On the Market

We finally got our house on the market. It's been a little over a month since we started working towards this goal. We probably would have hit it sooner if we hadn't had scheduling snafus with our contractors. But after weeks of packing and moving furniture and cleaning and watching our house slowly transform, we're finally ready to sell it.

The last push was particularly brutal. We got up early Saturday morning to buy the various things our stager told us to get (new towels, flowers, a welcome mat, etc). Then we had to get home to let the carpet installers in so they could finish the stairs. While they worked, Kevin and I cleaned the basement and he did some yard work. I tried to remember to take breaks while I cleaned the kitchen and found places for the things we had to hide.

Then I went shopping, because I've been in desperate need of a new bra for a little over a week now. By the time I got home, the heat had conspired drain the last of my energy. My plans to sweep and mop were thrown out the window in favor of recovering on the couch, especially since I had to stay up later than I'd intended. Kevin got a flat tire on the way to his baseball game, so I had to pick him up around 10.

The next morning we woke up as early as we could manage to finish getting the house ready. The cleaning seemed never-ending. It didn't help that I had to disappear at one point to get Kina to her grooming appointment, though it was necessary to have her out of the house one way or another.

Our realtor showed up a little before 11 and began shoving everything in cabinets. The blankets I'd carefully folded on the backs of the couches were hidden. Towels and soap were put away. Any trace of our pets had to be moved to the basement where they wouldn't be photographed. I never ended up finding the time to finish sweeping and mopping the main level.

The photographer came at 11, and we vacated while he took a bunch of pictures. It only took him 20 minutes or so to get everything done. Then we had to go deal with the flat tire of the night before.

When I finally got home, I basically collapsed on the bed.

But we managed to get everything done, or done enough. There's still some cleaning to be done. The sort of things that don't show up in pictures - toilets and showers. But at this point it's mostly a matter of maintaining the current state of the house while we cross our fingers for an offer.

It feels a bit like we've hit the eye of the hurricane. After weeks of working on the house in every spare moment, there's suddenly almost nothing to do. Hopefully that momentum we built up will carry me through making the bed and washing the dishes every day. But now there's almost nothing to do until we move to the new house in three weeks. I can only hope that we're under contract on the townhouse by then. It will certainly make life easier.

There's another whirlwind coming - one involving moving and unpacking. Then it will be all about outfitting a nursery and getting ready for the kid. I should probably look into signing up for a child birth class and other stuff like that. But for now I just want to enjoy the quiet. We haven't even made plans for the 4th of July, because all Kevin and I want to do this weekend is sit on the couch. And we certainly can't host anything at our place right now.

The heartening news is that I keep finding these pockets of quiet. Back in April I was sure that summer was going to be non-stop and that would turn into a nonstop life of childcare. But now I have a week or so of downtime. Hopefully this isn't the last rest I get before (or after) the kid comes.

Trading the Bs for Ds

Every year, we go to the Beer, Bourbon, and BBQ festival at National Harbor. It's a fun day with unlimited tastings of beer, bourbon, and bacon (the bbq costs extra). The earlier you buy your ticket, the cheaper it is. So back in January I didn't hesitate to buy mine, forgetting for a moment that we were about to start trying for a kid.

I got pregnant and ended up giving my ticket to my brother. But I agreed to be the designated driver for my friends. Dealing with the metro+taxi is difficult enough when the metro is running reliably, which it definitely isn't lately. So having a driver made the entire thing smoother.

I didn't actually attend the festival this year. It's held in a parking lot, which gets super hot under the June sun. Instead I wandered around National Harbor. I found lunch and ice cream and looked in a few of the stores. I had planned to find an air-conditioned cafe to read my book in, but the weather was actually gorgeous. Down by the water there was a nice breeze and a bunch of benches under the shade, so I ended up spending most of my time there.

After the festival, we went back to Zach and Sarah's to play games and nap and eat pizza. Once people had recovered somewhat, we went to a party at Jen's. I was actually feeling surprisingly good for the entire day and even stayed out later than I'd initially intended. But boy did I pay for it the next day.

I did a bit of shopping on Sunday and did my best to help Kevin continue to pack and clean our house. Before long I basically collapsed, though. By early evening my entire body ached and it was all I could do to move from the bed to the toilet when I had to pee. Monday was no easier, and I essentially collapsed as soon as I was home from work. On Tuesday I finally started to feel better, but I'm going to have to remember not to push myself so hard in the coming months. The recovery time is just too long, and there's too much to do between now and when the kid arrives.

Home Improvements

We got home from Las Vegas and immediately refocused on getting our house ready to sell. And I do mean immediately. The painters were able to start their work while we were still away, which meant that we came home to discover that the top floor of our house was unusable. Furniture was piled in the middle of each room, showers were taped off (they re-grouted for us), and plastic sheets covered everything. Not something you want to come home to in the middle of the night.

We spent a fitful night on the couch in the basement, being woken up periodically by the howls of our attention-deprived cat. After that we were at least able to get our bed back, though furniture has been shuffling around for the past couple of weeks. And I've used every shower in the house at one point.

We're close to done with the home improvements we needed to make before putting the house on the market, though. The cracks are all repaired. The lights are fixed. The walls are painted. The carpet is mostly installed. Now we're just waiting on carpet for the stairs and a steam cleaning of the basement. Then we need to go through and do a deep clean (dusting and mopping and all that fun stuff). But we're very close to actually getting our house on the market. I just hope that other people think the house looks as nice as we do and want to buy it quickly. It would be nice to not have to carry the double mortgage for too long.

Vegas Woooo!

Several years ago, a high school friend of mine posted pictures of herself and her husband in Las Vegas on their babymoon. What on earth does a pregnant person do in Vegas? I wondered. Of course, this was also right around the time I swore off all future trips to Vegas. They were always full of hot weather, loud clubs, and entirely too much alcohol. It wasn't fun for me anymore, but I didn't understand that there was a different way to experience Las Vegas.

Fast forward and here I am, five months pregnant enjoying a relaxing, extended weekend in Ls Vegas with fun shows, excellent food, and good friends. Not to mention plenty of sleep. At least, I would have gotten plenty of sleep if I weren't 5 months pregnant and waking up to pee every 3 hours.

Kevin went out to Vegas on Tuesday for a work conference. Danielle, Eric, and I joined him on Friday for a much-needed vacation. And a much-needed reunion; it had been over a year and a half since we'd seen Danielle and Eric at this point. Getting together with them was the whole reason for the trip. Then it turned out that my dad was also in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, so we were able to spend some time with him, too.

We stayed at the Palazzo, which is on the north end of the strip and connected to the Venetian with a mall. It meant that we didn't really have to go outside to get food or drinks, which was nice considering the oppressive desert heat.

On Saturday night, I had my pre-planned night of debauchery, which takes on a very different meaning at this stage in life. We went to Delmonico's for dinner, where I had a single glass of wine with my medium-rare filet. I know I'm supposed to be getting all my meat well-done, but if I'm going to pay $60 for a steak, I'm not turning it into leather. I was proud of myself for making the single glass last nearly an hour, especially since it was a rather stingy pour (our water got 8 glasses out of a single bottle). Then I had a sip of Kevin's port with my chocolate cake and followed it up with a cup of coffee in the hopes that I'd stay awake.

After dinner we went to a 9:30 performance of Ka, which was fantastic. It's an amazingly vertical show, with a stage that moves up and down and rotates on all three axes. The show was spectacular. Alas, it wasn't spectacular enough to keep me awake. Despite my carefully planned coffee, I slept through the final battle. I would have slept right through the end if not for a fireworks display during the finale.

We spent the next day hanging out with my dad while Danielle and Eric celebrated their engagement anniversary. We got to see the World Series of Poker, which was amazing. There were several ballrooms in the convention center filled with tables. Then we wandered along the strip and watched most of the Nationals game and all of the final hockey game. At that point the heat combined with a cold I caught on the plane to knock me out. Kevin and I went back to the room where I fell asleep. Then Kevin went out gambling and won almost $600 in half an hour, nicely recouping our earlier losses (I went through $100 alarmingly quickly at a cash game earlier). He decided to stop then, which meant that we ended the trip in the red, gambling-wise.

We also used our relative sobriety this trip to allow us to get up to Fremont Street for some people watching and the incredible light show. Kevin had attended a seminar about the technology behind the light display over Fremont Street, and I thought that knowledge made the show a lot cooler. After the sun set we went back to the Palazzo where Kevin and Danielle tracked down some absinthe while Eric and I ate dessert.

Around this we spent a bunch of time lounging by the pool (before the sun crested the hotel and took away our shade), playing games, and drinking cheap champagne. It was a fantastic trip with just the right balance or relaxation and doing stuff. At this point I'm eager to go back to Las Vegas, though it'll probably be several more years since I can't imagine taking kids there. But that's what grandparents are for, right?

Anatomy Scan

A couple of weeks ago we had the second trimester ultrasound, also known as the anatomy scan. This is the exciting appointment when you find out whether you're carrying a boy or a girl. That's what I knew going in. What I didn't know is that this is also the appointment where you get poked and prodded and rolled around for an hour while a technician measures every conceivable part of the fetus. This is made even more uncomfortable by the fact that you have to start off the appointment with a full bladder which you can't empty until they've gotten all their pictures and measurements.

We got the fun part of the appointment out of the way quickly. The kid was upside down, which meant that the initial image was right between his legs. And there was a rather obvious penis, front and center in the ultrasound. We are definitely having a boy.

From there, the technician pointed out various bones and organs. The bones were much more obvious than the organs. The kid has a nicely formed spine and arm and leg bones. Less obvious were the stomach and the brain, which looked the same. The heart was at least beating, but we had to take the technicians words about the kidneys.

Throughout all of this I was rolled to my side, then my back, then my side again. I had to get up and walk around at one point in an effort to make the kid flip head up. And they kept putting more and more goo on my belly. Just when I thought we were done, she had to come back and take additional measurements of the heart.

By every measurement, we had a totally normal kid. So that's something to be excited about. Now we just have to keep our fingers crossed that the head remains reasonably sized. Just a few more months until we can actually see him without the aid of a sonogram!

Halfway

I'm a little more than halfway through this pregnancy, and things are starting to get rough. Where the first semester involved me sleeping a lot and forgeting that I was even pregnant because nothing seemed to be happening, the second semester involves being tired but never getting enough sleep and feeling bigger and bigger with every passing day.

My belly is beginning to get in the way of my life. It's hard to get out of bed. If I sit on the floor or somewhere else low, it's even harder to get up. I'm trying not to do that, but the packing and cleaning involved with moving sometimes makes that impossible. I'm tired and achy in a way that I didn't think would happen for several more decades. By 8'o'clock most evenings I'm completely spent. But then I lie there for hours trying to fall asleep.

My belly is also covered in stretch marks despite the fact that I'm using shea butter religiously. I don't know if the shea butter is completely ineffective or if my pale skin means that it would be evn worse if I stopped using it. I don't really want to know either. So I continue to use the shea butter and track the growth of the kid by the stretch marks that are slowly climbing up my torso. They're just past my belly button now.

I'm sure the most of this isn't just the prgnancy. The misery is being compounded by the summer heat and humidity and the fact that we're getting ready to move. There's always something to do, and I'd always rather just be lying on the couch. Maybe it will get easier next month when we're settled in the new house. Then again, maybe it won't. At least I won't have to take the metro anymore after we move. I always arrive at the office lightheaded and shaky, needing to sit and drink water for ten minutes before I can think about starting work. The evening commute isn't quite as bad, since the train is emptying rather than filling, but it still sucks.

I realize that this is a lot of complaining. I expect it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm going to get bigger and hungrier and more tired. Hopefully my blood pressure will stabilize and the dizziness will fade.

At this point, I'm just excited to get the kid out of me so I can finally put it down. Even if it's only for an hour at a time. I can't belive I'm only halfway through this thing.

Insomnia Amnesia

So this is a fun new symptom. Initially I just thought I was reverting back to some of the exhaustion from earlier in my pregnancy. And, to be fair, I just had an incredibly busy weekend. Between the pregnancy, trying to sell our house, and negotiating the contract on the new house I haven't had a ton of down time lately.

But then I checked my fitbit and discovered that I was only getting about 5 hours of sleep a night. I thought the fitbit must be malfunctioning until Kevin confirmed that I was still awake when he woke up from a weird dream at 1 or 2 in the morning.

So it appears that I'm going to bed at 10, tossing and turning until 2 when I finally fall asleep and then getting up at 6:30 or 7 (complete with a trip or two to the bathroom) and then completely forgetting about the part where I toss and turn.

This past weekend I gave myself a day off. While Kevin and Connor were getting bookcases to the storage unit, I slept in until 10 for a grand total of 7 1/2 hours of sleep. It was sort of like catching up.

I'm sort of adjusting to it now. Things are calming down a bit with the house buying, and we're going on vacation this weekend which should help a lot. Also, I'm very glad I managed to cut caffeine out of my diet, which is a little weird to say. The truth is that I only actually managed to go 3 or 4 days without caffeine. But now that I've kicked the habit, a little goes a long way. I'm able to survive on the small amount of sleep I'm getting and within the 200mg/day restrictions I'm under.

The problem is that I know it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'll just have to keep taking advantage of lazy weekends and find my rest when I can. I'd honestly feel a bit better about this whole thing if I could remember my insomnia or use that time for something useful like reading or writing. Instead of it just getting wiped from my life without the benefit of rest.

Kicking Off the Busy Season

The Saturday before Memorial Day was the busiest Saturday I've had in a long time. Which is appropriate as this is shaping up to be the busiest summer I've had in a long time.

We got up at 6 in the morning. Kevin re-stained the stairs to the backyard while I swept and mopped and generally got ready for the barbecue we were throwing that afternoon. Then it was off to the home inspection for our new home at 8:30.

The inspection went well. There were a few issues, but some of them were maintenance things (trimming back trees that were overhanging the roof) and some we had been expecting (the seller had already told us she wasn't replacing the stove top fan, thus implying that it was broken). For the most part everything is in working order. The furnace is old, but it's still working, so that's an upcoming expense that we just need to keep in mind.

We ended up leaving the inspection a tad early. We'd gone over most of the major things and our inspector said that from there on it was just a matter of checking outlets and light switches. We went to the grocery store by the new house to see what was in the shopping center and pick up some last minute food items for the barbecue. Then I dropped Kevin off at home and went to my sister-in-law's bridal shower.

I arrived at the bridal shower almost an hour late because we hadn't really known how long a home inspection takes. But I was still one of the first people there. We ate some food and chatted and played some games and watched the bride-to-be open presents. Then I had to duck out a little early to get back to my house before guests started arriving.

Two of our friends were coming from NYC by bus. As I was leaving the bridal showed, I actually ended up behind their bus at a stop light. But then I got stuck in the wrong lane because I didn't actually know where I was going. I ended up missing my turn to get back on the highway and had to loop around a little bit. It ended up working out, though, as I still got to the bus stop right as they were getting off the bus.

From then the day is a blur of food and friends. Everyone from the bridal shower came to the barbecue, as well as a bunch of local friends. All told we had over 30 people through our house that afternoon, making it one of the biggest parties we've thrown and justification for the bigger house we're buying.

Sunday was devoted to my sister-in-law's bachelorette party. Though I'm not drinking, I had a lot of fun touring various local cideries and distilleries with the group. I'm looking forward to going back to Catoctin Creek once I'm no longer pregnant. They've expanded since I was last there and have a pretty exciting tasting menu now. Afterwards we all went to an escape room in Alexandria, which was a ton of fun. We made it out with 5 minutes to spare, which I think means that the puzzle was the perfect amount of challenging. Then we got dinner and I left the group at a karaoke bar while I went to pick up Kevin. He had been planning to metro home from our friend's house, but with all the track work going on lately, the metro has gotten really unreliable. It might have taken him two hours to get home that way.

Monday was devoted to packing up our house in preparation for selling it. We need to clear out a lot of stuff before the open house so that it doesn't look too crammed. We packed up almost all of the books and games, along with the clothes we aren't expecting to wear until the weather turns colder. Then Kevin got a storage unit and started moving boxes over while I filled up trash bags with junks we don't need anymore and things we want to donate. It's amazing how much stuff we got rid of and how much stuff we still have. But it's also nice to get a jump start on the packing, even though we won't be moving for another month and a half. Hopefully we'll be able to keep chipping away at this a little bit at a time and avoid getting too overwhelmed.