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I never stressed about getting the nursery ready before or shortly after the baby was born. Honestly it wasn’t a top priority. We just put up the art in Albie’s room and I love it. It’s not too nursery-ish. I like that it’s a little different than the norm. It’s all from the same Chicago based artist with the exception of the piece in the second photo to the far right. That is from his namesake and great grandfather who passed away years before I even met Doug. It hung in his house and Doug inherited it. Doug's grandfather owned a metal scrap company and the picture is of a metal beam and it is framed in a metal frame. I like to think his great grandfather is watching over him. I still have to put up shelves and add a few more things but it’s coming along. Maybe by the time he’s one I’ll have it finished!

Aleksia meeting her baby cousin Albie for the first time. So precious!

Albert (Albie) Fulton Simon came into the world 12/7/16. Can't believe it's been over a week since his arrival! We love him so much! 💙

A day late but happy 4 year anniversary to my love! We have a lot to be thankful and grateful for this year!

Some of my favorite before and after photos of our renovation. I loved the way everything turned out. Our contractor was amazing and it took about 7 weeks to complete from start to finish. I want to live in our master bath shower (not pictured is the rain shower head...I haven’t even used the handheld one)!

A lot to be thankful for...

Thanksgiving this year is extra special. This year has been one for the record books. We have so much to be grateful and thankful for.

It is appropriate that our 4 year anniversary falls on Thanksgiving which also happens to be my favorite holiday! I can’t believe it’s been 4 years and although we have been through a lot and have had our fair share in ups and downs, I feel like the best is yet to come!

We sold our condo in about a month and despite the annoying buyers trying to nickel and dime us on everything (they almost backed out of the deal because we didn’t have the original remote controls to the 3 tvs we threw in the deal for FREE), it closed and the timing was perfect.

We moved into our newly renovated home a week ago. I am grateful that we were fortunate enough to have been able to fund a renovation. We had amazing friends that allowed us to move in with them for 3.5 weeks in the transition between when we sold our condo and when the new place was completed.

I turned 36 on Nov 16 and also was exactly 36 weeks pregnant. I am so overjoyed and grateful that we will be welcoming a baby in the next few weeks. The journey to get pregnant was not easy but this last trimester has been a breeze. I definitely think fertility patients have a different perspective once they get pregnant. I don’t sweat the small stuff and I am very easy going.

Case in point, I was told at my 36 week appt that the baby was breech. My doctor scheduled an inversion to be done the following week. I spent the next week doing various yoga poses, acupuncture, moxa, and going to the chiropractor in hopes the baby would flip on his own. We checked into the hospital, they hooked me up to monitors, came in and did an ultrasound, and everything worked! He flipped on his own and we got to leave the hospital! Even if he hadn’t flipped and the inversion didn’t work, I would have been ok having a c-section. Not my first choice but the end goal is to have a safe delivery and healthy baby.

I am grateful that my employer gives me paid maternity leave and I had saved up vacation so my time off began Nov 18.

Everyone in my family is healthy and well. I will never take that for granted.

Sitting on a hot plane going on 2 hours. Let's go already! Philly is the worst airport for delays. I don't think I've ever flown out of here on time.

Life Update

The potential buyers that were interested in our condo are moving forward! We are supposed to close on Oct 20! All great news except that we aren’t ready to leave Oct 20.

Our place is immaculate. Everything is in working order yet they still had a list of 7 things we needed to fix. We could have either agreed to fix, said no, or given them a credit. My saint of a father came and fixed everything but one item on the list. So we offered them a $200 credit for the last (a dishwasher that makes a humming noise). The dishwasher is 2 years old. It is not broken. It begin making a slight noise after we remodeled our kitchen and the guys who took it out while we updated our kitchen countertops put it back in and now it makes this slight noise. Never bothered us. My dad messed with it for a bit but says that there is nothing wrong besides something pushing up against some pump. Bottom line, if he had the time to fidget with it all day he could have prob fixed it but we said let’s just offer them a credit. The buyers came back and said NO. Either fix it or replace it. Our lawyer went back to them and said NO take the credit or nothing because we fixed everything else on their stupid list! They finally accepted the offer. Next move we make, I want their anal retentive inspector who found every little stupid thing. Like the 3mm tear at the bottom of our screen door that we haven’t noticed in 8 years.

We are renovating a townhouse that has tenants in there until Sept 30. So we negotiated and are paying for them to move out by Sept 15 so our general contractor can begin demo Sept 16. They are going to Europe the last two weeks of Sept so they weren’t going to be occupying the place anyways. I am thankful that we are able to start a few weeks earlier on construction because we need it.

If you are keeping track that means that the workers will have 1 month before we have to move in and because we are pretty much changing everything on every floor we know it is not feasible for us to move in at that time.

So our good friends graciously offered for us to move in with them in the meantime. We might take them up on their offer if we can’t find a reasonable short term lease. In addition, our current neighbor who is a sweet, old widower that lives by herself and travels all the time offered for us to stay with her. She has 5 bedrooms (3 units on our floor combined into one). We would have a wing of her place to ourselves. Very much considering this as an option as well. Maybe we will live with our friends for 2 weeks and move in with the neighbor for 2-4 weeks (most of which she will be down in her Florida home during this time) so that we don’t overstay our welcome at either place. I think it will be weird to see the new buyers of our condo though and hard to refrain from wanting to punch them for being difficult in this process.

Either way, we have to pay for movers to move all our stuff out and store it for at least a month. Between paying for the tenants to move out early, the renovations, and paying for us to move and store our stuff we are spending SO MUCH MONEY. It is scary. I am the most frugal person and I don’t like spending money and when I do I make sure I get it a deal or buy things on sale. So this is very hard for me.

Reminder…I am pregnant and my due date is Dec 14. I pray that we can move into the townhouse at the end of November and this baby doesn’t come early!

I am trying not to stress but the amount of things that are happening all at once is crippling me. Internally I am panicking all the time. I know I need to calm down. I keep on telling myself these are all GOOD problems to have and I should be thankful and everything will work out. I repeat this all day to myself in my head. I have insomnia where I will wake up between 2:00-3:00am and be awake for hours with my mind racing with thoughts until I finally give in and get up for the day.

By the way…I have a sister, stepmother in law + father in law, mother in law + stepfather in law, and sister in law that all live in Chicago. Not one of them offered for us to live with them. I asked my sister who lives in a HOUSE and she said NO. My bother in law actually suggested we rent an Airbnb (which I looked into and is extremely expensive for a month). I know we are not their problem but would have been nice to count on family or at least have them offer for us to stay with them. Of course my parents offered immediately for us to move in with them but they live an hour away. Not the most ideal but if we had to we at least have that as an option.

Random thoughts

I have extreme heartburn all the time and nothing seems to help.

We are selling our condo and wow is it stressful! Of course I think our place looks great. The only negative is that we don’t have hardwood floors but our carpet is really nice and high end...not cheap carpet. It doesn't matter because almost everyone that comes in to see the place makes a comment about wanting hardwoods. Ok, fine we will credit or reduce the price! But I guess people don’t want to do all the work themselves. So we just had 2 floor guys come out and give us estimates because it looks like we will have to re-do the floors. Ugh. Bye bye $$$$$.

BUT we had a potential buyer come see the place last night and they didn’t mention anything about the floors! So I am praying and crossing my fingers they make an offer today or tomorrow. That would save us from having to re-do the floors. We have 3 mounted tvs and we were initially going to take them with us when we move but they want us to include in the sale. Great, fine, take the tvs...I don’t care...just buy the place! Fingers crossed these are THE buyers!

The townhouse we are moving into we are basically gutting. We initially were going to replace the floors with hardwood but since we are doing that we might as well update the bathrooms, kitchen, etc. The plan is to live in the townhouse for 3-5 years and then probably move to the suburbs. We want to make the right updates to the townhouse now so that when we want to sell it will be ready and we won’t have the issues we are having now with potential buyers complaining about not having hardwoods. Thinking about all the stuff we have to do stresses me out. Ideally, we will have a month to complete the renovations. I am preparing myself that the timeline will probably not go as planned. Just breathe...some things are out of my control...it will all work out.

Too many life changes all at once. Selling, buying, moving, renovations, baby coming! There is also a chance my company will go through layoffs this fall. I really hope I am safe because that’s just one other life change that I can do without. I will sue the crap out of my company for letting me go while pregnant or use it as a negotiating tactic to get a better severance package.

It’s gonna be one of those days

A coworker is on vacation today and calls me late yesterday to ask if I can cover and represent our team on a call for a special project he is on since he will be gone. He neglects to tell me that there is a presentation that needs to be completed which is detailed in the body of the invite he forwards to me. Of course when I ask him about it he says he didn’t complete it and that I can just throw something together. Not cool. So I spent hours last night putting something half ass together so that I don’t look like an idiot. I shoot it over to the leader of the call who calls me this morning (15 mins before the call…yes the call is at 7:30am) and was impressed with my thorough thoughts and recommendations. He wants me to share my screen and lead the call. I know I should look at this as an opportunity to shine but I don’t want to do this.

Update: Call went great…I received lots of kudos…I will look at this in a positive light and take this as a win!

2016...year of the baby

I finally feel comfortable sharing that I am pregnant! After five miscarriages, years of fertility treatments, a doctor switch, a successful surgery, and hundreds of shots, it finally worked. I am still in a bit of denial. All that stuff we had to go through really puts a damper on being pregnant. But I am starting to wrap my head around the fact that this is really happening and we have waited so long for this moment. The first trimester was brutal and now that I am finally feeling better, I am loosening up and trying to enjoy the ride and stop worrying that something may go wrong.

I am so thankful for modern medicine, technology, and world class doctors.

#it's a boy 20 weeks halfway there

Ramblings

In NYC for 2 nights for work. My morning meeting tomorrow canceled. I now have time to kill and looking for ideas of things to do or a good coffee spot to set up shop and work from in Chelsea. Looked at last minute Hamilton tickets figuring I could get one for a reasonable price. Wrong. It's around $440 for a ticket. Nope, nope, nope. I sat in Madison Square Park and people watched for a while. The weather was perfect and it was both relaxing and entertaining. Saw a popular fashion blogger, someone I recognized from tumblr, and literally bumped into Jill Kargman from Odd Mom Out. Couldn't decide on a place for dinner so I ate a slice of pizza. It was a whopping $1.00. I thought I misheard the total. The place was crowded so I thought it must be good pizza but now I know it was because it was super cheap. Boo. Staying down the street from the Serbian church that burned down on Easter. Very sad to see in person.

Feeling Rage

I took 4.5 weeks of meds that were not necessary because of a nurse who miscalculated the amount of time I was to be on these meds.

My gut told me something was off so I called the doctor’s office not once, not twice, but three times to check and see if I was supposed to go that long taking the meds. Each time I spoke to a different nurse. I begged and pleaded for them to wean me off sooner. The third call I was actually crying over the phone. All three times they were firm on the end date...July 15. I counted down the days until this magic date when I could finally end the drugs which made me feel crappy.

I found out I should have stopped the meds by running into the actual doctor at dinner over the weekend. He asked me how I was feeling and I said great now that I finished up taking the meds this last week. He had this stunned look on his face and asked me to clarify and then told me I should have stopped last month.

The good news is that there are no adverse side effects of pumping my body with stuff I didn’t need but I can’t seem to get over this.

I called the doctor’s office and spoke to a nurse and asked her to explain how this could have happened. She had no answer and just kept on apologizing. They had three opportunities to double check my dose, my chart, or check with the doctor. There is nothing I can do about it now. It is over and I need to move on but what if it COULD have caused adverse side effects. I am not even mad about the extra money I spent for the meds, I just can’t stop thinking about how I could have been feeling better WEEKS AGO.

#31 extra shots in my ass and 93 extra nasty vaginal inserts

Happy 1st Birthday to my sweet niece Aleksia! Uncle Doug was a hit with the kiddos and is recovering from all the shoulder rides.

Work Venting

Got my ass chewed out and handed to me by our CFO last week.

Immediately after my call with him I had a call with our President, VP of Marketing, the CFO that chewed me out, our Dir of Sales and two other coworkers that have same job as I do (we are just on different teams). Call went just as poorly and had coworker A throw me and coworker B under the bus during the call.

Promptly after the call ended I called the turd and tore into him about making us look bad while trying to make himself shine. Of course he was stuttering like a fool filled with excuses and poor explanations. This is the second time he’s pulled this crap so he is on my forever shit list.

There is a huge trade show in Chicago this week so many sales people, our leadership team, and our marketing team are in town for it. Luckily, I don’t have to attend because none of my customers are going. However, three weeks ago I set up an in person meeting with one of the marketing girls for 10:00am today. I text her at 9:30 to remind her and check in to see if we are still on even though I sent a calendar invite. She asks to push the meeting to 12:00. Just now I receive another text saying she is running late and asking if we can push it to 12:30. Ok, sure I will just sit here waiting for you all day! Btw, she lives in a different state but her boyfriend lives here so guess where she is staying? So you are running late because you are hanging with your boyfriend (he works from home). This girl is the epitome of a slacker. I have had numerous discussions with her boss about her performance with documented proof of her inabilities. It’s amazing she is still employed.

I got a new boss last week. I am meeting him for the first time on Thursday for dinner. I had to reach out to him and set something up. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? He is three years younger than me and is managing a team of eight who are all older than him. I have nothing against his age. Hey, if you are great manager, smart, and work hard then I have no problem but so far he has not impressed me. You are on board for almost two weeks and don’t reach out to introduce yourself to your team? Yeah, I have a problem with that. So yes, I guess I am judging his age because I don’t think a seasoned leader/manager would slack on reaching out to their new team.

Having an absolute hissy fit

My husband invited 5 guys over to watch the basketball championship game. I have no problem with that. I was going to head to my sister’s house but her whole household is sick so plan B was to quarantine myself in the bedroom and watch tv all night. I was actually looking forward to it. I already ate dinner and am in my pjs. My husband just told me one of the guys that is coming over is bringing his wife because she doesn’t like being alone. Ughhhh I don’t want to socialize. I just was to be a hermit. I’m so angry right now. And it’s going to be a late night. The game doesn’t start until 8:20! I guarantee they will be here till midnight and I will have to make small talk and pretend to enjoy myself. I’m so crabby right now!

Update: The universe loves me! The wife didn't show up. She decided to stay home and bake. I'm cozied up in my bed watching The Americans! I'm so happy!

Friday thoughts

-If one more person announces that they are pregnant I will jump off the balcony. I am just trying to have one baby and so many people are getting pregnant with #2. #feelingfrustrated

-I have already decreased my time on social media but based on the previous thought, I may just deactivate entirely. Looking at you Facebook.

-It’s scary how much time I think about having a baby. I hate it that it consumes me.

-My ass is bruised and hurts from the dreaded progesterone shots. I am not complaining but merely stating a fact.

-I wish to be one of those people that naturally have a positive attitude and outlook. I’m trying to work on this.

-Looking forward to being social this weekend and getting my mind off the always present elephant in the room. But no, I do not want to hang out with my pregnant friends or ones with newborns. I just can’t. Ironically they are the ones always trying to make plans with me.

-It is not orthodox Easter yet but I still plan on going to church this Sunday. I need all the help I can get and am hoping this will make me feel better. One last prayer, plead, beg session before our transfer can’t hurt.

-Please send good thoughts on Monday my way.

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