Couponing + 30 Weeks + HOTHOT Summer

Ah, normalcy!

We have our own place now and are living with our heads barely above water with one paycheck. It's awesome.

I know... I know... Awesome to live paycheck to paycheck? Crazy talk, right? Well, At least we manage to get our bills paid with one source of income and still manage to eat on the regular. I can't be more thankful. Hubby always seems to provide everything we need. He may be stressed out about it and I drive him crazy because a hundred dollars in the bank account doesn't scare me enough to not spend thirty dollars of it on groceries. In couponing terms, that's atleast seventy dollars worth of groceries anyway... so I don't see the issue.

Nicolas Cagey

I keep starting a blog and never finishing it. Either on the computer or in my head I've written quite a few blogs I just can't seem to get over here and type the damn thing out.

I even started writing it on my phone just to get into some rambly rant thing that just didn't jive right. So here I am, attempt number twenty. Put a stamp on it.

I've been writing a lot in my apocalypse blog. I've gotten sudden inspiration for it. It just started pouring out. Maybe it's because I've felt caged lately. Sequestered. Itching to get out but no where to really go. I'm relearning myself as a person. I'm Mom now. I'm trying not to get too wrapped up in it, though. I think that's how women become twisted and catty. I'm Mom but I'm also me. Zombie and music loving knit hippy. Yup, that's me. But now I change diapers, worry over that noise I just heard and I make sure to read the latest Parent magazine from cover to cover. O, and Pinterest is my bro. I read more recipes than anything else recently. Maybe that's why I'm cagey, I haven't read a book since I got back from NC.

 Cagey... ha...

Nicolas Cagey.

But anyway... that's been my life as of now. I'm pretty surprised as the amount of traffic my blog has gotten. One post and it doubled it's all time views in a week. Maybe I'll actually stick with it this time. Eh. Who knows? I do need to get out of the house though. I keep missing my knitting group. I feel like I shifted "my week" to Thursday to Thursday so I could catch it and I still realize it's Saturday and then I'm all, "Dammit, man! What happened to Thursday?!"

I think I'm slowly overdosing on coffee and Cheers. I really do need to start reading again. I can't lose myself in the zombie apocalypse. There is too much life around me for that. Too much pint sized life. I'm starting to see what people mean by seeing life through their eyes. Her expressions, her smile, the way she blows raspberries... everything. She's just adorable. Her eyes follow you across the room. She even does a sad face if you walk away from her and she wasn't done playing yet.

And what is it with kids and losing ONE SOCK?!

 

Green Around the Gills

I am very early on in this pregnancy. I haven't gone to a doctor yet. I'm at week 7.

My morning sickness is getting physical. Not only do I feel nauseous I have actually puked. So it was only once but it was carrot juice, okay? Carrot juice coming up is not so much fun. The smell is horrible and warm carrot juice is not a tasty treat. I can't bring myself to drink any today and this morning I was so sick feeling I even forgot to take my prenatal vitamin because the thought of eating anything made me queasy.

 I bought a book yesterday. The more I read the more it freaks me out. Some of the information I've gathered as brought me some comfort but for the most part it even made me nervous about drinking water from any faucet because it might have touched a lead pipe and therefore will make me hemorrhage and die. It instructs those with animals with a flea collar to not touch the flea collar. Could you imagine the panic of petting your doggie or kitty and then all of a sudden, "OMG, I TOUCHED THE COLLAR, IKILLEDMYBABY, ZOMG, FREAKOUTFREAKOUTFREAKOUT"

Yeah, that would be me. Luckily we don't have an animal but there are so many fears associated with being a pregnant woman. "I'm going to have to get you a tazer gun" says Hubby, "Pregnant women are more prone to attacks." O great, lets just add that to my fear of anything I eat, the air I breath and accidently touching a flea collar. That makes me feel peachy. "You need to start driving my tuck," He has said to me before, "Your car isn't that safe. I don't trust it if you get into a car wreck." He says. My tiny little eco-car really isn't built for protection... got ya... but what was I before I got infected with his DNA? Chopped liver? C'mon, man... why am I so fragile now?

I'm prone to being paranoid. Yes, let's start with that insight. I have a grand fear of being arrested for something that I didn't do, zombies, spiders, dust, and closed in dark places. As you can see, I carry very irrational fears around in my pocket every day. Spiders? I know some of you guys share this fear but how many of you have been BITTEN by a spider?! I have! I slept through it, even! I had a weird bruise/swollen area on my collarbone for WEEKS! I could've died and slept through my demise! No fighting chance at all! The cop thing... well, I blame that on my parents. "Buckle your seatbelt or that nice police man will carry you off and then you'll never see mommy again!" Yay for fear mongering your kids until it developes a real fear!

So, now that you know my top five fears I can now add to my paranoia because I'm carrying a living thing inside of me. I always viewed pregnancy as a scene from Alien vs Predator when the baby alien bursts through the chest of unsuspecting people. Fear, anger... no matter how dead those people always looked they seemed to scream and scream and scream while the alien life form crawled out of their ribcage. All of my closest friends either was pregnant, had small children or became pregnant while I was friends with them. I got to experience their pregnancies by proxy. Since I was their close friend they didn't sugar coat anything with me, "I puked for two hours straight yesterday." and "I feel like they're in there boxing my lungs and using my ribs as a xylophone!" Fear. Fear, I have. I'm just beginning! This is the beginning of a very long year. Luckily it's going to be during the winter but winter has always made me uncomfortable to begin with... and now I get to wear tons of clothes over my huge body and overheat and feel fat and bloated. I could complain for days. I'm glad it's not during the summer though because Louisiana heat isn't a joke! The air is so thick outside it's hard to be out there for long. Part of me thinks that if I consentrate on all the negative things then if it goes much smoother and not so bad then I can truly appreciate it. I keep mentally preparing myself for anything horribly wrong that could happen. That way, I'm not dumbstruck or think, "This could never happen to me and the baby" because in my head it already has.... seven times. I'm not stressing myself out too much though, just staying realistic about the entire thing. Shit happens, ya know?

I also have lost all desire for work. I just want to be home, curled up in a ball, sleeping the day away. Laying down makes me less sickly feeling. I'm exhausted. I wake up sometimes and get a good thirty minutes of feeling completely normal, completely rested and ready to take on my day. That feeling is usually quickly taken away from me the first time I bend over to reach for something or think about food. I feel terrible. Work being so slow also doesn't help. I don't want to just hold down a chair, I want to work when I'm at work. It also doesn't help that work hasn't been so awesome lately too... soooo much drama and adults acting like children. It seems like ever since I realized I was pregnant this job lost all importance to me. I don't have the drive I had before. I think I'm too sidetracked with my own drama in my head to focus. I know that it's horrible to say, I just got this job... but at what cost? My body is making it difficult enough for me to function,

I just don't have the energy to worry about childish bullshit at work too.

"You really are in trouble now! You were safe in here!" (Dream)

I had (what felt like) a very long dream last night of dying in a hospital.

My symptoms: Not being able to swallow, shallow breathing, unexplained rash on my arms and legs.

There were three to a room. The room strangely looked like the back spare room from my Grandmother's house but I would later discover in the dream the "hospital" was in her carpenter's shed. (It's a dream, remember?)

Normally my not-so-pleasent dreams consist of zombies in numerous ways of attack. This dream had mention of zombies but I don't recall ever seeing one in the dream.

Well, anyway... in the dream I remember being allowed five minutes in the ER before Health Insurance wouldn't cover anything else. They tucked me away in one of those ER rooms just long enough for me to hear over the loud speakers, "Your five minutes are up!"
I grumbled, "Figures," just moments before a doctor pushed his way into the cubical like medical room. He took what seemed like a gallon of blood and let me know that they had a room available to me until the tests came back.

"I don't have money for that. Five minutes are up. Health Insurance isn' t covering anything now." I plead with him to just call me with the results but the doctor laughs at me and leaves the room, I overhear him telling a nurse to 'stick her with the other ones.'

Fast forward >>>>

I'm in the room they stick me in, the one I previously mention. My bed is in the middle. There is a large grassy plant hanging over me and making my hives worse. I remember trying to make small talk with the woman to my left before I realized she was deceased.
"She died five hours ago." The middle-aged woman to my right clarified.
"What? Why haven't they moved her?" My voice unsteady.
"No Health Insurance. They will move her last on a garbage day... if they get around to it." The woman scoffed.
"Been here long?" I ask, thinking about how large the bill will be.
"Two years next month. Waiting on blood tests, my symptoms went away after a day or so of waiting but its clean here and no one seems to bother me much. I figure they can't send a bill if they're still charging me." The lady chuckled. I found her annoying. She was a bit overweight, had wild curly short hair that bore gray roots to crudely dyed brown hair. She looked mousy and un-kept. Her clothes were street clothes and she never looked at me directly, her gaze never left the soap opera on the small television mounted on the wall.

The dead woman separated me from the large window to my left. I choked down tears. Somehow I knew that I had been kidnapped by the Hospital and I was doomed to die or watch soap operas for the rest of my life: Both outcomes scared me equally. I fell asleep to the sound of Mousyhair speaking along the words to the television, like she had seen the program hundreds of times before. I awoke much later to the dead woman making popping noises with her body. The dead woman's head twisted in my direction, mouth slightly agape and her eyes vacant. My fear turned to annoyance when I realized it was the not-so-dead woman making the popping noise with her legs. "These hospital beds are killer." She spoke mainly to herself, throwing her head back in a mighty triumphant fit of laughter. I rolled my eyes and got up to look out the windows. I felt like the room was a couple floors up (couldn't recall an elevator ride, but then again... how did I get there, anyway?) But I saw the familiar backyard of my Grandmother's house, it also appeared that we were on the ground level.

"I can get us out of here." I say aloud to myself as my fingers quickly start to open the window. It took moments that felt like ages but the window gave, crackling and creaking. As I pushed it open a cool breeze of fresh air rushed in and I took my first full breath in days. I felt much better. Fuck the blood test. I hoisted my leg up to crawl out of the window when Mousyhair seemed to hover on the opposite side of her bed. I couldn't see her feet to be sure. "I wouldn't do that." Her voice was demonic.

I gave a weak smile, "But it's nice out here. All sunshiny and perfect." I tried to sound convincing, as one would to entice a friend into a cold pool on a summer day. I didn't stick around to see if Mousyhair was actually floating or not because I fell from the window, three stories down, landing on my back. I stood up to dust myself off and look at the bleak dried grass visage around me. My eyes canvasing the horizon. It felt like I was seeing shadows run at the edge of the woods but surely my mind was playing tricks on me. "You really are in trouble now! You were safe in here!" Mousyhair called down to me in her demonic voice. I didn't turn to look at her, my eyes still trying to focus on the familiar landscape.

Then I heard a man's voice behind me, "She's right, you know." I turned around to face the ER doctor who had put me there. "Its not safe out here." He had something in his right hand and was tapping his left palm with it. A scalpel or syringe? I never got a good look because I heard a howl in the distance, a very human howl, a zombie howl. I remember sucking in a lot of air and running with a camera scene all jiggly like in Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project; a flew glimpses of the doctor and the figures running in the distance. I wasn't sure if they were memories or what I was seeing because my eyes opened and Hubby's soft snoring and his hand gently resting on my shoulder grounded me back into reality.

It was just a dream.
It was just a dream.
It was just a dream.