They Don't Know Anything

It is another edition of Pam Complains About Pregnancy!

In this weeks episode we find Pam doubled over in upper abdominal pain. The medical advice received? Take a warm bath.

This in and of itself doesn't bother me, because the pain went away on its own, but after billions and billions and billions of babies have been born shouldn't we know a little more about pregnancy? Everything in obstetrics is guesswork. They guess your due date, guess how far along you are, guess what's wrong with you, or guess that everything is fine.

Even BEFORE you get knocked up it's all a matter of guessing. They guess why you can't conceive, blame it on something obscure and leave you to your own devices.

Then again, I bet a lot of medicine is just guessing.

A List for Tuesday

Okay, so it's like a month late, but here is The Davis Family 2010 in Review:

January:

• Pam graduated with her Master's degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University
• Chris stayed behind in Pennsylvania while Pam and Dutch moved back to Utah, temporarily living with Chris's mom and dad
• Pam turned 27
• Chris turned 29

February

• Pam and Dutch started watching Baby Alexis every day when her mom returned to work
• Chris was still in Pennsylvania doing all of his clinical rotations for school

March

• Pam, tired of  not having a place to call her own, and angry with the storage unit for being leaky and ruining some of her stuff, finds an apartment and moves in without Chris every seeing it
• Chris comes to Utah to do his last rotation at the Fourth Street Homeless Clinic in downtown Salt Lake City
• Pam and Dutch are ecstatic
• Dutch stops calling Pam "Mama" and begins calling her "Daddy"

April

• I don't really remember anything huge happening this month

May

• Chris graduated from Seton Hill University as a Physician's Assistant
• Chris passed his boards with flying colors (the minimum score you had to get was a 350 and he got a 536)
• Grandma Morgan passed away

June

• Josh and Dawn got married
• Pam's best friend's father passed away

July

• Dutch turned 2
• Pam got to meet Gail Carson Levine
• We bought Dutch a potty and thought we would start potty training him (it didn't work out)
• Chris was hired by Dr. Warner (even though he didn't start work until August)

August

• Dutch moved from a crib to a toddler bed
• We took a family vacation to Bear Lake
• Dutch was evaluated to determine if he should begin Speech Therapy

September

• Pam got to go see She & Him in concert with her friend Julie
• Pam found out she was pregnant, but didn't share the news for a little while longer
• Chris promised to buy Pam a new car.  But didn't.

October

• Chris and Pam celebrated their 7 year wedding anniversary
• We finally tell people Pam is pregnant

November

• Mallory Hope was born (Pam's sister's daughter)
• We celebrated Thanksgiving with 3 different dinners

December

• We had a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year

And that was our 2010 in a nutshell.

Weekend Update

Chris got home early from work on Wednesday and had the whole day off Thursday and Friday, so we had an extra-long weekend! Pretty much the entire weekend was spent cleaning, organizing, moving, and going through every single thing that we own. We made the decision to stay in our two-bedroom apartment for another year and that required some creative thinking of how we're going to fit Baby Jack's eventual stuff into our place. We donated literally a dozen garbage bags to DI and the house feels so spacious now. We put a few things in storage (even with the storage unit our rent is still less than we would pay to move).  We also bought a brand new kitchen table and chairs!  Hooray!

Saturday morning Hayden gave me a much-needed break and took me, for my birthday, to the Desert Star Theatre's production "Back From the Future." It was hilarious! All that they do there is parodies. I'd never been, so it was great to be able to go with Hayden.

Poor Dutch is sick. All last week he was quiet and still, which first tipped me off that something was wrong. If he's not going a mile a minute then you KNOW he's not feeling good. On Saturday he started coughing, had watery eyes, and had a runny nose. Poor baby. It makes me sad not to be able to do anything about it!

Yesterday we had to stay home from church because Dutch was sick, which ended up being fortuitous because I got REALLY sick. The entire day all I felt like doing was moaning. I couldn't get comfortable and I couldn't keep anything down. It was miserable. I haven't had a bad day like that for a long time. It makes me appreciate my good days even more!

A Change of Plans

Okay, so we've decided to stay in our two bedroom apartment for another year.  They made us an offer we couldn't refuse!  We spent most of the day today rearranging rooms so we have more space, re-organizing all the closets, and just basically going through and getting rid of a truckload of "stuff" we don't need anymore.

The problem is now that we're staying here Baby Jack won't have his own room for a nursery.  He'll sleep in our room for a while and then move in with big brother.  So now I need a new theme for the room that Dutch and Jack will share.  I'm thinking of using orange and blue as the colors of the room, because we have a lot of blue furniture already and orange is awesome with blue.

Any ideas?

The Miracle of Speech Therapy

I don't think I gush nearly enough about Dutch's Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) Abby.  She's amazing!  This last week her miracle went above and beyond all previous miracles though.

Last March or April Dutch stopped calling me Mama.  I'm not sure why, there was never an explanation, but one day I was Daddy.  And so was Chris.  So when he would call Daddy if Chris wasn't home he was talking to me.  Since the day it started I have corrected him EVERY TIME he called me Daddy.  I would try to get him to imitate my M sound and everything.  It didn't work.

Abby, in all her amazingness, has gotten Dutch to call me Ma and Mama!  I don't even know that she realized what a huge thing this was for me, but I will make sure when she comes on Monday that she knows how much it meant to me.  He's even self-correcting if he calls me Daddy!

It's a January miracle!

A Pregnancy Complaint

Why are maternity clothes so expensive?  Unless it is a transitional piece that I can wear AFTER the baby is born I am not willing to spend $100 on a shirt, or a pair of pants, or a dress!

Where are the inexpensive maternity clothes?  The ones under $50, or even better $25?  I would like to find those and buy them because I still want to look pretty even if I do feel like a big white whale. (Just call me Ishmael.)

A Game of Catch-Up

So the further behind I get in my blogging the less I want to blog. Here's a quick run-down of the two birthdays we had in our house this last week.

I turned 28 last Monday. Though it was a holiday, Chris did not get the day off so we decided to celebrate the Saturday before my birthday. We left Dutch with Grandpa Greg and Grandma Honey and went to lunch together. It was really nice to be out just the two of us. Chris also bought me a dozen white roses, my favorite. It was a very nice, very mellow day.

My actual birthday was not nearly as restful. Dutch woke up two hours earlier than he usually does and decided it was Messy Monday. I literally went from cleaning up one mess to the next the entire day. While I would clean up one he would make another and I kept telling him, "It's my birthday! Be good on Mama's birthday!" This did not phase him at all. The worst and most heartbreaking mess was when he pulled my cake off the counter and it landed on the carpet, frosting side down. Very sad.

My handsome husband is officially an old man! He turned 30 on Saturday. Dutch, to celebrate his Daddy's birthday, woke up at about 5am and didn't want anyone to go back to sleep. All the more time to spend wishing Daddy a happy birthday! He then proceeded to be an absolute terror for the entire morning. Not fun at all. So Chris dropped him off at his mom and dad's and we went out and about. There wasn't really a plan for the day, it was just a time to enjoy each other. Then we went to his mom and dad's for dinner and cake and watching family movies. Dutch still seemed to think that birthday celebration needed to include lots and lots of tantrums. All in all Chris said it was a really wonderful day though.

Thank you all for the birthday wishes, gifts, phone calls and cards. We both felt very loved on our days.