Today–

Things with the house reorganizing are coming along every so slowly doing it mostly by myself.

Yesterday I reorganized all the boxes in the POD outside and brought in 95% of the toys.  They’re semi-organized in our old bedroom, the new playroom/office.  I got completely worn out and sore after moving all those boxes.  I’ve been too tired to do any more today!

I managed to take the girls outside earlier to check out signs of spring.  We also potted some flowers they picked out when we were shopping yesterday.  I was intending to plant some seeds too, but after feeding the chickens and carrying the chicken feed, then walking outside with the kids, and putting a few flowers in pots I suddenly had no energy left.

This pregnancy is really wearing me out for some reason.  My body just stops.  Cannot keep going, must lay down.  Dislike!

I get antsy when I can’t get up and do things.  If there’s no chaos I feel the need to create some, I can’t just sit here. Body, really…I’m not feeling sick anymore thankfully, just worn out sometimes.

Maybe I’m becoming elderly and feeble.  You know, at the ripe old age of 26.  ;)

And my toes are swollen.  Dude! I’ve never had swelling this early in pregnancy before.  June and July might be long, hot swelly months for me.  Yikes.

I am getting cautiously excited about a teeny brand new baby to snuggle and love on.  I’m still paranoid about miscarriage, or I guess now still birth.  He’s not nearly as active as Rosie and Ada were, at least not that I can feel all the time.  My placenta makes an L shape along the side and top, so maybe that’s blocking some of his movements?  He’s down so low too, way lower than the girls.

I’m already in love with him, somehow.  That scares me since he’s not safe in my arms yet.

But a new baby! I might really be having one?  To dress in cute baby clothes, and with a tiny bum to pat.  Soft baby hair to sniff.  Send help.

Hate being pregnant when I feel awful, but I could easily have a million newborns.

I’ll just…post pictures now.

First, here are a couple of instagram pictures from yesterday at lunch.

These pictures are from our time outside this afternoon:

Our strawberry patch got decimated by the ducks.  I wasn’t sure they would come back up, but yesterday tiny leaves appeared and today they’re even bigger.

Rapidly growing!  These little dew looking drops are not dew.  Guttation, maybe?

This would be perfect if Rintoo was sniffing a flower, but instead he’s sniffing dead tomato stalks from last year that I never cleaned out…

Periwinkle is in bloom!

This is the almost actual color of these flowers. They are very dark blue/purple in person.  I’ve never, ever seen ones so striking before! I can’t remember the name of them.

I saw them at Walmart yesterday, which isn’t somewhere I normally buy flowers but I couldn’t not buy them!

Rosie and Ada picked Primrose flowers for themselves.  We put them in clay pots today and since they only need 3-6 hours of direct sunlight per day the girls can keep them their rooms.

Rosie was distressed because the petals on her plant got old and white overnight.  Luckily there are brand new buds down inside waiting to open.

The wild violets are blooming!

I don’t know why people put weed killer on their yards, some weeds are beautiful.  What is our obsession with plain perfect grass??

I don’t know what these are, but they’re so cool!  They’ve never grown under this tree ever before.  We just found a random patch of them had popped up.

They’re tiny.

Leaves: Coming soon to a tree near you!

It’s supposed to storm tomorrow and then turn cooler again.

The past couple of days of 80 degree temps were heavenly!  Can’t wait for summer.

Rosie had an appointment today with the allergy doctor.

She’s been complaining about her belly hurting for quite awhile, since early spring of this year.  Finally a couple of months ago we realized she was pointing to her chest area and just calling it her belly.

Her lungs hurt, not her stomach.

Tyler has asthma and takes an inhaler.  Sometimes he can’t breathe, especially after being outside.  We decided to take Rosie to the allergy doctor to see what was going on.

 

First she had to do a breathing test where she breathes as hard as she can into a computer thing to blow out candles on a computer screen.  That went ok, but she only had 75% of her small and medium airways functioning, and only 92% of her major airways.  Not a huge deal, but still not 100%.

 

Second she had to get allergy testing.  They did the kind where a sharp plastic object pricks the back, and if you get a hive it means you’re allergic to whatever they put on the prick.

I had to hold Rosie down.

She cried.  I cried.  Tyler cried.

Ada clapped.  Oh Ada.

 

Here’s her back afterward, while we were waiting the allotted 15 minutes for the full reactions to occur:

 

(Note: My arms look freakishly skinny in this picture.  Um, they are not really that skinny…!)

See number 7 there in the middle?  That one swelled up HUGE.

It was grass.

The rest of them didn’t swell up at all.

We even tested for major food allergens.  She isn’t allergic to any common foods, not allergic to any animals, and not allergic to mold or dust!  I am so relieved.

Just grass.  I can handle that.

After the back pricking torture session Rosie had to have a breathing treatment.  Then we waiting 10 more minutes for that to settle in her lungs before redoing the breathing test where she blew out the computerized candles.

The doctor said if she has asthma then the breathing treatment will have made a difference in her results.  If she doesn’t have asthma then nothing would change from the first test.

Well on the second test her airways were open right around 100%.  The breathing treatment made a huge difference!

So Rosie has asthma, like Tyler.  Poor Rosie.

I’m so glad that her lungs will no longer be hurting her all the time though.  Relieved, really.  I bet now she’ll be much happier and ready to go have fun instead of complaining all the time.  I’m sure feeling badly had to affect her mood and behavior.

She also has terrible eczema on her knees and elbows, which the doctor said has no cause other than being hereditary.  She got that from me.  I guess I’m going to try the steroid cream for a little while to get that cleared up so the poor kid stops itching.

I hate the idea of steroids in my little girl–the inhaler and the cream–but she’s been miserable for months now and I’m ready to see her happy and feeling good again.

I made myself and appointment for the end of August.  When Rosie goes back in for her one month breathing re-test I’m also going to get the back pricks for food allergies.

I had the testing done for other allergies in middle school and I was allergic to EVERYTHING.  Grass, pollen, trees, weeds, dust, mold, horses, rabbits, dogs, cats, etc.

I did allergy shots for years and now I’m way better.  I’m not hardly allergic to cats and dogs at all now–no hives, no red itchy eyes, no stuffy nose, and I don’t get sinus infections anymore!

But they didn’t do the food allergy testing back then, so I’m going to have that done.  I’m really nervous.  What if I’m allergic to everything?

The doctor said the food allergy testing was accurate if the test was negative, but sometimes it has false positives.  If I get a lot of positives we can double check it with the blood testing, which sometimes has false negatives.  Between the two you can get a better picture of what food allergies you might have.

*sigh*

Ok enough allergy talk.

Tonight Rosie was feeling good, after the breathing treatments, and so we played outside.  While the girls colored with chalk I enjoyed my flower bed.

I plant giant Zinnias every year.  I *love* them.  They are my most favorite flower of all time.  (My bearded dragon Norbert also loves to eat their leaves!)

 

Tyler always makes fun of me for taking pictures of flowers, but I can’t help it.  I think they are so beautiful, and kind of mysterious.

 

Some of them are just starting to bloom.

I think this little white flower looks like it’s having a party in the center.

Streamers, fireworks…do you see them?

I noticed this very tiny colorful aphid tucked in between the leaves.

I’ve never seen one primary colored before.  Strange.

And this little bug too…just hanging out on a petal.

Can you spot him in the second picture?

If you missed him, here’s the answer.

 

For those who keep asking me, sorry I never get time to respond–for my macro photos I use the Canon 60mm 2.8 lens.  (I have the Canon 40D camera.)

I’ve discovered the secret to taking good photos of bugs is the aperture.  You have to turn it up to the largest number you can.  (The aperture is what creates the depth in photos, the bokeh blur behind your subject, or the lack of blur if you want.)

If the shutter speed is too slow for the available natural light you want to use then you can turn the ISO on your camera up higher.  Be careful though, the higher your ISO is the more grain you’ll get in your photo.  In these photos I had the ISO at 1000.

I had the aperture set to 8 for these photos.  For the pictures I took of the baby praying mantis recently the aperture was set higher, I think it was around 14.

Unfortunately the higher number for your aperture means the narrower the opening when you take a picture, so less light gets through.  That means your shutter speed will need to be slower keep the shutter open long enough to properly expose the picture.  I hold very, very still to get a clear shot.

I love how photography is such a delicate balancing act, and a challenge to find the perfect combination of shutter speed, exposure, aperture, and ISO.  It takes a lot of practice–I’m still practicing–but it’s so much fun.  I only use my camera in manual mode, once you try it out you’ll never want to go back to automatic

This little guy has been hanging out on my front porch in the garden bed for a week now.  I love how expressive bugs are when you get up close.

Hard to tell from this macro picture, but this is a baby praying mantis just a little larger than my thumbnail.  Rosie and I had so much fun stalking him.

 

 

I love the way they cock their heads to stare up at you!  I happened to notice that his eyeballs can rotate completely backwards, without turning his head he can move his eyeballs to look straight behind him.  How cool is that?

 

See what I mean?  One set of eyes can see out of the back and the front of his head.

(Why aren’t human mothers equipped with this skill?)

 

Rosie and I also found these little bugs.  I have no idea what they are–they are super tiny, smaller than a pencil eraser.  They have a puff of cotton coming out of their behinds.

What in the world?  Never seen bugs like this before.  They are all over some weeds by my back porch.

I’ve nicknamed them Blast Ended Skrewts.

I am such a nerd.  I love looking at bugs up close.

They are so fascinating!  They look like we would imagine aliens to be, or monsters, except on a very tiny micro scale.

 

Anyway, moving on from insect photos…ahem…

 

Tyler is working nine days in a row, starting today.  (Saturday)  Good money, but…blah.

We’re going to go see that farm tomorrow night.

Excited/nervous/excited/trying not to get my hopes up.

 

Been thinking about what exactly we need to get done in our house if we’re going to put it on the market.  Kind of a long list of small things, a couple of bigger things.

-New closet doors, since the others fall off…wouldn’t be good if those big slabs of wood fell on someone when they were looking at our house!

-New bathroom sink/cabinets because the old one is horrific.

-Touch up/finish bathroom paint job.  I never painted behind the toilet because you can’t really see it, I just never got around to it!  And the paint above the shower needs a second coat.

-Touch up ceiling paint, door frame paint, and door paint.  Easy and will make a huge difference!

-Pressure wash the siding and the concrete around the outside of the house.  (Did the front tonight, tomorrow we’ll do the back.)

-Weed eat and rip out the horrible overgrowth.  When we moved in the yard was unkempt.  It’s scary, the weeds will never go away.  We’ll just cut them back as much as possible and hide them with a nice layer of mulch.  This will take a lot of work. Most dreaded task ever.  It’s like a weed jungle all around our house.  I gave up on it awhile ago.

-Clean out the garage.  It floods every time it rains, there are drainage holes drilled in the walls of the garage.  Great, right?  (It’s an unattached garage.)  We store everything up on bricks.  Redneck garage.  It looks gross in there because when I was pregnant with Ada and feeling miserable a few chickens started living in there.  Really, a redneck garage.  Pressure washer will fix this problem right quick.  It’s fun to spray out muck with a pressure washer, as long as you keep your mouth closed tight and wear your boots!

Once all of that is done, if we are making an offer on the farm we see tomorrow and planning on showing our house then I’ll pare down everything we own to the bare minimum and drop the rest in storage.  I already have a ridiculous organization system set up with rubbermaid tubs as a result of living in an inefficiently laid out 1000 st ft, so this will be an easy task for me…and secretly enjoyable.  But I’m not packing stuff up unless we think we are actually moving right now…so this has to wait until very last!

Then I will have to implement my strict cleaning schedule and maintain it while we show our house.  Ack.  I should start going to bed earlier so I am more energized.  How does 1 in the morning come so fast?  I have horrible insomnia.  I suffer from racing thoughts about all kinds of random things.  I purposely distract myself from going to bed because I hate laying there trying to get my brain to shut up!  But at the same time late night racing thoughts are where I come up with my best ideas…so…trade off, I guess.

 

 

Please tell me you also see it–doesn’t it look like this Cabbage Butterfly has on huge glasses like Professor Trelawney?

Or maybe I just have too much Harry Potter on the brain.