Changes everywhere

We got our drywall done. And no, we would not recommend our contractor. We’ve been priming and painting, with Seppo picking up the heroic portion of the load, what with my general tiredness, back aches, and legs & feet that swell if I stand too long. We’ve also picked the most bold choices we’ve ever chosen in our lives for the walls, which basically means that we just stole the colors from our friends with better taste. When you see the colors, you’ll know who you are.

We hired on a company to do repairs to the floor and refinish the surface. They will start next Wednesday. I think more than the walls no longer falling down, the changes to the floor will make the biggest difference in how we perceive the house.

We also now employ someone who will come to maintain the yard on a regular basis, rather than on a call-by-call basis. Better to automate all this now, before the Big Life Change.

The other potential thing that might happen is the upstairs bathroom renovation. Our friends who live up in Walnut Creek (whom I just found out are also having a baby, due only two weeks after us!) are getting their kitchen renovated this month, and it’s supposed to take one week. One week! If they like their contractor, and if they stay within the time & budget limits, I think we’d think about hiring them for our bathroom.

Work is hard but rewarding. I’m getting happier and happier with our product every time I hit a milestone. I am tired though, because I feel like I’m trying really hard not to let my fatigue show at work, and not let anyone think I am falling short or not pulling my weight due to being pregnant. I’ve been doing really well so far, but the thought stresses me out. And I end up so tired that I don’t pull my ever-increasing weight at home, which pulls me further into a stress-guilt cycle. Bleh.

Other than the tiredness and aches, everything is going well.

May stuff

The first weekend of May, we went to Chicago for a wedding. We proceeded to eat a CRAZY meal at Alinea, attend the wedding, and spend a day with some friends we met for the first time (mini-TGFCon 2009!), and generally had a great time. Chicago was beautiful, the wedding was sweet, and the TGFers were kick-ass, as expected.

I then flew to Philly to spend some time with my best friend H and attend her graduation from nursing school! Woo hoo! I almost cried seeing her walk. I also saw a bunch of friends I hadn’t seen in about 3 years, and a handful of cousins, two aunts, and one uncle I hadn’t seen in probably about 15 years. They all fed me until I was stuffed to the gills and generally babied (unintended pun!) me due to my being pregnant.

Oh, lest I forget, I finally got to meet the little daughter of a friend I’ve known since the third grade! She is also referred to as The Paragon, The Perfect Angel, etc. by my other friends. 😀 And you know what, she serious was really, really awesome: perfectly behaved, totally charming with her hellos and thank yous, and honestly the prettiest little baby girl I have ever met, apologies to my very good looking female nieces/cousins/kids of friends, whom I love dearly. I mean, many of them have been simply adorable! But C was kind of unreal in how pretty she was. And as I said, she was a perfect little charmer as well.

All during the trip, I actually worked full time, which was the only bummer, but I was lucky to be able to work remotely at all, so I am not complaining. Since most of my friends work full-time anyway, it wasn’t a big deal to just meet up for lunch and dinner.

I miss my friends already. I will be missing one of their weddings in September due to it being so close to my projected due date. 🙁 I told her she should live videocast her wedding, but she seemed to think I was kidding. I wasn’t!

Brushing off the dust

Wow, it’s really been a while. This may have been my longest blog hiatus.

A lot has happened since the last entry. The day after my last entry, I took a pregnancy test, which came out positive. 🙂 I’d been keeping a locked blog about my experiences, which I opened up today, for the reason that we have finally told our parents. Please don’t feel obligated to read it, because I do talk about some unpleasant and possibly too personal things, like the state of my GI tract, or “lady business” (heh – this is in reference to a stupidly named iPhone app I saw the other day). It’s over at Made of Family. Again, it’s a bit TMI so if you don’t want to know how my state of barfing is, or the nitty gritty details of our doctor’s visits, please don’t go!

This current blog will remain my general blog, and hopefully I’ll stop being so lame about it. I had a lot of pregnancy-related fears in my mind, so it was hard to think of something to blog about without venturing into that territory.

On top of that, I’ve been incredibly busy at work. I’ve gained some new responsibilities and visibility, which is both really nice and a buttload of work. I’m up to the challenge and feel good about the things I’m doing, but it’s kept me from random musings here. Plus, twitter makes it so easy to give short updates when there isn’t enough time for an actual post.

Anyway, here’s to more frequently coming up for air.

The Big Reveal!

We’ve told our families! Woo hoo!

On Tuesday, April 14th, we went for our monthly doctor appointment, where everything seemed to be fine. We also went to get my blood drawn for the second phase of our integrated tests.

As usual, there was some trouble in finding a good vein to draw blood from, so this time, they tried something new and drew blood from the back of my hand! Sure, it hurt a little tiny bit more going in, but they were able to get blood going right away, so I had no problems with that.

We were told that the results would come back in about a week, and if everything is fine, we’d hear back from our doctor, and if everything is NOT fine, then we’d hear back from the doctor of the testing labs. The testing itself takes about 2-3 days, not counting the transport time of the blood specimen, so I really was expecting to hear back last Tuesday (April 21). 

When Wednesday rolled around with no call from the doctor, I started to get a little nervous. Thursday morning, while out walking the dog, I called the doctor’s office and found to my chagrin that my doc was not in the office on Thursdays. I left a note with the receptionist who told me that we’d hear back on Friday. The good thing is that I actually got a call back from the office just an hour later. The bad thing was that the nurse who called me back said that they don’t actually have the results and it can take up to 9 days total and that we were on day 8, so she was going to call the lab to see if the results were ready.

In about 30 minutes, she called back to say that she was concerned because the lab said they hadn’t even receive my blood specimen yet! That was a big WTF. She felt the same way, so she said she was going to call back with the originating blood collection location to try to track the whereabouts of my blood. She asked me to confirm that it was with ABC labs, which is where my blood work is usually done, but I told her that it was actually XYZ labs, which is where the main integrated testing lab told me to go. With that new piece of information, she told me she’d follow up.

I didn’t get a call back that morning, so I called later in the afternoon and spoke with the nurse. She said that she had been able to get in touch with the correct lab and that they had my results ready to mail, but upon her request, they were faxing it to the doctor’s office. She let me know that she had put the results on my doctor’s desk with a note to the doctor to call ASAP when she came into the office on Friday. She said the doctor is supposed to deliver the results, and that she is not supposed to talk about patient records.

So by now, I was really grateful for her work and getting the results on the doctor’s desk as fast as possible. At the same time, I was worried that the results were bad, because I’m paranoid like that.

However, the doctor called back Friday morning with the news that we had less than 1 in 20,000 chance of the baby having Down’s Syndrome, 1 in 20,000 chance of the baby having trisomy 18, and 1 in 1000 chance of having a neural tube problem. She told me that those are really great numbers. I even looked up those numbers after the conversation to confirm and indeed, they are great odds! 

I know that doesn’t mean the baby is 100% sure to be healthy. There are lots of things that can’t be detected before birth, and these are screening tests, not diagnostic tests, so nothing is certain. But the results were great enough that we felt we could finally tell our parents! 🙂 Yay!

I called my mom. This is how the conversation went:

Me: Hey mom. How are you doing?
Mom: I’m ok. How is everything with you?
Me: It’s ok. I’m sorry I haven’t called a lot recently. I’ve had a lot on my mind. Actually, I have some news.
Mom: What is it?
Me: Guess!
Mom: Hmmm….. You got a raise?
Me: No.
Mom: Are you pregnant?
Me: Yes!
Mom: I had a dream about this!

And there ensued a 15 minute monologue on the dream she had and how she told my sister-in-law about the dream. Ha! 😀 She was really excited. She’s been waiting for this news for a while now. I broke it to her that we were pretty sure I was pregnant when we were visiting her a few months back, and she sounded sad at not having been able to make me even more dishes than she stuffed me full of already.

I found it funny that she guessed I had gotten a raise, because I know she wanted to guess pregnancy as her first guess, but knew that I had been telling her the last several months to stop pressuring me. Heh. That was pretty thoughtful.

We were standing outside of the work office we were in the middle of moving from when I made the call. Zee husband yelled toward the phone, “Mansei!” which is a Korean cry of celebration. 🙂

He also attempted to call his parents but we found that his dad was traveling out of the country, and his mom’s cell was off. 🙁 Sadly, neither of us had their actual ground line on our cells! What terrible children we are! Heh. His dad apparently called back from abroad so we were able to pass on the news. We had to wait until we got home and could look up the phone number to re-contact his mom, but we were able to finally make contact! 😀 Funniest thing was when she called back about 10 minutes after the first excited call and reminded us to get cracking on fixing the house. 😀

The good news is that we have a quote and a reference check for the contractor who gave us the quote, so we are ready to go! 🙂

I also told work in a rather lame fashion. We were at the new office, hauling our stuff up the stairs and into various rooms (I was in the “move into various rooms” duty, and not on the “hauling stuff up the stairs” duty, and I was using a chair as a dolly) and it was so hot that I needed to take my baggy hoodie off. The baggy hoodie had been serving as my Pregnant Belly Disguise, a.k.a. my Hobo Uniform. But it was hot and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I whipped it off and told people I was pregnant as they came up the stairs.

I had told my manager and my CEO shortly before, so I figured I can tell everyone in this lame fashion. Heh.

…and more!

Also fixed the pressure cooker. 😀

Hrm.

Yeah. Other than that, it hasn’t sunk in on this end yet. I mean, sort of, but there’s something strangely distant about the possibility still.

Conferences I want to attend

I’m going to She’s Geeky next Friday! Anyone else? I’d also like to go to the following:

• TED – Ugh, expensive
• The Entertainment Gathering – OMG, even more expensive!!
• BlogHer , maybe – $99-$198

Let the Dancing Commence!

America’s Best Dance Crew Season 3 is coming! Watch for it this Thursday. And if you miss it, it’ll rerun over and over on MTV or MTV2, so don’t worry about it. 😀

Woo hoo!!!!

Oakland Tragedy Begets Another Tragedy

Via Becky, here’s a first hand account of things that went down at the Oakland protest over the shooting death of Oscar Grant.

This is just so tragic.

Hit and Run

I need to post about:

• New annual goals
• NaNoWriMo
• Theory about ladeez falling asleep on people’s shoulders

Answer to a frequent question I’ve been getting

Made of Happy is a private project and has nothing at all to do with anything like work. I do it on my private time and I do it so that I can have inject some overt and intentional positivity to my day. I do it because it makes me happy, not for any profit.

And sorry I’ve been shamelessly plugging it so much. Heh. It’s just very difficult to contain my enthusiasm for the project. Some days, it is kind of depressingly difficult to find positive stuff, so I end up with news from months ago, but it’s still nice to dig up stories of people being good to one another.

It is a fundamental and abiding belief of mine that people are generally good or have the capacity for good in them. I’ve grown cynical over the years, but I still think people are capable of much generosity and kindness. I hope I haven’t made you gag. :p Heh.