week 23

it won't be long before i can't see my feet any longer.

how far along: 23 weeks

total weight gain/loss: not sure.

maternity clothes: yup, but i discovered H&M maternity line so that helped me expand my wardrobe a bit. (please save your lectures about the moral failures of buying cheap clothing because, yes, i know, i shouldn't be supporting a company like this, but i did...).

stretch marks: still none. (yet.)

sleep: getting slightly more difficult lately, due in part to my ability to stay asleep now and harvey's recent fondness for barking loudly in the middle of the GD night. ugh!

best moment this week: feeling her moving like crazy while i was in yoga class. i just broke out in a great big smile because i felt so connected to her!

movement: more and more, especially when i am still. perhaps this also impacts my lack of sleep.

food cravings: tillamook cheddar and icelandic-style yogurt (which is awesomely thick and has tons of protein!)

gender: female.

what i miss: being able to order a glass of wine at a restaurant. while i am drinking an occasional alcoholic beverage in the comfort of my home now that i am out of the first trimester, i don't feel right drinking in public or putting the server in an awkward position.

milestones: a few weeks back we got a call from the midwives that after the anatomy ultrasound they determined the baby was younger than we thought, so they moved the due date to dec 28. i got a little glum about the change, but i rationalized that i would rather have to adjust to a new due date at this point in the pregnancy than when i am DONE at the end. (i also secretly think they are wrong and that she will come closer to the original due date of dec 19. wishful thinking perhaps, but oh well.)

baby o updates

how far along: 21 weeks

total weight gain/loss: 8 pounds.

maternity clothes: a random combination of whatever fits my ever-expanding body (namely, my chest).

stretch marks: still none. (yet.)

sleep: inconsistent, but not horrible. and still entirely dependent on a that magic half tab of unisom. i might have to buy stock in this stuff. which reminds me, i think i might be out so an emergency trip to the store is now a must!

best moment this week: learning that our little baby o is a girl. somehow that makes this whole pregnancy thing feel less like i am harboring a parasite and more like i am growing a human being.

movement: she was moving so much during our ultrasound that we have to go back in a few weeks to allow the ultrasound tech to get all the required measurements. she clearly likes to bicycle kick her legs, which is fitting since she is joining this family.

food cravings: yumm! sauce and fresh tomatoes.

gender: so clearly a girl. we are getting more and more excited about this, as we were pretty surprised to learn we weren't having a boy.

what i miss: having a full day go by where i don't collapse on the couch in an afternoon haze.

milestones: realizing that the odds of our kiddo becoming a sponsored professional downhill mountain biker are actually much higher given that we are having a daughter. priorities, right? :)

and baby o is...

brandon and i were surprised today to learn that baby o is a girl, as we were both pretty certain it was a boy growing in there. so i guess a few of those "old wives tales" i shared last week might be on to something...

we are very excited, but have a lot of work to do in the name department and in terms of comprehending how one raises a daughter in a world that isn't always encouraging of women being themselves. for now, it is fun to say "she" and "her" instead of "it," as that moniker was not making me feel like we were expecting a baby.

there is no winning in this game

although we are far from parents [well, not that far; baby o is half-way cooked as of this week.], it seems to me that this whole parenting olympics competition is not for the faint of heart. who knew you could feel judgement about the decisions you make about parenting before you are even a parent?!?

the reality is that we are going to screw up and have to hang our head and admit that our "parenting plan" was naive. we will be wrong. a lot. hopefully we will be right a few times along the way too.

every time we tell people that we are pregnant we hear some version of "you two are going to be such great parents." there are some people that tell us this sincerely, but we have been hearing it so often that we have come to realize this is just what people say to people expecting a baby. [and now we wonder if every day might be opposite day?]

anyhow, it seems you can't win for trying, because someone somewhere [especially that wee bundle of joy] will condemn you for trying your darndest. i came across this list, and although it is a bit pessimistic, it is a humorous reminder for me that we are not even close to being in the running for the parenting olympics gold, silver, OR bronze. and i am ok with that.

PROOF THAT YOU ARE F*ING UP YOUR OFFSPRING NO MATTER WHAT

If you’re...	Then obviously...
Exclusively breastfeeding	THE BABY WILL NEVER SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT AND YOUR NIPPLES WILL FALL OFF, AND YOU’LL HAVE NO ONE TO BLAME BUT YOURSELF.
Exclusively formula-feeding	YOU’RE POISONING YOUR BABY, YOU MONSTER, DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT’S IN FORMULA? PRETTY MUCH JUST FECAL MATTER AND SCRAP METAL.
Sleep-training	YOU’RE ABANDONING YOUR BABY AND AS A RESULT IT WILL NEVER FORM A PROPER EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO ANOTHER HUMAN BEING.
Not sleep-training	YOU’RE CODDLING YOUR BABY AND AS A RESULT IT WILL DEPEND ON YOU FOR THE REST OF ITS NATURAL LIFE.
Co-sleeping	IF YOU DON’T ACCIDENTALLY KILL YOUR BABY BY SMUSHING IT IN THE NIGHT IT WILL PROBABLY GROW UP TO BE A SEXUAL DEVIANT.
Introducing solids at four months	YOU MUST WANT YOUR BABY TO CHOKE TO DEATH, DON’T YOU?
Still feeding your one year-old purees	YOU MUST BE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL PUSSY.
Making your own baby food	WHAT, MORTAL FOOD ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOUR PRECIOUS BABY, GWYNETH?
Not making your own baby food	CONGRATULATIONS, YOUR CHILD HAS JUST INGESTED ITS OWN WEIGHT IN ARSENIC.
Using disposable diapers	YOU MUST WANT TO SPEED UP GLOBAL WARMING WITH THOSE LITTLE SHITBALLS OF ETERNAL WASTE.
Using cloth diapers	YOU MUST BE THE TYPE OF HIPPIER-THAN-THOU MARTYR WHO ENJOYS BEING UP TO HER ELBOWS IN LITERAL CRAP.
Going back to work and hiring a nanny	YOUR CHILD WILL PROBABLY GROW UP CALLING YOU BY YOUR FIRST NAME
Staying home with your kid	YOU’RE NOT CONTRIBUTING ANYTHING TO SOCIETY. LEAN IN, GODAMMIT. LEAN INNNNNNNN!!!!!
Engaging your child in educational play every waking moment	YOU’RE A HOVERING PSYCHO WHO’S SABOTAGING ANY HOPE OF YOUR BABY LEARNING TO BE INDEPENDENT.
Letting your child watch Mythbusters while you blog and drink half a bottle of wine	YOU’RE A NEGLIGENT SLOTH WHO’S SABOTAGING ANY HOPE OF YOUR BABY GETTING INTO A DECENT COLLEGE.

sassycurmudgeon.com

i came across this some time ago, before we were even ready to talk about having a baby. it still rings true: 

gender neutral

first of all: i passed my licensed clinical social worker exam this week. it was a huge hurdle in this 2 year process. although getting my LCSW is important, it doesn't have major implications for my current  jobs. never-the-less, having this done will make me more employable down the road and will allow us to move to another state without me having to start the process all over again.

- - -

baby o seems to be doing well, as far as i can tell. he/she hasn't been moving a whole lot, but as soon as i got in the car after finishing my exam on tuesday i felt a ton of movement. i think i had a lot of stress hormones coursing through me in the weeks prior to the test, so i am sure that kept a damper on his or her activity.

we find out the baby's gender on monday. i am excited to see that little peanut bouncing around on the screen again, this time without the fear we had last time (at 13 weeks we had to have an unplanned ultrasound because the midwife couldn't find the heartbeat with the doppler). hopefully baby o won't be too modest, because i would really like to know what direction we need to go in terms of a name.

although i don't put too much stock in the "old wives' tales" of gender prediction, they are kind of fun to consider. here is the breakdown for us:

• chinese gender chart: girl
• bump height (neither high nor low): either 
• heart rate: girl
• sour or sweet cravings: either
• mayan even/odd rule: boy
• acne (no changes): either
• ring swing test: girl
• morning sickness: girl

from that list, the deck seems pretty stacked for girl, but i feel like this bebe is a boy. i guess we will have to wait and see what vida, the ultrasound tech, can reveal on monday!

studying, studying, studying. oh, and baby o too!

shouldn't i be done with studying considering i've been out of school for two years? one would think. but this road to become a licensed clinical social worker involves some fortitude (and time and money and brains). i sit for my licensure exam at the end of the month, which will be the final hurdle in my journey to getting those "LCSW" initials behind my name and becoming a legitimate social worker. 

i just spent the last 2 hours taking a practice exam intended to simulate the real deal. it was brutal and i felt completely incompetent the entire time i was taking the test, all 170 questions. in the end, i passed the practice test by a pretty big buffer. hopefully i can maintain a similar score on my actual exam and put this stage of life behind me and those letters behind my name.

---

in other news, baby o is doing well. we heard his/her heartbeat this past week and it is right on target. my nausea has almost entirely subsided, with brief bouts here and there, but nothing horrible like i had in the first trimester. my friend brittany (and others, i'm sure) have documented their pregnancies well with the questions below, so i decided to do the same, mostly for the sake of our families and so i stand a chance of remembering the details of this little one's hatching process.

how far along: 17 weeks

total weight gain/loss: 3 pounds from my pre-pregnancy weight, 9 pounds from my first-trimester-sick-all-the-time weight. 

maternity clothes: mostly maternity bottoms and regular skirts, with non-maternity shirts.

stretch marks: none. (yet.)

sleep: dependent on my half-tab of unisom. brandon was trying to get my to wean myself off of it, suggesting i was dependent, but the nurse midwife said unisom was harmless to take throughout the pregnancy, so i shot brandon the "see!" look and continued popping those little blue pills of sleep salvation.

best moment this week: laying in the grass in our backyard and feeling a few little baby movements for the first time.

movement: i think that's what i'm feeling in there. it is strange to think that for the rest of the pregnancy i will feel this baby moving.

food cravings: (gf) bagels and cream cheese and just about every fruit under the sun.

gender: we don't yet know, but are scheduled to find out august 5. most guesses from friends and family have been pro-boy. 

what i miss: feeling comfortable in my clothes without having to perpetually pull, tug, and rearrange.

milestones: i finally feel good about a contender in the girl name arena. we've been settled on the name if this is a bambino since the first few weeks of the pregnancy, but names for a bambina have been trickier.

15 weeks in oregon.
on our 8 year anniversary too.

18 weeks in wyoming.

one thing i noticed coming back from our road trip to lower elevations, is that my belly seemed to stick out a lot more at 3200 feet than it has since we returned to 7200 feet. among the many benefits of living well over a mile above sea level is that the atmospheric pressure here seems to act as free SPANX, which everyone can appreciate.

silencio

my apologies for the continued quiet. i thought life would be less busy and i would have more fun things to blog about, but i have been mostly working, working, and working some more. however, tomorrow marks the beginning of a very good thing: summer break for me!

a few months back i got an overwhelmingly positive performance evaluation from my boss. it made me wonder if he was really paying attention, because it was THAT positive. but i capitalized on his glowing assessment and negotiated for a bit of "free time" compensation, since raises are not permissible for state employees this year. what that means is i get to have all of july and half of august free. already july is booked, which is a little nutty, but it will be filled with so many great things: a week of work at the hospital, a visit from becky, the overstreet family reunion, and then the month will conclude with me taking my... [dun, dun, dun] ... licensure exam.

before any of those great things come, an even greater thing will happen first: my brother is marrying the most wonderful woman next saturday. my little brother, who came home looking like a wrinkly old man, and who i instantly loved and loathed, is getting married. it is such a mind trip in one way and then in another sense, it is absolutely the most "right" thing in the world. weddings are generally joyous celebrations, but this one just feels overwhelmingly happy to me. these two are meant to be together and now they will be forever.

aren't they just the best?!?

sporadic blogging

it feels like not much has been happening in our lives that is "blog worthy" since i returned from honduras. i suppose that is the way life works sometimes, with big, intense waves that leave silence and solace in their wake.

we have been steadily chipping away at house kitchen projects and brandon built a great built-in bench for the dining corner of our kitchen. this, of course, led us to have to find a new table because our other table was much too big to allow both the back door to open and access to the utensils, so each time we needed to get to one or the other we had to hoist the table a foot in the opposite direction. (does anyone else feel like all home projects are essentially variations of the if you give a mouse a cookie book? you can't even consider doing one project without 13 other projects suddenly requiring immediate attention!)

last week i had a training down in denver, so brandon joined me for a little work/leisure trip. while i spent the days being inundated on the techniques of motivational interviewing, he (mostly) kayaked in the whitewater park in golden, co. we also managed to completely fall for golden -- bike paths and great restaurants are everywhere and the life of the city seems to center around the river (and, the coors brewery, but alas...). it was fun to live the "city life" for a bit, but are hearts were both content to return to the quiet of laramie.

now that spring has finally appeared (the first leaves began to sprout on the trees just last week), we are looking ahead to yard improvements. i have my sprouts started for the garden and i'm hoping to get them in the ground about june 1, provided the snow doesn't plan to return. we have ordered sod and brandon is installing a sprinkler system, which will really transform our backyard. there are very few true pleasures in life that come in the form of instant gratification -- laying sod is one of them though!

our plan is to head to the black hills for memorial day weekend, but we just might scratch that in favor of sticking closer to home and tooling around the house.

complications and imperfections

i can't believe i have been back from honduras for over a month now. it seems like it was just yesterday, even though life in honduras, at least rural honduras, is worlds away from life in the states.

people keep asking how my trip was and it is incredibly hard to summarize with a soundbite.

it was complicated. it was rich and rewarding and it was painful and exhausting. it wasn't always clear that our being there was a good thing and our presence was certainly not without unintended consequences. but alas, this is life and, especially, international aide. 

i have come to learn that some things are just complicated. and we can fight this, we can wrestle it, we can resist it, we can ignore it. or we can acknowledge that very few things are as simple as we wish they would be and work continuously to make these flawed systems slightly less flawless. 

while i was in honduras i was reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, which proved to be perfect timing in terms of challenging my own issues with our trip through the way dr. paul farmer and his international medical service work relentlessly try to serve the poor. this book upset me and gave me hope in humanity all at once. while i highlighted hundreds of quotes from the book, one continues to resonate:  don't let perfect be the enemy of good (p. 160). 

i will admit that i am in that strange space between youthful naiveté and late-twenties/early-thirties bitterness. but one thing i took from this trip is that relationships are the vehicle for lasting, real, meaningful change and that if we focus on perfection, we are only going to be left with emptiness and brokenness. we must do the good we can with those we can reach. 

so with all that posturing and politicizing  here is the true story in pictures. i don't have many pictures of the children, because i don't have a way of making sure they don't mind if i share their faces on the internet. don't be fooled though, there were children everywhere--lack of accesible birth control and 97% catholicism will do that.

driving in tegucigalpa--for one brief second while the shutter opened the roads weren't packed; this was an anomaly.

hospital in la esperanza + recently decommissioned ambulance.

church and gorgeous tree in la esperanza (where we stopped over going in and out of honduras).

THE town of agua salada. literally, this is the whole town: church and school. 

one of the mango trees near my tent. we ate hundreds of mangos over the course of two weeks
and now the ones at home just don't compare.

church doors at the stations of the cross service i attended.

one of the nicer homes in the area.
just to the left of the frame is an incredible garden of the local herbalista.

these rocks were used to grind corn for tortillas, tamales, pupusas, etc.
i wonder how many hours the women of this house have spent using this?

no one has indoor plumbing and few have outdoor plumbing.
everyone has a pit-style toilet outside their home.

and everyone that has ever done any work abroad knows, futbol is the way to relationship.
and perhaps the path to peace? oh no, those post-futbol riots are pretty awful.

we went on many home visits, which were my favorite part of the experience.
we have no concept of hospitality in the US in comparison with the rest of the world--these people have next to nothing and they shared without a second thought.

as you can see, the roads are primitive and steep.
somehow every direction we went from agua salada was uphill. in 100+ degrees. youch.

most people arrived at our clinic after many hours of walking, but a few people came on horseback.

the clinic in operation.

my home for two weeks--the cozy little green tent.

we had a torrential downpour one day that left me stranded at the local school for two hours,
made the nearby road impassible, and soaked many people's things.
fortunately, my little tent held out and i stayed dry through the night.

the market in concepcion,
which was packed full of people and designed for hondurans (i.e., not for people exceeding 5'7")

this dog stood on the edge of this building (?) for hours, just looking out over the people at the market.
i'm not sure how he got up there or planned to get down.

with lots of cattlemen in the country, nearly every booth in the markets sell lassos and rope.

one of the social work students that went on the trip had never been camping,
riden in the back of a pick-up, or been on a horse.
honduras provided each of those experiences for her, which is ironic because those seem like
hallmark wyoming experiences.

this little dude has my heart. for whatever reason he and i hit it off so
wherever i went he wasn't far behind.
one afternoon i made up a card came and taught it to him. we sat and played "two kings" for hours
and then he started teaching it to his friends and family.
when i think about honduras now, i think about him and miss him immensely.

two of the days we were there were leisure days, both spent at waterfalls,
in hopes of escaping the 100+ temps.
this waterfall was just outside concepcion and was fun to sit underneath.
this picture is of one of the translators, demas, enjoying a back massage courtesy of the waterfall.

this was the waterfall we hiked to on our second leisure day.
we sat in the spray of the waterfall for three hours, enjoying the closest thing to air conditioning honduras has to offer. it was glorious!  

on the last night in agua salada we played spoons. all of the men in the community were entranced by the game and many got really into it. who knew spoons could be a way to connect despite language and cultural barriers.

i hope to return to agua salada regularly and to continue to improve our system and process for the betterment of the community. providing medical care is a form of social justice and an "area of moral clarity" (to borrow from dr. paul farmer) in terms of how we must share our wealth with the world. it is a situation “rare in the world, where what ought to be done seems perfectly clear. but the doing [is] always complicated, always difficult” (p. 103).

bound for central america

i leave tomorrow for 13 days in a rural, mountainous town in southwest honduras. i will be going with 19 nursing, medical, and social work students (plus a few actual nurses, doctors, and social workers [me]). i am expecting this trip to be exhilarating, exhausting, and life-changing. i came across this quote from anthony bourdain, which i plan to share with our group:
"Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you- it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you… Hopefully, you leave something good behind."
this absolutely sums up my vision for this trip. i know we will have more good done for us than we will do for others and i know we will return bleary-eyed and conflicted about our privileges,  but i believe the gestalt of this trip will be something that will forever alter each of us.

this is a picture of the community where we will spend most of our time

p.s. i really hope the mark this trip leaves on my body is not in the form of chigger bites.