Nice Long Post (for Alann)

So Alann says that my blog posts are too long and don’t have enough breaks. =P to that. But I’ll try to make them more user friendly.

This morning:
I had a rough time getting dressed this morning. I picked out what I wanted to wear. Then I decided I didn’t like the pants. So I picked another pair of pants. I still didn’t like it. So I picked out my new maternity jeans (yay!) and decided that those would work. I put on the shirt I had picked out and went to brush my teeth. As I brushed my teeth, I decided that there was WAY too much cleavage showing, so I would have to put on an undershirt. This isn’t a problem since Debbie so kindly bought me two spaghetti-strap camisoles. I went to put on the cami and the stupid strap broke! I stared at it, and realized it wasn’t a big deal, I could fix it. So I took it out to my sewing machine which happened to be set up and threaded (a miracle with devil cat around) and sewed the strap back on. Then I sewed the other strap, just in case it was thinking of the same thing. Then I went to put the shirt on, and I had sewed the stupid strap twisted! By this point, I had to leave, so I decided I must need to not wear this shirt today for some reason, so I picked a new one and managed to get myself out the door. But tonight, I will be fixing the strap once and for all, and probably will reinforce the other cami straps too just in case.

Claire
Claire is doing well, at least as far as I can tell. We are at 21 weeks and about halfway to my weight gain goal. I don’t feel her kicking and moving all the time yet, but I do feel her more often every day. (Though it still isn’t uncommon to go a day without hearing from her.) But the exciting part is, when I AM aware of her, you can feel her moving from outside too. It’s strange how different the two feels are. When I feel her squirming around inside, it’s almost like “oh it’s just another body part moving” or “I shouldn’t have eaten that taco” feeling. But when I put my hand on my belly and feel her move that way, it is so exciting. If I’m talking to Alann in person (so she can hear his voice), she usually starts kicking around, like she wants to say hi. Last night he put his hand on my belly and she gave him a good hard kick. It kind of startled him I think. I think feeling her move from outside is just another indication that this is real. We have our anatomy scan ultrasound this Friday. I am trying not to worry about it too much. This is the scan where they will be able to tell us if something is wrong, not that I have any reason to think there is, but I think I will be a little more relaxed afterwards. They did the triple screen blood test at my last appointment. That is the test where they can see if the baby has one of several fatal conditions that they may or may not be able to detect on ultrasound. That came back fine, so chances are everything is good. And I know that the Lord will not give us challenges we cannot overcome, so I am really trying hard not to worry. (I guess that is my job as mommy though.) I love my doctor because he always gives me a straight answer. He doesn’t try to influence me one way or another. He says “These are the facts. This is what I would suggest, but you need to make the decision.” Like when we talked about the blood test. He said that Utah is not a “wrongful life” state, which means that I can’t sue him if my baby is born with some condition that had it been found by a test, I would have aborted it. So he couldn’t and wouldn’t make me take the test. But he thought it was a good idea, and after I thought about it, I decided I would rather know ahead of time. Whether or not we would make that choice aside, I would rather know. And everything came back fine. Oh, and she has taken up residence on top of my bladder. I haven't had any problems yet with having to go to the bathroom a lot more, but suddenly this weekend, it started. Like every hour I have to go. It's seriously annoying. Get off my bladder child! There is still plenty of room in there for you!

Weekend stuff
This weekend was quite busy for me. I had a lot of things to do with the church.
Saturday, Alann went up to his scout camp, so I had the morning to myself. After wearing myself out by working on my rose boxes, which I intend to finish before it snows, I went to Kohl’s to return some maternity pants. Then I went to Target. I did our baby registry there, and then wandered the maternity section. I found the most awesome pair of jeans. They actually fit, they don’t fall down, they don’t bug my belly, and they were the right length! If only they had been on sale, but I was not terribly upset to pay full price, since I know that I will wear these quite a bit. I also found a few more shirts. All in all, it was a rather fulfilling morning and afternoon. Saturday evening I went to the Relief Society General Broadcast. I was glad I watched it. It was awesome.
Sunday I had to visit our new Samoan ward’s Young Women and give them a message. Then I sat through the YW class. It was...interesting. The girls are nice, they are just rowdy. I am not used to having so many girls in one age-group class. Our poor ward has two girls, sometimes three, that come regularly. So having 30 total, and 10 in a class, was awesome. Loud, but awesome. Then we had a meeting with the leaders of YW. Then I had to go to my own ward because a family that had moved away last year came back for their son’s mission farewell. I wanted to see them. Then after all that, I had a youth (teenager) fireside (talk) to go to. It was a pretty awesome presentation. The speaker was an internationally known speaker / psychologist who focuses mostly on addictions, especially pornography. He talked about how different brain chemicals work and how that affects our decisions. The focus was “protecting youth from inappropriate media” specifically pornography. He told us how President Hinckley fulfilled a prophecy by announcing that pornography is the “desolating scourge and disease” that will fill the whole world. And my, isn’t that right. It’s everywhere. Overall, I’m glad I went, even if I did go by myself because someone refused to go with me, and I had to sit by some really obnoxious boys who obviously didn’t want to be there.

Garden
The tomatoes got the message. The big ones have started ripening. I made bruschetta last night with one huge red tomato, and that was enough for both of us to have what we wanted. (It went with a salad, so we didn’t eat just bruschetta.) My love-hate relationship with tomatoes just gets stranger. The bruschetta I made was completely my own creation. I looked in all of our cookbooks, which is a lot, and couldn’t find a single recipe. So I threw some olive oil, salt, garlic, tomato, and dried basil together and called it good (though I am STILL tasting garlic, two teeth brushings and 15 hours later). I should have added a little balsamic vinegar. But it was pretty good, even though it was mostly tomato. I won’t eat them plain or as a topping, but make them into something and suddenly I love it. Weird.
I am hoping to make some canned salsa this evening or maybe next. Alann refuses to come home on time (something about a new job and needing to study. Yeah right.) so I have a lot of free time lately. And since Alann could eat his weight in salsa (seriously, we buy a huge jar of Pace almost every month), this is something that I intend to learn how to do well before the need arises (as in I have 12 bushels of ripe tomatoes and no idea how to make canned salsa). I should have enough tomatoes to make at least 3 pints, maybe more. I’ll have to go raid the pepper plants again, but there are still at least 10 bells and 5 hots out there in varying degrees of ripeness. Last night I picked one that had a really deep well in the bottom, and some spider had taken up residence (on the outside, not the inside). So I politely asked him to leave (with a sharp pointy stick) and then took my lovely bell pepper inside. I don’t mind the spiders one bit. They have quite a web system set up in the tomatoes. But you know, I haven’t had a single bug problem and I haven’t sprayed anything. I like this mostly organic gardening. I put out snail bait, because those buggers are nasty and mean and don’t care about anything, but other than that, the bugs handle themselves.
I had the most amazing idea for the perfect way to grow tomatoes. If we had a second story deck, I would build nice deep flower boxes up there and plant the tomatoes there. Then I would just let the vines hang over the side. No trellising, no tying, no pain. I hate having to get underneath the tomatoes’ skirts to find anything. If you just go in from the top or side, you miss most of them. So I think this might be a good way to grow them. Just walk over and pick. Of course it might be a while before I try this idea, since I don’t have a second story, or a deck, or any other means of planting the tomatoes up high, except maybe on the roof and the neighbors might think I have lost it at that point. Plus with the winds we get sometimes, that might not work out well. But it’s a thought.

I keep meaning to take a picture of our front yard, since I bored you all with pics from when we tore it up. Maybe once I open my birthday presents, if I get a camera, I will take the pictures. =)
The yard looks really nice though. I am impressed every time I see it, especially when I think about how it looked before.