Alanna Risse

The night we got the keys to our home, we met with our realtor and looked around the house for a while, imagining how we would set things up or what we might change. Along with flowers and keys, lots of congratulations were exchanged. We walked him out and said our good byes. And standing there, on the front walkway to our house, keys in hand, looking up at what was now OUR house, Tom started to giggle. It bubbled up out of somewhere deep inside him, like a wave. It was quite possibly the happiest I’ve ever seen him, and I’ve seen him plenty happy over the years.

I love you house.

All I can think about is what I’m going to do once I leave my job. And I have to keep reminding myself I’m going to have a small baby, and I don’t know how hard or easy that is going to be. I don’t know how much spare time I’ll have, if any at first. I need to allow myself some space, and to appreciate this new life. I need to realize it’s going to take some adjusting.

I want to have that spongy feeling again. The feeling where everything around you is inspirational. I feel it welling up now. I want to read, see, hear, feel everything. I want to think of a million ideas, some of which may stick, many of which will just be passing thoughts.

I’m going to allow myself lots of time to ease into my new life with my beautiful daughter. To figure out a rhythm. I’m going to allow myself playtime, because it’s the biggest thing I’ve been missing since I stopped doing much other than work and house stuff. I’m going to allow myself failures and I’m not going to let them get me too down. And I’m going to allow myself quiet time, to read or draw or just think. I’d like to walk barefoot in the grass, or smell pine needles, or feel the sun on my skin. I’d like to take pictures of things, let the camera help me focus on beautiful things around me. I’d like to stay up late with an idea burning in my mind. I’m going to allow myself these opportunities.

But for now, I’m going to try very hard to not get discouraged at work. I am almost done, I’m just antsy. I got some blank notebooks at Powell’s last night. I’m finding it difficult today to make the first mark. They represent a new beginning for me. I’ve been on a winding path for many years. A path to change my career. I tried to straddle both my old and new profession and the less important one gobbled up the most important one. I got so far off the path in some ways, I feel like I’m starting from scratch. I just need a warm up, something to get the ball rolling again. Time to take a deep breath and jump. I just want a place to spill out all my ideas and thoughts, away from my public blog, and in my own handwriting. My notebooks will keep me going through the last couple months at work. They will be my beacon.

I must do this for my daughter. I must show her that you can do what you love, that you don’t have to settle. That money isn’t as important as happiness. I want her to know hard work, when applied to the things you love and hold dear, gives great rewards.

Here I am, week 25. Things are pretty smooth sailing. I’ve needed more naps lately, and I hurt my stomach muscles swimming last week, but other than that I’m doing good. I’ve been having trouble gaining weight. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s where I’m at. I’ve gained 9.5 pounds total. I’m not depriving myself at all, in fact, I eat all the time even when I’m not hungry. i think just removing most sugars and simple carbs just makes me feel really full and I’m not getting as many empty calories… though I miss them so. I can’t have all the snack food that’s so delicious and bad for you and I think it’s temporarily halted my weight gain. So I think it’s ok. As long as I’m slowly gaining and not loosing, and as long as I feel healthy, I’m not going to stress. I have a midwife appointment next week so I’ll talk to them about it.

Baby is super active all the time. She kicked me so hard the other day it felt like a cartoon kick, like my belly extended out 3 feet or something. It made me squeal from the shock of it. Tom’s felt her a few times, even once when we were hugging. She seems to like music, she was moving around like crazy when I played Neutral Milk Hotel. And I think she likes hearing me sing. Or maybe she’s my new inner critic and I can’t take a hint.

We had a housewarming party this weekend. It was so much fun having people over to our amazing house. We really can’t believe we found this place and that it is ours now. Someone brought over a pie late in the day though, and now it is taunting me from the fridge. I’m slowly chipping away at it, tiny slice by tiny slice. Tom said he’d eat it all but he hasn’t been making very good work of it. I made three different salads and corn bread and there was lots of meat. We had a steady trickle of people all day so I got to talk to people a little more than if they had all showed up at once. After everyone left we did some dishes and I plopped down on the couch. I could have gone to bed at 9, but I stayed up and watched some tv. I feel lame wanting to go to bed at 9. I know that’s silly, but I guess I miss hanging out with my husband. He gets home at 7 on weekdays so if I go to bed at 9, well, that sucks. It ends up just being dinner and dishes with the hubby and that’s it. That’s no fun.

I’m very over my job right now and looking forward to the next stage in my life. I don’t know what exactly it will look like but I know that I need to try with all my might to do what I feel passionate about, and stop taking jobs that are nothing more than paychecks. I’m nervous about money, but we’re good at living frugally. Our mortgage is very manageable. It’s time. I’m in the mood for inspirational, career change, enterprenuer type books so I’m going to Powell’s tonight.

I’m getting more and more tired of hearing the “you don’t know what tired is until you have a kid” and “Appreciate your life now because as soon as you have a baby, it’ll be over as you know it.” Yeah yeah yeah thanks but no thanks for your useless advice. Do you not remember how annoying it was when people gave you the same advice? You’re boring me, please use your energy on something useful for a change. And thanks Evany for putting it straight. She said she has plenty of energy, aside from those common 4 month old baby-no-sleepy woes. As my friend Kara Jo said, she was more productive after her first child was born than any other time in her life. So it isn’t always that way, just depends on the parents and the baby. And it’s just life anyway, it is what it is, and every life is different. I also find it bizarre that people think it’s crazy to not do disposable diapers. Crazy? who’s the crazy one? It’s like people complaining about the banning of plastic grocery bags, it just ‘don’t make no sense’. Of coarse we should try to use cotton diapers if we can. I don’t judge others for using disposables, I understand cloth is more work, but calling me crazy? That’s just well, crazy! Let’s see what else can I bitch about today. And the exercise thing, people find it amazing that I exercise even though I’m *gasp* pregnant. It’s more important now than any other time in my life that I get exercise. Do people really sit around on their asses for nine months eating bon bons? Because sometimes that’s what it seems people expect from me. Sorry, I like using my muscles. I feel like I definitely don’t do enough.

So please opinionated folks of the world, do me a few favors. 1. read up on cloth diapers vs disposables 2. read up on the importance of diet and exercise when you are pregnant. 3. Read up on your choices for birth experiences. If your opinions are informed, I’ll gladly get into a discussion over these topics, but if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, don’t judge other people’s choices and keep your mouth shut. You just look plain ‘ignant’. Done.

One year ago today.

Tuesday night, after band practice, Tom was munching on a late-night bbq chicken thigh. It slipped out of his hands, hit the floor and immediately hopped straight into Mississippi’s stomach. It went directly to her stomach. It did not pass go, it did not get chewed. We had zero time to react. By the time we grabbed her mouth it was in her stomach. And so today I find myself poking her poo with a stick. I assumed it would come out pretty much just as it went in, but I find myself doubting. Could it have been broken down into stringy fibers in such a short amount of time? Or is that just a stick she chewed? Guess we’ll have to just keep waiting to see. She’s in very good spirits, and wouldn’t you be if you got a free chicken thigh bone? And so I continue to poke and prod.

We read lots of pet advice websites. All of them said the same thing, watch her, make sure she’s not lethargic or seems to be suffering from a swollen gut, watch for bleeding. Make sure she still eats and poops. Should be out within 48 hours. So far she seems no worse for the wear. Something tells me this won’t be her last chicken thigh. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but yeah, she was pretty good at getting a hold of the last one in a hurry.

We got a new fridge. To you suburbanites, it may not seem all that exciting, but to us, it is heaven. We got a bottom freezer, french door fridge, a big one. We now have three produce drawers AND a deli drawer. We can put bottles of wine in the fridge upright. We can open the fridge doors all the way without completely obstructing an entire side of kitchen. Our new fridge doesn’t sound like Herbie the love bug either. I don’t even want to take a gander at how much energy the last fridge was eating up. It was from 1983.

A year ago we had an apartment fridge. It was small but nice. We bought it at Costco because the other apartment fridge we had was from somewhere around 1962, not self defrosting. When we turned it off to defrost it, we found a 10+ year old bottle of Jagermieister and a bag of peas from who knows when.

Our last house had a nice fridge, but you couldn’t open the door all the way because of where it was placed, so we could never clean the drawers very well. It had a water filter and ice maker but the water filter didn’t work. The new fridge has an ice maker but we may never hook it up, we’ll see.

This fridge is ours. We picked it out ourselves to suit our needs. We’ll have room for all that delicious CSA food starting next month. I love our fridge. Silly I know, but it’s true. Tom likes it because it looks like a face.

According to BabyCenter.com, my uterus is the size of a soccer ball right now and my baby is the size of an ear of corn. As Scott says: “Amaizing!” I am incredibly physically tired at night. Most nights it seems I have to struggle just to get to bed. But every day I wake up and feel back to normal. It’s a strange cycle.

I’m staying off of sugars and simple carbs since the high glucose levels in my last urine test. I’ve given myself a bit of a break and am allowing a few strawberries and some occasional granola. I lost 2 pounds initially but I’ve gained a pound and a half of it back now so I think I’m on the right track.

The nursery is almost done. I’m slowly painting the old windows so they don’t get stuck shut. I’m going to paint the closet but I might put that on hold a couple weeks. I got another boatload of free baby clothes from a friend and the dresser is now full. Little girl clothes are so disgustingly cute I could just puke all over myself with glee.

I’m doing much better than last week. Last week just sucked. I cried all week long pretty much. I had a good emotional purging with a friend, thank you Summer, and I think it really helped. I think I just really needed to say outloud “This sucked, this sucks.” I’m now also able to say out loud “My mom died” and although it’s still hard, it’s getting easier. Knowing that my job only has about 3 months left makes me feel a whole lot better too. I can start thinking about the future more, and visualize it actually happening. I welcome the change, scary as it may be at times.

I’ve started coveting a BOB Revolution stroller. I think about it far too much. I keep finding myself reading reviews or looking at product specs. It seems perfect to me. You can get an adaptor for a car seat for tiny ones, The front wheel can be locked or unlocked, it can be used as both a jog stroller and an about-town stroller, it’s good for tall people, it’s lightweight yet durable, cute and fairly compact, you can get an optional rain cover for it, and it comes in brown/pink, one of my fav combos. It has a high wheel clearance so we can take it on hikes. It’ll last us years. Me want one.

We’ve been blessed with a ton of adorable hand-me-downs. We’ve been pretty frugal about everything else baby related, I’m even making diapers from bargain and recycled fabric. The stroller is pricey, but I just want it so bad, I don’t think I can settle for anything else. Is that terrible? No, Alanna, it’s not terrible, you like things that work well and that suit your needs, don’t be so hard on yourself. OK, Thanks conscience.

BOB Revolution Stroller

Oh yes stroller, you will be mine.

Last night at dinner we started talking finance. The moment I think about us being on one income, I start to panic and I start thinking of ways to make money, all of them involving precisely what I want to get away from. He stopped me. He said I needed to first make room for the things that will ultimately make me happy, and those things that are just temporary band-aids to me, if I keep doing them, I’m going to suddenly wake up one day to find that my whole life has passed me by and that I never did what my heart wanted me to do. He said the freelancing only fits in after I’ve made the space for the things I really want to do with my life. He is right and I need to remember this. Getting my degree was the best thing I ever did and I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t given up corporate web developing. Now it’s two years down the road, I’ve paid a lot of my student loans down, we bought a house, and baby is on the way. The job has helped me accomplish these things and now it’s time for the next stage. Now I need to take some chances. I need to be brave. We are good at living frugally.

Thank you Tom. Please keep reminding me of this, I’m sure I’ll forget again.

I stared blindly at my belly last night waiting to see if I actually see my baby’s kicks from the outside and sure enough, the big kicks are visible to the outside world. This is getting interesting.

I’m going on a little trip to see a friend in three weeks. It’s weird to think about how big I’ll be by then. I always just feel like I’m always going to be just this size, even though every day I get bigger and bigger. I don’t know if it’s magic hormones that do that to you, or what. Magic hormones that make you believe everything that’s happening to your body is totally normal and nothing to be alarmed about. It weirds me out that it doesn’t even hurt me that my belly is getting so stretched so quickly.

The maternity leave conversation came up today. So I had to tell them I don’t have plans to return. I want to take a nice long maternity leave and attempt to actually use my $60k degree for something. My last day will be somewhere around July 13th. For my last build release there will be two of us working instead of just me. That will be soooo nice.

Feels good to have that out in the world. It makes it seem more real. Baby is jumping for joy right now. Mississippi hates web developing and I’m sure baby would too. The idea of letting go of a well paying job that wants me to stay is a scary one but I’ll figure something out. I’ve got to get out of this house, or at least out from under this desk. I’m not really under the desk, just my legs.

The job was good and I’m thankful for it, it’s just time to try and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

I lost weight this week. Two pounds. This news would usually make me ecstatic but as I’m pregnant and should be gaining weight, not loosing it, this is bad news. It means I’ve technically lost 3 pounds. Since I cut out simple carbs and sugar, it’s been challenging to get enough calories, try as I might. So I’m instilling a new rule, second breakfast every day, and probably second dinner too. I am usually hungry before bed but I’m too tired to do anything about it, or to think of anything interesting to eat.

Fed up with not making art
Fed up with watching my friend’s art careers blossom while I barely seem to have to time to shower, let alone put mark on paper
Fed up with unrewarding jobs
Fed up with never spending time with friend
Fed up with not making new friends
Fed up with having no life outside of work
Fed up with no exercising
Fed up with crying
Fed up with being isolated in my house every day
Fed up with a lack of joy in my daily life
Fed up.

Tom felt the baby move for the first time last night. She kicked hard for him, several times. It was a trip.

I’m kicked constantly now. Tom still can’t feel it, which sucks, but I bet he will any day now. My baby weights about the same as a mango, says BabyCenter.com. My belly is big, getting bigger every day. Such a trip. I get weirded out when strangers seem surprised when I tell them I’m pregnant. I feel so big. When I take a bath, I feel like a beached whale. My foot pain went away when I stopped wearing my pumas. My nose is still totally effed up. And I have allergy stuff happening on my hands. It doesn’t want to go away. I am the lotion queen these days.

I had my first case of swollen ankles, after a show Friday night. Two bands, standing up after a long day was enough to swell them up, no wonder you don’t see a whole lot of pregnant ladies at concerts. The show was good though, Rogue Wave played at the Wonder Ballroom. The swelling wasn’t bad, it just hurt. I might just stick to the Aladdin or Mission Theatre where you can sit for the whole show. I kept plugging my ears so I could hear sort of what it must have sounded like for baby. I hope she liked it and it wasn’t too loud.

I’ve cut out sugars and simple carbs. It’s going good, we’ve been eating good meals and I’ve started looking into all my great cookbooks to find inspiration. It’s easy to get into the pattern of cooking the same things all the time. My favorite cookbooks are Jack Bishop’s vegetarian cookbooks. Things haven’t changed much food wise around here, but I noticed the whole world has been taunting me with shakes and donuts everywhere I turn. Today I had cravings pretty bad, I’ve been doing good since mid week last week.

My moods are mostly up, sometimes down. Today is a down day and I don’t want to go to yoga class at Yoga Shala tonight. It’s too hard and I just want some gentle yoga. I am sad and tired. So I’ll go to the basement and do some quiet dvd yoga. I don’t want to be challenged today, I want to be coddled.

We’re been seriously nesting, we both feel like it’s gotten a little out of control but it feels so good, and we’re being pretty frugal. We found a very large mission style dining room table with 10 chairs for $580 off craigslist. We found a beautiful entry table for $199 and a baby dresser perfect to use as a changing table for $99 in an antique shop in Oregon City. That’s not bad right? I did a lot of moving of heavy objects this weekend. I was really careful. I haven’t had any of the abdominal muscle cramps that I had earlier on. I was definitely feeling it yesterday though. What’s worse is watching Tom lifting very heavy objects by himself. All I need is a husband with a strained back. I hate feeling like I can’t help.

Our house is looking so amazing these days. Last night we sat on our porch before dinner, laughing and marveling at how lucky we are. It feels amazing.

It’s cheese and cracker time!

I want to talk about my family. Can I do that? Is it safe now? My mom died about a month ago. In the middle of our closing on the house. I didn’t want to be sad. There has been so much sadness surrounding my mother, I just didn’t want to go there at all. I hardly told a soul. Besides Tom, I think only one other friend knows, and that’s only because she asked. My mother and I hadn’t spoken in about 15 years. I didn’t cut off our relationship out of anger, I did it out of a desire for self preservation, and fear too. I was afraid of how miserable I felt around her, how self destructive I became. I was afraid of not being able to get her out of my life again, if I ever let her back in. I didn’t want to watch her slowly kill herself. I wanted to heal and I felt like I couldn’t do it as long as she was in my life. It’s taken years to heal, I don’t know if you ever do completely. It was a decision I renewed regularly. I was always much more afraid of seeing her again than I was of not having her in my life. I knew she would die some day, she was always dieing. I had made my peace and I continued to feel right about my decision to keep her out of my life. I wish I could have told her I wasn’t angry, but I didn’t think she’d ever understand that.

I guess there is a wake happening soon, I might have missed it already. Part of me wanted to go, but part of me doesn’t understand what I’d be going to. I had so little interaction with my mother’s family. I feel like I could count on one hand all the times I’ve spent with them, maybe two hands. I spend more time with my grocer. I don’t know them, they don’t know me. I’m also afraid they’d never understand my decision. And it’s all too heavy and too sad. Just too much sorrow. I’m tired of the sorrow.

Several years ago, the second fish, of a pair of fish I’d had for years, up and died on me. They lived in a fish tank that I’d given to my dad when he was going through chemotherapy for lung cancer back in 1990. The tank had algae eaters, plecostomus and catfish. My dad said when he did chemo treatments, that he would imagine the chemo was eating out all the cancerous cells, like the sucker fish cleaned up all the algae. So when the last goldfish died, I decided it was time to get rid of the tank. I cried my eyes out as I was cleaning it out, thinking about all the stuff that’s left behind when people die. What do you do with it all? The crying got to be overwhelming. I grabbed my dad’s old coat from the closet and curled up into a little ball. It was only then that I’d realized it was my dad’s birthday. It had been something like 15 years since he’d died, and it was the first year I’d almost forgotten his birthday.

I felt like I couldn’t talk about any of this. Like I had to stay silent until my mother died. I’m tired of holding it all in. I want to be able to talk about my past. Let some sorrow out.

She wrote me a letter before she died. I was afraid to open it. Afraid it was another attempt at manipulation. I just couldn’t imagine what good could come from reading it. I finally just opened it and read it. It was just a nice letter, saying she loved me that that she was sorry that we could never have a good mother-daughter relationship. She said she thought she understood why I went away. It’s doesn’t really matter if she did or not. When I read the letter, it made me sad that maybe she’d never known that I didn’t leave out of anger. But maybe that doesn’t matter either. There isn’t a clean resolution with these kinds of things. You just have to move on and trust your decisions.

I’m feeling much better. I had enough energy to empty out a couple more boxes from my office yesterday. We had a very lovely dinner at Veritable Quandary in Portland right on the river. Very yummy food and nice place. I had chicken and black eyed peas, yum. We skipped dessert but I had an after dinner decaf cappuccino.

I’m much more calm about the diet thing. The test doesn’t say anything other than there was more sugar in my body than my body could process, after a breakfast, first thing in the morning. It doesn’t mean I have gestational diabetes. It just means it’s time to be better at my food. Gestational diabetes is pretty common and it generally goes away once the baby is born. So I know I’m more at risk of getting it, given my family and personal history. I’m ready to stop messing around. I think I’m already past the initial shock of removing sugars and simple carbs, there wasn’t that much in my diet to cut out in the first place. I will now keep an emergency bag of cashews in my purse instead of clif bars. Anyway, things are good, I might start posting some recipes or some of my food journal, hopefully it’ll help inspire other pregnant women out there to see all the yummy stuff that’s out there even without simple carbs and sugars. Tonight it’s eggplant Parmesan. I’m sad at the idea that I can’t get lingonberry juice from Ikea, but my baby is worth going without for 4 months.

We’re in serious nesting mode. We found a dining room table last night on Craigslist and we’re going to pick it up tomorrow morning. I hope we can enlist some help to get it into our house, because the top is too heavy for me to lift. It’s a great, thick mission style dining room table with 10 chairs. Just in time for our housewarming party. I set up the crib and I’m hoping to have time today to exchange the mattress. I got the wrong size. This weekend we are putting together the grill and probably finding more furniture off craigslist. We may even look at fridges. We hope to have a lot of stuff taken care of this weekend and hopefully be done with the bulk of move-in stuff, except for getting our sewer line fixed, but yeah, we won’t think about that right now.

Tonight we go see Rogue Wave at the Wonder Ballroom (after a nap). Things are looking up. Next week will be a very busy week at work, but I’m hanging in there. I’ll go hang out at Tom’s work for a change of scenery.

I started crying yesterday on and off, by bedtime, I was just crying me a whole goddamn river. Not for any one thing, just from being sad. I woke up this morning and the crying continued. It showed no signs of stopping so I called in sick to work, washed off my face and got out of the house.

I’ve been working from home full time for over a year now. Things have gotten progressively busier at work, so some days I sit in this little room, all day long, staring at a screen, rarely going outside. I could managed it before I got pregnant. I had energy at night so I still had my art, I could get beers with Tom and be awake enough to enjoy them. Since the pregnancy, I have less energy, plus all the stress from the moving. So much to do all the time. So I had to cut out a lot of the things in life that gave me joy. I’m trying to focus my energy on work and getting the house put together. I miss art, I miss outings. Even on weekends we focus on house stuff. It’s just getting to be too much. I need a break. I need some fun. I feel like I have no life. Like I have no friends. I haven’t been able to work downtown with Tom for a while because 1. it took time to get Mississippi into daycare, 2. I wanted to ramp her up slowly, make sure the place worked out. It’s working out, so now I can leave her there for a full day and go work downtown with Tom. I’ll probably go on Friday. I think Thursday we’ll go out for some dinner.

I developed a sweet tooth with this pregnancy. I tried to be good, but I was having those Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches every day. I’d have a soda every now and then, not every day. but pretty regularly. When we went out, I’d have root beer. So now that i have to abruptly stop my sugar intake, I’m probably crashing a little. That’s probably contributing to my tears. That will fade quickly. I got some snacks to help me through. Nuts and whole grain crackers with no white flour. I went through one of my favorite recipe books and made a shopping list.

So I left the house. I went shopping at a maternity and baby consignment shop. I got some things I need like a bathing suit and nursing bra, plus some cute clothes for spring summer whenever the sun decides to show itself again. I went to Goodwill and found a rocking chair for $15. More importantly, I got out of the house. Now I’m back and I’m going to finish painting the baby room if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll feel so much better once it’s done. I’m so close now.

I’m going to get on top of this dark cloud. I have my swim suit, I can try out the community indoor pool close to here. I’ve got my yoga and I need to take Mississippi on more walks on the days she stays home with me.

We brought Mississippi home exactly one year ago today. We’ve been through a whole lot, the three of us. She is the sweetest, cutest little monster on the planet and I am so glad she’s part of our family now. Tonight we are going to give her a special chicken dinner. She’s being extra snuggly today. I took her to the park for a little walk on her long leash, and I entertained the thought of letting her roam free, but then she saw a squirrel and took off, nearly taking my arm with her. So still no off leash for her, but she’s getting there one step at a time. We’ve come a long way. Mississippi, we love you to pieces!

Mississippi’s OHS photo

Mississippi March 2010

Mississippi March 2010

One year ago today

I’m really sad today because we went to our monthly midwife appointment and my glucose levels were a little high. I know how to fix it, I’m not scared about that, it’s just that I’m sad I have to say goodbye to all the deliciousness out there. No more Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, no more occasional sodas, definitely no more cinnamon rolls, no more sweet, delicious vanilla yogurt. It’s grains, veggies, and protein for me. I just got a little too sure of myself. I thought I could have sweet, tasty treats because I was doing so good otherwise. My diet sorta went downhill with the moving. I need to take this thing seriously. It’s up to me how the rest of my pregnancy goes. I’m going to keep a daily food journal. It’s going to be ok, I’m just really sad about it right now. There were also amounts of some hormone (can’t remember what it’s called) your body produces when it’s starting to burn fat stores, so it seems my diet needs a general overhaul. No more simple carbs.

The rest of our monthly midwife appointment went really well. My baby maker is just above my belly button now and there’s a good, strong heartbeat. They reviewed my ultrasounds and everything looks great. I have two fibroids that we are keeping an eye on. My weight gain is right on target and all else is well.

I want to take a ‘me’ day and just calm down about the glucose thing, but work is really busy this week. So I’m just sad at my desk. Sad sad.