Lately

Goodness gracious, do people like to give you unsolicited advice when your'e pregnant! For the most part, it's all doomsday kind of advice, all contradictory to what other people are saying, along the lines of the following:

Sleep now, while you still can, because you won't be able to sleep for the next 18 years of your life! And it will only be 18, if you're lucky!

Enjoy this time, because you will never have a free/happy/stressless/fun moment after the baby arrives!

Make sure you do ______ when you're at the hospital giving birth, otherwise you will suffer (insert most gruesome, horrible pregnancy complication you can possibly think of here).

Don't try to breastfeed, it will only make you and baby frustrated.

Do try to breastfeed, it's the best thing you can do for your baby, and if you don't do it, that means you're a horrible person.

Don't co-sleep, because your baby will die.

Co-sleeping was the best thing we did, we all got so much more sleep!

Etc., etc., etc.!

Out of all the unsolicited "advice" I've received, I've had TWO people, literally TWO people say something positive.  The first person told me, "Having kids will change your life, and it will be the best thing you've ever done! We are so excited for you!"  I was so surprised when this person said that, because I fully expected to hear "Having kids will change your life (insert something awful and negative about your life never being the same again)."  It was a nice change!  The second person was a complete stranger.  We were helping clean up our church building one Saturday morning, and the daughter of one of the members of our congregation who lives out of town and doesn't attend our congregation was their helping her dad clean.  She saw that I was pregnant, and asked how things were going, when I was due, etc., etc., and she said, with this amazing smile of sincerity on her face, "Oh, man. Having kids is the best thing ever! It will totally change your life for the better, and you'll wonder how you ever lived your life without these new people in it! I am so happy for you." 

Best unsolicited advice ever.

I know I can't fully comprehend what it will be like, or how hard it will be to be a parent yet, because this kid is still inside me.  But really, with all the horrible "advice" out there that people give, it's a wonder why people aren't having more children, or delaying having children until much later in life. People with kids make it sound like a death sentence.

One of the most inspiring things I've come across in regards to being a parent, was actually said by Chris Rock (go figure!) in an interview on NPR (see here):

"When I hear people talk about juggling, or the sacrifices they make for their children, I look at them like they're crazy, because 'sacrifice' infers that there was something better to do than being with your children. "

I don't know, maybe it's my naivete, or maybe it's super easy for Chris Rock to love being a parent, because he's rich and probably has a nanny or something, but I like that sentiment and it really resonates with me.  Maybe it's because I'm becoming a parent when I'm older, and so I don't feel like parenting is making me miss out on a ton of things.  Several years before I became a mom, I read a book called "I Am A Mother" by Jane Clayson Johnson (former CBS anchor of the Early Show, Latter-day Saint), and she talked about how everyone's lives rotate through seasons.  We have seasons when we're carefree kids, questioning students, young adults exploring the word, newlyweds hopelessly in love, young parents who are frazzled, more experienced parents, grandparents, etc., etc., etc.  The thing she said that really resonated with me is that everyone will tell you to try to hurry up and get to the next season, or that the season you are in isn't as good as another one (teenagers get this a lot--"Oh,  you're just a teenager, you'll be done with this stage soon, and then you'll be a better person!"), but that this thinking is wrong!  Basically, she said not to let anyone rob you of the season you are currently in, enjoy it and love it and learn everything you can from it. Nobody is better than any body else just because their life is in a different season, and each season has so much to teach us and so much potential joy that can be gleaned from it. I really liked that. 

Any way, lots of deep and sentimental thoughts this time around on Ye Olde Bloggy Blog.  I've been having a lot of them lately! (Especially about how to raise a girl in this crazy world. Seriously, I need to write a series of posts about that, just to get all my thoughts out of my head!) 

Irrational Pregnancy Fears

In all the pregnancy books I've read, they have mentioned that it's totally common to have irrational fears about you or your unborn child while you're pregnant. I'd heard of this before, and one of my books even lists "Irrational Fears" in a "Pregnancy Reference Guide" for common concerns or problems people have during pregnancy.  But I never really realized what "irrational fears" would be like until recently.  Here is my current "freak-things-I'm-afraid-of" list, in no particular order:

• That this child will be born with a gigantic port wine stain over some extremely visible part of its body
• That the child will, in fact, not be a "she" but a "he/she" and that we'll have to "decide" what gender the baby will be later on at some point in its life
• That I'm going to get hit by every single other car on the road as I'm out driving around. 
• The other day I freaked out when I got stopped by a train at a rail road crossing, because I began to envision the train jumping off the tracks and ramming into my car, instantly killing me and my unborn fetus.
• That this friend of mine (who seems a little more obsessed with our baby than we are) is going to go crazy and break into our house and steal our baby, or cut it out of me in the middle of the night when we're sleeping or something (seriously, I watched ONE episode of "Private Practice" (horrible show) and it was the one where a crazy lady cut open a pregnant lady to try to steal her baby--TV is evil!)
• That my child will become a sociopath.  Seriously, there's no test for that. You can't reliably predict if that will happen, and if it does, there's not really anything you can do except lock them up before they kill people. 

Aaaaaand, that's about it for now. Irrational fears, people! They weren't kidding! 

Almost a Year!

Sheesh! I can't believe it's been almost a year since I've updated my personal blog.  Ridiculous!  So much has happened, and yet so much is exactly the same, though.  Here's a quick update on our lives over the past year.

• The biggest new thing= I'm Pregnant! Yup! That's right! I'm writing all about this whole thing over on my diabetes blog, so feel free to hop on over there and check it out. But since most of the readers of this blog follow me over there already anyway, you won't have to! I'm due in October, and we're having a girl, and so far everything is going really well.  Although both Ben & I are a little horrified that we're going to be parents, we're mostly just really excited!  
• We're both still working at the same old things. Ben is still at Battelle, and I'm still teaching piano lessons, although I've got a crazy full load of students this year.  I have 9 students, many of them siblings, and I think that is probably the most amount of students I want at one time.  Although, I'd probably just round it off to 10 to make it a nicer number. :)  I'm planning on keeping them when the baby arrives (after a nice little "maternity" break), but I'm also aware that I might not be able to keep them all, so we'll just have to play that by ear when the time comes.
• We have both had crazy busy callings at church. Ben is the executive secretary for the bishop and I'm the compassionate service leader, so church stuff keeps us busy! 
• We visited all our family out west in May/June. It was a wonderful vacation. Hopefully I'll get my stuff together enough to post pictures of some of that visit soon!
• We are still in Columbus, although we're getting the urge to leave more and more.  We'll definitely be here until the baby comes, and for awhile after, since I have such great doctors here. But we are thinking we want to be closer to family and in a more sunny state. We just have to figure out when and how to make that happen!

And that's pretty much it! I'm sure a lot more stuff has happened, but I'm apparently not so great at remembering to blog about it (we've been busy, cut me some slack!).  I'll try to be better (I know I say that every time).  Sigh. Oh well, it is what it is. :) 

The Great Summer Blackout of 2012

Having lived in Columbus for about 5 years now, I can safely say that this city is the absolute WORST, out of all the other cities I've lived in, at maintaining its electrical grid in good, working order. OK, so maybe Kumasi was worse, but Columbus comes pretty close.

Some of you may remember when Columbus got the remnants of Hurricane Ike a few years ago. I was still single and living with my good friend K at the time. Our power went out for about a week. We did end up getting power back in one half of one outlet, but it really wasn't good for much. It was a trying time. We ate out a lot.

Well, a few days before the 4th of July this year, we had a huge windstorm sweep through the area. Specifically, it was a derecho which is a wind storm made up of straight-line winds that travels over huge geographical area. This one went from the Chicago area all the way to the East Coast. Straight-line winds are the same kind of winds that took off our chimney/roof in the Peach Palace back in the day, for those of you former Peach-palace Pretties who follow this blog.  Basically what straight-line winds do, from what I can gather, is tear up a bunch of stuff in random ways and in random places.

For example, there were TONS of trees knocked down all over the city. But the trees weren't up-rooted, they were sheared off right at the base where the trunk meets the grass. Crazy! And the destruction was really random, too. Trees would be knocked over in one yard, but not in the one right next to it. One neighbor's roof would be ripped off, but not the next.  Crazy. Power lines were down everywhere, roofs were blown off, and billboards looked like mangled heaps of metal. It was dastardly!

Any way, because Columbus has an extremely poor electrical grid to begin with (our power goes out and comes back on immediately at least twice a week in a normal week), this derecho did a number on the city. There were people without power for up to two-weeks. One-million people in Ohio lost power, and President Obama declared  Ohio a Federal Disaster area.  The winds got up to 85 mph! It was really neat and scary to watch from the safety of our home while it was happening, but it was really scary. I've never seen wind and rain blow that hard, except on TV when they are covering hurricanes!  Oh, and did I mention it happened at the very hottest time of the year? The temperature hit 100+ degrees for multiple days in a row while half the city was without power. Awesome.

It happened in the evening right as the sun was going down, so we really didn't see the extent of the damage until the next morning. It was insane! Ben went ventured out to see if he could help any of our neighbors clean up. He met another guy from our ward doing the same thing, and they wandered around the neighborhood for awhile, helping whoever they could clear their yards and get the bigger tree limbs out of the streets.

At first we didn't lose power and as a result,  several of our friends who had lost power and live nearby ended up staying with us or coming to our house to spend the day in the A/C and cook meals.  We took on an entire refrigerator's worth of another family's food. They had just gone shopping and stocked up on so many things and we couldn't bear to let them lose it all, especially since they are on a student budget right now!

But, after about 3 days of having power, we suddenly lost ours. It was AWFUL! The friends who were staying with us took their food and left to go to another friend's house who still had power, but we tried to tough it out in our own home the first night.  When we lost power, I put tin foil up in all the windows in our house, because that's what they suggest you do to try to keep the sun from heating up your home. It was hilarious, and looked like we were crazy people, but I was determined to keep my house from heating up! It worked for awhile, but that night was horrible. I didn't sleep at all, and by the next morning I was going a little crazy from the heat. I couldn't think straight and was starting to feel slightly delirious and very desperate.  I begged Ben to get me out of there! So, we ended up at a friend's house to spend the night too!

Church even got cancelled that week because there was no power and the building had water damage from a leak in the roof caused by the derecho.  This is my second power-outage disaster in Columbus, and it really made me see what areas we were prepared in (like powerless cooking, water storage) and what areas we weren't (like keeping cool in the heat). I can't even imagine living through a disaster like the tornadoes in Joplin or Hurricane Katrina. I feel like Columbus becomes a war-zone when we had these comparably small disasters, I can't even imagine what it would be like if the situation was worse!

Any way, we all survived the heat. The power ended up coming back on, and going back to it's normal 2-3 times a week 2-second outages, which I'll take over a 6 day outage any day!

It was an eye-opener for sure. Ben and I will be purchasing a generator as soon as we can afford one. And, we are so grateful to be members of the church. It really is an instant safety net.

Oh, and apparently that particular derecho was so cool that it gets its own Wikipedia page, here.

Stuff Since Vacation

We have been busy bees these last few months!

I've taken on a few more piano students, and currently have 4, and I just got a call from a mom needing lessons for her two daughters, so if our schedules match up that will be 6! I also pawned 2 other students off on a friend of mine, because they were a little more advanced than I'm comfortable teaching and they had crazy schedules that I just couldn't deal with. I am really enjoying teaching! We're going to try to have a little class/group lesson in October for Halloween where the kids can practice playing in front of each other (in a non-scary, non-recital setting) and we'll probably make a Halloween craft or something fun, too. I did this when I was a kid taking lessons, and I really enjoyed them. I've run the idea past a few of my students and they've all been excited about it, so hopefully it will be OK.

I've been working REALLY hard to get my A1C lower, which you can ready all about here. I try not to make this blog too diabetes-heavy, but it's a part of my life, so sometimes it creeps in here.

Church stuff has been awesome and SUPER crazy all at the same time. I finally got released from being an Activity Days leader, which now leaves me with only TWO callings instead of THREE. It is nice, let me tell you. I loved that calling, and had a blast with those chillins, but I was definitely getting burnt out! And Ben is now the Executive Secretary in our ward, which means we are both somehow a lot more busy, so it was just too much! And because we live in a college town and because it's August, that means we've been helping people move in or out about twice a week lately!

Our ward also had a Luau! Our dear friends, The C-Family, pretty much put on the whole thing. The husband is Polynesian and grew up in Hawaii, so he is pretty adept at throwing luaus!  Ben and I were involved in several aspects of it, the most exciting of which was that we were both in a dance number! I did a slow hula (you can see what it is supposed to look like, here) with some of the other relief society sisters, and Ben did the Haka with a bunch of the Elder's, the bishopric, and a few little boys. And somehow they managed to convince the Bishop to let them do it with their faces painted and no shirts! Also, our little Activity Days girls did a faster tahitian dance (you can see what that one is supposed to look like here) that they had been working on for MONTHS, and they were so cute! It was awesome. I'll try to get some footage of it to post here, I know someone recorded it. This was probably one of the best ward activities I've ever been to. There were 250 people that came, and the gym was decorated amazingly, there was SO MUCH authentic Hawaiian food, and entertainment. Above all, so many people in the ward were involved in so many different parts of putting this thing on, from food prep, to decorating, to being part of the entertainment, that it was very unifying for our ward, which is something our ward desperately needs right now.

Our friend, K, came to visit too! She was only here for a few short hours, but it was SO good to see her, even if we did have to share her with other people. (K! Next time, come visit and don't tell anyone else you're coming, mwa ha ha ha!)

So, all the summer craziness is starting to wind down (Oh, wait! That reminds me that I need to post about "The Great Summer Blackout of 2012".....another day maybe). We're gearing up for fall & winter, and looking forward to it! Hope all of you are doing well!

A very late "Vacation: Part 2"

Sheesh, I can't believe I've neglected to write about the rest of our vacation for this long. There's simply no excuse other than I'm easily distracted by shiny objects, reddit, another nerdy shoulder injury that makes it hard to type with my right hand,  and an extremely busy couple of months. But still!

So,Vacation Part Two! Here we go!  The rest of our vacation was awesome. After leaving our beloved K (sniff sniff) in Our Nation's Capital, we headed down to Ben's family's homestead of High Point, NC via Raleigh, NC.  Ben has an old college buddy that lives in Raleigh with his wife, and we met them for dinner so Ben and he could catch up and so we could get the skinny on what it's like to live in the Raleigh/Durham area.  We got into Raleigh a few hours before we were supposed to meet up with Ben's friend, so we took the time to drive around a little bit. Mostly, we were trying to find a shoe store because our feet hurt so bad from walking the day before that we each needed to buy some new flip flops to give our tender near-blisters some airing out. We were successful! Also, we realized that it was SUPER easy to get around Raleigh, and that we could basically get from one part of the city to another in about 15 minutes, so it's a lot like Columbus in that sense. I always tell people that everything in Columbus is about 20 minutes from everything else, and it's usually true!

We met Ben's friends for dinner, and they were very nice! And they told us how much they enjoy living in the Raleigh area (they actually live in Carey, I think). They said it's nice because it's close to the beach, close to the mountains, and close to D.C! We had a delightful sup with them, and then left to go to Ben's parents'.

While at Ben's family's house we did a lot of just hanging out, but we did take one day to drive back to the Raleigh/Durham/Research Triangle area with Ben's mom to help us check it out even more. We drove around Durham, which was kind of nice, but reminded me a little too much of Oberlin only bigger. We also drove around the Research Triangle, learned all about the difference between "the Triangle"  and "Research Triangle Park" , drove around Carey and the temple, and just had a nice time.  We're a fan of the area for sure.  I think it would definitely be a great place to live.

Ok, I'm sure we did some other fun stuff, but it's been so long since we actually went, that I can't even remember! Blerg!

I was going to update some more about what has happened in life SINCE vacation, but this post is too long, so I'll write it in another one.

Vacation: Part 1

We went on vacation!

Well, sort of. We considered it a working vacation.  See, Ben & I have had the desire to get out of Columbus lately (and by lately, I really mean for the past 3 years).  We like Columbus a lot, it has a lot to offer, but we don't really see ourselves becoming lifers here and it's just time to move on.

So, we're starting the process of trying to figure out where we'd like to "settle down."  Ben's skill set is such that we can pretty much pick the general area we want to live and then work at trying to get him a job wherever that is, which is pretty nice. So, we've decided to start our location search.  We started with a trip to Our Nation's Capital, Washington D.C. And we followed that up with an excursion to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina.

OUR NATION'S CAPITAL

Carper Family in front of the Washington Monument

Our Nation's Capital was amazing! Our good friend K has recently moved there and really enjoys it and since K is so awesome, we figured if she likes D.C., then we probably would too! And we did!

We pulled into Our Nation's Capital around 3pm, just before rush hour traffic got really bad. We checked into our hotel and then K got off work and came to meet us. Then (and this was probably the highlight of the trip) we went to CAFE RIO for dinner! That's right, folks. The D.C. area is now home to 3 Cafe Rios! So yummy. It was everything I remembered and more!

Erin doing her T-Rex impression. Tiny Arms!

The next day, while K was at work, Ben & I took the Metro into the city and spent the day going to as many museums as we could! We ended up seeing the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery (West), the Air & Space Museum, and the American History Museum.

The Rotunda at the National Gallery

On the recommendation of Ben's brother & cousin, we also walked all the way up Capitol Hill to eat lunch at a little burger place that is just on the other side of the Capitol Building, called The Good Stuff Eatery. Good stuff indeed!

The Capitol Building

We also saw the back side of the White House, including the new vegetable gardens that The First Lady has put in. Very cool!

The Obama Home

The First Lady's Kitchen Garden

Then, K got off work and came to meet us to tour the memorials. We saw the WWII Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Korean War Memorial. K does not care for Jefferson much, so we skipped that one, which we were just fine with because by that time we were so tired from walking so much that we could barely walk and we were chafing in places that no one should ever have to chafe.

WWII Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial

After that long day, K took us to Chinatown to eat at this place called Chop't. It wasn't Chinese food, but it was super tasty, and I wish they would expand them to lots of places all over the country.

Other highlights of the trip to Our Nation's Capital included: a sighting of a blue jay stealing a peanut from a squirrel on The Mall, watching the latest episode of Sherlock with K at her swank apartment in Alexandria, seeing what I was pretty sure was a covert government spy get off the Metro at the Pentagon stop (don't pick up the newspaper he left on his seat!), learning how to correctly use the words 'captial' vs. 'capitol,' accidentally parking K's car in front of two people making out in their car in a busy and well lit parking lot and they didn't stop even though we were obviously parked there and watching them for quite some time! (p.s. we weren't watching them to be creepy, we just had to stay in our car because it was super rainy outside and we were trying to finish eating our frozen yogurt. Don't worry, after a while we moved to another parking space.)

What would've been an awesome picture if the reflecting pool had been full. 

Any way, the trip was awesome, the weather was perfect, the company was fabulous, and we'd go back again in a heart beat! Stay tuned for Part Deux of our D.C./North Carolina adventure!