What's in a Name?

We are all healthy and well.  I'm hoping to get back into blogging now that life with baby is starting to be a bit more normal.

Here is the beginnings of a blog post I started writing in September.  Obviously I never finished it ...

I have no idea what we will name the little guy.  In fact my list of about 5 names (which hadn't changed since Jan 2009, and had a clear front runner) has expanded to about 15 names.  I love slightly quirky names that have been around for a while, but aren't in the top 200.  I also love strong names that have been in the top 10 for decades.  Hubs and I's names have been in the top 20 since the 1950's, and stayed in the top 10 for 30+ years.  They're Biblical and they have nicknames (which makes them versatile).  I always loved my name: full name and the many nicknames.  And no offense to all of my lovely friends named Tiffany, Jennifer, Jessica, and Stephanie (there are a lot of you that I LOVE!), but your names were kind of a flash in the pot.  The same way I assume Jayden, Aiden & Ethan will go.  Although I do love the name Ethan.  Then there is our top contender name that I have watched rise in popularity and is currently at it's all time highest ranking.  What to do, what to do.

Over the next 3 months we worked our list down to a top 3 and from there a top 2.

James was not on the list.

I have always liked the name James.  When I mentioned it as a possibility to Hubs in the beginning of name talks, he gave it a firm "no."  The reason was that we knew a James, so he felt the name was already assigned to another person.  As name conversations continued Hubs realized that whatever we named our child, that name would become uniquely his.  He wouldn't hear the name and think of other people, he would think of our son.  In September Hubs tried to reintroduce "James" to the list, after having a conversation about the book in the Bible.  I replied, "You already took that off the list."

Throughout the whole process I neither of us were sold on a name for more than a day, and I kept wavering.  Then I stopped liking our front runner with the middle name "Francis," which had been decided forever ago.  Then I fell in love with the name Celeb, and 24 hours later realized there is already a Celeb Francis in the family!

At Christmas Eve service we ran into the aforementioned friend named James, who after asking about the name of our unborn child said something to like, "Well James is a great name." or "You can use the name James if you want."  I can't remember.  But then I said the full name, and then shortened it to just the first and last, and I kind of liked it.

2 weeks before (maybe less than 2 weeks), Hubs and I were reviewing our top name contenders, and we again mentioned James.  We decided to put it on the list for our D day decision.

As most of you know my labor ended in a C-section (birth story to be shared in a later post), so I only got a glimpse of my baby before he was wisked away to be examined.  Hubs went with baby.  The nurses asked Hubs what his name was, he said we hadn't decided yet.

Hubs carried our sweet boy over to me, and asked, "So what should we name him?" 

I replied, "I don't know I think he kind of looks like a James."

Before I could change my mind Hubs said, "That was my first thought, too!"

The funny thing is, we both agreed he didn't look like our front runner name, but maybe our 2nd choice name.

And so he was named, "James Francis."

So far he has come to be called ...

baby Jesus - Christmas just happened an my 2 year old niece was still trying to sort things out!

Buddy - I've been calling him that from day one, but only as "hey Buddy" or "good job Buddy"

Sports-o - my dad

Jamas - like the last half of Pajamas, but not pronounced like jam, more like the French word jambe (leg).  Another variation of this has become Jaw-mez
Jamesy

I would however, like to keep his name intact, and not refer to him only by a nickname; we'll see how that goes.

And to close out, here is a quote from St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

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James Francis

Born January 8, 2012 (on his due date)

9:33am

7lbs 12oz

21.5in

We are so in love.

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Wheats up with that?

I thought I should update you all on the "wheat-free" me.

Basically, it's working.

The last 3 years I've developed a cough I couldn't kick, and my body produced mucous by the truck load (2009-2011: starting in Nov going till March-ish), this year I've only had a few sneezes here and there.

At first I was super diligent about making sure that there was no wheat that was in my diet.  Then I relaxed a little.  When at a restaurant I would usually just order what I thought was wheat-free, rather than have the waiter do an extensive ingredient check.  After about a month and a half like this, I thought I would try a little wheat in the form of my favorite Christmas cookie.  I actually just ate a little of the dough as I was rolling it in little balls and patting it into little discs.  At most I took in 2 Tbs of flour.  The next 3 days my throat felt raw and, I was blowing my nose non-stop.  STRANGE.  Now this was not the most scientific way to go about things.  There were people around me that were not feeling well at the time, and I could have picked something up from them.  If I weren't pregnant I would totally try again and see if my body reacted in the same way.  However, I could go into labor at any moment, and the thought of not feeling 100% during labor, makes the task of natural child birth seem even more daunting.  So I'll try again in March, when my allergies have usually subsided.  My mom was even nice enough to freeze some of my favorite cookies for the occasion.  And like I said, I'm sure a little wheat has slipped in here and there in seasonings and sauces, but all in all I'm as close to wheat-free as you can be.

Note: we did try to make said cookies with gluten-free flour, but it resulted in a weird flavor, and wafers that fell apart.

Here's a list of a few wheat-free things that I have fallen in love with.  Obviously there are a ton of naturally wheat-free things (meat, veggies, fruit), but here are the substitute type foods (so much for trying paleo!).

Even better than the normal burrito, because the tortilla stays soft.
Not better, the price tag!

I seriously can't tell the difference.

I loved these even before the wheat-free thing.

Again, I was already an addict before going wheat-free,
but the fact that everything but the tortilla is gluten-free is very nice.

Okay, I haven't actually tried this one, but I hear it's the BEST!

Just wanted to keep you all posted on my life and my 9 weeks without wheat.  If you're having some crazy health problems that doctors seem to not really know what to do with, and live in the Houston area, let me know and I'll get you the acupuncturist's #.  He's expensive, but soo worth it.

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A New Year!

So many people said that I would not make it to the new year still pregnant.  Part of me hoped that was true: tax deduction, I was already off of work, Christmas time feels like nesting time when the world slows down.  It's like January 1st is the "play" button after two weeks of slow motion and pause.  But I'm still pregnant, and am now exactly 1 week from my due date, although I could go till the 16th ...

It's kind of a weird place to be: totally ready to go to the hospital any day, but not sitting around waiting and driving myself crazy.  I've intentionally left things to be done around the house, and made plans with friends.  I actually don't have a sub for this wednesday and thursday.  I mean I have people that are on call to go in if I can't, but right now I'm planning to be there.

I'm also nervous about being away from teaching.  I love my job.  I'm also a bit of a control freak when it comes to my classes, and releasing that control seems so very unnatural & scary.  And to add to it, one of my maternity subs feel through, so now my boss and I are scrambling to find someone to replace her.

I know my life will be totally different once this boy is in the world, but I can't help but think that I'm going to want to get back to teaching as soon as my body feels strong enough.  I mean it's not like a normal job that going back is all or nothing.  It's not like I work 40 hours a week.  I can take back half of my Monday night (2 hours) and my Wednesday night (3 hours), and then the next week add back Thursday and the rest of Monday.  And then it's going to be Spring Break, and I can take back a day of massaging.  I just can't imagine not wanting to get back and working with the girls to get recital dances started, and refining them for ballet testing.  But this is pregnant me talking, not mommy me.

People like to ask, "do you know how much your life is going to change once you have this baby?"  I've consistently replied, "no."  I mean, I kind of have and idea: an idea at least to the degree of change, not necessarily the "How."  I don't know, maybe I'm totally clueless.  I guess we'll see.

Well before life feels like it's changed from "play" to "fast forward" I'll recap our Christmas time!

Christmas:

We went to Christmas Eve service with both families in Kingwood.

We stayed the night at Hub's parent's house, ate a bunch of their families traditional foods, but also a lot of yummy wheat-free, dairy-free, and vegetarian foods, watched Meet Me in St. Louis, and played a new game called "Things."

Christmas morning we opened presents, ate breakfast, and then the rest of the family was off to the airport, while we headed to my parent's house.

At my parent's we opened presents and then cleaned up for all the company coming over: G&G, and my sister's in-laws.  We cooked, played cards, and games, and Hubs and I decided to stay the night.

Sit & Spin!

Dancer dog was exhausted, and still wondering where Shakespeare was!

Mom in the kitchen.

Christmas is also my mom's birthday.  This is our traditional picture!

The morning of the 26th was super chill, and we enjoyed watching Kylie play with her "Beemer tricycle."

Every year I think, "it's over?"  Christmas and big events are funny like that.  All in all it was a fun and relaxed holiday with family.  I hope you are all having a blessed beginning to your 2012.  We are looking forward to some amazing changes! :)

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The home stretch

My pumpkin on Thanksgiving Day.
Just in case you missed it, UT won!

So pregnancy is going well.  I'm currently 36 weeks, which means I'm 4 weeks from my due date.  Everyone keeps telling me that I'm not going to make it to January, which is kind of fun ... I wouldn't mind if baby came between Christmas and New Years.  But the fact of the matter is, no one knows when baby is going to come.

We have an appointment tomorrow, and normally this is when the doctor starts doing weekly pelvic exams.  However, my team of certified nurse midwives don't do pelvic exams (unless you really want one) until you are past your due date.  The reason being that it's not that great of an indicator: some people sit at 2cm for weeks, some go from 0 to having a baby in a day.  I assume like most things in pregnancy that most people are somewhere in between.  The bummer is mostly for the first group.  I'm sure knowing that your body is dilating causes quite a bit of excitement, and it would make the last weeks feel even longer.  I don't know, I've never done this before.  In order to combat the overwhelming opinion that baby is coming early, I have changed his due date to January 16th.  Why that date?  It's the longest my midwives will "let me" go without inducing.  January 16th seems like a nice day to have a baby and who wants to stress when the "due date" comes and goes without a baby!  Not me.

We are very excited.  Ready enough, but I'd still like at least another 2 weeks to prepare.  Mostly I just don't want to be in labor on New Years Eve.  A very good friend is getting married and the Hubs is supposed to play it.  It would be really nice if I could attend and even do some dancing!! :)

I was honored with another "shower" up at the dance studio.  It was a week long event, where the teachers and staff took turns putting out snacks and a nightly game for parents to stop by, eat and play.  I got tons of wonderful things!  Now it's just a matter of purchasing the last things for the room.  Crib mattress, sheets, and a few decorations.  Fortunately I have a small fortune in gift cards to Babies R Us (unfortunately: the crib mattress & sheets aren't sold at babies r us).

Tomorrow I will be packing the hospital bag, finishing up some thank you notes, and Hubs will be installing the car seat.  This is the last week at dance, and next Monday is my last day massaging (other than a few friends, who I'll massage at home).  WOW, Christmas is just around the corner. Maybe I should work on buying some presents?  But really, isn't gestating a grandson/ nephew/ son enough of a present?

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Dancer Prancer Boxer Brown

With all this baby talk, I feel the first baby in my life deserves a full post.

Dancer Prancer Boxer Brown walked into our life May 22nd, 2010 at around 1:30am.  I had just produced a show in town for a youth company that I directed, and then went out to dinner with the family to celebrate: the show, BILs b-day, my parent's anniversary, and my b-day.

We pulled into our neighborhood, and at the end of our street, running around in our park, was a small dog.  I told the hubs to pull over and see if the dog had a collar or tags.  The dog ran away.  We pulled into our drive way, I hopped out of the car.  While waiting for the hubs to pull in, I grabbed our now broken vacuum that now lived in the garage, and was pretending to vacuum the concrete as I watched him pull in. We walked to the door, pushed the garage door button, and went inside.  Just a moment later I turned and said, "don't forget to get the laptop out of the trunk."  Hubs turned opened the door to the garage and then turned around, back to me, and shut it.  He looked at me and said, "there's a dog in there!"  He said she looked friendly, but we didn't quite know what to do.  And how did she get in there, there was a max of 30 seconds she could have walked in before we hit the button, and not tripped the sensors.  Crazy.

Anyway I told him to go out the the front and open the garage door that way.  A minute later he was back inside, "There's another dog in our front yard."  All of this was too strange to me: 3 stray dogs in 10 minutes.  Since it was so late I thought it best to try and get them into the back yard and decide the next day what we should do.

I turns out our boxer friend in the garage was in heat, and her skittish black lab friend was hoping to be her suitor.  I went and bought them collars & leashes.  Hubs took them in to SNAP Houston to be scanned for microchips, vaccinated, and tested.  The boxer, Dancer, had fleas, but other than that was in good shape.  The lab, who we were calling Dasher and is now known as Shakespeare, came back positive for heart worms.

We decided that day that we were going to keep the boxer.  The lab bounced from house to house, since we didn't want the two to procreate, as we searched for a home for him.  SIL decided she wanted to adopt him.

People are so sweet and talk about how lucky the two dogs were that they found us.  But as ridiculously cheesy as it is, we are the lucky ones.  We love our Dancer Prancer Boxer Brown, who constantly makes us laugh and brings smiles to our faces.  And we know Master Shakespeare does the same for SIL.  A year and half later, and we can't image life without her.

And on a personal note: Please don't buy dogs from breeders.  There are so many dogs out there that need homes.  If you are looking for a specific breed, size, disposition ... most shelters will work with you over time to place you with the perfect dog.

Also, please spay or neuter your pet(s).

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Etiquette: Thank you notes

Random thoughts on "thank you" notes.

So I kind of suck at "thank you" notes. I have lots of excuses that I could offer you: my parents never made me, when I write them I want to make sure that I have plenty of time to focus and make them genuine, I want to use or put to use the gift so that I can properly thank the gift giver, sometimes it takes me a while to really appreciate a gift, once I write a thank you note I don't always have the address, or stamps, and sometimes forget about them!  Maybe I'm just bad at being thankful.

My parents never made me.

In my immediate family it always seemed to be okay that if the person were present to see you open the present, and you were able to thank them immediately ... there was no need to write a note.  OR if you talked to the person that day, as we often did at Christmas or on birthdays, and were able to express thanks to them over the phone, a note was not necessary.  I don't think this was ever said, it's just sort of what I felt growing up.  I understand now the courtesy of sending a note, but as a child it also just felt redundant and shallow, "Dear _______, Thank you for the ___________, I really like it.  Love, Me.

When I write them I want to have plenty of time to focus & make it genuine.

I call it Lazy OCD, my sister calls it being a procrastinator perfectionist.  No matter how you define it, we both have it.  Basically we wait till we have enough time set aside to really delve into a project before we even start.  This results in a lot of un-started projects, and guilt of not getting to them.  In the past 2 years I think that I've mostly put aside this issue: usually by being honest with myself, "you're never going to get to that project, just throw such and such away, it's just creating clutter & guilt."  But it's not just the getting to the project, it's that when I do the project I want it to be perfect so it's so time consuming.  When I re-read thank you notes I've written, I often find that they don't sound nearly as enthusiastic as I felt and intended (but goodness knows I use way too many exclamation marks already).

I want to put the item to use so I can properly thank the gift giver.

This is especially true with cash and gift cards; don't you want to know what I bought!?  The truth is that it can take me months to getting around to spending the gift (another procrastinator tendency: I want to put the gift to it's best use, but first I need to think about what that use is, and then I have to plan the trip to that store ...).  And with items that you receive, it may take time to work them into your routine, figure out how many cool uses there are, buy the required batteries, find a place for it in your home.  The problem with delaying the "thank you" note till a gift is put to use, is that it takes time, and after a while you get busy and forget.  Or the writing of the notes gets spaced out and you send some, but not others (maybe I'm just terribly disorganized).

Sometimes it takes me a while to really appreciate a gift.

I kind of hate having people watch me open presents.  Hubs and SIL are the BEST present openers.  You would think by watching them that every single thing they open is the best present ever.  I remember I once gave Hubs a gift that he thought was something else, and he gave me the most enthusiastic thanks, and a commentary about how hilarious it was, till I finally asked, "wait, do you know what this is?"  He didn't!  That left me rolling!  But with his enthusiasm and desire to be thankful for the gifts he's gotten, he rarely returns gifts.  This sometimes means that he has things that still have tags on them or are sitting in the closet unopened.  As a gift giver I hope that you like what I pick out, but more than that I want you to use and enjoy what you get.  If that means returning something, I'm SOO okay with it.  Seriously it doesn't hurt my feelings.  So back to the point: if I get something that I wasn't expecting, I don't always know if I love it right away.  I'm ALWAYS thankful for the thought put into it, and the money spent on it, etc, but generally I open something with more curiosity than enthusiasm.  I'm the type of person that when I try something on in a dressing room, I take a lot of time deciding if I really love it.  But when I love something, I usually grow to love it, it's not usually love at first sight.  Does this make me a terrible person?

I don't always have the addresses.

This is lame, I should be an adult and create an address book, so that I don't have to call Mom every time I need to mail something.

Sometimes I forget about them.

This is referring to after they are written.  I recently came across a set of 5 "thank you" notes from 2 years ago.  When we moved (2 years ago), I came across 2 for wedding gifts.  Again, I'm lame.

The funny thing about all of this: the longer I wait to write a "thank you" note the more I think about the gifts I got (as the process of expressing it to the giver is guiltily hanging over my head), the more thankful I am for the gift ... ponder that one!  However, I would like to resolve to not wait and to just buckle down & write a note as soon as I've received a gift.  If I get a chance and remember I hope to share with my gift giver how much more I've come to love their gift over time, and how many cool new uses I've found for them. Thank you notes are part of being a polite adult, and it's time for me to overcome my excuses.

If you've ever given me a gift, THANK YOU.  If you never received a formal note or had a conversation where I expressed my thanks ... THANK YOU!  I'm sorry I'm such a loser!

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