Happy New Year!

Arbitrary list of things that happen in my life:

1. My sister is overdue by now. Her due date was the 26th.

2. I am only one week away from my own due date. So, if my niece will wait a little longer and my little one (I'd say a girl, hubby says a boy, both of us say we'll love you no matter what, baby) will be a few days early, we could have a double birthday party. :)

3. Granny is waiting. We do visit her every day, and there is no change in her situation at all. On the one hand this is so sad that it makes me cry a lot, but on the other hand she does not give up on life and that's awesome. 

4. When baby is there I'll show her to granny as soon as possible. Maybe she cannot see baby, but I'll make sure she'll feel, smell and hear her.

5. Silly fact: whenever I sing Eleanor Rigby I change the chorus from 'all the lonely people' to 'all the lovely people'. I like my version much better, because it is more positive and maybe because hubby laughs at me whenever he hears me doing this, like today.

6. Tilda has a new doll that she loves to pieces. Both ladies share the same bed. :)

7. Things are more than crazy in our family lately, because my sister and her family have to move soon, so everybody is trying to help.

8. Our freezer is full of pre-cooked meals. That was advice from Cat and DF when I was pregnant with Tilda and it was definitely awesome advice!

9. Next year, when baby is there and I am not nursing her anymore (2017?), I'll try coffee again. Apart from spankings this is what I have missed most. Well, I do miss chocolate a lot too, but can't have any, because heartburn. :) 

10. Hear that?! Next year??? I am sorry for not being around much lately, but will try to be better again. But far more importantly, 

I hope you all have a marvelous and peaceful 

and 

a

Happy New Year !

Merry Christmas

Wishing you all love and connection, a hand to hold, someone to hug, a loving smile and a pleasant giggle :)

...so, basically, I'd love you to have the most awesome time you have ever had. 

Merry Christmas to you 

 

Not Mrs and Santa Claus, but lovely snowmen. A little snow just for tonight would have been great, but it is more spring-like instead. :)

 

Happy Thanksgiving

Looking at all the awesome pictures and recipes for Thanksgiving meals makes me hungry. But since I already look like stuffed, I better stick to healthy food only.

I hope your food does not look like this

Maybe more like this

And maybe some of the birds are lucky too :)

Wishing all of you a

 wonderful 

and 

Happy

Thanksgiving!

Happy LOL day!

HAPPY Love Our Lurkers Day!!! 

The acronym of Love our Lurkers seems to be lol or LoL, or even LOL, which also means laugh out loud, doesn't it? I'd love to create a smile for you now and then, or even better, make you laugh. ... Well, currently things are not always funny around here (sorry), and I know that I even have to reply to comments from my last post. I'll try to fix that soon, because if anything  the last I want is you to feel unappreciated. On the contrary, I appreciate your comments a lot and want you to know that. 

After all, it means that you read something and found it worth commenting on, and that is awesome! Thank you for that dear reader.

Additional thanks go to Hermione for organising Love our Lurkers 10. Thank you Hermione. :)


Oh, talking about lol,

And...

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend full of all the good things in life.

Bag of mixed news

There are positive news in this entry, and I even mention TTWD again. Finally. Nevertheless, the day was still a rather mixed one. We had a family meeting which was lovely, but I spent early morning with granny and today that was really hard.

Granny

Granny’s is still fighting, and even though I don’t want to see it, her fight is harder than ever. She is the one who taught me most about not giving up, and she shows me how this works till the end. Writing this with the picture of her in hospital is so hard, I'd love her to be good again. Oh heck. She is so small in this bed, she looks so lost there. I went there early in the morning together with Tilda and today seeing granny like that hit me so hard that I just sat there and focused on breathing, so that my sobs would not alarm my little one too much.  I don’t know, I have been so uneasy when I went to hospital during the last week, but today was so sad that it hurt to have not one reaction from her side. This is so sad. :( I am sorry for the downer, I know that many of you are dealing with the same or similar situations. I wish you all the strength you need and the best possible outcome; something that makes the pain and grief bearable.

Sister, the car, Amy and I

Maybe I am also frustrated because I am sort of almost grounded when it comes to driving. Sister has been back home for the last few weeks, not on bed rest anymore, but only allowed to move a bit and not do much of the housework. So I took over for a while. Until last weekend …

Hubby has decided to limit the time I am allowed to visit my sister to not more than two times a week - and only when the weather is good enough. I can phone her all day long, but not go there by car, because one tour takes around an hour, so that makes two hours when I go there, in addition to going to granny or grocery shopping, going to the doctor’s and other things.

I am not even miffed because I know hubby is right, especially now since the roads have become slippery at times. In addition I do not want to drive that much if possible (yep, I really mean it!), and sitting behind the wheel too long does not feel good anymore either, that's why I am almost fine with this. But it feels like I let my sister down. She understood, and I believe her, so there is no grudge or anything, but I would have loved to help more. 

Amy shares half the driving with me now, because whenever she can, she comes with me to see granny, and afterwards we try to get back into town where I can help my sister then. Amy has expressed her displeasure of doing that at all, which is only because she worries that I might do too much. I promised to be careful, but it will not be much longer till she stops me for good. 

Hehe, she is not my nanny, but she is extremely convincing and my trust in her is too big not to do as she wants. Not to create the wrong impression, I am listening to my body and I do feel a little less nimble, which is ok, as I do not under any circumstances want to do anything that could harm baby.

Baby

Since I do not blog much at the moment (although I’d love to!) I rarely have a chance of doing my pregnancy countdown …. I am already in week 28!?! Whoa that was fast!

Seriously, I have already seen that this last year passed quickly, after all Tilda has already had her first birthday party! Her first birthday, imagine that, and there are moments when I do not know what I did in this year. Somehow it really feels more like Tilda was born a few days ago, and suddenly baby sweetie has grown and we are week 28 again?! Wow.

So, even  though I had a gloomy start into this entry, just thinking about my little one and her little brother or sister makes me smile. There are the pangs of sadness when I wish for granny to see Tilda play, to touch my bump, to have time with us, but for me, those two sweet little cuties mean the world and help me go through rough days like this one. And granny loves baby news. Knowing that helps me, at least sometimes. 

I do not know whether we will have a boy or a girl. Hubby would like a boy, though more because he wanted to tease me a little after I have said that I am almost sure we’ll have a little girl again. LoL, I cannot even say why, maybe it is because her kicks feel just like those I got from Tilda. Not surprising, is it? :) Baby has her own rhythm, she is more active when I go to bed and early in the morning. So, we do have our bonding time then, though less often on the sofa than I’d like to.

On another positive note I am pretty happy that there are only few pregnancy-related problems that I have to deal with. Ok, the loo needs to be close, but the only things that are not too awesome are a lot of heartburn and sometimes insomnia. Sounds familiar, and I think I handle both rather well at the moment. :)

TTWD

Woohoo, finally I have TTWD in my blog again. But that does not really mean a lot, because dd is pretty limited for us at the moment. I mean, hubby is HoH, he decides, and he really does. He keeps an eye on me, I think he has noticed that there have been times after returning either from granny or sister when I was not like myself. I literally got some quiet time then, not like being in the corner, just a quiet thirty minutes to breathe, be a little sad, calm down, just take my time on the sofa or in the bedroom.

But somehow he has given me a lot of room in other situations, too. I am glad about that, because there have been moments when I was maybe tired, or simply over-emotional, and he has definitely warned me more than he would have done in non-pregnant times. I am grateful for that. Maybe it is just my lack of concentration, but I have had moments where I really did not know how to act the right way, it was like I just forgot completely. Probably doesn’t make sense to anybody, but I appreciate that hubby did not take away privileges and instead told me what I did, which was enough for me to be embarrassed. He didn’t always keep me out of the corner though. I have been a wee bit too liberal with some information online for his taste, so hubby was really vexed and in a way the only reason why he did not take away my online time was that I don’t have much time to be online anyway due to our current situation. However, I should better be careful, or else …. .

Just because ...

 

 

 Wishing you all a wonderful week with a lot of love.

The mess continues, sorry

This is only a short update on what’s currently going on around us. I am not sure what to make of how I feel, I really am confused … yep more than usual. We are still not in a good place, and in addition to our deepest sorrows about granny, my younger sister has been brought to hospital at the weekend. :( She is pregnant too, only two weeks further than I, and she has had contractions and is slightly dilated. What makes me really angry is that she has taken a lot of time before she finally told her husband that maybe she should go to hospital, only after things started to intensify. (I learned this part of the story only today) AAAAAHH!!!! I found that risky, but then again, maybe that is only due to the miscarriages I had before Tilda. As some of you know, I go the other way and phone my doc more often than I need to.

I love my sister, but this is where I had thoughts of spanking her. However the good news is that her little one is ok; due to the medication in hospital the contractions have been reduced, almost stopped. The doctors have not decided yet whether she has to stay in bed till giving birth.

So, let’s see …  we have my younger sister in hospital in Hamburg, but her baby and she will be fine we think. Then we have granny in hospital outside the city, the place where she wants to be for her last journey. I still can’t say it. I am shaking my head about all this and feel helpless.

Since Sunday my mom is a mess because she is afraid now that my sister might have a miscarriage because it seems to run in the family. She forgets that my older sister had no problems ever. And according to the doctors there is no immediate danger for my younger sister of losing her baby either. So, my mom is currently more irrational than I am. A rare occurrence. I still don’t like being without Tilda, but I have given her to my mom for a few hours, while I was visiting granny and my sister in one morning. It made things easier for me, it made my mom happier, and in a way, I had a quiet time for the first time in days, with Amy gone for a few days, and hubby working. No other relatives were around, no friends either, because I had not bothered to call anybody. Nevertheless, I cannot even say that I enjoyed this alone time. It was good to see that my sister was ok, but obviously my mood is not at an all-time high.

The weird thing is that my mood concerning granny has improved a lot, once I learned that my sister and her baby would be fine. I don’t know if that is good though. I love granny, seeing her motionless makes me sad, and I have not told granny about my sister. I mean, maybe I should, and I would, if I had hopes that it would wake her up again. My love for granny is where it always was, however yesterday, and even more so today, seeing her like this did not hit me as hard as it often did before. I don’t believe I am losing my love for her, but I feel cold from this happening and don’t like it. I don’t know what to make out of this really. Did I mention that I am confused?! 

 granny likes angels

Anyways,

Wishing you all a great week, and I simply hope that there will be nicer news soon.

I’d love to have good things happen here,

and I’d love to have good things happen to you.

P.S. Jan, I did not forget answering your mail, it was just a little busy, I’ll get to it as soon as I can. <3

The nice and the horrid things

The horrid things

The last weeks have been somewhere between not good to most awful and terrible. My current silence here is most of all out of sadness, due to my granny being in an extremely bad condition after suffering three strokes, virtually within hours. The doctors are sort of surprised that she is still with us, ... maybe I should say they are impressed. This has been going on a bit over two weeks now, but now I feel able to write about it here.

This is a glum time, and I am so sad that there are moments when I simply don’t know what to do. However with each day that passes, this seems to be a sort of normal, at least for the moment. I don’t know whether I am getting used to the situation or whether it has simply worn me down. It is not that I feel less for granny in any way, definitely not. But there is nothing we can do. We are here, which is the place where granny was born. Tilda and I visit granny twice a day, usually Amy is with us. Granny knows Amy just as well and loves her like me, because for most years before hubby we were almost inseparable.

Accordingly, Amy suffers no less than I do, and I am so sorry that I have given her a hard time in addition to the sadness and pain she has to endure. None of it was intentionally, but she has made sure that I eat and drink when I simply could not. I really couldn’t do that the way I should with my baby growing, because seeing granny like this, after I had thought she’d recover, left me numb. I don’t know what would have happened without hubby, Tilda and Amy, but they were there and had love for me in a moment when I couldn’t feel anything at all, well, I felt like tearing, but that didn’t happen.

One of my dreams of good life was that granny would see our children grow up. I don’t know. This is so hard to say, but this dream won’t come true, however at the same time I scream at myself it will happen. She has been so happy to hold Tilda, just like she was all excited when I told her about baby. She might have thought that I had not seen her worries over the years, as she always tried to play that down a little bit, but I have, and I have a bad conscience from that. However she never gave up hope when things went terribly wrong, and I guess she would have deserved someone who’d be less trouble. I know she has been so relieved that things turned out so well for us. And she is someone who always finds a kind word, gives you a kiss and hug, takes you with her and listens, no matter what. She’s so adorable, she deserves so much better, but not this! Quick change of topic.

The nice things

So, obviously this is not an all-out positive post, I apologize for that, however, even when I am having a hard time appreciating all the good around me, I know it is there. It is just waiting for me to see all of it again.

On Tuesday things changed to the better side of things. While visiting granny, one of my uncles came in who I have not seen for about twenty years. He took us on a day trip which was awesome. I found out how wonderful he is, and he told me some stories about granny too. I loved that day because he is such a charming and warmhearted man, he made it so easy to talk, and somehow it was as if he had never really been away, because he knew all the details about our family, and his way of talking was just like I remembered. I am not going to let him go again for another twenty years.

 

He made a difference, and I found more of my appetite again, which is so important at the moment. Apart from sleepless nights and the troubles I had with eating, I think baby is having a good time; after all, Amy made sure I did eat and drink. It was the loving kind of blackmail a lá ‘no lunch no visit at grandma’s ’, and of course I want baby safe, so I tried and it worked. I am glad and grateful that she was there in these moments.

A small positive change was when granny looked so much better yesterday, more alive. Seeing her like that created hope in me. It is just to see her a little better that made the whole day a good one.

The title spoke about the nice things, so I wanted to end this with the nice things in our life, also because granny wants us to appreciate these. Tilda is walking, but when she wants to be fast she often goes back to all fours. Not long and she'll be running! She is talking a lot, though most things are not easy to understand yet. But we can discuss her toys and all sorts of things by now. In a way. :) Let's see, she looks like hubby, and she seems to have his stubbornness. But she talks a lot more than hubby does, even though he is not short of words either. :)

And somehow baby grows, and I am already in week 21! All in all, I am feeling good about my bump, there are no major problems, and if the circumstances were a little different, this would be a post about how awesome things are, I guess. Ok, that was weird, but if you read till here, you are used to that from my side. :) 

Imagine that, week 21! There was like no time to write much about baby, just like baby and I did not have much quiet time to appreciate how good things are around and inside my bump. So, this is about the nice things, just like Jan’s grandbaby news have been such a wonderful light in a gloomy time! 

 Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!

The kitchen incident 1

A whiff of fresh air touches my back and makes me turn around. I had such a wonderful dream about veggie salad and Nutella. Does anybody know if snails have got a deeper meaning in dreams?  … Don’t ask; my excuse is it was a dream. However pickled cucumber with Nutella have been extremely awesome earlier today! :)

Our bedroom is dark, with the window wide open and the cool air of a fresh breeze wakes me up more than I like. There is almost no sound up here, well, from the garden I hear a huffing and puffing hedgehog, but in the house all is quiet. Good, Tilda is fast asleep; we’ve been through some bad teething nights, so, when she is quiet, things are good. I frown. Where is hubby? His sheets are sprawled all over his side of the bed. Empty. I stop breathing, listen again and hear faint sounds from downstairs. Sitting up in bed, I try to see a little more in the darkness.

What is he doing downstairs at the dead of night? 3.30 am, so this is not normal, not even in our house. Besides, usually it is I who would be up and get something to eat or drink. I am getting cold, which is no surprise, because the bed is always colder when he is not there. Or maybe it is that I am in the nude and no longer snuggled into my warm sheets. For a short moment my thoughts about him keeping me warm in different ways let me feel the pleasant butterflies in my stomach before I return to the present. It is not warm tonight. My feet are unpleasantly cold, and I hurry to put on my infamous fluffy moose house shoes, snuggle into my dressing gown and feel it over my belly, which makes me smile again. I am so proud to have that little bump and love it dearly.

Quietly I open the door, listen downstairs. There is a wonderful sweet smell all over the house. Ah ok, that’s the fridge door. That’s the cutlery drawer. Cupboard. Ok, sounds like an after midnight snack. Great idea, I'll see what I can lay my hands on. I'd love to surprise him, because we have been busy lately, so our reconnections have been short and not too many. Accordingly, an intimate moment with hubby would be a treat. Oh yes, and of course I'll demand my fair share of the spoils, whatever the fridge has to offer. As I tiptoe down the stairs I see soft light fall into the corridor. I open the door a little wider and see hubby doing something at the kitchen counter. Compared to the cool bedroom it is blazing hot in the kitchen, and I think the warmth makes me tired, so I yawn, audibly.

Hubby turns his head to me. Uh oh, it seems I have interrupted him. He looks a little disappointed. Darn. Not a good start for an early morning snack.

“What are you doing down here!? Have I been too noisy? Sorry, sweetie.” I shake my head. Oh snap, clever reply, girlie. Finally I manage to clear my throat and speak.

“No, all was ok, but I missed you in bed.” I step closer and try to see what he is hiding on the kitchen counter. “What have you been doing here? Have you seen what time it is?”

He nods and grins. “It’s a surprise, and it is a secret till then. Come, sit down.” Hubby leads me to my kitchen chair, takes my hands, puts them on the table. “Don’t move, close your eyes, keep ‘m shut, hear me?!” I know better than to create trouble before daylight. 

“Yes, Sir” He kisses my cheek and seems to chuckle. “Good girl.” Hmmm I love that. More, please. 

He leaves and it becomes almost quiet again. For me it is practically dark in our brightly lit kitchen. Suddenly I wish I had come down naked, because it is so awfully hot in here and that makes me sleepy. So, tired as I am, depraved of sight and touch, all left to do is smell.

It smells sweet, like biscuits. Yummy. I visualize the sweetest oatmeal  biscuits and this is more than enough to make me drool. I must have been in biscuit dreamland, because hubby has returned without me noticing and touches my hair from behind.

“This will make it easier for you”, he says as he puts a sleep mask on me. 

“What is this for? Why? What are you doing? Give me some idea, pleeeaase.” I can hear him rummaging somewhere to my left. He chuckles again. “Thank you that you think I am so funny. Sir.” Ooops, that came out harshly. But I am getting hungry from all the sweet odours and secrecy.

“You better behave, or I will not tell you anything and send you upstairs.” I sigh audibly, facing left, where I think hubby might be. “Sorry, I didn’t want to be rude. But this makes me seriously hungry. I feel starved! That’s not funny.” No joke, instead of my Uber-sexdrive from last year, I need food.

I almost jump when he whispers from the right side “Sweetie, just a little longer, you’ll love it. Promise.” He kisses my cheek again, whereas my attempt to kiss him fails and I kiss the air. I hear his chuckles again. I try begging. “Can I get a hint, Sir, just something to keep me busy, pleeaase?”

He breathes sharply in. Ooopsy, the queen is not amused? “Ok, one tip. It is colourful.”

Oh that could mean a lot. Colourful food?! Everything in our house is about colour. No idea what food is colourful. “Can I ask, and you answer yes or no?” Chuckles. “You don’t give up, do you? I’ll answer what I want to, to keep you nosey girl busy.”

“Thank you, Sir. Are they cookies?” I grin. Haha, I must have won.

“No, sweetie. My turn. I think the rules of this game are not clear to you yet.” Suddenly a sharp, disgusting odor invades my nose. “Eeew, what’s that?!”

“Sweetie, it takes two to tango. Every time you get a ‘no’, I’ll let you smell something, or even put something into your mouth. This was onion.” I am really bewildered, kind of. “Do you still want to play?”  I can virtually hear his smirk, because he knows perfectly well that smells can currently drive me crazy and make me jump to the bathroom. He must think I'd chicken out. 

"Ok, let's play..."

I'll try to finish writing down the rest of what happened soon. :)

There are no other news up to now, so we'll wait and see.

Wishing you all a wonderful and most peaceful weekend, 

unless you want a 

most exciting fun weekend, then I hope you get that!