Wherein we redub the baby "Grasshopper", and Liam finally wins on my sugar habit.

We bought paint for the baby's nursery. The paint color was called "Grasshopper" (a really light spring-y green), which made us laugh and now we are calling Player 3 "Grasshopper", especially because it likes to kick. The kicks are actually kicks now, instead of the swish-swish-thumps of two weeks ago. They're still gentle and cute (for now) but it's very disconcerting and uncomfortable to have your internal organs jabbed from internal directions.

There is new research out that is linking excessive sugar consumption to heart disease (excessive defined as more than 8 teaspoons a day for women, more than 10/day for men. There are about 4 grams of sugar per teaspoon. For reference, a cup of vanilla Greek yogurt has 26 grams of sugar, or 6.5 teaspoons of sugar) and Liam has finally backed me in to a research corner for my sweet tooth. He's been trying to get me to cut back on sugar for my health for years now, trying to link it to diabetes, but all of the research out there had only linked poor lifestyle and fat consumption/body weight to to diabetes and heart disease. Well he's got me now, the *@&#$*, and I've been trying really hard to cut back on sugar. It makes me very unhappy because I love sugar very very much, but, you know, science.

Liam's shoulder is getting better. His MRI in December found nothing. The good news is that it meant there was no need for surgery. The bad news is that the doctors had no idea what was causing him so much pain. They wanted to do a cortisone shot as a we-don't-know-what's-wrong-with-you treatment, but it would have been a painful procedure involving inserting a long needle into a delicate spot, x-raying it to check the placement (with the needle still in there), adjusting the needle, x-raying again, and then pushing the plunger on the needle. He chose instead to go to a chiropractor as a last-ditch effort before the needle, and it has been great. This chiropractor examined him and noticed the same displaced rib that the Physical Therapist noted but the doctors dismissed. Basically what she thinks is wrong with him is that something is out of alignment way over here on the other side of his body and it's pulling on this which is yanking on that and the end result is that the end of the line (his shoulder and bicep) have such pressure and pulling on them that they're under tremendous stress. She works on him for maybe 5 minutes a week and he's been seeing marked improvement. Nice lady. Walk-in-only practice, 3 days a week, doesn't even need to advertise and her waiting room is always full from returning clients and word of mouth advertising.

Nashua-the-dog has news: he's being removed from the program. His training is flawless and his intelligence is unmatched, but he likes to steal things off of counters for attention which is a big problem for a guide dog because you can't move things around on a blind person. It is not unexpected for a retriever breed to want to bring you things, but it is an automatic failure if he can't be broken of it. Even the top trainers in the organization can't break him of the habit, and they've progressed to outright punishment to try to deter him. The good news is that he is such a perfect specimen that they are 95% certain that he will be used as a Stud Dog, which is a huge honor since only about 2 male dogs every 4-5 years get chosen for breeding service.

I practiced making fondant (that smooth cake frosting edible sugar clay stuff that they use to make wedding cakes look fancy) for the baby shower cake. It was a delicious disaster. Candy-making is apparently very different from baking. I used way too much sugar, accidentally, and the stuff was too stiff and thick and unusable. Liam thought it tasted like fresh Circus Peanuts and ate quite a lot of it. You know it's too sweet when even I recoil when you offer me another piece.

Player 3 has entered the game

After three happy years of marriage, Liam and I have decided it is time to add to our little family. In June of 2014 our family will be growing by two feet, as we welcome Baby Jewell!

We've taken to calling the baby "Player 3", since we both enjoy video games.

This was the announcement picture that I wanted to take, but the extra game controllers were packed away in the attic.

We're currently in a frenzy of decluttering as we seek to make room for Player 3 in our house. The lack of a proper basement in our house makes storage particularly difficult, and we're making some hard choices about what we keep and what gets tossed. We're ignoring the problem of where we'll store the stroller when we're not using it.

My belly grows larger every day. We kept my pregnancy a secret for a long time as we were enjoying the privacy that it afforded us (unsolicited advice! overly personal questions!), and I'm sure my co-workers were quietly assuming that I was enjoying the holiday season's food a little too much. But my bump has finally popped out and it is a secret no longer. It's already so large, I feel like a whale when I try to get comfortable in bed! We're only halfway there, it's only going to get larger.

It's hard to stay fashionable in maternity clothes when it looks like you're accessorizing a beer belly.

Player 3 has been actively kicking for a few weeks now. The kicks are still in the soft and cute phase, and I've noticed that the favorite time for acrobatics is at about 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. Liam has been able to feel the kicks only twice, each purely by chance. Every time I call him over to feel the kicks, they stop as soon as his hand is on my stomach. Player 3 is either shy, or quite the prankster.

In which Liam's shoulder continues to pain him, and feline love blossoms in my closet.

What a month! We've had our first snow fall in these past few days, and it reminds us how pretty (and how cold) our lovely state can get. It also reminds us of all the heavy snow that we will have to be shoveling in the months to come. Fortunately, our driveway is not large. Unfortunately, Liam's shoulder is not improving, despite physical therapy. He has an MRI scheduled, and we will finally learn what is causing him such constant pain. I, particularly, am eager for his shoulder to be fixed, as currently all of the lifting and yardwork falls to me (this will include snow shoveling!). Liam tried to mow the lawn once this fall, and spent three days in agony after his shoulder made it clear what a terrible idea that was. He manages not to display it to everyone, but most days he is in constant pain. Even lifting a roast pan into the oven is too much.

We do have some good news: we paid off one of Liam's school loans early! He had been overpaying by 20%, intentionally, since the beginning, and we cut off years from the repayment schedule. There are still plenty of school loans between the two of us, but it's nice to be able to turn the suddenly free money in our monthly budget to another one of our loans. Which one shall we put it towards? We have no credit card debt, but we each have school loans, there are two cars, and a mortgage. Hmmm.... possibilities, possibilities!

We've also finally got a storm door installed on our back door! Ever since we moved into our darling little house I have dreamed of having a screen door put in so that I can open the heavy interior door in the summer and get some light and air into our kitchen. In the winter, it adds an air buffer to keep drafts out from around our door. My father bought us the door for my birthday (note on how to tell you are getting older: you suddenly care if things match, and you desire housewares and hardware on your giftlist), and Liam's father helped install the door (since Liam's bum shoulder forbade any actual movement). Like all things about our old old house, the door had to be custom sized in order to fit the frame properly. Fortunately, modern storm door kits allow for a few inches of adjustment.
The cats don't know what to make of the new storm door. We don't have the interior door open often (it is winter), but they stare at the "open" space with big eyes. Why is the door open? The outside is showing! What if it comes in to get them?! Tomoe runs in terror, Sirius sits very very still, across the room, with his eyes fully dilated. If you touch his back when he is looking, he jumps. Butterscotch is nowhere to be found anytime the door is open, preferring to stay in her safe world of Under the Armchair where nothing can reach her.

"You cannot separate us. We are in love."

Speaking of the cats, I have a humorous story. Some of you may know that Sirius has a fixation on wool, and has gone to great lengths to steal several skeins of wool-blend yarn out of my knitting stash. Often I will follow a yarn trail around the house, only to find him with his entire body wrapped possessively around the skein. He is very sullen when I take the yarn back from him. He has ripped through plastic bags to get his beloved yarn back. It is only wool yarn that fascinates him (this is not uncommon among kitties, although many also like to lick the fiber, which he has shown no interest in).
This past week I purchased a lovely cardigan, adding a soft neutral color to my collection of professional sweaters. Every morning I have found it in a different spot in the house. Every morning, curious, I pick it up and bring it back to our bedroom. Then I thought to check the label: merino wool. Sirius has been stealing the sweater and bringing it on a romantic rendezvous to knead and snuggle! Now I bring the sweater back each morning and tuck it in a shopping bag to see how he will choose to steal it and where he will bring it. Oh kitty.

It has also come to my attention that many of you, despite me diligently typing your email addresses into the "share" feature each time I publish a post, are not receiving notices that a new post has appeared. My apologies. I tried!

In which Liam misses his dog, and I prove yet again how oblivious I am.

In October, we realized that we were going to have to give up Liam's dog. His shoulder was getting worse and worse, and every time it started to get better, the dog (who is 70+ pounds of solid puppy muscle) would yank on the leash and retear his shoulder/bicep. It was at the point that pain meds weren't touching it (medications are not particularly effective on him anyway, something he was born with. Remind me one day to tell you the story of his mole being removed, and how the doctor would not believe that the Novocaine was not taking effect), and he was constantly suffering throughout the day.

After identifying the dog as the source of his constant reinjury, Liam willingly broke his own heart and handed over Nashua to another family in the Guiding Eyes training program. This family has been fantastic. They have several teenagers, all in involved in sports, so Nashua is constantly stimulated and exhausted by the end of the day. "Does he go jogging?" they asked when we handed him over. "'Cause he's going to go now." Stimulated and exhausted is a good state for a puppy with a mind as sharp as his. It means he gets into significantly less mischief!

Liam misses his dog every day. Originally, he was hoping that his shoulder would heal quickly and we would get the dog back within a month, but that timeline looks less and less feasible (although his arm is healing). Even when he is diligent about not using his arm, the healing takes slow. Yesterday he did some fall yardwork (I weep at all the leaves! So many leaves....), and this morning he is certain that he's set himself back two weeks just from the vibrations of the lawnmower jostling his injured muscle.

We did get to see Nashua on Sunday when we attended the bi-weekly training class. He did a double-take when he saw us! He looked very healthy, and very mellow, and was completely unconcerned that he had not seen us for weeks. Alas, this lack of long-term attachment is exactly why Labradors are used for this training! Unlike other breeds, they quickly stop pining for their trainers and reattach to their new owners.

Sunday afternoon and evening we spent at the New Horizons soup kitchen, volunteering to serve up a Veteran's Day dinner to the Manchester homeless. Liam and I were placed at the check-in table, keeping track of who came in, ages, genders, etc. Once again I proved to be completely oblivious, as Liam noted that a significant number of the people coming in 1) went to me instead of him, even after we switched seats to see if being closer or farther to the door made a difference, 2) were intoxicated (the kitchen is a 'wet' service, meaning that they elect to feed folks even if they have been drinking or self-medicating. They do screen people before they let them in the door, though, turning away violent or fall-down drunk persons). I had absolutely no idea, and it struck me that apparently many of the less fortunate and homeless folks I have dealt with over the years were probably intoxicated and I was oblivious. All this time I thought that the ones that slurred their words and had a hard time focusing or standing straight were suffering from some mental impairment or old head injury. Nope. Apparently I am just completely oblivious. (This is supported by the time one of the workers at my old job came in drunk or high and I thought she was just tired and sick and had been crying. Completely oblivious.)

The New Horizons soup kitchen is apparently run by a NH television personality, Charlie Sherman, and it warms my heart to see how much he cares for the people less fortunate than him. He had brought in a 10 person brass band and they played for the homeless folks during dinner (it was very hard to hear people as we checked them in. They were loud.), which was much appreciated by the diners. How little joy they have in their lives!

September 2013

Things we did this month:

Liam discovered that he does not particularly care for nuts, but rather it is the salt that is often put on nuts that he likes. We discovered this after he purchased a jar of roasted unsalted mixed nuts. He was very disappointed.

We discovered that the old dead witch tree that sits on our elderly neighbor's property (and which drops its dead limbs and peeling bark onto our property) has piles of sawdust at its base. The tree is literally rotting from the inside out. We hope to approach her out taking it down again this year. Last year she refused to let us take it down because there was "plenty of life left in that tree!" We were very confused, as it is a very very dead tree, but realized that she is about 90 years old and quite near to blind and is mistaking the leafy stranglevine all over its trunk for healthy branch growth.

Someone in Liam's office was hiding how much her dog allergy was affecting her at work, and Liam chose to stop bringing Nashua into the office with him. Some of his co-workers were very disappointed that there would no longer be a morning game of fetch, but Liam noticed an immediate improvement in his allergic co-worker. Her eyes stopped swelling, and her breath was easier. The pup gets bored at home, now, and he's a mighty terror again.

It dining room ceiling beams look much better now that they're stained and sealed. At last, they look finished, or at least not like a forgotten mistake.

Forgive the tarp, we learned our lesson the first time with the sawdust.

Elisabeth turned 28! There were flowers (thanks Mum!) and cream puffs shaped like swans (thanks Liam!).

Liam's shoulder continues to get worse. He asked for a referral to a physical therapist, but was instead sent to a shoulder specialist who then sent him to a physical therapist, both of which were unable to figure out what was wrong with him shoulder. The PT did notice that there was a rib out of place and poking the muscles, and popped it back to where it should have been. This had the affect of moving and changing the pain: instead of intermittent pain in three places, Liam had extreme pain in one place almost constantly. Medications have little to no affect on Liam (or his mother) so over the counter pain relievers are barely touching his pain. His shoulder is slowly improving (only paining him when he uses it, or when he moves his arm or lifts something) under the PT's care. The theory right now is that there might be a tear in his bicep. Check out this nifty steroid patch he was given to wear for a few hours! That's an electric thingy on the patch, and it would send little shocks into his muscle, seizing the muscle slightly and doing... something... to the medication in the patch. I'm assuming the steroid encourages the targeted area to repair the muscle.  Science is cool.


The new bookstore opened on my birthday (it's like it's both of our birthdays!), and it's beautiful! The reception from the community so far has been very positive. It was such a relief to move from 3,000 feet to 10,000+! It really struck us how cramped our old space had been when we were having trouble fitting all of the books onto the shelves in our new space. If we were having trouble now, how did we ever manage it in the smaller space? The only answer we could come up with is that we were wizards.

Sports writer and middlegrade children's writer Mike Lupica fills our event section on September 20th.

August 2013

Liam's new job continues well. He's quickly become well-liked, and continues to dazzle his superiors with his competence and natural talent for working with people. The training programs he's come up with have become very popular so far. It's nice to see him come home with a smile on his face, and to see him still have energy on the weekends.

 My 10 year high school reunion came and went. I was uncertain if I really wanted to go, but I'm glad that I did. There were some people I thought I would want to see, and some people I thought I didn't care to see, and some people I had forgotten about but was glad to get to know now that we're adults. I think I made a new friend or two, too, which was unexpected. Not that we weren't friends or friendly as children, but it's astonishing to compare and contrast our relationships directly against where we left off ten years ago. We're so much more now, and we're a lot more fun and interesting now that we know who we are.

I'm really not certain why we're all leaning forward.

Courtesy of Poulin Photography!

The dog continues to be a goober.

Liam traded in his car and got a Subaru, which he's been dreaming of for five years. At last he has a vehicle with a roof rack for his kayak, and enough space in the back for the dog. Interestingly, since the Subaru has a higher safety rating, we are saving more money on our car insurance than we're losing on our increased monthly car payment.

After two springs of stepping through mud and squelchy grass on the lawn, I installed stepping stones in front of the porch leading to our driveway. They're not pretty, but I'm rather proud of them. I also replaced the door knob on our bathroom door. That was an adventure. When the "vintage" knob came off in my hand I was actually rather thrilled (this was probably due in part to the fact that I wasn't stuck inside the bathroom when the knob fell apart) because it meant I could replace the ugly awful thing. It was one of those old faux tortoiseshell, "porcelain" knobs that were popular decades ago, the sort that gradually lose all of their tension and stability and start drooping and rattling in their sockets. Unfortunately, most of the door knobs sold commercially these days are either entirely too modern looking to blend nicely with a simple house from the 1870's, or are cut crystal and glass and Victorian looking. Those glass knobs. How many frustrated memories I have of actual vintage glass knobs slipping and twisting and rattling in my hands, when all I wanted was to open a door. They may be desired by some people, but I am not one of those people.
The look of the knob itself aside (we finally found a nice simple knob with a faux patina that doesn't look too modern but also doesn't look like we're farmers with pretensions of glamor), the door and the latch were another problem. Once I finally pried the latch assembly out from underneath a dozen layers of paint, the door turned out to be the original solid wood, with a knob hole sized for antique doors. Did you know they make fancy doorknob hole cutting kits that clamp the hole saw at exactly the right distance from the edge for you? Hurrah for living in the 21st century! The original latch assembly apparently required some funnily placed holes, so I got to play with wood filler, too. The latch catchplate got moved, too, (yay, I got to play with chisels!) and the bathroom door shuts completely and securely now. The pets are very confused, as before this they could pop the door open if they banged into it at the right speed and angle. Sirius gets quite upset now that he can't force his way in whenever someone is in his Magic Water Room. The dog is just confused as he had just figured out how to open the door (from watching the cats), and now he keeps smacking his forehead into it and the door keeps shuddering but not opening.

Silly dog.

In which my complaint is transferred to Business Cat.

Liam: "Hi hon, just calling to let you know that I just got out of work and I'm at the Merrimack office so it will take me at least 45 minutes to get home. Actually, I need to pick up dog food and a few other things so I'll probably be home in about an hour and a half."

Me: "Boooo, so late? I protest."

Liam: "Oooooo sorry, all of my complaints are being handled by Sirius now."

Me: "... Sirius?" (Sirius is my cat.)

Liam: "Yep. He's very good at handling complaints. He has a 100% success rate."

Me: "But..."

Liam: "And if you're still unhappy he'll flop over and let you snuggle his belly."

Me: "Hmmm, that does sound nice, but what if he cannot resolve my complaint?"

Liam: "Well, we happen to have a fine manager. She's a little hard to find, but she's great at listening."

Me: "And who would that be?"

Liam: "Butterscotch. She's usually hanging out under the arm chair. She looks like she's napping, and she might run away, but that's because of the meetings. Believe me, if she finds out that Sirius can't resolve your complaints, she'll punish me. Probably by yacking up a hairball or tripping me."

Me: "So what role does Tomoe have in all of this? What is her job?"

Liam: "Um, Tomoe is my cat."

Me: "She doesn't have a job?"

Liam: "No, she's a cat. I'm surprised you haven't picked up on this."

I didn't have a response for that. Liam: 1, Elisabeth: 0