24w6d

Yeah, I really need to start updating this thing more.

Just a warning...this post is pretty long and kind of all over the place. I'm pretty emotional right now and it's still early on a Saturday morning, so I'm not exactly thinking clearly.

So we're at 24 weeks, 6 days. The girls are crazy active most of the time and I'm able to see my belly move now and I can feel Katie from the outside, which is awesome. Katie spends most of her time just under my belly button. I can't feel Natalie from the outside because she hangs out down by my crotch most of the time. That would look weird if all of a sudden I started grabbing myself there.

M. hasn't been able to see or feel anything yet because he hasn't been around when they've been most active.

The last few weeks have been difficult emotionally. The pregnancy hormones hit me like a ton of bricks and I've been alternating between anger and crying for awhile now. The entire thing came to a head on Thursday when M. and I got into a MASSIVE argument.

M. had spent the night before at a friend's house because he had too much to drink and didn't want to drive home. Fine, I get that. I like that he wouldn't drink and drive. The part I didn't like was that I'd barely seen him over the last few weeks. He's been gone every weekend at various activities and he's been biking to and from the bus, so on his ride home he's been takin the scenic route, which adds about 20-30 minutes onto his commute in the evening, meaning he doesn't get home until about 7 PM. Then he'll putter for awhile while I make dinner. I go to bed at 8:30 or 9.

So days will go by and I'll have spent literally 10 minutes with him that day. That's not cool with me right now. I feel like I've been taking a lot of the responsibilities regarding the girls and he's just kind of skating through life. I figured out the budget, I've done all the research on cribs, cloth diapers, strollers, carseats, jumpers, swings, etc. etc. etc.

He's called his HR department to figure out how much it would cost to put the girls on his health insurance. (It's $72/month for both of them. Huzzah for working for the government!) That's it.

I've been trying to get him to look at the things that I've researched and see if he agrees with them, but he never has time. I don't know if he's avoiding looking at it or if he just plain forgets, but it's starting to stress me out. We're supposed to be setting up our nursery in a few weeks and we don't even have cribs picked out because he won't look at them. We were supposed to get cribs from friends, but both couples decided to keep them for now. We're getting our cribs from Amazon, so it's only a few days shipping to get them here.

I finally had to make an executive decision about the carseats and bought them. Now we're just waiting for delivery so we can make doubly sure they fit in our cars. We checked a slightly smaller model in our cars at BRU, but I want plenty of time to figure out if they'll fit in case we need to send them back.

I need help with this stuff and he's not making the time for it. It's frustrating as hell.

Anyway, the argument. The argument lasted for about 4 hours and a lot of things were said that probably shouldn't have been, but needed to be said. None of it was personal attack, but there are some issues we're still working out in terms of our future. For example, M. and I don't share the same view on what a house is for. For me, a house is a home. You live there. You sleep there. You raise kids there. You have people over and celebrate the holidays and mark your kids height on their bedroom door frame with a pen.

For M., a house is an investment and a place you stay until you find another house. There is no permanency and you should be able to up and walk away from your house if you need (or want) to leave the area you're currently living in without incurring any penalties or having to worry about if the place will sell.

We got caught up in the housing craze a few years ago and bought a townhome for more than we should have. More than likely, we'll never make any money off of it and we may even have to pay a little when we sell to cover the difference between our mortgage and what the house is currently worth.

I'm fine with that. I never saw our house as primarily a place to make money. M. on the other hand, is apparently staying up nights worrying that we'll never be able to sell our house and we'll be stuck out here "in the boonies" for the next 20 years because the housing market is in the crapper. He considers us "in the boonies" because we're a whole 20 minutes by car from his friends and family. THE HORROR!

With the exception of T., I'm 2-3 hours away from my hometown and my parents. I have never ONCE complained about that. I dealt with the fact that I went from seeing my parents every day to seeing them maybe once a month by, oh, calling them or maybe even emailing them.

Jesus tapdancing Christ.

Yeah, I'm a little bitter on that point.

So the argument hasn't quite ended. We haven't resolved anything relating to the house, but we've agreed to put any discussion of moving or selling the house off until at least 2012 so we can evaluate the housing market then. Also, M. wants to go back to school, so he's currently researching doctoral programs that he may want to apply to, the majority of which are outside of WA state. If he gets accepted to one, we'll have to decide what to do about that house then.

But for now, we're just going to let the argument go.

The hormones, however, remain. About 45 minutes ago I put on "Sweet Home Alabama" and made it to the part where Patrick Dempsey's character leaves Reese Witherspoon's character a shitton of roses in her apartment before I broke down into a weeping mess. I think that part is about 5 minutes into the movie.

I finally got myself together and remembered that we're taking the cats to the vet today for their annual exam and they'll not only get their temperatures taken, they're getting shots. They also hate riding in the car and cry the entire time (it takes about 10 minutes to get from our house to the vet). I broke down into tears because I don't want anyone hurting the kitties and I don't want the kitties to hate me for putting them in that situation.

GAWD.

If this is going to be my life for the next 13-16 weeks (or beyond once the PP hormones hit), I may just go crazy.