What a Week

This has been quite the busy weekend.

Wednesday we were graced by the presence of various guests. My Uncle Billy and Aunt Barbara drove in from Georgia for an all too brief visit. They came bearing gifts for Parker from a yard sale given by my cousins. We visited on the front porch of my house, as the weather was so nice. Parker enjoyed seeing them.

Thursday, of course, I failed my one-hour blood glucose test.

Friday morning Parker and I left the house early to pick Granna up so we could all attend the Little Lambs Consignment Sale at First United Methodist downtown. We were there a full two hours.

I am claustrophobic, which means it is nearly impossible for me to enter an aisle that is already jammed with people. This becomes a distinct disadvantage when it comes to huge consignment sales. Thankfully my mom was with me. We found winter clothes for Parker, the random toy or two, as well as a crib mobile for the coming baby, and some maternity clothes for me. By the time were were finished I was numb. The ability to make decisions soon evaporated.

Friday evening I had one of those lovely emotional breakdowns that come about as the natural product of pregnancy. The fact that I haven't yet started taking my iron supplements doesn't help. The catalyst for this was a disastrous last-minute trip to Winn-Dixie which resulted in the purchase of eight containers of Yoplait Yogurt for 75c each. I'll rail against Winn-Dixie and other grocery stores that require the use of a plastic card to obtain sales prices, and cashiers who ignore their customers very existence, on some other occasion.

Saturday we celebrated Parker's birthday with my family, along with a brief visit from Heather and Ceilidh. This only after having portraits made for our church's new photo directory, photos we chose not even to see since we knew it wasn't a good time for us to buy. I don't think the photographer was well pleased by our lack of interest. I spent the entire day getting ready for both events and washing all of the clothing purchased on consignment the day before. Parker failed to nap at all on Saturday.

Today I learned how to use a baby sling, and I attended the memorial service for an acquaintance whose passing has made me very sad. Tomorrow I go in for the three hour blood-glucose test. I can have nothing but water after midnight tonight. Tomorrow morning they'll give me twice as much of the sugar soda to drink, and I will have my finger pricked every hour for three hours thereafter. I have to pass two out of three finger-pricks. If I fail I will go on a diabetic diet for the remainder of my pregnancy, but the doctor doesn't expect me to fail and neither do I. I wish I didn't have to go in for another test however. It would have been so much more convenient to get it over with the first time.

I had hoped to post some pictures, but the device doesn't seem to be working this evening.

Parker's amazing strength

I failed my one hour blood glucose test this morning, but only by three points. This means I get to go back to the office one day next week for the three hour test. No surprise. The exact same thing happened when I was pregnant with Parker. Dr. Edward's thinks I'll probably pass the second test, which requires that I pass two out of three blood sugar measurements.

Tuesday morning Parker and I were working in the church library. At one point Parker got away from me (I was trying to reshelve books, after all), and guess where I found him. Inside the darkened ladies bathroom. With the door closed. The surprise was that he was heavy enough to open it on his own in the first place. Later I learned that Parker is able to open the front door to the church all on his own, because he made it out the door and halfway across the parking lot before I caught him. That was scary, but now I know.

Parker has become extremely affectionate recently. There have been a couple of times when I have been standing in the kitchen and I've dropped something or hit my head on the freezer door and yelled out, "Aaah." I then heard little feet running in my direction and Parker has come to me saying, "Hug, hug," and given me a sweet one. It certainly has made me feel better. However there was an incident several weeks ago when I was sitting in his room weeping over something (something silly--most of the upset was that I was upset over something so minor), and Parker came into the room and just laughed at me. That was fun, I can tell you.

Parker hugs his stuffed animals. Sometimes when I read to him a book Michael's grandmother sent--Lamb Chop's Fables: The Boat Contest, featuring Aesop's The Lion and the Mouse--Parker wants to hug Lamb Chop, who is treated poorly by Charley Horse in the story. He puts his cheek up against the picture of Lamb Chop in the book.

The other day Parker was watching The Muppet's Take Manhattan. There is a muppet babies sequence in the middle of that movie in which baby Rolf plays the piano. Parker saw Rolf, pointed to him--"Dog!"--and he said, "Hug, hug." He ran up to the television and tried to hug the tv. When baby piggie sings

"And I'm going to climb the Matterhorn, but only after all my children are born, because I want to be a good mommie too, and I'm going to always love you."

Parker hears mommie and yells out "Mommie" and runs to me to give me a hug.

Won't he be embarrased when he reads this when he's sixteen years old?

Michael and I just celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary. We went out last night and when we got home my mom snapped a picture.

I only have to be up as early as any other morning tomorrow, but here are some pictures of Parker.

Right now I'm simply trying to figure out how some of Google's new features work. This is the face we call smiling at the sun, which recently has become the expression he gives whenever I ask him to smile at all.

Occurrences

I could start by sharing with you several of the occurrences that have caused me temporary stress recently, but instead I'll simply update you on positive changes that have taken place.

1. We recently became a two car family!

Let's see if I can figure out how long it has been since we had two cars. Our Oldsmobile Achieva S died while I was working at the University in International Graduate Admissions. Even though the car was less than ten years old, the damage to the engine proved to not be worth repairing. There was something funny about the engine so that salvage replacement was highly unlikely.

That must have happened about four years ago since my driver's license expired just after I started working there, and my renewal comes up at the end of this year (which means my new driver's license photo will be taken when I am very pregnant!) At the time I was very interested in paying for insurance on only one vehicle so we chose not to replace the car I had been driving.

Looking back on it this may have been what I wanted and not what God wanted.

2. A couple of weeks ago I had my second ultrasound. It's a boy!

Just like last time it was pretty obvious from the images that our baby is male. He was so curled up, however, that the technician was unable to get a shot of his profile. I have no notion yet of what his name will be.

Parker has become very interested in his little brothers heartbeat. Occasionally he'll start saying, "Heartbeat! Heartbeat!" which means he wants to see that part of the DVD. We put our machine on repeat, and each time it ends he says, "Again, Again."

Explanations

When I do go online these days, it's usually to meet the needs of the moment. I check email to see if there's anything there I need to know. I check Facebook because, hey, it's addictive--but mostly just so I can update my Visual Bookshelf. If Parker is asleep or Michael's home I may play a quick game of Hidato or see if there's any new television online that falls under the category of "wannasee." I don't read much online, and I write very little of anything. Blogging has fallen off the priority list these last several months, as has Parker photography.

Will this change? I don't know yet. But it might.

www.noisetrade.com

As many of you may already know, Don and Lori Chaffer a/k/a Waterdeep are my favorite musicians of all time. Don enjoys doing silly things with his music sometimes, which I appreciate though my musically advanced husband doesn't, but mostly I love Don and Lori for their lyrics: Always thoughtful, often profound, willing to use strong language (by which I don't mean profanity) to make their point. Their worship stuff is really cool too.

Anyway, I got an email from them today advertising Derek Webb's new music trading website www.noisetrade.com. I don't know anything about Derek Webb, so I don't know whether I would enjoy his music or not, but Don and Lori have two albums listed, "Heart Attack Time Machine" and "The Khrusty Brothers." I already have a hard copy of the first, and hope to get Khrusty Brothers eventually.

I'm curious to find out what you guys think of this concept. I'm unwilling to enter my friends email addresses without their permission, even though I am guaranteed by the website that these won't be stockpiled, but I'm not sure how much I should pay to download an entire album either.

Photos

Michael took these photos last Saturday, when Parker went outside in the morning thinking he would play in the pool. Actually the temperature outside was so comfortable that no pool was needed. I found them yesterday. These are irresistible to a mom, especially the one in the middle.

Parker Being Cute

Parker got a hold of the camera again this morning and he took a few more pictures. The cute things he's done today are 1) rubbing oatmeal into his eyelashes, and 2) dragging the old infant tub out from under his bed and pretending it was a boat. He sang "Row, row, row, row" and ate cookies all while sitting in that blue infant tub. Too bad I didn't get any pictures of that.

Parker Smiles at the Sun

This is a modified version of the way that Parker smiles at the sun. We say to him, "Parker, Parker, smile at the sun, Parker." Then he scrunches up his eyes and nose, sticks out his lower jaw and gives us what Michael calls a "big cheesy grin," all teeth. Very cute.

...and I haven't even gotten to the sprinklers yet.

In honor of my parents' trip to China, these are a few family pictures taken at the beginning of the summer, somewhere close to Parker's eighteen month mark. My hair has changed since then, along with everything else. I haven't checked my calendar, but these may have been taken before we found out about the new baby in our future.

Parker Playing in the Rental House Backyard

Robert and Carol have been renting a small house in Madison while their new home is being built. Several months ago we paid a visit, and Parker had a great time playing in the back yard with Michael, the sprinklers, and Pam's dog.

Pictures of Parker from the only time he ever spent any time playing in his baby pool.

He enjoyed it for approximately half an hour, and hasn't shown much interest in it since. It's strange to me because this is the same boy who will play in any other standing water he can find in the back yard. These days he prefers the sprinklers.

Pictures of Parker

I've become sidetracked. I'm supposed to be loading pictures of Parker onto the blog. Instead I've been cleaning out my post list. These are the latest. The first shot is Parker's self portrait. The second is just Parker being cute.

An Old Post, Never Before Published

The reason why I haven't been blogging recently (This is how it goes):

I'm pregnant, and when I am pregnant I have trouble stringing words together. Maybe I'll get together a paragraph in my head while I'm supposed to be working on something else, but then I'll start to write it, and... There's an interruption of some sort, or I can't get it to work the way I want it to. It happens over and over again until I finally decide that I'm not going to do this for a while.

In graduate school just before Parker was born my inability to write proved disastrous. Three papers due at the end of the semester--the one I turned in to my Black Women's Metaphysical Fiction professor was total crap. I couldn't come up with anything interesting to write about, and what I finally did write about was incoherent and possibly offensive without any sort of redeeming usefulness. Seriously. I've tended to feel like an outsider a lot of times in the past and tried to write about being disappointingly marginalized by Ntozake Shange's expressed intent concerning the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.

The paper I turned in for my Shakespeare class that semester, I don't even want to think about, and to this day I turn over and over in my mind possibilities for completing that incomplete earned in Theory of the Novel because I simply couldn't do anything with it. The incomplete haunts me because as long as it exists I damage my chances of ever being able to go back to Graduate School, even though by now I don't know whether or not I really want to go.

At this point I've said way more than I meant to say when I'm supposed to be posting pictures. Anyway here's a post I started at the beginning of May, and so instead of throwing it away, I'm posting it here, almost eight months late:

Parker slept late this morning, which turned out to be a good way to start the day. Especially since I wasn't in the mood to put anything away last night; so there were toys to redistribute, dishes to add to the dishwasher, and others needing personal attention. He atypically slept through one and a half showers, giving me the opportunity to do some devotional reading. I'm slowly and inconsistently working my way through Devotional Classics edited by Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith. Today's selection was from Jonathan Edwards, and I confess that it did not get the attention it deserved. Maybe I'll have better success with comprehension tomorrow.

Parker has lately become a hugger and a cuddler and a climber and a talker. He doesn't blab, blab, blab away all day, but he is saying more and more words.

I've emailed two different people blog worthy material this morning, so I'll lay aside the guilt I feel at not revisiting those subjects afresh, and reproduce what I have already written here.

The first item I considered blog-worthy on May 2, 2008 was a story about how pregnancy hormones affect the mental faculty:

Two coffee cups. One has residue from yesterday's coffee because I found it this morning under my bed. The other has been freshly used then rinsed because I've decided to make a cup of tea. Which cup do you think I chose to put the tea bag and hot water in?

My used-to-be perfectly-good brain says, make sure you use the right cup. My perfectly-good brain does not say, put the old cup in the dishwasher before you do this. Thankfully the tea tastes okay anyway, and Parker is temporarily placated. Unfortunately I just realized that I forgot to put a bib on him, so he has oatmeal down his shirt.

Honestly, I no longer remember what the other blog-worthy post was meant to be.