Gametes In Love

This one was for me. It was my first flu shot ever, so ya it was a big deal!

That’s right, the H-R household is now officially 100% Influenza vaccinated (in the bi-ped variety anyway. Neko gets his shots at the end of this month too).

You’d think that after all the shots I had to endure to get G into my oven, and after all the blood draws I’d be more comfortable with needles. For awhile I was. Really. But now with over a year without a reason to be pricked, my fear of the shot has returned. I’d never gotten the flu shot before — I mean why get poked when I didn’t have to? However, on account of G being little, I’m getting one this year, so that I can stave off the germ-fest that is my office, and not get my little guy sick.

My office does the flu shots for free every year, so this year I hobbled (why run?) at the chance. On the way over I gathered up a small posse of other colleagues open to the idea. They kept me company and ensured I didn’t make a run for it mid-way. No joke my teeth were chattering on the way there, and I had a knot in my stomach. But when all was said and done it wasn’t too bad. After I signed off that I was willing to accept the risk of the neurological disorder that is Guillain-Barré, I got my shot and was sent merrily on my way. The line by the time we were done was huuuge.

What you don’t see in this photo is that it went past the corner and continued down the stairs. Geez, you’d swear they were handing out money or something.

I had to tell myself that I subject G to shots like this almost every other month, and he takes it like a champ. Maybe it helps that he doesn’t know it’s coming. I should, in turn, just suck it up. But where’s my ice-pack, kisses and cuddle when done? The vaccination staff doesn’t provide that extra service 🙁

All I gotta say is that G better appreciate I’m doing this for him. I expect a cuddle and kiss from him for the effort this evening, and I will take my fee out in full!

I’d like to introduce you to an interesting product a friend brought my attention to: Baby Bangs (http://www.babybangshairband.com/). I for one, think it’s terrible for the mental & physical health of our society.

(Although not stated so in the literature), I assume it is for the self-conscious parent who is:

1. Tired of telling everyone what gender their little one is,
2. Really eager to put hair accessories on their child, or
3. Can’t wait for the kid’s own locks to come in

Here’s the part I don’t get: how do you convince your child to keep it on?

Let’s take G for example: the child hates (I mean HATES) anything on his head. Remember those hats he wore non-stop until he was 6 months old? Yeah, apparently I over-did it. Unless I can strap or staple the sucker on, any head-decorating object is promptly removed, and if not tugged on until it comes off. So… back to the little hair toupees above: how do you blackmail (I mean cajole) your child to keep it on?

I mean, I’m picturing a mom taking little Kimmie out to the store with her new hair, while in the middle of mom’s retail therapy Kimmie decides she’s had enough of the hair piece and just yanks it off. Now take the elderly lady standing next to the pair — she just witnessed little Kimmie scalping herself more or less. Said elderly lady has a heart attack in horror. Hence bad for the health of our fellow citizens. Think of the fragile elderly… I beg you! Say “No!” to the Baby Bangs!

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but this nifty little blog of ours exists beyond just the online, digital format: I print it out. And no, I don’t mean, use-my-printer-at-home-and-put-stuff-in-a-binder printing… I mean book-bound, Holiday-gift-worthy printing.

Blurb.com makes this process super easy. Not only is the book creation software easy to use, but Blurb also imports all of your blog entries in for you.

Sadly, until we can get moving paper (ala Harry Potter), Movie Mondays aren’t nearly as fun, but hey — the rest comes out pretty well.

To date I’ve created 4 Gametes In Love volumes:
– Vol I: Our journey through infertility, treatment and good news
– Vol II: Pregnancy hi-jinx and birth
– Vol III: 0-6 months of G fun
– Vol IV: 6-12 months of G

I’m not really sure if I’m going to be doing a book every 6 months. I’m contemplating doing one every year going forward, but seeing as my last two books went over 150 pages, I fear what the size of a years worth of blogging looks like.

Either way, I wanted to spread the word about Blurb. Aside from making blog books, Blurb does amazing photo books too. Enjoy making your own!

We received a “One Lovely Blog Award” blogger award! Thank you Christa (from ‘A Journey of Endometriosis and Fertility’)!

I now need to tell you the blogs that I think are great. This is a hard one — I follow a lot of blogs, and really enjoy a lot of blogs.  I feel very awkward having to pick from them.

So… as to not offend anyone for not being included, I’m only limiting my choice to 3 that get my Gold, Silver and Bronze medals (in order) 🙂

http://www.becoming-mom.net/ – For all the awesome photography and baby rearing tips.
http://smartassmom.blogspot.com/ – ‘Cuz laughter and parenting really go hand in hand
http://augiechangphotography.blogspot.com/ – Yeah, I’d love my photos to be this good…

I cut my hair last night. Short.

After 20 months of prenatal vitamins, my hair has been the healthiest and longest it’s ever been. So I decided to donate it. I’d always wanted to, and I figured that what better time to do it, then when I’m hopped up on superhuman vitamins. Besides, this might be the last time that I’ll be able to.

I’m pretty pleased with my decision.

The hair will go towards making wigs for cancer patients, who are loosing/have lost their hair to treatment. If my hair will help someone decide to seek treatment that could save their life (no joke, some people avoid it knowing they’ll loose their hair), then it’s worth it. I’m not in a position to find a cure for cancer, sadly, but this is one way of me helping.

There were two organizations I was looking into: Locks of Love and Beautiful Lengths. I ultimately went with Beautiful Lengths because their charter… plus hair length requirement was shorter (8″ as opposed to 10″). At 9″ I had as much as I could bear of loooong hair and decided I had enough.

Now my hair is resting in a zip-lock bag waiting to be sent out.

After my pony tail was put in a bag, my stylist said “What do you want to do now?”. My response? “Whatever you want!” But I had one condition: it couldn’t require styling, product or hairdrying of any sort because let’s face it — I like to sleep in the morning, and sleep wins over hair in my book any day. I wake up at 6 these days, do “G chores”/basic hygiene for the first 30 minutes, feed/change/dress G and then we’re out of the house on our way to daycare and work. All this in 50 minutes. There’s no time for hair in there. The result was the epitome of the “mommy hairdo” (a Bob in my case), but it’s working for me.  I feel lighter, although running my fingers through my hair makes me feel like something’s missing (or a lot is missing ;p).

So that’s the story of the “Mommy Do”. Hope G will be proud!

As you recall our most recent vacation resulted in a lot of pee puddles throughout our house, courtesy of Neko.

Sadly even after we returned (and cleaned-up), his behavior continued. What’s more he was taking bold steps and peeing right in front of me! I took him to the vet, read online articles, and made an appointment with a cat behaviorist (which is scheduled for the 11th).

His veterinarian (new lady, but I like her A LOT — I’ll be scheduling all his appointments with her going forward) did a urinalysis. The results took 4 days to get back, but here’s what we know: Neko doesn’t have a kidney infection, but he did have traces of blood and crystals in his pee. I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. The crystals can be signs of a previous infection, but it’s nothing that can be treated with medication. I’ll be honest, my heart sank when I heard this — not that I wanted my furball to be ill, but I had hoped the results would show that we could address the problem easily. I don’t love medicating Neko — he’s not the easiest to give pills to, believe me, but I was willing to do a few weeks of meds if it meant no more pee. Yet, alas, no meds, because none were required nor help.

We go back to the vet in 2 weeks for a follow-up urinalysis test. Meanwhile, at home I’ve made the following changes:

– moved his food away from the master bathroom and down into the dining room. I’m hoping this does 2 things: 1) per reading suggestion, keeps his food away from his litterbox, which is also located int he master bathroom; and 2) since the dining room was his latest pee-area of choice (the only one he kept post-clean-up), I’m hoping he wouldn’t want to pee where he ate.

– replaced his ceramic water bowl with a stainless steel water bowl. The vet wants us to increase his water intake as much as possible, and said that steel bowls or recirculating systems seems to do that for cats better than ceramic bowls. I’m starting with steel first.

– change his water a twice a day.

– purchased a second water bowl. This is a new thing, but I figured I’ll keep one upstairs (still in the master bath, oh well) and one downstairs with his food. That way he doesn’t have to change floors if he’s thirsty.

– purchased a second litter-box. Now he has two. The fancy one upstairs, a Littermaid which cleans up after him; and the new, plain-box one in the downstairs bathroom. With one on each floor, again I’m hoping he won’t result to going on my dining-room floor when a litterbox is less than 10 feet away.

– changed his diet. This was another vet recommendation. She’s worried about his weight, and noted it might be contributing to infection, so she wants him to loose some poundage. Kitty-exercise videos aside, she has a new diet recommendation. It’s pricier (ugh), but hey, if it helps…

– twice-daily spray-downs of the dining room with Feliway. The Feliway hormone is supposed to be relaxing to cats and reduce anexiety.

So the results?

3 days now with no pee! I’m so excited!

I don’t know if this is a pattern, which combination of the above is helping, but something is working. I still wake up every morning with trepidation, and return from work worried if he’s left a puddle-surprise for me to clean-up, but a few days with no accidents is helping. I won’t go as far as say that we’ve resolved our issues, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

We still have the appointment with the behaviorist next Saturday. I filled out a very detailed questionaire for her, so I’m hoping she’ll have some additional tips on how to handle this situation and also teach us how to better, and more effectively discipline Neko.

So, Neko Pee Watch continues. I hope it lasts, ‘cuz I’m not looking forward to the idea of diapering a four-legged child in addition to my two-legged one. I wasn’t above it though!

As it turns out the East Coast in the summer is a bit on the toasty side. Toasty an humid. This means hot-weather clothes. Now being a Northen CA girl who spends most of her days indoors, I’m quite comfortable in jeans. That’s right — full legged jeans. I do own a few pairs of shorts, it’s just a rarety to see me dawn them on.

However, after S brought up how hot it would be out East, I figured “Eh, I might as well as throw a pair or two in my bag”. This I did.

Well, come yesterday as I acknowledge that it is in fact hot, and it is in fact shorts weather, I decide to put one of said packed shorts on. Now, I should note that I packed shorts that I last wore 2 years ago. Being pregnant, and “larger than usual” last summer, I had no need (or ability) to wear those particular pairs of shorts. As I put them on I noted how snug they were. And then came the velcro fasten. The pair I dug out of my luggage had velcro instead of a zipper. I velcroed on, took a breath, only to immediately hear the velcro undo itself all the way down. Yeah, that’s when I realized that my lovely blue shorts no longer fit and that I don’t quite look the way I used to.

That same afternoon as we did a quick Target run to pick up the common baby supplies we decided to just buy after we arrived (and spare ourselves in packing weight) I looked for some new shorts. I went into the fitting room not once, but twice, because it took me awhile to figure out what size I was.

Let’s just say I am not pleased!

I can’t say this is pregnancy’s fault though. I’ve regained my pre-baby weight, but the flab that accompanied the poundage has stuck around, and my dietary habits are certainly not encouraging it to pack it’s bags. Worse yet, I’m not working out and live a happily sedentary lifestyle. I blame it on the nursing, as I am very paranoid that weight loss and exercise will tank my supply to obscurity.

In a few months though I will have no more excuses. I want to look at myself in the mirror and see my abs again. I miss those! I don’t know that I’ll ever have those again, but can I please get close? I’m not loving my acquired love handles 🙁

Ok, many of you have noted that you’re having a hard time being able to view the private posts I’ve created. I thought that simply signing in, would let you view them, but alas No. I’m also struggling to be able to add new users and the invite feature isn’t doing what I thought it would be.

So…. the two posts are now password protected instead. The password is “gnluv” (and will be going forward for all “not-directly-visible” posts going forward.

Knock yourselves out 🙂

I spent some time writing down my thoughts on what happened over the last few days. It’s important to me to remember the details and how I felt.

Given that these are long, and not quite in the theme of G, I marked them as private. That way if you are looking for your “All about G” fix in your blog reader of choice, I didn’t want you to get berated with my thoughts on loss.

However, if you’re curious, you are welcome to read them — just log into WordPress and go to our main blog website: http://gnluv.wordpress.com