Riah's Mommy

I am 15 weeks pregnant. I have felt really good this time around, no morning sickness. I was having major food aversions to many of the foods I used to love, but they are starting to sound decent again. I've been craving healthy foods - lots of fruit and veggies, but also craving many of the foods I can't eat anymore - it's the first time in the year since I've been diagnosed with celiac disease that I have been very tempted to eat things that aren't gluten-free. I want pizza like nothing else, sandwiches with real bread, and strawberry cheesecake with graham cracker crust. I think I just need to find a good alternative to the cheesecake crust, and then I'll be okay. A big thing with gluten-free cooking is you need to try a few different recipes before you find something that is edible, so much just doesn't taste quite right.

I'm still very surprised to be pregnant, very very surprised.

I haven't really been spreading the news about my pregnancy too far, I think my experience with the miscarriage a few months ago scared me from shouting it from the rooftops. 12 weeks came, and I was gonna write something, but I still felt scared to announce it for some reason. I'm getting a pretty good-sized baby bump, and I figure I should say something before my belly says it for me.

We did have a scare, around 6 weeks. My hCG weren't rising as they should've been and my doctor called me and told me that she wanted to do an ultrasound to see what was happening. This was almost exactly what happened last time. I was expecting to go to the ultrasound and see nothing, no heartbeat. When the ultrasound tech started the ultrasound and told me that my baby was just fine and had a nice strong heartbeat, it was amazing. What a blessing.

They did another ultrasound at 12.5 weeks, just to make sure everything was going along smoothly. Baby had a heartbeat of 162, and was jumping around in my uterus (just like Riah!). We were able to see the gender of the baby, the ultrasound tech said she's 80% sure it's a boy. :)



Sariah is so excited to be a big sister, she keeps telling me she wants to share her toys with the baby and give him crackers. She's gonna be a great big sis.

The fridge and A/C should not break within the same week. WTF.

I finished block 1 of nursing school yesterday, and have a little under a month until I start block 2. I've been enjoying nursing school so far, and I've been learning a lot about how to think like a nurse, and lots of different stuff - injections, nursing assessments, common meds, oral/enteral med administration, catheter insertions & d/c, wound care, etc. The tests are so different from ones I've taken in the past - pretty much all the answers to the questions could be correct, but you have to pick which one is most applicable to the situation. Clinicals were great! We worked at 2 long term care centers, and a rehabilitation center over the course of 12 weeks. We had to do head-to-toe assessments each day we were at clinicals, and pass meds and do a care plan for each different facility that we went to. I'm glad to have a little break, time to get things around the house organized and have some fun!

Curt and I went out to celebrate after I got out of my final yesterday. We saw the movie 'Up', it was so good! I didn't really know what to expect at first because I only saw one vague preview for it, but it was a wonderful movie. After the movie, we went ice skating, and since we got there half an hour before they were going to end the session that was going on, they let us skate for free! 

I'm looking back at the last entry that I made. I've been debating with myself about elaborating on what has been going on in my life this last month or so, but I think I'm just gonna go ahead and write about it,- I got pregnant two months ago after 15 months of trying, and ended up miscarrying. It was pretty devestating. I'm trying to find the positive, and that is that I was able to get pregnant after 15 months of nothing happening.

Onto happier things, Riah starts swim lessons on Monday. I think she'll have fun.

So today I found out that I have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis and Celiac Disease.

Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disorder, basically my immune system is attacking my thyroid gland and it can lead to hypothyroidism. With Celiac Disease, my body is damaging my intestinal villi (those little shaggy things in the small intestine that allow nutrients to be absorbed) whenever I eat foods containing gluten and I am becoming malnourished as a result. And according to my bloodwork, the villi must have been pretty dang damaged and inflamed. My ND is pretty sure that in my case, the Hashimoto's is a result of the Celiac Disease.

And, as weird as it sounds, I am so relieved! I have a diagnosis, finally! I've been feeling so exhausted and brain-fogged for so long with doctors doing bloodwork, and a sleep study(which didn't indicate anything), and telling me that I just need to get to bed by x time, or to exercise more for energy and it will go away. All it took was going to a naturopath that does more detailed bloodwork, and it was obviously there as I looked at the bloodwork charts with her. All the things that the doctors normally tested for my thyroid showed that I was completely normal, but she went into it just one more test, and that result was in the 450's when it should have been in the 30's, wow.

Now I can start doing something about it, I'm taking some supplements to help in the process of healing my digestive system and also some really nasty liquid medicine for my thyroid. And now I have to have a gluten-free lifestyle. And I'm finding out that gluten is in pretty much everything! So I have to be really careful about what I eat. Which is going to be hard with Christmas coming up and pie, and cookies, and mmmmmmmmmm. I'll have to find some good gluten-free recipies for baked goods.

I forgot about the pics of our house that I put on photobucket a couple of months ago and emailed to my grandma in CA. They are here. There are a couple of rooms that I didn't get pictures of because they are still major works in progress. Some that are in there are still works in progress too, especially the bathrooms that I need to paint. Riah seemed to sneak her way into a few of the pictures too, haha.

I want to start updating more again, but I don't really know where to start. So I guess I'll just start with today. We went down to Coolidge for the baby blessing of my cousin's daughter. I always enjoy spending time with my extended family, not that I'm biased or anything, but they are really great people.

About two minutes before we were going to leave our house to drive over there, I was brushing my hair and Sariah was playing with her doll on the floor of my bathroom and the next thing I know, she has my dark red nail polish opened and is painting my toenails and then, of course, some of my foot before I even noticed. She also spilled some on her dress, so I had to hurry and get her another one so that we could leave on time. After I finished getting her dressed the second time, she looked at my painted foot/toe thing I had going on and said "pretty toes mamma!" - Oh dear!

I went to a holiday cookie party last night, which I had to bake 13 dozen cookies for, and so did the other ladies that attended, then we exchanged the cookies and exchanged gifts, ate dinner, played games, and just had fun. So I came home with a variety of 13 dozen delicious cookies. I don't know how Curt, Sariah, and I are going to eat the mountain of delicious cookies piled up on the kitchen counter, so I'm thinking of making up a few plates and taking them to some of our neighbors or something.

Drinking hot cocoa and listening to Counting Crows is making for a pretty good night.

Yesterday Curtis and I celebrated 4 years of marriage! I love him so much.

Today Sariah turned 2! My big girl! I love her so much, too.

I'm finally off the waiting list! I start nursing school in January. Yeeeeeeeee!

Curt's birthday is in a week. I need to figure something good out.

Neglecting everything (except Riah, of course) to play Mother 3 = win.

We started a small sq ft. vegetable garden in our backyard a little under a week ago. We planted lettuce, tomato, carrot, onion, and broccoli seeds. I'm going to try my best to keep everything alive because I've always had a black thumb. I'll make another garden post when things progress. Our broccoli has already started to grow a little, yay!

( Garden pics )

The tree in our front yard fell over. :(

My baby is now 22 months old!

This weekend I went up to Alyssa's bridal shower in Show Low. It was so good to see her and her family again, it's been awhile! She was one of my best friends in middle school. It was also nice to be in the trees, so much cooler than down here. The drive up was so beautiful, through mountains and desert scenery and then through the woods.

I've been so busy trying to get the book for my book club finished (we are reading The Host by Stephanie Meyer) that my house has gotten really messy for the first time. I think that I'll be finished with the book tomorrow, so I'll definitely have to get things clean before they get out of hand. Sariah likes to help me clean, she throws away the trash that is on the floor and puts away her toys (then takes them right back out again. :p)

We went to a birthday celebration for a few people in Curt's family yesterday. On the way home a random lady came at our MOVING car from the sidewalk (we were probably going at least 25mph) and was cussing at us for some reason. We didn't do anything to her, I'm still confused, it was just so random! Sad thing is that she was probably a tweeker, we were in a notsogood part of AJ.


And on another note, we saw The Dark Knight on Saturday night. VERY awesome.

Wow, it's been a little bit since I've last written. I've been so busy getting stuff done here. We're loving our new house, but holy crap, it was so much work to paint everything and get things set up and put blinds up. Everything is pretty much done and set up, and I've been working on decorating. My aunt took me to a really nice decorating store and gave me a gift card, which was really awesome because a lot of the stuff that I used to decorate our apartment with doesn't really go well in the house.

One of Curt's co-workers gave us one of her dogs that she couldn't keep anymore due to renting. His name is Charlie and he's hyper and cute. He's a Chihuahua/Jack Russel Terrier mix, so I guess a JackChi. We lost him the first night we got him, which made us feel like horrible dog parents. We put him out back thinking that he'd be able to run around the backyard and not be cooped up while we went out to buy house stuff. We got back and he was nowhere to be found (we're still not quite sure how he escaped, we thought it might have been a small space under the gate so we filled it in with some rocks), so we went looking for him around the neighborhood (which was mostly dark and half of it still under construction) we finally found him after about a half-hour of insanity. We were also having issues with him going to the bathroom on the floor, but we've since smoothed that out for the most part and learned his cues and know when to let him outside. Oddly, when he goes to the bathroom in the house now it's always in front of one of the toilets (which I still don't like, but it's much better to clean it up there compared to the carpet.)

Riah turned 20 months today. She's starting to use 2 words at a time such as "apple juice", "charlie('s) food", "momma('s) shoe", "thank you", she even says "i love you" and sometimes will sign it. She loves animals and plants and being outside. It makes me wish that we had our backyard finished so that she had a place to play with plants and rocks and grass. It's just a whole lot of dirt right now. I want to start my vegetable garden after the really bad heat lets up, maybe I can get her to help with digging and other garden stuff.

Curt is now running his own store, which he loves, aside from the earlier hours that he is still not quite used to. We're both not really used to it, I'm still up pretty late (yay insomnia?) but I'm happy that he gets to eat dinner with Riah and I every day now.

I forgot to give Sariah her medicine for her ear infection tonight, so I gave it to her in her sleep and she didn't wake up - *phew* - she hasn't been sleeping well lately and really needs her rest. For the past couple of days after she's taken it she wants more, which I don't understand because it's shake face cherry flavored.

I'm so excited. We close on our house tomorrow morning!

We bought a new car yesterday. A 2000 Kia Sephia. We got a pretty good deal on it, and it's the newest car we've owned. ( Wanna see it? )

On the way home from buying it I got pulled over by a cop. Curt drove the new car home because he wanted to see if it had any problems and I drove the old car home. I got pulled over because we have a crack on our windshield. We don't really think about it because I'm short enough to see under the crack and Curt is tall enough to see over it. Anyway, the cop wrote me a warning/fix order for the windshield, and then laughed at me because I was driving with a bottle of laundry detergent behind my back. He asked why I had it behind my back and the reason was because the seat broke a couple days before and is stuck in the farthest back position (I think Curt broke it :p) Curt drove us out to buy the car and I had to drive back so I put the bottle of laundry detergent that I bought earlier that day behind me so that I could reach the pedals. He also asked for the registration of the car and when I went to get it out of the glove box, the glove box fell onto the floor of the car. I'm glad we got a new car because our other one is kinda crappy.

We also took my dad out to dinner for his 50th birthday last night, fun times.

Yesterday night, after watching The Terminator, Curtis and I went out for McDonald's. In a car across the street from the house there was a man with his window rolled down. We got into our car and I started to drive. I noticed that the man in the other car was coming up behind us at the stop sign just next to the house. Curt jokingly said to me "oh no, he's following us!" We drove a little bit more, with the man coming in the same direction. Not a big deal, I thought, he was probably just headed the same way we were going. We turned into McDonald's, and so did he. At this point I was really starting to freak out. I drove around in the parking lot just to see if he was really following us, and he was! I drove to turn out of the parking lot and he followed us out. I drove into a nearby parking lot to make a u-turn in the other direction and he tried to cut us off. I was able to get out of there before he made it in, and got on the main road again. I drove for a little bit longer, trying to lose him, but he kept following me, trying to cut me off. It was so scary! I drove into another parking lot to either try to lose him or get help. We saw an open sign on at a pizza place, so we parked the car and made a run for it. The pizza place was locked, open sign on and all. The man was pulling into the parking lot around this time so I threw the keys to Curtis so that he could drive because I knew he'd be better at getting away. We got back into the car and drove off, the man still following us. Curtis drove away, onto the main road, and made a few turns. We turned into a residential area and mazed our way through until we found a good place to hide out for a little while. Just then I got a call from my sister. The timing of the call seemed like too much of a coincidence to me, seeing how we just lost the guy that was following us. Was it her following us? She played innocent but I could tell that it was her. I told her that I knew she was the one following us. She laughed. Apparently she was ducking down in her friend's car every time they got close. So now, I just have to get her back for this. Any ideas?