eat.
Meal planning: No more
As much as it pains me to say, my meal planning has taken a hard hit since moving to Ireland. Between being busy with all of the stuff that comes with moving and the significant difference in groceries, it’s been hard!
Some of the most basic ingredients have been difficult or impossible to find. We have about a thirty minute walk to the nearest chocolate chips, spend a fortune on two jalapeños, and weirdly enough have yet to find thyme. Pantry ingredients are really limited and even shopping for produce is different. Every time I try to pick out recipes ahead of time, we end up getting to the store, trying to find the asked for ingredients, looking instead for the most similar ingredients, and then just end up modifying the recipe or deciding to make something else entirely. I’m hoping that I get to know the shopping better and can get back to meal planning but it’s put a huge damper on my meal planning.
I have nothing to blame my lack of pictures on other than a dirty kitchen and scattered brain.
Cookie Day
With everything that’s been going on lately, I feel like I am missing time with Foster and want extra sweets to stress eat! I mean, the baby wants the sweets…
I found a perfect solution: cookie day. Once a week, Foster and I pick a cookie recipe and bake cookies together. It’s something fun for us to do together and the output is usually pretty, darn, good. My favorite is seeing Foster learn more about how to measure and what standard ingredients typically go into cookies. Keep an eye out for some of our favorite recipes and hopefully some pictures!
sweat.
Again, life has gotten a little in the way. After hearing the bad news about baby Lucky (read on for more), I was hesitant to put too much stress on my body. I kept myself limited to walking but didn’t do much else.
This morning, I started easing myself back in (two weeks off while pregnant is a doozy!) with a low impact dancing workout from the Beachbody series called ‘Country Heat.’ It felt amazing to get moving again and while it didn’t feel like much at the time, I’m going to wait and see how I feel tomorrow before deciding if I should add to the suggested workout for the day in the series. I’d love to get back to strength training as I’ve gone a little soft and have to get to prepping this body for labor!
parent.
foster
Foster has recently started preschool and has been loving it! He cries whenever I go to pick him up. It was cute the first time but now it’s old. There’s a nationwide program here that allows for children to go to preschool for one year for free and it’s been an absolute lifesaver for us.
The main excitement in Foster’s life was that sometime during the night before Halloween, he fell out of bed, hit his head on the fireplace, and crawled back into bed to fall asleep! He came out of his room on Halloween morning with his skull showing and his head (and floor) covered in dried blood. I’m not sure how we made it four years without any emergency room visits but it was quite exciting to have our first one be in Ireland! The first hospital we went to didn’t accept kids under the age of 14 so we had to call a new cab, drive back to the other side of Dublin, and go to the specific children’s hospital that was actually closer to our house than the one the letting agent suggested to us.
He did not cry or complain once through this entire process. Holding a cold washcloth to his head wasn’t his favorite but he did like getting to be in a car in his jammies. By the time he was seen, the doctor decided to ask him a couple of questions to see if there was any brain damage and Greg and I were specifically asked to stay quiet and not help him with anything.
Doc: “I see you have a brother, do you also have a sister?”
Fos: “I don’t know!”
Doc: “Ok, and do you go to school?”
Fos: “Yes, I do!”
Doc: “Great! What’s your teacher’s name?”
Fos: “Ummm…it’s an adult.”
I thought we were doomed. Greg and I understood his answers, he knows he is getting another baby but that we don’t know if it’s a brother or sister and he had been in school for less than a week but I’m sure these weren’t the answers the doctor was looking for! For better or for worse, she decided his answers overall were sufficient and there was no brain damage. She glued his head back together, gave each of the boys a new teddy bear, and sent us home with instructions of “no boisterous play.”
graham
This kid.
He is an absolute goober and either loves or hates his mornings without Foster. We either end up having wonderful little dance parties and get to build towers that can be knocked over or he sits in my laps and points to his stroller just waiting to leave to go get Foster again.
Overall not much new with him, he’s a wrecking ball that gets into everything and I just can’t keep up.
lucky
Two weeks ago at our first scan in Ireland, we were told that Lucky had a bilateral pleural effusion-fluid in the cavities around both of their lungs. The two big things that we needed to look out for were chromosomal abnormalities and the development of hydrops fetalis, neither have good outcomes. Luckily, the chromosomal testing came back about a week later as negative which meant we were waiting to monitor for the development of hydrops. The fact that the effusion was the only thing wrong was something in our favor but the fact that it had progressed to both sides of the chest was not positive.
The outcome for chromosomal abnormalities ranges all over the board and hydrops has a 60-90% mortality rate but all that we could do was wait to see how the fluid levels progressed after two weeks, anxious and hoping that hydrops would not develop.
It was an incredibly agonizing two weeks of not having many answers and not wanting to share and worry our friends and family before we ourselves knew a lot. We had prepared ourselves for an early delivery (as early as 26 weeks if hydrops developed), extensive NICU time, possible surgeries before and after birth, and even thought about the worst.
We were on the brink of crying out of sheer joy at our follow up scan as the maternal fetal medicine specialist squirted that cold jelly onto my belly, searched around, and found that there was essentially NO fluid in either pleural cavity! I’m not sure we can stress what a relief, and shock, this was. It was the outcome you dare not even hope for. Our idea of a positive scan would have been the fluid levels staying the same and no other symptoms developing. Draining fluid we could handle, possibly losing our baby we could not.
Now, instead of constant monitoring and being considered high-risk, we go back in four weeks to verify that the fluid has resolved itself completely but we should be in the clear! Spontaneous resolution for this is not a common outcome and ‘Lucky’ could not seem like a more fitting name for our little one right now.
I can’t begin to encompass the emotions I felt over those two weeks. Guilt, fear, shame, anger. Were we going to have to tell Foster that his baby died? Should I even be looking at double strollers? Staying neutral was hard enough let alone being happy or excited about little Lucky in my belly. I am so thankful for Lucky giving me a swift kick every once in a while to let me know everything was still at least ok and nothing had happened yet.
This is one family that will not be taking health for granted after just two weeks of stress.
eat sweat parent 