J'Espere

At just over 2.5 pounds, the baby is all over the place internally. What I’ve noticed that’s strangest to me is that all the eating I was doing a couple of weeks ago has essentially ceased. There are times when I feel like I should be hungry, but also feel like nothing will fit into my stomach. I had 2 thoughts about this: 1. The Baby is pushing up on it? Is that possible? 2. Is this how people feel after gastric by-pass? They want to eat but it won’t fit? There are so many people in our lives giving us advice, and for the most part it’s really great. The part I’m not understanding is when they say “Rest while you can! Change is coming!” Because I feel like our lives (or at least mine) has already completely changed. For instance: I have a weird back twinge going on. It’s on my right side. In case you’re wondering, this is completely normal (as is everything else, right?). On my left side, my hip is usually killing me. So at night, I try to balance by sleeping some on my ...

Real Conversation Friday Night: Me: "That's weird. My foot feels numb." Walk around some waiting for the feeling to come back. Matt: Hmmm. Me: What does that mean? Matt: Nothing. Me: Your face doesn't say nothing. What's going on down there? (sometimes I think he forgets that I can no longer readily see my feet) Matt: Your foot looks, I don't know, different than the other one. It was different. Completely different than the other one. My first experience with swelling. I put my feet up and watched in amazement as, in fact, my left foot was completely different than my right. Up until this point, I actually thought (hold the laughter back) that I wasn't going to swell. I figured it might be all the water I was drinking, but I was going to be one of those pregnant women who didn't get swollen feet. Go ahead, you can laugh now. I also vaguely remember my friends complaining about swelling and thinking that it was kind of...

I promise I was going to totally make this about the kitchen, but amazingly I couldn't find any of the 1000 photos I took of the kitchen, so here it is- the Master Bath. When we came into the tiny space (5x4', perhaps? Or is that an exaggeration?) we had never seen a shower like that before. Very cool in kind of a retro-y way- we're actually hanging on to it for the distant future, if we decide to add another bathroom. But definitely not a master bathroom ala the ones I had seen in Traditional Home, Elle Decor, or even North Raleigh. Thus it has become a huge project. The laughable part is that I thought it would be easy. Not easy, exactly, but I fantasized walking into places picking out the perfect tile, wall coverings, tub, sinks, mirrors, hardware. Do you see what happened? Somewhere in that transition it occurred to me that picking out that stuff is time consuming and hard. Everytime I thought I knew exactly what I wanted, I changed my mind. Most of your time is spen...

I was originally going to post something huge about what's been happening with the house, but then yesterday happened, and suddenly the house seems much less important for the moment. If I'm feeling super ambitious however, I will put up a bonus post tonight. The Boston Marathon is THE marathon. I think the only possible way to beat it would be with the original marathon from Athens to Crete. If you're not running down dusty Roman roads, however, run Boston. Every runner has it on their bucket list (even me, with no intention of doing it before I'm about 80- have you seen the qualifying times??). Always the 3rd Monday in April (Patriots Day), usually pretty and cool, thousands gather to run around the city of Boston, receive their jacket, and then go home to say "I ran Boston." It's a very important marker in a runner's life. What I love about races is the feeling you have when you get there. I remember the first race Matt came with me ...

When Matt and I got married, I just moved into the house he had purchased a couple of years before we even started dating and we went to work on it. The house was really nice; it just needed some serious updating, and for the first year of our marriage we painted and rearranged things and it was great. When we decided we were ready to move we did a lot more, then placed the house on the market and sold it. I think that the pride we took in fixing up our first home together and then selling it took over a bit, and we started looking for something different. I am always on the lookout for “something different”. It’s probably genetic, but I tend to look at old houses and imagine what they could be if someone were willing to throw, oh, I don’t know, half a million dollars towards it. I grew up in a restored home and know how much fun it is (even amongst the work) to live in something that has a story. Don’t think for a second we picked up a Preservation NC house (but if you’...