Toddler Cruise Travel List

Must survive three more days...

The super crazy, anal mom in me made a list of everything I need to bring.  This way on the day before the cruise I can just throw everything together, check off the list and know I got everything. Here is A's packing list:

Now off to make my list. Then off to convincing S to make his list so that I'm not stuck waiting around on him once I get both A and myself packed. Men...

UTI, You Are Not My Friend

Of course now that we are ttc for the first time in forever that I get a UTI. Haven’t had one in forever and when I need to be good and healthy this thing springs up on me! I hate you UTI, I hate you. We are not friends!

Saturday morning I woke up feeling kind of funny. It kind of felt like my period was about to come but because I am mid cycle I knew it wasn’t possible. Maybe just maybe I was wishful thinking that I was feeling implantation but soon enough I would find out otherwise.

We had a birthday party to attend to Saturday afternoon and all morning I was feeling ok, just funny. We went to the party which was really nice, I enjoyed seeing friends and family. I told S that I wasn’t feeling too hot and we should start heading home soon. We got home and as soon as I sat on the toilet to go pee, I knew that was going on and my next thought was "Ughhhhhhhh".

Even thought I knew, I ran to Walmart to pick up a test. Since peeing on a pregnancy test will be a bust now for this month at least I get to pee on the UTI test right? I didn’t even know they had tests until recently which was pretty cool. So I picked up the test and some Cystex (relieves UTI pain so it claims) and hoping for the best. Got home, took the test and it was positive :-/ Took the Cystex and it was useless. A few hours later I am crouched over in pain with a water bottled filled with hot water between my legs about to cry.

S was kind enough to go back to Walmart and pick me up some AZO and I called into the doctor to see if he would call in an Rx for me which he did. Thankfully the pharmacy was still open and I was able to get the meds. I also had S pick up some cranberry juice. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find "real" cranberry juice that isn’t mixed with a bunch of other crap? He finally found pure cranberry juice and one liter was $7!

It wasn’t until midnight that the pain finally subsided just a bit where I was able to fall asleep. I have never had a UTI hurt this bad before. Holy smokes! It literally felt comparable to what my lady garden felt like after giving birth. The burn was just horrible.

On an upside, we got a bunch of stuff done this weekend! Annabelle got a new playground, we put out our lawn furniture and we even cleaned the outside of the house. Now I just must survive 5 more days. Five more days and I will be on a boat away from everything!

I leave you with this. A strawberry champagne tea amidst the chaos of my living room that I am enjoying while A naps.

Its Been a While...

It’s been quite a while since I posted and I apologize for that. For some reason I'm finding it a bit hard to sometimes put it all out there even though I want to document my journey. I hope some of you who read this will learn a thing or two or just enjoy the experience.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I will get into the story of where we are in life so here it is. We have a wonderful daughter named A and when her 1st birthday came around we decided to try and conceive (TTC) a sibling for her. We were so excited to start the journey again even though if you were to ask me about having #2 when A was born I would have told you never again!

Thankfully we got pregnant right away and I got a positive test at the beginning of December. We were super excited but unfortunately that came to an end December 19th when I started to bleed. Doctor's confirmed I was having a miscarriage (M/C) and that was the end of that. It was hard but not as hard as I anticipated. I took the m/c very scientifically and just kept telling myself that its better now than later if something wasn’t right. There were times when I was very ok and times when I broke down. It was such a roller coaster of emotions.

I was finally finished m/c naturally December 26th (yay Christmas) and the question's of "When are you going to try for #2" from friend's and family were extra painful since we didn’t tell anyone. Went back to the doctor a few days later and he gave me the ok to TTC again whenever. I thought that was a bit quick from what I have read but naturally we wanted to be pregnant again asap so we tried again. Before I knew it, I got yet another positive test at the end of January.

I think I was more excited this time around than I was the first time. I thought to myself, what are the chances of it happening twice! I got pretty comfortable with that idea and even told a few friends. I was happy, I was excited until Feb 8th came along and I started bleeding again. At first it started with a little brown spotting and I thought it was normal since I had the same with A. The next day it got red and I just knew.

I went to the ER even thought I knew there was nothing they can do for me. Again, they told me what I already knew. This time around I think I took it a bit harder. I didn’t really tell my friends about the m/c again until a few days later when I was finally comfortable with the idea. It sucks to have a m/c once but it sucks 5x worse having one after another. Even though I'm not religious I just kept telling myself that at least now my first angel has someone to be with.

I switched doctors because I didn’t feel comfortable with the advice I was given. After telling the doctor what has happened she advised me that this time around I should give it 2-3 months before we ttc again. She said that because I got pregnant so fast after the first m/c that my body simply wasn’t ready to carry a healthy pregnancy just yet. When having a m/c your body sheds all the lining in the uterus and the lining wasn’t strong enough to carry just yet.

Fast forward to now and here we are, ttc yet again. This is our first cycle and I promised myself I won’t test until after our cruise. Even though I felt that the m/c didn’t affect me that much, they did. First time around I was excited about ttc again and looking forward to being pregnant. Now I just want to get through it and be at 12 weeks. Wish us luck, I hope this will be it!

So, there it is, our story so far. Getting it off my chest has helped a bit and I hope to be able to document the rest of our journey. Stay with me!

Chlorine Is Not Our Friend!

What a beautiful weekend this was! As usual I planned a million things we wanted to do but realistically got a chance to only do a few. One of them was going swimming at our YMCA today. We canceled our membership but still have access until the end of April. We were hoping to get a lot of swimming in but it looks like that won’t be happening anymore.

A has been diagnosed with eczema because for the past few weeks she has been having major flair up's around her belly, legs and behind her ears. We went to the doctor and she prescribed us Fluocinolone Acetonide 0.01% which is an oil you put on the skin after moistening it first. The eczema fully cleared up within 2 days and we haven’t had a breakout for a few days. Then we went to the pool on Wednesday and it returned but it wasn’t all that bad. Today we went to the pool once again and it was fully back.

I have no idea what took me so long to realize what it was from. I guess I figured since we were in the pool last year without any problems that it wasn’t what was causing it. I was thinking maybe it’s the chlorine that they use at the YMCA or maybe her skin just changed in the past year. I hope she grows out of it soon. At least it doesn’t seem to bother her. Here is a lovely picture of her little ham leg!

When Did This Happen???

My daughter officially has a busier social life than I do! Between the birthday parties, play dates, weekly activities, classes and other events I'm basically just a chaperoning shofer. The kicker is that she’s only 17 months. The rest of our month is pretty much booked, how ridicules is that. The good thing is that she’s getting a good exposure to other people and has an opportunity to play with others.

On a different note, a stone fell out of one of my favorite rings! S got me a beautiful opal ring (A's birthstone) for Valentine's Day from Amazon but it was really from Direct Jewlery. First I called Amazon and they told me to call Direct Jewlery. I called today and they were so helpful! Even though my 30 day return policy was over they still offered to replace the stone for me for free, all I have to do is ship them the ring back with the prepaid shipping label they e-mailed me. Very convenient, this is how companies keep customers! Tomorrow will probably be my errand running day so we can get that done.

     Here is what it looks like:

This weekend will finally be a nice warm weekend and we are dedicating it to yard work! We need to trim a bunch of bushes and spread the new grass seeds. Last year we had our whole lawn redone and ended up getting hydro-seeding done which gave us amazing results! There are some spots that didn’t fully fill in so we hope the seeds this year will fill it up. I can’t wait until the trees start blooming! There is something about fresh spring air and fresh bloomed flowers that just warms my heart.

And…..Tomorrow will be 30 days until our vacation! Eeeek!

When Booking a Cruise...

When you are looking into booking a cruise make sure you enter all the right info from the beginning, otherwise you will end up like me having to change a million things afterwards. I think I spent a good hour on the phone today fixing issues that I could have easily prevented!

A little over a month ago S and I decided we want to take a vacation from life and it’s been so long since we have done so. Life has thrown us a few curves since December but I will get into those in another post soon and a break is just what we need. Well I decided to browse around www.cruise.com and sure enough I found a cruise that would work perfect for us! The cruise leaves out of NYC for 7 days to the Bahamas and we dont have to buy plane tickets since were in MD! I got super excited and talked to S about it that night.

The next day I was sitting around and I wanted to find out all the prices and details. I selected a cabin type we wanted but didn’t look much further because I was just "checking things out" and in order to get the right quotes you have to put in all the details such as your age, address etc. Being lazy I half assed everything with half the wrong info and didn’t think much of it since I only wanted a general quote. I got my quote and went on with my day.

Well about a few hours later a rep from www.cruise.com calls me because they saw my entry (apparently I got my phone number right!) and offers us all these deals that come with booking right now, which we did. Well, all that half ass stuff I entered...was now part of our booking. When S was on the phone with them he was able to change a bunch of details like our birthday's etc but one thing nobody noticed or mentioned to us was that we were in a handicapped cabin! Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but since A is coming with us, I would love to have a bath tub so she can get a bath in.

We booked a Penthouse Suite with a large balcony and one of the features was bath and a shower but not in the handicap room. I tried to change our reservations online but it didn’t work. I had to call in and spend all that time trying to change our room and thank goodness they had ONE cabin of our category left that they were able to move us. Now I am excited again.

Lesson learned. If you want to do something, do it right from the beginning! This is our ship and what our room is like. I know it looks small for a room but for a cruise cabin it's actually pretty big!