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Happy World Breastfeeding Week!
Aug 2nd
I just found out from a friend on Facebook that it’s World Breastfeeding week. That is awesome. Hooray for all the women out there breastfeeding their children. I knew that I wanted to breastfeed James even before I knew I was pregnant with him, but I didn’t know how I would feel about it, or about feeding him with other people around. But since he was born and I got past the initial rough period, I love it. I love the bond I get while feeding him. And I don’t mind feeding him in public at all. I fed him in line to see the tall ships this weekend, and I feed him at restaurants and wherever else we might be when he gets hungry. I guess I figure that he needs to eat, and people would much rather I fed him than to have him fuss.
Anyway, I encourage all you breastfeeding moms out there to keep up the good work!
*****
I made this recipe from The Pioneer Woman for dinner tonight, and it was AWESOME. I’ve never used leeks before, but I’m a big fan. Probably could have used a little more pepper, but it was still really yummy. Ryan agreed. And how convenient! It only takes 1/2 cup of white wine. You wouldn’t want the rest to go to waste, would you?
Next time I think we’ll try it with bacon to cut down on the cost a little. But yeah; quick, and delicious.
It’s June! And my baby is 3 1/2 months old already!
Jun 3rd
When did all that happen? Yikes!
He’s so cute. Have I mentioned that? And he’s pretty much the best baby ever. My sister and her fiance were in town last weekend, and he had never been to Duluth before, so we were tourists all weekend. We toured Glensheen (the historic & haunted mansion!); we walked down by the canal and the lake, and went for dinner in Canal Park; we drove up Seven Bridges Road (and Bill got carsick. Whoops!); we toured the William A Irvin ore boat, and a friend took us out on his boat on Lake Superior; and we ate at Betty’s Pies on the North Shore. We took James with us for all of this, and he didn’t make a peep of complaint.
I was telling my sister that our lives would be very different if we had a baby with a different temperament. James is so easy-going. We take him everywhere with us, and as long as he is fed and changed he doesn’t care. He takes it all in. I can only imagine how hard it is for parents of other kids. And we are definitely spoiled and will probably have a rude awakening when we have another child who is not so even-keeled. But for now we are enjoying our happy baby, and our freedom. Although he did put a bit of cramp in our style, since we couldn’t take him to our favorite bar in Wisconsin (the Anchor). We draw the line at a bar; especially one where they still allow smoking (only until July 1!). ;-)
It is Ryan and my 2nd anniversary next Monday, and so we are both taking the day off work. His parents are coming up Sunday and we will probably go up the shore and do some light hiking on Monday. A fitting thing, since we spent our honeymoon up the shore hiking. I hope the weather cooperates.
In completely different news, I recently deleted everything in my Google Reader. It was constantly at 1000+ items unread, and it was stressing me out. Instead, I marked them all as read and am manually going back to the blogs that I want to catch up on and reading back. And of course trying to keep up with the new stuff in my reader. I may have to remove a couple things from it. Lifehacker, I love you, but your 20 updates every 2 days is killing me!
Anyway, that’s where life is at right now. Busy, especially gearing up for summer, but a lot of fun with this adorable baby around. Hopefully it stays that way!
Delurking Day
Jan 14th
It’s apparently national delurking day on the internetz, and I personally wouldn’t want to delurk on a ranty post like the one previous to this one, so I’m adding a new one.
If you’ve been reading and not commenting now’s your chance to tell us what you think. But be warned; I’m almost 9 months pregnant. I cannot be held responsible for my reaction to negative comments. Probably it would involve crying, and no one wants that. So lie if you have to*, but leave us a note!
*Yes, I realize I just asked you to tell us what you think and then suggested you lie about it, which would seem to defeat the purpose. I’m almost 9 months pregnant. Have I mentioned that? Rational thought has mostly escaped my brain at this point. Does that frighten anyone else? There’s still a month left of this.
It’s about time!
Jan 6th
I finally updated the blog roll to be more reflective of the stuff in my Google Reader. There were quite a few links that had been missing, so I feel better now.
I also had Ryan add my twitter account to the sidebar. I feel all fancy. Woo. Unfortunately, I’m not very witty, so my Twitter account isn’t very exciting. Oh well. One step at a time.
Ack. It’s after 10. Definitely time for bed. Here’s hoping I can sleep most of the way through the night. My back has been bothering me more lately, and that’s made it hard to get a good night’s sleep. I also managed to twist my ankle while disassembling the Christmas tree yesterday (because I am that smooth-I wasn’t doing anything crazy, I promise!). Hopefully I can make it the rest of the way through pregnancy without further injuring myself.
Funny
Nov 19th
I just saw this blog entry, and I think you should check it out because it is frickin’ hilarious. Ninjas. heh.
Also, I was just sitting here, browsing the internet when Ryan says out of nowhere in a high voice, “Look! It’s my little polar bear friend!” Um…yah. On World of Warcraft he has a pet polar bear. And a pet penguin.
Completely unrelated: we are planning on doing as much of our christmas shopping online this year as possible. The stores are already insane, and so as much as we can we would like to avoid them. It’ll be a challenge, but fun, I think. And theoretically it’ll mean we’ll get things done early since we need to allow time for shipping. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I just saw another add for New Moon. I read all the Twilight books, and really enjoyed them for their escapist feel. But those movies all look kind of ridiculous. Maybe they are better than they appear, but even reading the books I was thinking “this would be almost impossible to portray in a movie without getting totally CGI/totally cheesey/whatever.” Anyway…if you’ve seen the movie/movies and thought they did the books justice let me know.
I want to talk about the books I’ve been reading, but I don’t know what I want to say right now, so maybe I’ll wait a little while.
As a final note, the commercial for Al Gore going on 30 Rock is cracking me up. “There is an old African proverb that I invented…” HAHAHA.
It’s about frickin’ time!
Jan 22nd
That’s my thought about how long it’s taken me to come write another post. Jeebus, January is only a week away from being over. I really need to get on this.
I was telling a friend the other day that my favorite blogs are ones that are written as if they are talking to you about their every day life. But another thing my favorite blogs share is that they update regularly. At least once a week, preferably 2 or 3 times a week or even more. So I would like to make it a goal to write at least once a week here. I think it would be a little less overwhelming to think of a topic to write about if I write more often, because there won’t be so much to update on, and I can be more specific. So yah…I’m putting that out here so you all can help hold me accountable! Make sure to yell at me if I’m not holding to the once a week thing. Unless I’m having a bad day – then don’t yell. Tell me I look beautiful and that I should have some chocolate.
Everyone else on the internet talked about the inauguration (or at least it seems like it), and so I want to mention it too (I’m a total sheep). We DVR’d it, because Ryan and I both had to work and can’t really watch the streaming video while working. That worked out nicely because we could fast forward through the boring stuff at the beginning and get right to when Biden and Obama did their swearing in. I missed part of Obama’s speech because I had to go to the gym to have my free personal trainer session (poor planning on my part, I know!), but we still have it saved so I’ll probably watch it tonight while Ryan’s working or something. Does anyone else just love to listen to President (!) Obama speak? Because I do. He’s so eloquent, and doesn’t dumb down what he’s saying – and he isn’t afraid to say that things will be hard, and that we’ll all have to make some sacrifices. I would much rather hear that truth than someone saying “Oh, it will all be ok – just keep going like nothing’s changed.” ANYWAY, you don’t care what I think about public speakers, so I’ll stop there.
OH! Speaking of Obama and the inauguration – Ryan and I were heading to the bank Tuesday around 11 to go combine our checking accounts and such, and he got in the car and said “Obama is taking over the internet!” I laughed, but was totally confused. It turns out that because of all the people watching the video and listening to streaming audio on the web, it was putting a lot of pressure on the router that his company uses to direct all that traffic (did I mention he works for a tech company? he does). So they had to scale back how much some people were using, because otherwise it was taking up too much space or something. That had never happened before, so it was kind of a big deal to them.
That story totally sucks, mostly because I have NO IDEA about anything about computers or the internet (don’t tell my coworkers – they think I’m a COMPUTER GENIUS!). Oh well. Most of you are used to it anyway – I’m just not a good storyteller. I just thought it was funny that Obama was taking over the internet.
Moving on, did you know the White House now has an official blog? Because I think that’s awesome! Here’s the link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/
Well, that’s about all I have to say for today. I should probably get some work done. My goal is to get my desk cleaned off today. It is a disaster currently, and is kind of stressing me out. As a side note – does anyone else find that if there is a mess somewhere, it makes it very hard to do other work, even if you know that work should be a priority over cleaning the mess? Because that is a constant problem with me. And yet, do I clean my mess of a desk? No. Because I would apparently rather be stressed out and thinking about it while trying to do my “real” job. My life is so difficult. I know.
Happy Thursday, everyone. It’s almost Friday, and that’s good enough for me!
Google Reader will be the death of me
Nov 19th
In case you haven’t noticed, I like to read blogs. All kinds of blogs (don’t be fooled by the short list on the left – that was set up when we first started the blog and hasn’t been updated). I read mom blogs, HR blogs, tech blogs, blogs by people living in NYC, blogs by people living in the middle of nowhere, blogs by people my age, much older and younger (although I’m pretty sure none of them are MUCH younger than I am). And up until recently I’ve always either bookmarked each one or linked through from someone else’s blog to theirs. That is how I’ve found some really great blogs. I figure if I like their writing, I’ll probably like the writing of people they like. I only know a couple of the people whose blogs I read personally. But many of the others I feel like I know. Most of them are much better about updating than Ryan and I are.
Last week sometime (I think it was last week…), Ryan was setting up Google Reader for himself. Of course his is full of Slashdot and CNN and stuff. News feeds, mostly. And I was telling him that I haven’t used Google Reader yet, and was kind of scared to. I had heard horror stories about people with 200 unread messages, and it would totally stress me out to have something like that, I thought. But the next day, I succumbed. I went through and added almost all of the blogs I read regularly to my Google Reader. And at first it was really overwhelming. There were well over 200 entries. But I had read most of them, so it wasn’t too bad. But now, there are like 20-30 new entries every day. A lot of them I can skim through, and I do like having them all in one place, but God forbid I ever have to go without internet for a few days….it will not be good. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about forgetting which blogs I’ve checked, which I haven’t, and which one was linked from where. As Monty Python says, “Always look on the bright side of life.” Or something like that.
Do you all read a lot of blogs (Adrienne, I know your answer to that one!)? Do you use Google Reader or some other method of tracking them all? Or do you bookmark/link from others/remember the sites?
EDIT: Just after I posted this, Lifehacker (one the blogs I read) came out with an entry about how Monty Python is sick of rip offs and stuff on youtube, so they created their own youtube channel. I have updated the link to direct to that video, which is apparently higher quality, and is Monty Python approved. Thank goodness for Google Reader, huh?
It’s not always just black and white.
Oct 20th
First of all, I want to apologize to the commenters whose comments have been sitting in the “waiting for approval” box on our blog. It’s supposed to forward the reminder emails to me, but it didn’t. And as you can tell, I haven’t written in a while. So I’m really sorry! I love you! Come back sometime! ;-)
On to more serious matters.
I don’t really know how to write this entry. Mostly because it is such a deeply personal issue for so many people, but also because there are some people in my life that I’m afraid that I will offend. But I still feel like I need to say this, because it is important to me.
I’m not “pro-choice” per se. But I think that identity was developed using what the conservative right has defined being pro-choice as. Believing that it meant you were for abortion, without reservation. And I am not. I’ve identified myself as “pro-life” since I can remember, although I try to always make the distinction that I’m not “pro-life” like some people are, who are really anti-abortion but don’t appear to care about all the other ways life is abused in our nation and in our world. The wider pro-life view is a big part of why I will be voting for Obama this year. But that is my choice, and I know other people need to make their choices based on their personal research and priorities.
Where am I going with this?? I don’t really know, other than my point was to direct you all to a few entries that I think anyone who thinks the abortion issue is black and white should read. These are real stories by real women. And I have to agree with one of them in particular, who said in reference to McCain’s air quotes when talking about the health of the mother and late term abortions, ”I don’t see any way a thinking person can look at those air quotes and see anything but pandering, contempt, and a dangerous willful ignorance.” (For those who didn’t watch: he put air quotes around “health” and said that the pro-abortion ((sidenote – is ANYONE really pro-abortion???)) movement has stretched the term “health” so that women could get abortions basically whenever they wanted.)
Before you comment, please read the entries. And if you still think the issue is black and white, well then I guess we’ll just have to disagree. And that’s fine. I just wanted you to think about it.
Uppercase Woman - On National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Rememberance Day and her personal story
Uppercase Woman – On John McCain
Thank you for your time. And if you have nothing productive to say, save it and say a prayer for my soul instead.
Being thankful.
Oct 6th
Swistle wrote an entry this weekend that I thought was totally worth sharing, about how when we are feeling bad about our living room furniture, or our appliances, or about having to take the time to go grocery shopping (ok, she didn’t list that, but I hate it so I’m listing it), we should think about other people in the world, or our great grandparents or whoever, who would really appreciate everything that we have, including the ability to run to the grocery store whenever we want to and buy foods that are already mostly prepared, if we want them. Not comparing in a “things could always be worse” way, but just in a reality-check type of way. And since I’ve been feeling complainy lately, I figured I would admit to it and pass this awesome entry on. So go on over to her site and read there. In fact, I would start with that entry and then keep reading through the archives. She’s pretty awesome.
So you DO still love me
Oct 2nd
Posted by Becky in Pregnancy
No comments
It has come to my attention that there is a problem with posting comments on the blog (thanks, Aunt Janice!). I have logged a complaint with the administration (read: I told Ryan to take a look at it and fix it). Hopefully it should be back to normal soon?? I don’t even have a clue what’s wrong. Probably it’s my fault though. Is it too soon to start blaming things on the baby?
And here I thought that people just didn’t like me anymore. That’s a nice thing to be wrong about. I’ll just pretend there are a TON of comments out there in cyberspace that people wanted to post and just haven’t been able to. Whether or not this is true does not really matter.
PS. We finally got the computers out of the baby’s room and the dresser assembled and in there. It even has a few outfits in it that my mom picked up the other weekend at rummage sales. And a GORGEOUS blanket that was embroidered by my grandma. Because she’s awesome. It feels more like a bedroom and less like an office now, which is nice. Slowly it will feel more like a BABY’s bedroom, I’m sure.