baby showers!

Since I normally only complain, I thought I should post about something else for once. :)

The first shower was two weeks ago. It was hosted by my aunt and held at my parents' house, which is several hours away from our house but is much closer to a lot of my family, high school friends, and many family friends who have known me since I was a baby. One of my oldest friends (we were BFFs in 1st grade) even made the trip. It was really nice and not nearly as awkward as I had feared - and we got a ton of stuff!



Unfortunately the only photo I took was of all this "loot" on my iphone so I apologize there are no super-cute and exciting photos like most people remember to take. Oops. We didn't have any super-fancy food but my grandma did make some excellent brownies that included broken up pieces of toffee Symphony bars.

Baby showers are kind of weird because the point is mostly to get stuff, and unlike bridal showers, most of the people at the shower will not really be included in the "main event." Unlike our wedding though, we *really* needed all of the stuff and *really* needed the help financially. Me not earning any money whatsoever this year has made things a little tight, which makes me even more thankful for all of the generous family and friends we have. Which reminds me - not included in the photo are the biggest gifts, from my mom and MIL. My parents got us a crib and are also helping us pay for cloth diapers, and my in-laws bought us a stroller and car seat. HUGE relief to at least have those things!

I also have to point out, way off in the left of the photo, is the beautiful quilt my grandma made for us. It is gorgeous, and in purple & gold (Vikings colors). She must have spent a ton of time working on it and it is so cool to think that our son will have something special like that.

I know this is getting pretty long, and DH is asking me when I'll be ready to run to Target, so I'll try to wrap this up.

Shower #2 was ridiculously, fantastically perfect. :) My sister-in-law, who is also one of my best friends, hosted and she went above and beyond. The decorations, the food, the special order chocolate with peanut butter frosting cupcakes, the games - I couldn't have asked for anything better. This shower was also mostly for "all the young folks" - basically all of my law school friends. I was shocked that so many people came! And none of my friends have kids yet so they were all excited to have an excuse to buy baby stuff. It was very odd to be the one answering questions about pregnancy and babies, instead of being given unsolicited advice from 1980.

Back to today's task: Washing all of the baby clothes we received over the past two weeks. I swear to god those little plastic tag thingies are driving me insane...

useless

I've used the word "useless" more in the last few weeks than the rest of my life put together. Unfortunately, it sums up how I've been feeling about myself the past few weeks. To top it all off today, I had ONE thing that I had to do today and 100% failed. Seriously, the ONLY thing I had to do today was go see my therapist. I knew this when I got up this morning. I even had my calendar open for several hours around lunchtime. Yet I somehow completely managed to forget about it by the time the actual appointment rolled around, and then got a call from my therapist about 10 minutes after my session was supposed to start. I feel really bad about it - it costs my therapist money and it bugs me even more because it just isn't "me" to flake out and miss appointments. Hell, I am the person who gets there 15 minutes early "just in case" (in case of what, I'm not even sure). I just hate this feeling of being so undefined and out of control.

Besides today's screw-up, it's getting harder and harder to do chores. And since I am unemployed and am only a student 10% of the time, that's really all I do. I've been getting Braxton-Hicks contractions whenever I lift anything bigger than a gallon of milk, which actually limits a relatively large amount of housework. We also really need to polyurethane the new doors we installed and paint the trim for the hallway, but of course I shouldn't do those things because of the fumes (and of course DH is dragging his feet on those things, but then I feel like an unappreciative nag whenever I mention them to him since he is the one working and I'm the one sitting on my ass all day). Why do the pregnancy books fail to talk about this? It can't really be that abnormal. Although I guess I shouldn't trust the books because all of those authors seem to think women are obsessed with the whole weight gain aspect, and I couldn't care less about that.

It's weird too because I am sure there are plenty of women in the third trimester who dream of having no job, but I just really suck at handling this. My therapist pointed out last time that I've never had this much downtime in my entire adult life, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. She probably didn't know that encouraging me to embrace an easygoing lifestyle for a few months was going to cause me to miss my damn appointment. lol.

I feel bad that I pretty much only blog when I'm feeling down about something, but honestly when things are going well, I don't feel the need to write it down. I've had two wonderful baby showers in the past 10 days and I *promise* I will write about them soon (although, again, unfortunately I failed to take even one photo at the nicest one so there will not be any visual evidence).