Farewell First Trimester (and Happy Friday!)

I’m not going to lie. The first trimester of pregnancy is a special little version of hell. I’ve spent the better part of the last six weeks in a state of fugue. I’ve been utterly without motivation, or inclination to do anything at all. I’ve done no sewing, no writing, absolutely nothing. I lie on the sofa unmoving, marathoning Madmen and wishing for a sure and quick death.  The other facet of this is the unrelenting morning sickness. The term morning sickness may apply to a portion of pregnant women, but for many, like myself, the sickness is not at all restricted to any particular time of day, instead rearing its ugly head whenever it pleases, unrelentingly reminding me in the most horrific way that I have no control of my body. My stomach will clench painfully, and it will not stop until it has squeezed out every molecule of whatever it is that is pissing it off. Even if that means I can barely breathe and I could swear I can feel my toes coming up.

Not a single one of the old-wives remedies worked. Ginger did not work; it was just unpleasant to vomit up. Lemon wedges, the hard candies, crackers, bananas, or the whole BRAT diet, all complete horse-hockey.

My doctor eventually gave up trying to convince me that a half-pill of Unisom every 12 hours would keep these symptoms under control. Occasionally it helped temper the vomiting but most of the time, I just vomited the pill up after it had melted into my stomach acids to create a dark brew akin to battery acid, and I’d continue vomiting unrelentingly until I started wishing for my own death.  The doctor kindly decided to prescribe Zofram, which is a medication which is commonly prescribed to chemotherapy patients to manage their hellacious nausea symptoms.

The Zofram has made my desire for my own demise fade away on the most part. I’ve learned that the best way for me to use this medication is to take it before I go to bed. If I take it in the morning, it gets retched up within half an hour of being ingested, and I am not confident enough in it all being removed as to take another dose.  It does however, have a strong sedating effect on me, and makes getting out of bed nigh impossible.  I’ve missed SO much work from all this, I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do for bills.

BUT... all this wretched misery has been proven well-worthwhile.  On Monday, hubby and I went to my first-trimester screening, and met with a genetic counselor.  The screening included an ultrasound. Our first ultrasound was pretty profound. Seeing that little flickering blob, the beating heart, the lima bean, that was pretty amazing. But it was overshadowed by what we saw on Monday. The moment I stretched out on the ‘slab’ and unbuttoned my jeans, got the warm gloop squeezed onto my tummy, and the wand was pressed against my pelvis, the dark blob resolved itself, and then the little beanlet came into view. She/he was facing the ‘camera’ so to speak, and we saw him/her appear as if in layers. Toes, fingers, nose, forehead, lips... and next thing you know, there’s a whole little person resolving before us in grey and white points.

Two inches from ‘head to rump’, there was really no difference between what we were looking at and what a newborn looks like except the size and scale. Not only did we see with astonishing detail, the profile and hands and feet, we saw the beanlet kick and squirm with great animation. Our critter is a spunky little wiggle-worm. The baby seemed determined to squirm away from the ultrasound wand as much as possible, twisting away and showing us its teeny back and rear end.  It didn’t help that with ever twitch, squirm, cartwheel or kick, I would explode into fresh tears and sobbing because I could not believe what I was seeing—making the technician’s job of capturing measurements somewhat harder.

We heard the little heartbeat, and oohed and ahhed in utter amazement at the miniscule creature growing in my belly.

I am looking forward to earning my ‘bump’.  Right now, I can feel the little nugget ball nestled in there, but there’s really no marked baby-bump right now.  I’m almost a full-third of the way through the pregnancy already; which is scary if I think on it too much. By the ORS retreat in August, I’ll be bumpified. I’m through the highest risk time, and am hoping for a continued healthy pregnancy. The way Beanlet is tumbling around, and kicking off of walls like an astronaut in space, I can feel free to look forward and not dwell and worry too much.

Tag is looking around while stuffing his face. His first few hours
at 'camp'.

My horse has been horse-napped by my generous sister, who has offered to keep him at her place for the duration of my ‘confinement’.  So he was taken on Sunday last, loaded into her roomy trailer and driven from his dark stall and cramped conditions to her house, where he has a very large paddock to play in, and two friends to torment.  He has been quite excited and happy the past week, and is just starting to settle down. He is in the best hands, and I am SO grateful to my sister for doing this for me. It means the world. We plan to go visit him in Eastern Oregon on Memorial Day weekend.

My sister's horses were curious about the cinnamon newcomer.

I have no creative things to report because since March, I have done absolutely nothing. I have SO much to do; sewing, website updating, helping my sister revamp her blog, and so many other projects that have been in suspension while I float through this fugue of first-trimester misery. I’m hoping the crappy stuff will fade soon (I’ll be at 13 weeks on this coming Monday) and I will be able to catch up on all these things and start working on my retreat stuff.

Next weekend, come hell or high-water, I and my husband will be joining other ORS members for our Topsails and Tea event, where we have tea in Newport Oregon in the early afternoon, and then we take a serene evening sail on a tall ship (either the Lady Washington or the Hawaiian Chieftain). So I will try to remember to take pictures. I had planned to wear my riding habit to this event, but I haven’t done anything on it since February, and I don’t think I can do all that much in a week (or if I’m even motivated to do anything to begin with). So I’ll wear something I already have and maybe I’ll finish up a hat for the occasion. We shall see.

Have a lovely weekend and happy Friday!

Wow. Space and grass and hay and a salt-lick. Could life get any better?

Some clarification

My sister's congratulatory gift for the 'bean'. She painted it in oil.
It's called 'Shetland in Grass'. She knows my weakness for ponies.

I’m surprised. I provided a good clue in my last post as to what my ‘news’ is. It’s right there in the text. The first letter of each line spells it out. And it says: OMG I AM PREGNANT.  Nobody figured it out!


Yes. I am pregnant. It happened. How, I do not know. Running on one ‘cylinder’, with odds of <20% WITH Clomid, never mind without Clomid to help me ovulate. Back in January, my doctor decided not to renew my Clomid prescription. I’d taken my last ones in December and failed to get preggers. I was pretty depressed to say the least. But I found her decision to stop easier to accept than I thought. I was sad, granted, but I was also relieved. Not thinking about it all the time, not stressing myself out about it... it is probably the reason why we were received this incredible surprise back in March.

I’m sure the loss of 30+ lbs had something to do with it too.

Yes, I will not lie. I heard this story OVER and OVER and OVER again when we were struggling with the whole fertility thing. “You shouldn’t worry about it... it’ll happen. My sister/friend/cousin’s best friend’s brother’s coworker was trying for years and years. They gave up and boom, as soon as they did, she got pregnant.” Or “My brother in law and his wife tried for years, and then decided to adopt a baby from China. Two months after the adoption went through, she was expecting.” I heard these stories ad nauseam these past seven or eight years. Now we’re one of them.

My last Clomid treatment was in December. After Doc cut me off the Clomid, I said “screw it” and finally decided to give in and turn the spare room into a sewing room. So the bed went into the attic, and it was reorganized so there was room for a cutting table, and my sewing table, the shelves, my trunk for costumes... and I won’t lie, the room is AWESOME. So of course, of COURSE, the moment I do this, I find out I’m pregnant.

Finding out was sort of an exercise in convincing myself. I was feeling awful during the middle of March—I took a day off work for being extremely ill. Weeks back, out of habit, I’d marked the first day of my cycle in February on my calendar, but I’d forgotten about it. I had no need to track it anymore, I wasn’t taking Clomid. So I just flipped the next month on the calendar over and didn’t pay it any heed.

My birthday rolled ‘round (I’m marginally sure that this child was conceived on or near my birthday), and somewhere along the line, my one working ovary popped out an egg, and somewhere along the line, a horde of eager swimmers swarmed it and one tenacious little bugger punched through and got the whole thing started. It happened. Holy crap!

I was about weeks on when I began to suspect something. For one, my ‘girls’ were MEGA sore. They get sore as a mean when my cycle rolls ‘round, but they were super-extra-grandé-sized sore. They are ‘don’t even look at my boobs or THINK about looking at my boobs’ sore. I was also getting really bad tension headaches EVERY day, suffering from light sensitivity, I had to pee constantly and I just wasn’t feeling well. At some point, it occurred to me that maybe I should see if I was late. So I looked at my calendar, and thankfully, I marked the date of my last cycle. At that point I was close to 9 days late.

I’ve been late before, and after all the constant years of disappointment, I refused to give up the idea that I was fooling myself. I convinced myself that if my cycle didn’t start by the 12th day, I’d get a pregnancy test.

When you struggle with infertility, getting a pregnancy test is a torturous thing. You are filled with hope every time, and when it comes back negative, you are so crestfallen, no matter how well you’ve convinced yourself not to get too excited. Over the years, I used to sit and plan all the ways I’d tell my husband if I came back with a positive, I had all these elaborate ideas, like a treasure hunt with baby-items, or whatever. Stupid stuff. But this time, I was too afraid to believe it. So I called my husband and warned him; I was late, I wasn’t feeling hot, my boobs hurt, so I was going to get a pregnancy test. He also had a little trepidation about it. He knows how disappointed I got, and didn’t want me to be crestfallen again.

I left work during lunch and zipped up to Walgreens and bought a 2-pack of EPT tests. I had to swing by the bank, and I was so anxious about it, I actually did the test at the bank. I sat in their restroom staring at the positive with complete incredulity. I thought I was reading it wrong. That maybe I did the test wrong. I read the instructions several times to insure I was reading it right, and feared I’d held it in the stream too long, or at the wrong angle, and got this false positive. I rushed back to work to confer with my coworkers. I spread the instruction sheet over the table and the three of us studied it like a bunch of generals in a war-room studying a map. We looked again and again and the consensus was; positive. The line that was faint was the one that was supposed to indicate negative. The line that indicated positive was not only quite blue, it was heavily darkly blue.

I still thought there was room for doubt. Go figure.

But doubt still filled me, so a few hours later, I did the test again. Once more, the test was positive. It was a fast-positive, immediate. No waiting time for the line to darken, it was a strong, vivid blue line. You’d think after getting positives on two 99% accurate tests would be proof enough, but for someone who has lived with disappointment over pregnancy over and over again, I STILL required convincing. So the next day, I went to a pregnancy resource center, and because I made the mistake of telling the lady I was an atheist, I had to endure long-winded faith-based lectures about the pitfalls of abortion (::oy::) and was then subjected to attempts to coerce me to find faith-based support groups for parenting. Their intentions were respectable but wholly unnecessary. In general, Atheists are not evil fetus-ejecting jerks. We can be decent, respectable, loving people (with an occasional streak of cynical snarkiness of course). I smiled and thanked the lady, and proceeded with the test. She set a timer for five minutes but I got a positive within 20 seconds of my urine being dropped onto the test. This was my first clue about my HCG levels. They are SKY HIGH.

At that point, I accepted the fact that I was pregnant, and I totally lost it. I burst into blubbering tears while clutching the hand of the center’s volunteer lady. She was so sweet, and she even gave me a pair of knitted booties. I texted my husband. Mind you, it’s hard for a young, healthy young woman to hold onto her baby for the first three months.

I wanted a blood test (further confirmation perhaps) and to talk to my OB. That was when I found out she retired without telling me, and I had to hunt down a new OBGYN. I found one, had my first appointment the next week, and our first ultrasound the week after.

Surprise, motherf**kas, I iz here.

I’m now at 10 weeks. Only two more weeks and I’m through with the first trimester.. scary huh? I’m almost a third the way through the pregnancy. The baby is due November 20ish if all goes well.

This first trimester has been HORRIFIC. My HCG levels were 10x what is considered normal. I’ve been violently sick for weeks. I’ve lost six pounds in two weeks, in fact, I’m at the lowest point I’ve been on the scale in many years, and have broken my WW plateau. I am quite sure I’ll gain it back and then some if I get through this colossally horrid pukey phase and am able to eat anything besides bagels, bananas and rice crispies.

So I’m on my way, and the little lima-bean in my tummy (now about the size of a kumquat and looks disturbingly like a teeny-tiny Voldemort) is still there (at this point...) we’re about to embark on our next appointment today, and hopefully we’ll have a new ultrasound soon enough. Because I’m of ‘Advanced Age’ I will need a specialist doctor who is used to geriatrics with babies and more monitoring to ensure a healthy pregnancy.

As I get closer to the end of the first trimester, the chances of the baby sticking around to full term become much better.

This is how my husband chose to announce it on Facebook.
Yes, those are my toe-socks.

So yes. At 41 years of age, I’m about to have my first (and last) baby. I still can’t believe it. But last night, when I turned onto my tummy in bed, I could actually feel the little nugget in there pressing against my pelvis. Pretty soon I’ll be showing. How weird is that, to imagine there’s a tiny, wriggly little ‘skwerm’ inside me. It is already so loved, and it’s only 10 weeks old and an inch and a quarter long. Hubby is on cloud nine.

I will have to find something to do with my horse for the rest of the year. I was hoping to pasture him; I don’t want to lease him out to an inexperienced or bad rider. I have that to figure out, and the sewing room now baby-room. I’m trying not to panic. :)

Thank goodness I didn’t get rid of all that baby stuff. Who knew?

Surprise.

First office-special in a long time. :)

Oh man,

My head is about to explode.

Give me some air!

In the span of a few weeks

A lot has happened.

More than I could have imagined.

Probably more than I can handle.

Really, everything will be okay.

Even if everything is going to change.

Granted, I wasn’t expecting all this.

Not when I had already resigned myself.

And given up.

Now that’s usually when it happens.

To tell the truth, I’m terrified.

~~~~

Maybe this will explain my silence and cryptic posts of late. It was an eventful birthday indeed. :)  I'm treading softly, it's a delicate time. Things could change.

My Regency Stovepipe Bonnet Pattern for Download

Well, I think I'm going to stop selling my bonnet pattern as a physical papery thing, and have decided to merge it and the instructions into one easy .pdf file that can be sent to your local FedEx Kinkos or CopyMax (or wherever you can find a large-format printer) to print it for you. It's usually a little under $4 to print it.

You can pay with Paypal or a credit card, easy peasy, and it will be delivered to your email box. It's only a 1MB file, so it shouldn't be a problem. This will save me the worry of getting things out in the mail on time, and it will save you shipping. :)

Organizing & purging frenzy

A bad photo of the newest project. Simon is photobombing below.

All hail the IKEA Pax storage system! We have reduced the footprint of our small bedroom floor by about nine square feet—but we gained 89 cubic feet in storage space. We went with the shallower cabinets, you can get them in either 14ish inches or 23ish inches. But since our room is small and we had one wall to do this on and only so much room for the bed, we figured it would be best to go with the shallower cabinets.

We got a bit of a tax refund, and most of it went towards bills, but we had decided that in spite of our difficult financial situation, this was a needed expenditure. And I do not regret it at all. I am in love. We now only have three pieces of furniture in our bedroom. The bed, and two bedside tabley type things. That’s it. No horizontal surfaces to clutter! We got rid of THREE dressers (two of which were set ablaze in the back yard and both went up like roman candles-the third is one I painted a tree on and it, along with our log-headboard is going up to seasonal vacation cabin in Prineville belonging to some relatives. The contents of those dressers filled about 60% of ONE 19” bay of this cabinet system. The rest was well... free storage. We did also purge a tremendous amount of stuff. I donated a bunch of crafty stuff to our local elementary school.

Rod for large cabinet

I set up one of the narrow bays for my regency gowns. They all fit. The shallow cabinets do prevent you from hanging things on a traditional hanger rod-being a few inches shy of the width of a standard hanger. I had to get rods that run the depth of the cabinet rather than the width, (if that makes sense). The big one has two rods that stick out like arms. But it allows you to hang things flat, facing the door. The little one is a pull-out rod, so I can tug the gowns out to access all of them easily.

Small pull-out hanger. Pretty sweet. 5 bucks too.

All of my dresses, including my heavy dressing gown, fit in the bay without a problem. We got three 19” cabinets and one 39” cabinet—totaling 8 feet of cabinet storage. I got a double-rod setup for the big cabinet so hubby would have a nice space to hang his jackets and coats. His motorcycle helmet has a place; our clothes are all tucked neatly away. Sheets and blankets have a place, there are baskets on top of these seven-foot-tall cabinets for other blankets, our clothes are in tidy little wire drawers inside. Photo albums and books that usually sit around the house are now neatly organized in this unit. It’s like heaven. This little house of ours reallllllly needed a storage solution.

An approximation of the setup we have. I couldn't get the
hanger rods to place in there.

This cabinet has in essence upgraded our whole house. Having a place for things decluttered the house immediately. We took the twin bed out of the ‘guest room’ and I finally annexed the space as my sewing and craft room (there is something humourous I will add to this later on in another post but not this time). I opened up my cutting table, moved furniture around, organized my things in bins and on shelves, and my sewing machine has its own desk. It’s really the ideal workspace, which is ... argh... maddeningly delightful!

Doors look like different colours on the website, but the aren't.

That’s why I haven’t been blogging much. I confess I’ve been sort of preoccupied. Mostly tired and worn out, partly in a reorganizing frenzy, partly feeling slightly under the weather. There hasn’t been much motivation to draw, write, paint, sew or anything at all.

I am nearly finished with the top of the riding habit. I’m in a bit of a conundrum with the arrangement with the buttons. I may also have to cover them with a second layer of fabric since the metal is shining from underneath. ::grr:: I’m trying to get the piece finished for the Topsails & Tea event in May. Let’s hope my motivation carries me through. I will also need to make new stays pretty soon. YET AGAIN.

Anywho... that’s my boring update for now. I may have more interesting things to share in the next few posts. We shall see!

As you know, I can see how people come to this page, and I often check what people are searching for that brings them to my blog. This is hands-down one of my favourite search-word visitors so far (click to enlarge).

Indeed!

Wasn't so crappy after all & Happy Friday!

Happy Friday all!

A hasty sketch & ink office-special. He needs to be
redone with greater care. Lord Fox.

I had a wonderful birthday; almost flawless—the first one I can think of that was so romantic and intimate. My co-workers took me to lunch as promised at my very favourite Sushi-joint (I love how fresh their food is and I’m addicted to their Florida roll), it’s SOOOooooo good. I pigged out; we shared a Florida roll, of which I had the lion’s share because I’m a savage—and I had the bento I love so much with sushi. The restaurant knows me pretty well, there was a time when I would eat there twice a week sometimes, and so when they found out it was my birthday, they played the birthday music and the whole restaurant broke into song while the server brought me a ball of green-tea ice-cream with a candle in it.

My coworkers were sweet and thoughtful. They treated, and we ate until we were so full we could barely breathe. Back at the office, they presented me with a balloon and some begonias, and a card and a badly sung rendition of Happy Birthday.

I then drove home after work to discover my husband waiting for me inside the back door holding a package. A little backstory here, everyone knows I love the American Duchess’s Pemberly shoes. I’ve wanted them from the moment she released the first design concepts, but since we are always in a financial pinch, there’s no way I could justify the expenditure, not to mention explain to a husband who has little to no patience for my expensive costuming hobby, why I reallyreallyreally want this shoes. So when the American Duchess posted an announcement of having some ‘imperfect’ shoes for sale, I thought, hey, maybe he’ll let me get at least imperfect ones for my birthday. I sent him a link, to which he did not respond, so I was pretty sure he probably rolled his eyes upon receiving it and promptly deleted the email.

So excited, I took them with me into the car to
admire them on the way to the restaurant.

To my surprise, when I came into the house, I saw in his hand a rather clumsily-wrapped box suspiciously sized similarly to a shoebox, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I smooched him and grabbed my present, excited to have something to open on my birthday (another rarity). I tore it open and it was still in the shipping box, but when I saw the shipper’s name on the tag I started squeeing like an idiot. I tore it open and pulled out the pemberlies, my eyes glistening with tears.

He then informed me that these were not the ‘imperfects’ but the ‘perfect’ shoes as he watched me turn them and examine them for flaws. More squees ensued, and in spite of being almost late for our dinner date, I insisted on clickety-clacking around the house in them like an idiot just to see how disgustingly comfortable they are. For anyone who knows how English Country Dance can take a toll on one’s feet because of the flats we wear, you would surely appreciate the comfort of these shoes. They’re AWESOME! I’m so excited. I just ordered leather paints for them.

Anyway, we went to my other favourite restaurant; the Rendezvous Grill, it’s a local place we go to for most of our special occasions, they have really great food and you can go in a pair of jeans and it’s okay. Dan walked right into the dining area instead of waiting for seating, and brought me to a table with a reserved plaque on it, and a vase of pink roses and pale yellow carnations. Apparently he’d stopped by the restaurant ahead of time to drop off the flowers so they would be on the table when I got there. Aw!

Yes, my cellphone camera is a joke.

It was a delicious dinner. And yes, I had my snails; don’t yuck my yum. Escargots have been a favourite of mine since I was very little. In fact, one of my favourite treats when I was little was whelk sea snails that were cooked in a super-peppery broth. You could only get them in certain spots, but they were SO good. We also ate periwinkles; they’d serve them to you in a paper cone, just like fries, and they were yummy as hell, if not challenging to wrench their tiny, coiled bodies from their shells using the pin or toothpick sold with the cooked critters. Don’t wrinkle your nose at that! I’m pretty sure wherever you live there’s something *I* would consider gross; but I’d try it before I said yay or nay, and I wouldn’t go: EWWWW! (There are some small exceptions; when it’s insects, eyeballs, testicles, or anything worm or grub-like, I’ll pass). It’s my way. It’s all about culture. Suck it up!

I topped my meal off with a piece of cake with chocolate, mascarpone and drizzles of Grand Marnier (why is that SO good with chocolate? It’s evil). Anyway, the whole evening was nice (save for one hiccup that was completely unnecessary but happened anyway; I merely shoved my grumpiness about it until the next day. Days like Wednesday was are so rare, I wasn’t going to let something smirch it for me) and I went home glowing with happiness. Best. Birthday. Ever.

Un p'tit morceau de gateau. :)

Birthdays are the only day that’s truly yours. Holidays are about family, weddings about everyone else BUT you, even if you think otherwise, but birthdays, that’s different. I used to think I was selfish to expect to feel welcome and special on the day that marks my birth, but I have come to realize there’s nothing selfish about that at all, and anyone should be able to spend their birthday in a way that makes them happy to be alive. It’s the whole point of celebrating it. There are always forces out there that willfully or unknowingly choose to do things to make you feel less than happy, which sucks. For me, that has unfortunately been the case more often than not—so when days like Wednesday happen, I hold onto them tightly. I do love my husband. But more so for his attention to the details that mattered so much, the expensive shoes I wanted badly but really did not need; the flowers on the table; his smile when I saw my gift.

Satan called but only to get my sister’s number. My eldest sister is out of the country so she didn’t call, and my brother and his family are too wrapped up in their own crisis to think of it. My middle sister, Helen called and sang me the ‘zoo’ version of the birthday song, which I punctuated with a couple of monkey ‘oohs’ when she finished singing. LOL. Satan felt bad and shoved some cash into my hand yesterday, ordering me to buy new riding jods because my old ones are falling off my butt. “Joo look layke a homeless woomahn,” she said.

She’s coming up tomorrow, I’m making mussels Belgian-style. I’m not sure about fries though. Maybe some baked ones, not sure. Then I’d like to focus on fixing and finishing up the bodice for my habit—which will require me to measure out and cut sleeves, which his always fun.

Oh, and I forgot--the fox drawing reminds me... Someone asked me recently if I knew what that screaming noise was in P&P '95 I think during an outdoor take looking at one of the great houses, maybe Pemberly, could be Netherfield, who knows... but the answer is a that is a red fox screaming.  It's a haunting, skin-crawling sound that upon my visits to the UK as a child to see my two best friends, would scare the bejeezus out of me.

Anyway, that’s it for this lovely Friday.

Happy %$#@& Birthday, Hungarican Chick.

Today is my birthday.  Be prepared for whining. I whine on my birthday. Birthdays for me are something I have come to dread—because there’s the selfish expectation, and then the disappointing reality. And it’s rarely a day where I am not finding myself upset by being forgotten by certain people, and upset at myself for feeling negative when others are doing things to make it a good day for me.  I know that the people who apparently matter won’t change; they will continue to forget my birthday, or treat it like it’s any other day. I really hate it when someone doesn’t really think about it, and then in the last-minute, does something as an afterthought—or simply out of a sense of obligation. I’d rather they do nothing and not even mention it.  I cannot stop myself from being hurt by all these things, year after year after year. Even at 41, I let myself get hurt by it.

Mind you, this began years ago in childhood, where my birthday was perpetually an afterthought. When I hit my 20s, it was forgotten constantly. And in the past decade, My birthday has mostly consisted of last-minute calls from someone who had to be reminded by someone else that this was my birthday; but most of the time, no acknowledgement at all. My family then gets all upset when *I* don’t make a big fuss about their ‘special’ days either. Hm.

A part of me wants to just hide at home and not be given any reminder that this is my birthday, and there’s a part of me that secretly and selfishly desires to be treated like queen for a day; to get a cake and have the people I love all around me paying me special attention just like I see other families and friends do. But when they do, I’m just embarrassed by it all and I am made anxious by all the attention.  I truly, truly, truly HATE my birthday. I hate the fuss, but want the fuss. I hate the forgetting, but wish everyone would just forget it. It’s a horrid divided feeling that I want to just go away.  When the day is over, I’ve secretly cried at least twice.

What would my ideal birthday be? A day that shows that someone listened to me, and paid attention to what I love the most—and shown an effort to fulfill that wish—not do what’s convenient for *them*. I wish to be surrounded by people who will not hurt me, or turn the day into a drama-fest about them; make me feel like their presence or efforts are an inconvenience, or like they’d rather be elsewhere.  I want to feel precious and loved and not like an afterthought. To feel special, I guess. Most of the time I do not—by my own doing in some cases, and by the way my loved ones treat me in others.

So my solution is to grump out on my birthday. To hope everyone will leave me alone, and still be sad that they do. It’s inevitable. Unless the poles reverse, pigs learn to fly,  and my family learns to give a crap about things like this, and get together in Brussels to throw me a huge regency ball with all my friends, and shower me with gifts of sidesaddles and chocolate , I will probably never be happy. LOL!

Today is probably closest to the most tolerable birthday I can have. No muss and fuss (in great quantities). My coworkers want to take me out to lunch, which is okay. They don’t go nuts, they take me where *I* want, which is always a plus, instead of taking me where they want (I have an in-law who insists on doing something for me on my birthday, asks me where I want to go, and then when the day comes, her husband exclaims that he doesn’t want to go there, and we end up going where he wants—where he proceeds to complain incessantly and dominate the conversation the whole time).  My husband is then going to take me to our favourite local restaurant where I can eat my Escargots à la Bourguignonne and a decadent dessert (maybe with a candle, maybe not) and then it’s homeward bound for bed and the rest of my week.

Today, I got lots of wishes on Facebook from friends and not-so-close-friends. It was sweet, especially from the people who I adore. I know people think the facebook birthday reminder is an exercise in thoughtlessness, but I don’t think that at least with my friends, that their wishes are in any way insincere, and for a day where I spend most of it on the edge of tears because my family doesn’t give a crap and never has, it is fortifying and touching that so many people I care about really want me to have a happy day. It’s humbling.

To top today off, Mary Robinette Kowal, author and someone I look up to, organized a month of letter-writing that went viral recently, and someone obviously said something about my upcoming birthday, and even though I am not an active participant in this letter-writing initiative, I have received a flow of lovely cards from all of my Regency friends which really touched me very deeply. It was so sweet to have all this post waiting for me filled with scripted wishes. :D

So happy birthday to me I guess. One year older. Yay.

Aaaanywhoo... Progress on my riding habit... Stalled. I sewed in the rest of the lining last night, and did so sitting on the sofa watching TV. All I had left was the collar area, and I sewed it too tightly. I’ll have to release the seam and resew so that it doesn’t distort the back, which it did. Annoying.

Also, the barn owner, Dee let me have a child’s 14” English all-purpose saddle she had lying about not being used. I will use it for S2’s girls when they come to ride Tag.  When she gave it to me, it was in this shape: 

Now, after a vigourous cleaning, it looks like this: 

How cute is that itty-bitty saddle? Teehee!  The saddle is cheap, but it’s fine. It has a tiny little fleece saddle-pad and very shabby leathers I’ll eventually replace. I put new stirrups on it.

My horse is throwing his winter coat, and he gets SO fuzzy. Last night I combed a pony off of him.  Look how long his fur is:

Sorry the pictures are so dark. My cell phone camera kind of sucks.

Annnnyway, that’s it for my birthday rant. You all have a lovely Wednesday.