Category: Uncategorized

I am loving this easy breezy three day work week! It’s Thursday night and I’m done work until Tuesday morning, what could be better? The little girl I’m looking after gets picked up pretty early (usually around 4:15 although this week it was more like 3:45) so I have tons of free time in the afternoons as well! Yesterday I used it to get get my bangs trimmmed (although not my roots touched up, CLEARLY) and today I treated myself to a pedicure. An hour of getting my feet & legs rubbed and scrubbed = pregnant lady heaven.

I bought my American Apparel Neon Red polish to the nail salon with me for one last summer pedicure hurrah.

After we finished taking pictures we took Georgie to the dog park to play. I think she’s a little lonely with all her dog friends away!

Don’t forget to check out my new all-Georgie tumblr, Pomversations!

Do I post too much about dogs? Is that even possible?

Every now and then I get a sweet idea for a new tumblr so I get all excited and make it and work really hard on it but then no one is as excited about it as I am so I lose interest and let it die. BUT NOT THIS TIME because THIS TIME it’s about my dog and I will never lose interest in her.

It’s called Pomversations (thank you to Kristin at High Socks for the name idea!) and it’s all about stuff I talk about with my dog, like how she’s so cute and such a good girl and kisses. SO EXCITING I KNOW. I’m also going to post pictures and maybe videos if I ever make any new ones. Maybe I’ll even cave in and start using Instagram so I can post Instapom pictures WHO CAN SAY THE POMSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.

I’m still working on the layout (customizing layouts on tumblr is SO DUMB, like why give me the option to change the ask box text if there’s no ask box???) but I made it very orange, just like my dog.

Kichou is leaving today for a dogcation so Taylor had to pack up a doggy bag for him. Here’s what he’s taking:

1. the bag is just a reusable shopping bag, I WISH we had a tiny suitcase for him but maybe that would be crazy (although maybe I did spend some time on the internet looking for one…)
2. his new rainbow-striped tank top; Kichou loves getting dressed up!
his special blankie from his crate, he’s had it for almost his whole life and it’s currently very grubby, but that means it smells like home
3. a few toys: his duck, a squeaky devil and this weird flappy ball I bought the other week that he LOVES
4. his special blankie from his crate, he’s had it for almost his whole life and it’s currently very gross and grubby (he is a dog, after all), but that means it smells like home
5. a couple rolls of poop bags
6. a custom mix of kibbles, this won’t last him the whole time he’s gone but they’ll have a bag of his regular food

He’ll be gone for a couple weeks (he’s visiting with Taylor’s ex-girlfriend’s mom and won’t be back until after I get back from my trip on the 27th), but the crazy part is Dougal will ALSO be leaving today for a long weekend at my ex’s parents’, which means that Georgie will be an only dog for like, five days! I wonder if she’s going to miss her fuzzy bffs…

Today is my first day back at work after vacation, which is GREAT because I think I’ve reached the can’t-sleep-and-when-I-can-I-have-weird-dreams portion of the pregnancy. After tossing and turning for hours I finally drifted off, only to have what was clearly a baby anxiety dream: I dreamt I had triplets, and they were so tiny and fragile that they were in the hospital for weeks or months and I was so scared they were going to die I couldn’t bring myself to visit with them. What a crummy dream!

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really struggling right now because I’m in this super cock-blocked version of nesting mode right now, and it’s getting worse. I JUST WANT TO MAKE MY BABY’S ROOM HAPPEN, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK??? Unfortunately it’s three more weeks before I can buy the furniture and set it up, although I’m hoping to paint sometimes before then. In the meantime I’ve been busying myself by moving things in and out of my storage room, getting on the case of people whose stuff I’m storing to clear it out (I NEED THE SPACE), and sorting through the boxes and boxes of baby clothes people have started giving me. I’ve unboxed, separated, washed and reboxed I-don’t-know how many tiny onesies and pajamas and suits.

This is the first outfit I bought for Sym. I was super poor back then and almost all the clothes and things we had for her were bought by someone else. The other week when I unpacked this little ghostie suit I was dismayed to find that the white shirt had ten-year-old spit-up stains on the front, but after a 20 hour soak in OxiClean, it’s as good as new!

I’ve also signed Taylor & I up for a prenatal class, figured out when to take the maternity ward tour, and have been reading up on the hospital where I’ll be giving birth. It’s actually the same place I had Sym, but back then I was like this science dog about childbirth:

I didn’t pack a bag, I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t even take prenatal classes. Basically my water broke and I just wandered over there and was like WELP I’M HERE, NOW WHAT? I also didn’t know to advocate for myself and although I feel like my delivery was great and went just how I wanted, the aftermath was kind of a bummer. The nurses there are very, VERY pro-breastfeeding, which is awesome…. if you don’t have extensive damage and scarring from a breast reduction that make you incapable of doing it. Some people in my position are able to breastfed just fine, and I tried, I really did, but once it became obvious it wasn’t going to happen and I wanted to stop and give my crying, hungry baby a bottle…. well, they made me feel like shit. I felt really judged and looked-down-upon, and that’s something I’d really like to avoid this time. I’m considering writing up a short paragraph about my situation and printing out a bunch of copies to hand out to everyone and anyone who mentions breastfeeding to me. Is that weird? I mean I haven’t had strangers come up to me on the street yet and start lecturing me about how ~breast is best~ (OH REALLY? WOW, THANK YOU FOR THE BRAND NEW INFORMATION) but just last week I had a salesperson in a maternity store repeatedly pressure me to take advantage of their buy-three-get-one-free nursing bra sale and it made me feel really awkward.

Not being able to breastfeed at all means I have a bunch more decisions to make before Baby Laramie arrives. I need to pick bottles and formula and all the other accoutrements. Do I need a bottle warmer? What about a strange baby-espresso machine that heats and mixes the formula for you? Or maybe kettle that warms the water to the perfect temperature and keeps it there all day? I don’t know! I’ve been trying to research things and everything sounds awesome until you read the customer reviews, and then everything sounds terrible. Of course, you really have to take reviews with a grain of salt because I feel like a lot of the people who leave them are barely a step above youtube commenters. I read a review of a bottle warmer where the reviewer gave it one star and said she wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, because she exclusively breastfed her baby and therefore never used the bottle warmer. WOW WHAT A HELPFUL REVIEW, OH PRIVILEGED ONE. Honestly, why even bother?

Luckily for me, a lot of the women in my internet discussion group of amazing ladies have been having babies recently, so I have them to turn to for advice. I’ve decided to go with these fancy-schmancy Lifefactory bottles.

I could say it’s because they are glass and no weird chemical leaching from plastic and blah blah blah but I’m gonna be real here and say it’s because they are cute. They are cute and they look cool and come in a rainbow of colours! SUE ME I LIKE CUTE RAINBOW THINGS. I also like cute plant things, which is why last week I bought this Boon Lawn Bottle Drying Rack. You can get flowers to put in it that hold the nipples and rings! I’m dying from cuteness!

Of course I still don’t know what I’m going to actually put IN the bottles and therefore IN my baby. I’ll probably end up going with whichever brand of baby formula has the cutest label, like I doubt they are all that different from one another and I can’t imagine there’s anywhere (on the internet especially) where I’ll find helpful reviews.

please note: I know women who breastfeed their babies have all kind of problems with people judging them too, like creepily sexualizing it, making rude comments, etc, and I think all that sucks too. This blog, though, is about me and my experiences, and in my experience a lot people, ESPECIALLY women, look the hell down on you for formula feeding, regardless of your reasons. Basically my feelings are this: BABIES GOTTA EAT, and no matter how or when a parent chooses to feed their baby you have to respect that choice (unless it’s one of those weird situations where they are feeding a newborn some weird homemade concoction of like, sticks and nutmilk and it starves to death, but if the baby starves that’s not really feeding them, is it?) because in the end, it’s NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS.

For some reason I thought that I would have tons of time to spend with Sym in August, seeing as how I’m now only working three days a week. Obviously this week we hung out a lot, but I didn’t take into consideration all the other weeks. This coming week she’s spending dad (except for Tuesday night). I’m going to be away the 24th-27th (note to internet stalking burglars: I’ll have someone staying here to looking after my fleet of vicious guard dogs & my razor-clawed cat, so like. DON’T GET ANY IDEAS). She’ll be going to her grandparents’ from the 28th-30th and then having a hotel slumber party with her stepmom on the 31st. Then on September 4th she’s back at school! I really can’t believe how quickly the summer is passing, and once I realized what was up I decided to spend as much time doing Symmie stuff as I could during my week of vacation.

The one thing I absolutely promised her we’d do was go to the beach, but OF COURSE as soon as I got caught up enough on my etsy orders to take a day off, the weather turned into a butt. We didn’t manage to get down to the beach until Friday. It was windy as hell and not as sunny as I’d hoped, but we still had the best time in the world.

Some other stuff we did this week…

We moved all the tissue paper pompoms from the nap room and some tissue tassels from garlands and hung them over her bed like a canopy.

We made some string art a la my friend Meg at Radical Possibility.

Sym’s turned out 1,000% better than mine, I tried to do something with the nail placement and ended up messing the whole thing up OH WELL.

We went shopping and she helped me pick out baby clothes (YES MORE BABY CLOTHES WHATEVER IT’S FINE I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM), a maternity coat and some cozy pajamas to wear after the baby is born.

We watched Megamind, read books together in my room, talked and laughed to the point where I couldn’t breathe, and ate a lot of ice cream and candy. I’m so happy I was able to spend this week with her before the rest of the summer blows past!

1. pea clothes & toys for the baby; 2. mini-zoo; 3. sour gummi worm; 4. paint samples; 5. tissue pompom canopy

I’m on vacation this week and AS USUAL I find it hard to keep this blog updated regularly. I’ve been trying to do lots of stuff with Sym and feel bad about spending our one week of the summer together at the computer, but I have some fun stuff we did to share, maybe tomorrow?

Anyway.

I’m 27 weeks pregnant now! I kind of feel like things are going to quickly and too slowly at the same time, like when I say “Oh I’m due November 8th” it sounds like it’s a million years away, but when I say “I’m due in 13 weeks” it sounds like RIGHT NOW! And I still have so much stuff to do before Baby Laramie comes, I can’t wait until I’m OFFICIALLY done work (only three more weeks!) so I can just DO IT.

I reallyyyyyyyy need to get my bangs trimmed, I actually stopped by the salon today but my stylist is on vacation all this week, which means I won’t be able to go until next Friday! Until then, I CAN’T SEE SHIT.

As I mentioned yesterday, Taylor took over 1,300 pictures at the parade yesterday, but he managed to whittle that number down to just 387 to upload. You can see them all here (note: some pictures NSFW).

I wore a silk robe over my dress so my shoulders wouldn’t get sunburned, it was basically the most genius idea I’ve ever had in my life. I also forgot to eat before we left the house, which was less smart. Since we were there an hour before the parade started I tried to go to the Starbucks across the street to get a muffin or something but there were literally one hundred thousand people with the same idea so I ended up getting an apple and some popcorn at a convenience store on the corner.

Fuzzy & proud :3

Instead of trying to post all the posts I missed posting last week, instead I’m just going to do one big post so I can start fresh.

On Wednesday Taylor and I took Sym and her friend to the second night of the Celebration of Light. I had given Sym a tube of glow bracelets and told them to put on as many as they wanted. This wa s a brilliant plan because 1. they thought I was SUPER COOL, and 2. I could see them anywhere. They were running around the field at the bottom of the hill we were sitting on and I could see exactly where they were the whole time, even though it was dark.

Sym had her phone and took some pictures to Instagram (I posted them on Friday), but I told her to not get so caught up in taking pictures that she missed the whole fireworks. Then I happened to turn around and there was a kid about her age behind us, filming the whole display on an iPad held up in front of his face. Like, he didn’t look at the actual fireworks ONCE, he just watched them on his iPad screen. WEIRD.

Anyway I actually took a billion pictures, but I only looked at my camera long enough to get the fireworks in kind-of focus and then I just held it in the same spot and didn’t actually look at any of the pics until… well, until right now!

Some of them even look alright if you don’t view them full size and you squint a little.

I put Sym in charge of making popsicles this week, so she decided to use all three kinds of lemonade we had in the house: cherry, raspberry and classic. She made two of each flavour individually, and I helped her make this striped triple-lemonade popsicle, which she saved for herself.

I wore this beautiful mint green dress from Asos Maternity for the first time, and since I am an idiot I spilled orange juice on the chest before I even left the house. SMOOTH MOVE, ME. I spent some quality time blotting the stain with baking soda in the afternoon and I think I got the it out, phew! Unfortunately I didn’t get any other pictures that show how lovely this dress really is, but I’m going to try and wear it again soon- maybe on Thursday for 27 week pictures?

We got up suuuuuuuper early on Saturday to go to the farmer’s market as our favourite hummus vendor was going to be there. He’s only been at the market by our house every four weeks or so, so Taylor STOCKED UP and spent something like $70 on hummus. I know that seems insane but it’s like, REALLY GOOD. And now we have a ton in the freezer to get us through the lean hummus weeks.

After the market my friend Jenn picked us up and we went for brunch at The Red Wagon. Taylor had their famous pulled pork pancakes with Jack Daniels maple syrup.

I had plain buttermilk pancakes- but asked for them a la mode, of course. The waiter laughed but I swear this is the best, most delicious thing in the world.

Jenn just moved and doesn’t have internet at her new place yet. Sym was HORRIFIED by this information.

After we got home I conscripted Sym into sorting out the storage room with me. I was DESPERATE to find a box of her old baby clothes I knew were in there somewhere, and I really wanted to start clearing some stuff out to make room for more stuff so there’s room in the house for all the baby stuff. We ended up getting rid of five huge bins, and I found the baby clothes! Sym and I went through them all and I got super emotional over things like the first outfit I bought for her and her first Halloween costume that I made and her first Christmas outfit and her first bikini and all these teeny-tiny sweaters my mom knitted. I even found these adorable booties one of my very first internet friends sent me back in 2001.

Awwwwww :’) I have to say, it was really smart of me to get pregnant at exactly the same time of year with this baby as with Sym, because all the cute things I saved will fit Baby Laramie when they are seasonally appropriate.

Later on Sym went to her dad’s, and I hung around with the doggies while Taylor ran errands. Errands like buying his dog a new shirt for Pride! Kichou loves getting dressed up, he literally almost exploded with delight when Taylor showed it to him. He even tried to jump into it!

We spent a good portion of the evening marathoning The Secret Circle (after I found out it had been cancelled I didn’t want to watch it anymore, but now I have to finish it). We were sprawled on the couch in the middle of an episode when I heard the first warning firework- it was the final night of the Celebration of Light and I FORGOT! I’d actually just talked about it at brunch that morning, but somehow completely spaced. We could have made it down to the beach in time to watch it, but I wasn’t feeling very well (pregnancy problems :/) so we decided to skip it.

Today we woke up pretty early again so we could get ready to go to the weekend’s biggest event: the Vancouver Pride Parade! Last year we ran down there at the last minute and arrived just as the parade was starting, but I knew there was no way I’d be able to stand around in the sun for two and a half hours this time so we went and got a spot an hour early so I could bring a chair. Sym’s dad ended up bring her to watch it with us (he can’t stand parades) and it was really fun. Really hot though. Taylor brought his camera with a brand new huge memory card and took well over a thousand pictures, some of which I’ll share once he sorts through and uploads them, but for now here’s a preview I like to call “baby’s first being glitter bombed by a drag queen.”

We all had showers when we got back to the house and we all still have glitter on us!

Today was a running-through-the-sprinkler kind of day. It was the last day for two of my favourite daycare kids and my neighbor lent me this octopus sprinkler for them to run around in (I actually have a similar one, but I couldn’t remember what I did with it). Taylor came out and tried to take a few pics but that crazy octopus sprayed water all over the backyard so it was basically impossible for him to take the kind of pictures he wanted and he got annoyed (and sprayed).

My bikini top is from Asos (it’s not available in grey/green anymore but they have it in brown/pink), I chose it because it came in size ginormous and the matching bottoms have a yoga pants-like foldover waistband. My shorts are from American Apparel, I try not to shop there so much but I LITERALLY couldn’t find shorts like this that fit me anywhere else, and they were only $8 so I caved.

I’m kind of dying at my big baby belly next to Symmie’s flat tummy (she has honest-to-god ABS). Of course then I think about how last time I had a big baby belly that flat-tummied girl was all tiny inside it and I get all emotional. GOD it’s so weird how one day you have a tiny baby and then you blink and suddenly you’re 35 and that baby is a long-limbed preteen. Kind of freaks me out tbh.

… and now I’m on vacation until the 13th, plus once I’m back to work I’ll only be working three days a week for three weeks and then I’M DONE. For a whole year!