Week 32: Happy (belated) Halloween!

Happy belated Halloween everyone!  I had a very busy day at work getting the rest of the Halloween decorations up, showing around groups of staff, faculty and students, looking around at the other decorated offices, eating junk and having a good time.  Here is what we came up with for our house (but picture it pitch black, foggy and with spooky music/noises)...

Department Assistant Isaac putting up cobwebs

This is our bathroom in the above two photos.  It was the only room in the house that was blinding bright, and we had a very scary version of "Ring Around the Rosies" on loop coming from the bathroom closet.  This was probably one of the scariest room in the whole house!

Who knew it would take an hour to put foam gravestones out?!  The wind kept knocking them down, I had to stabilize them with large paperclips.

This is the stairway up to our attic where we keep the orchestra and choral libraries.  We had a fog machine up here with really spooky sounds coming from a large speaker courtesy of our music production faculty member.

Here I am!

Overall I thought we did a really good job considering I'm the only staff member with the help of four student workers.  There were rumors that we were in the Top 3...but out of the 16 offices that partipated, Facilities took first (which is no fair-they had zombies with real power tools, a much larger building and much more staff), Business Office took second with their pirate theme and Financial Aid/Undergrad Admissions took third with their monopoly theme.  We should have gotten Honorable Mention or something!  And to make it spookier, one of my DAs swears she saw a ghost in the attic.  The fog machine was going crazy in the attic so she went upstairs to turn it off-she couldn't see anything except fog, but she managed to find the machine, heard someone coming up the steps and saw a black figure my height.  She called out to ask if it was us, got no reply, turned the machine off then looked back up and the figure was gone.  She bolted back down the stairs.  Poor girl.  But there are rumors that this building is haunted by the Petersons-the farmers who donated their land/property to CLU.  And this building is 100 years old this year!

When I got home, I started roasting spaghetti squash for dinner and hubby had the place cleaned and decorated for Halloween.  He was excited to see if we would get any trick-or-treaters since we have such a large complex.  We got ONE knock on the door with three kids.  Wah waaaah.  I think he was anticipating a lot more.  I told him in the future we'll have a house with lots of kids at the door, plus we'll have Baby H to take out trick-or-treating!

On another note, the night before I checked the mail and found a toy catalog from Toys R Us.  As I flipped through, I found these:

What's up rich kid toys!!!  Who is going to spend $300 on a toy Range Rover that their kids will use for at most a couple years?!  Holy shmoly.  Must be nice to have money to throw around.

I spent an hour and half this morning cleaning up the decorations around the office, and now it's pretty quiet.  Fridays are generally quiet on campus, it's kind of nice.  I'm excited for tomorrow-hubby bought tickets to the Dia De Las Muertos festival at the Hollywood Cemetery.  I'm not excited to have my three-hour GD test early in the morning.  I just want to get that over with!  Wish me luck...

Week 32: Ow

I got my first charlie horse last night.  I used to get charlie horses all the time when I played sports in high school and didn't drink enough water/eat enough potassium...I've had them on and off for the last 10 years...but I seriously can't remember the last one I had.  It of course woke me up 20 minutes before I was supposed to get up for work anyway.  I blame the lack of water yesterday as well as not eating as many bananas due to my restricted GD diet I put myself on...I haven't had yogurt, bananas or avocados since last Wednesday or Thursday?  Ugh.

I also got my flu and TDAP shots yesterday-didn't hurt as much as getting blood drawn, but of course after the first shot (TDAP), I see her scurrying to get cotton swabs and see blood all over her gloved finger.  Then after the flu shot same thing.  And then she says, "You're a bleeder!"  Thanks lady.

So I'm at Week 32 and apparently Baby H weighs almost almost four pounds and is almost 17 inches long.  He's growing fast!  Here he is (supposedly):

courtesy of babycenter.com

I've been feeling him hiccup a lot more and he doesn't move as frequently which is normal (apparently his sleep cycles are longer), but when I do feel him kick it's very powerful.  Again it's that alien-like experience where I see different parts of my stomach move.  I am also thankful that not many people come up and touch my belly-only a handful of close co-workers and friends have.  Phew!

Yesterday I walked down to the business office at my work and my jaw dropped...their whole office is decorated in a pirate-theme.  It's insane.  Apparently people came in over the weekend to decorate-I'm talking spiderwebs all over the ceiling, front desk is a pirate ship with a mast behind it, conference room looks straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean, copy room looks like a torture chamber with skeletons, and murals everywhere.  They went all out.  NO FAIR!  They didn't do that last year, so I thought we actually had a shot at winning the campus decoration competition.  Granted they also have about 30 staff members there.  I am by myself in the music department and my department assistants are helping. That's.  About.  It.

So in my spare time I frantically started decorating while my working D.A. and off-duty D.A. came in to help.  Today we're going to try to finish up a lot of it and then tomorrow I have to put these mini graves outside the house.  We know we won't win but at least we're getting into the spirit of it.  And of course we're using decorations from our own houses or using our own money to do this.  I think I've done a good job scouring the dollar stores for supplies.  But how I wish we all had lots of money to just splurge on decorations-since I work in the original farm house that was donated to the university, we could do wonders with this place.  My favorite small decoration I've done so far was "zombify" our department assistants...we have a "Meet the music department D.A.s" poster on our front entryway with their photos...I changed them this week to:

I still have one more assistant to go!  : )

Week 31: Halloweeny weekend

Yes, I wrote Halloweeny.  :)

Sorry it's been a while since I've written-it has been a very low-key week with not much going on.  Friday I had another two week checkup.  I pretty much left the office crying...

So my weight has been steadily increasing which is just fine-about two pounds every month.  Blood pressure is great.  Then after a long wait, my doctor comes in and looks at my chart.  She is the fourth and final doctor I am supposed to meet-my clinic has a total of four OB/GYNs, and I have to have an appointment with all four since any one of them can be my doctor the day of my delivery.  She was nice, but then she looks at my number from the gestation diabetes/glucose screening test.  I don't know if you remember this, but when I took that gestation diabetes test a few weeks/month back, they called me and said everything was perfect.  This new doctor said, oh wait, you have a score of 134, the last doctor must have been using the "old" numbers...let me break it down for you...most doctors say if your blood sugar level is 140 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood plasma or more, you need to take the three hour glucose tolerance test.  But SOME doctors say the cutoff is 130 mg/dL.  Yeah, my clinic apparently changed it so that 130-140 is a "gray area".  Ugh.

She said she wasn't going to push me to take this stupid three hour long test (which I've read that most people come back negative for GD), and that she can just have me see a dietician and make sure I'm eating properly, but I'd have to prick my finger every day just like a person with diabetes to test my glucose....but WAIT...

As I lay down for her to monitor Baby H's heartbeat, she first measured my tummy-standard procedure.  Then she says, "You are measuring a little high.  You should get that glucose tolerance test."

This test requires me to fast, have my blood drawn, drink a bunch of sugar, then have my blood tested every hour for the next three hours.  : (  One-I hate needles.  Two-I have to take time off of work to do this.  Three-WTF, gestational diabetes?!  If I do have it, they say it goes away after pregnancy usually.  But some women may develop diabetes after the baby is born.

And yes folks, I did break down as I was driving away from the clinic.  I thought I wasn't eating too terribly-but apparently not well enough.  Hubby made me feel better once I got home, and after a long walk we still went out to eat but I was a little more health conscious.

Pho Friday.  I got a small Tofu-Veggie bowl

All weekend I looked up gestation diabetes menu plans on pinterest and on the web.  I revised my grocery shopping list to include better foods.  Sigh.  I'll let you know how it goes-I won't be able to get the testing done until next week.

Saturday hubby and I ran some Halloween shopping errands-I wanted to get a simple mask for work since I'm going to wear my skeleton shirt again.  Then we looked around for cheap decorations for my work since we've entered in the Halloween decoration contest.  Stores were emptied out to make way for Christmas already!  It was nuts.  When we got home I worked on a creepy candle project for work that I saw on Pinterest.  It turned out pretty cool:

I'm going to throw battery-operated lights in there since I can't light candles at work...

Then we started carving pumpkins while watching horror movies!  Hubby was not too happy this year about the carving portion; I think he was a little impatient, but a good sport.

Look at that concentration!

My finished pumpkin

All lit up on our balcony

Both our pumpkins lit up

I'm a little sad I threw them outside so quickly-we brought mine in last night and it's already shriveling up-darn you sun!

Sunday hubby had to work, so I ended up doing a lot of laundry, organizing Baby H's stuff, grocery shopping and throwing chili in the crockpot.  I also took Miles for a walk in the morning and we went for another walk after dinner-trying to get on my feet a lot more.  Meals this weekend were overall healthy, and I'm aiming to stay on track this week as well.  I think my downfall has been candy at work-I keep a stash for students and faculty, and I've been sneaking Reece's cups here and there.  No more!  It's going to be very hard come Halloween...

So that was my Week 31 of pregnancy.  Tomorrow I get my flu and TDAP shots, Wednesday marks the second week of Miles' obedience training-which I failed to mention last Wednesday was his first and he did a fairly good job.  Then Halloween, one of my favorite holidays.  Hopefully I'll have an update sooner than later!

Week 30/31: Babymoon to Disneyland Recap

Pregnancy-brain kicked in yesterday and I put my cell phone in one bag then grabbed a different one.  So, I'm sorry for the delayed recap of our "Babymoon" to Disneyland this weekend!  Get ready for lots of photos...

Friday I met up with Matt at his work and to kill a little time (we didn't want to dive straight into traffic), we got his haircut at this quaint Armenian barbershop in Burbank.  $8 haircut and she did a great job!

Since we didn't know what else to do, we jumped onto the freeway and decided to grit our teeth and bare the long drive.  It was looooong.  But we finally arrived at our hotel around 7:45pm, then drove around for 20 minutes looking for somewhere to eat.  We ended up at El Toritos and it was yummy!

Saturday morning we woke up (er, I woke up excitedly) and got ready for our long day.  We got to Disneyland around 9:30am and stayed until 12:15am!  Here are most my photos, edited and collaged so there's not as many...

The first thing we did was get fast-passes for the World of Color, a night show in California Adventure.  Afterwards we stood in one of two longest lines of the day-the Toy Story Midway Mania! 

We walked around California Adventure after the Toy Story ride.  Flo's Cafe is in Car's Land and the Octopus-sushi guy was the Monster's Inc. ride.

After a yummy corndog lunch in California Adventure, we headed over to the main park-I love the fall decorations at Disneyland!

My hubby the skeleton

Top Left: Storm Troopers in front of the Star Tours ride
Top Right: Dixie Band on Main Street
Bottom Left: Storybook Land Canal Ride
Bottom Right: Pumpkin carvers come out during the fall-this is from Tangled

Left: Part of the Halloween festival
Right: Dia De Las Muertos tribute

Dia De Las Muertos band

Skeleton family waiting for the parade

Parade!

We stopped by Cars Land to take pictures before the World of Color show

Our view before World of Color

One of our last rides of the night, can't forget the Haunted Mansion!

 We ended with Astro Blasters since the wait was short, but Matt took photos the whole time while I actually shot at the aliens.  By the end of the night my lower back and feet were very sore, but I'm so glad I was able to get in our last trip to Disneyland before the family grows!  And hubby said I was a trooper...I have to pat myself on the back too, just because we saw a few pregnant women that looked uncomfortable, and one that was even in a wheelchair.

What really baffled me all day was seeing these families with tiny infants...both baby and parent were probably not enjoying themselves!  Why bring such tiny babies?  My biggest concern was the babies' health, surrounded by so many germy people!  And at the World of Color the people in front of us had a baby that was no bigger than 4 or 5 months old...the show was so loud but the baby had no earmuffs.  Why?!  Poor baby.

Anyway, Sunday we zoomed back to Burbank in less than 40 minutes and grabbed lunch before I scooted over to Thousand Oaks to pick up Miles from our friend Susie's house.  Once home he slept the entire day!  Happy puppy.

We also received a few boxes in the mail which was fun to come home to:

Petflow.com is my favorite place to get Miles's treats!  Usually a bullystick (those in the left corner) cost $8 PER stick.  This bag cost only $9.99!

Sorry so blurry...this is from one of Nana's friends who couldn't make it to the Baby Shower

More lovely gifts from Nana!

 All in all, it was a wonderful weekend!

Yesterday work went super slow, but afterwards I went to "happy hour" with a former student, current students and a staff accompanist at the Lazy Dog Cafe which was really fun!  I had a couple Arnold Palmers, that's why I quoted the happy hour.  The other ladies were able to enjoy the real happy hour.  : )

Lazy Dog Girl Night

Now it's just sit tight and grow larger until Baby H makes his appearance!  Things to look forward to in the next couple months:

• Pumpkin carving
• Decorating the music house with my department assistants to compete in a Halloween contest
• Scary movies (I love Halloween for this!)
• Day of the Dead celebration in Hollywood (possibly?)
• Second baby shower thrown by my co-workers  
• Cooler weather!
• Thanksgiving
• Families visiting
• Christmas
• Baby H's arrival!!!