended up carrying while massively pregnant. The last time, I was about four months pregnant. After that, I was just too big. The main problem was that wearing a belt was impossible. I spent days and days trying to find some way around this problem. A shoulder holster didn't work on account of my breasts- especially because pregnancy seemed to have "blessed" me with double the assets I previously had. I tried practicing an ankle draw, but my usual clumsiness was amplified greatly by my shifting center of balance. The closest thing I had to a solution was a belt system with THREE belts and my holster sitting on the middle belt at 2 o'clock- but it was unwieldy and my growing girth meant the entire system would have to be rejiggered constantly.

:-)

A baby girl. Born at the beginning of August. My life is complete. I didn't understand anything before now. (I don't understand anything now, either, but at least I understand that!)


Will get back to blogging when my life calms down. Which, people keep telling me, will be when she leaves for college.

Update

I was reminded that I hadn't blogged in a while.

No baby yet. Despite me poking my stomach and shouting "HURRY UP AND GET HERE ALREADY", she's remained firmly planted inside. My due date is on Friday- so it's not like she's overdue, I'm just so sick of being pregnant. It's hot. It's humid. I feel incredibly heavy and bloated and disgusting, and I am very sick of having to pee constantly. I miss my old bladder. Old bladder, I never appreciated you.


I've been cleaning. Lots and lots of cleaning. I didn't really understand this whole "nesting" thing, until I was sitting on the couch last week, and I noticed a stain on one of my window blinds. A half hour later, I found myself in tears as I scrubbed at that vinyl with bleach to find that the stain was refusing to lift. It's still there. I don't know what it is or why the magic of bleach failed me, but that stain is driving me insane. Like the baby will refuse to come unless the house is free of tiny beige stains on window blinds.



Keep your fingers crossed for me. That this baby comes soon, that I have a good birth, that she's healthy and happy and wonderful, and that I don't go absolutely bonkers with the waiting!

Baby Crap

Babies need a lot of crap.


I have spent the past year or so of my life decluttering. I've been throwing away all of the useless sh*t I've amassed over the years, because I realized that we had way too much stuff.

So I purged and cleaned and sorted- threw away lots, gave away a ton of stuff on Craigslist, burned some of the flammable stuff in the firepit (a failed chair experiment ended up blazing up in a very awesome way due to the spray paint and chemicals I'd poured on there!) And I think I have about half the stuff I used to.

I was happy. Our house was less cluttered, there was more storage space for the useful things, and I just generally felt better.




Then I got pregnant. And apparently, babies need things. A LOT of things.



And now my entire house is strewn with baby crap. I'm in the middle of trying to sort through it all and put it away and find where everything goes. I am entirely overwhelmed at how much crap a baby needs. A baby cannot possibly need this many clothes. A baby cannot possibly need her own special towels. We're cloth diapering (at least trying to!) and that brings with it a giant laundry basket full of diapers. Slings and carseats and bassinets and playpens and safety gates and rattles and pacifiers- there's just too much stuff.




I am very grumpy this week that my peaceful and calm living room is strewn with baby crap as I attempt to figure out where to put everything. At first, I thought it was because I like a nice clean room, and the mess was bothering me. But now I realize- it's because this is just a sign of the times to come, and how chaotic and confusing the rest of my life is going to be.

I miss guns

I miss guns. So much.


I haven't gone to the range... well, it's been quite a few months. Since September, I think. I know that I shouldn't go while pregnant. But... I miss it.


I haven't been carrying. I can't. There's just no way. Dennis over at Dragon Leatherworks tried to help me out with finding a way to carry in my "delicate condition" (ha!), but I couldn't find any method that worked. I took belts and ropes and velcro and spent several days wearing bizarre belt rigs around the house, but nothing seemed to work. I couldn't get the holster to stop falling down, or if I managed to stabilize the holster in one place, it would ride up when I went to draw. Not to mention my constantly growing belly added too much of a difficulty.

Shoulder carry doesn't work, because... well, when you get pregnant, a "funny" thing happens to your breastal area. (Breastal is a word now.) It gets larger. And I have been, um, blessed in this area, and seem to have doubled in size. (I never thought I'd say this, but my boobs are too big. It's ridiculous. I really, REALLY hope they go back to normal, because I don't think I can deal with boobs this size for the rest of my life.)




I miss the relaxation of going to the range. I miss the smell of gunpowder. I miss the percussive sensation that reverberates down my chest when I pull the trigger.




I got a poison ivy rash on my right hand. On my index finger. Mr. HusbandDude started cracking up as I was complaining to him about it. I asked him what was so funny, and he said "You've got an itchy trigger finger!"

I haven't done any gardening this year.

My front gardens are a MESS. Mostly weeds. A random petunia. A VERY random petunia- first of all, it's white- I've never planted a white petunia in the three years I've lived here- so where is this plant from? And it seems to be growing smack dab in the MIDDLE of my small azalea bush, making it look like the azalea has suddenly sprouted some very weird flowers. I'll leave it for now, so long as it doesn't start choking out the azalea. (Which gave me about twelve blooms total this spring. I think I need to fertilize more.)


I have hops growing, though! Last year, I ordered some hops rhizomes and planted them in various places around the yard. And none of them grew. To be fair, the rhizomes did sit in my fridge for about a month before I got around to actually planting them, and I just figured I'd killed them. So I shrugged and moved on with my life.
Until two weeks ago, when I noticed a very bizarre weed in the garden next to my front porch. I pulled it out, and at the end of the long root was... my hops rhizome? It was a hops bine! There were three more hopes bines (not vines! Bines!) in the immediate vicinity, although those aren't attached to the original rhizome, so it's a mystery as to where they came from. I shoved the bine back in the ground, and now they're growing happily- the big bine is growing a couple of inches a day. I put a four-foot arbor next to them to give them room to grow, but I think they're going to end up climbing up the front porch overhang.


I keep wanting to go outside and plant things, but bending over when seven (almost eight!) months pregnant is hard. I pulled into the garden center parking lot today, intending to get a few fast-spreading flowers and some herbs, and then realized it's going to be 95 degrees tomorrow, and my pregnant butt is going to be very unhappy working in the garden, what the hell was I thinking? So I guess that will have to wait.




I did plant some basil in a pot in my windowsill, and it's coming up nicely. When it comes time to thin out the seedlings, I think I'll transplant half of them into another terracotta pot, and then shove that in my front garden, because you can never have enough basil.


I've given up on pulling out the dandelions that seem determined to take over every garden bed in the yard. There's just too many, and every time I pull one out, it seems like they go hydra on me, and two take it's place. It's insane. So I gave up.


Poison ivy has also invaded one of the front beds, it seems. I thought it was a maple seedling that sprouted, but it's looking more and more like poison ivy. Mr. HusbandDude sprayed Round-Up on it, and now it's a shriveled mess, but I'm worried where it came from and if more will take it's place. (Random side thought- I wonder if my baby will be immune to poison ivy like I am?)


I had such grand plans for the yard this spring. We even worked "Yard And Plants" into the budget this year. I was going to tear out all of the bushes in the front of the house and put in some taller lilacs and shorter, fuller bushes, and trim the Japanese maple way back to a more manageable size, and replace the stupid ugly dinky bushes along the front walk with something that doesn't need to be trimmed every two weeks. If there was money and time, I was even going to tear up the front walkway (which is crumbling pink sandstone) and replace it with some gray patio tiles. It turns out that plans go out the window when you get knocked up.



Eh, there's always next year.

I am not good at this pregnancy thing.

Girl Scout cookie time has come and gone. I ordered one measly box of Thin Mints, since I figured I'm pregnant, and even when not pregnant, I am easily susceptible to the charms of chocolate. And the charms of cookies. And the charms of anything infused with mint. I thought that one box would be sufficient, and I would probably devour it in a day, but hey, it's just one box.


It has now been six weeks since the cookies entered my possession, and that box is still in my fridge. There's about five cookies left. I think that my subconscious is determined to savor every last morsel. Sometimes, I'll break off a piece of cookie and eat just that. I have never in my life eaten a box of something chocolate so slowly.


Mr. HusbandDude jokes that I am not very good at being pregnant- I'm not doing the late-night pig-outs, I crave very few things, and what I do crave is usually a nice salad with olive oil and vinegar, or watermelon, or occasionally, a nice cut of steak. He has not been sent out for ice cream once, and in fact, he purchased me some Rocky Road that has been in the freezer for about a month, being eaten slowly, one scoop at a time, and usually with diced fruit piled on top. I was experiencing dizziness before meals, so I started tracking my food intake- and now I need to make a conscious effort to eat more calories and more protein. We actually had to switch to whole milk so I could get enough fat in my diet.



I'm the kind of person who can't keep junk food in the house for fear of eating all of it in one sitting. Mr. HusbandDude takes all of the Halloween candy to work on Nov 1 because I demand it stay away from me. Potato chips are forbidden, except in single serving sizes, or if I buy a bag, I must tell myself "This is Mr. HusbandDudes, it belongs entirely to him" and then not eat even a single chip. (And then feel very proud of myself afterward.)


And then I got pregnant, and suddenly I'm the kind of person who savors a box of Thin Mints? I eat ice cream in tiny serving portions with lots of fruit? I crave vegetables? Who am I? Who have I become? What is happening to me? And how do I make sure it continues after the baby pops out???

"Have fun!"

I went to the doctor's today. It wasn't my regular gynecologist- it was an emergency appointment for something that could have been an emergency, but in the end, thank the lord, wasn't. It was a male doctor, which I'm generally okay with, since a doctor is a doctor is a doctor, and as long as you've got on a white coat, I can mentally move past the awkwardness that is someone touching me in such an intimate area. Maybe sometimes I can move past that awkwardness a little too far, and end up into the zone of flippancy.


Doctor: "Okay, I'm going to digitally examine you now, I need to feel your cervix."
Me: "Yeah, sure. Have fun!"
Doctor: [pauses for a moment, and gives me a look.] [clears his throat] "Well, um..."
Me: [meekly] "I mean, yes, I am ready for that to happen."