Monthly Archives: March 2008

I actually got off my ass and walked around Beverly Hills today. I took a half-hour break when I got tired in the afternoon, and went outside. I just clocked my route on Google Pedometer, and it was actually 1.6mi. This makes me happy. I’ve been worrying about not getting enough exercise, but it’s so hard to start when you’re already exhausted from, y’know, building a baby.

Anyways. Knowing I can cover that much distance in 30 minutes is reassuring. If I can make a habit out of it, I’ll be in much better shape by the time the Critter gets here.

I pulled off what was, by all accounts, a really great wedding, while working full time and six months pregnant. It was all about the tasklists. I wrote an entry a few days before the wedding about how I felt I’d done well in my work on this wedding, and how I’d be happy to say it went well after March 9th. And it did go well. And therefore, I’m happy – and proud that I managed to accomplish this.

Of course, this wedding weekend would not have gone NEARLY as smoothly without a few key people, like nafspeak and Vanessa, who were rockstar houseguests in helping me prepare dinner for Paul’s family on the day after the wedding – and cleaning up afterwards. Holy crap, my friends are awesome.

It is now one week afterwards, and the house is mostly clear of boxes, wedding-related debris, and unpacked gifts. Thank-you cards have been written for all but a small handful of gifts. The extra bedding used for the houseguests is being vacuumed into space bags, for more compact storage. We can now move on to the next item on the Big Life Events list: Preparing for Baby.

Also, if anyone needed ANY more proof that my husband is AWESOME, here it is: he is currently building me more shelves so I can re-organize all my pots, pans, casserole and baking dishes. I asked for many more of those sort of items as wedding gifts, without really thinking about where the hell I was going to put them. So he’s all scrunched up in the former broom closet, making shelves from scratch. I’ll have to cook him dinner for this.

After Saturday, I suddenly have swollen feet and ankles. I managed to go my ENTIRE PREGNANCY TO DATE without these problems, and suddenly, I HAVE CANKLES. Not only do my ankles curve out instead of in, but they are also PAINFUL and swollen. And all I can wear today is flip-flops, and even those are cutting into the puffy tops of my feet.

I’m just bitching about this because I know swollen ankles are part of pregnancy, but so far, I’ve been SO lucky as to avoid all those negative physical effects. I don’t have zits or any discoloration of my skin. This whole cankles episode is the first bad physical effect of the pregnancy, and I’m pretty sure it is a direct effect of the wedding. The wedding was such an endurance test that my feet were aching something fierce by the end of the night (but I was having too much fun to sit down & rest for more than a few minutes at a time) and I think that pushed my poor ankles into puffiness.

Sigh. This bites. I have to go hobble off to put my feet up now.

In my most optimistic daydreams, I hoped the wedding would go as well as it did. Today, my new husband and I are just basking in the fact that it did go that well. And that we’re married, which also makes us very happy.

The wedding went brilliantly well. It went extremely smoothly, thanks to some wonderful, helpful friends, and our team of experienced, gracious vendors. From beginning to end, the day was everything we could have wanted. We had a lot of people helping us – but especially nafspeak who ROCKED THE WEEKEND. She took charge to run everything while I was otherwise indisposed, doing everything from cleaning the kitchen post rehearsal-dinner to taking charge and handling things throughout the wedding day. Also, cracksmurf played a marathon three hour set to keep the dance floor moving, when he was only supposed to do 90 minutes – and that brought great joy to our guests and to us. And my sister was brilliant – finding a way to buy me a quality strapless bra at the last minute, breaking out a spontaneous speech, and helping to make sure I stayed somewhat sane. Weddings bring out a lot of awesomeness.

Today, we’re resting up. I’m exhausted, obviously – I’d be tired anyways, but being six months pregnant means that I am also a big mess of aches and pains. Especially my feet. And the muscles in my lower abdomen, which are tired from holding the Critter here up while I bounced up and down with my friends on the dance floor last night. I had so much fun that I couldn’t stop bouncing though. I’d collapse into a chair for a while, and then another song would come on, and everyone would start moving, and I’d join in and dance. But with the pregnancy, I’m just wiped out, and I feel like I did the day after an Arts County Fair (only, thankfully, without a stadium of garbage to clean up).

Anyways, now it’s time to lie down again, and rest some more. Weddings = tiring. This wedding = also wonderful. We’ve been very, very blessed.

Today was the first day of the Wedding Weekend. Which means it was my first day off work. And it was awesome. I spent the morning at the Korean day spa with heathervescent, getting all the dead skin taken off me. Seriously, I don’t know what their scrubby brushes are made of, but with those & the salt they use, I kept seeing wads of dead skin rolling off. I have dreadful dry, itchy skin in the winter (which is only relieved by Lush’s Dream Cream body lotion – even Eucerin anti-itch only lasts a few hours) but after this morning’s exfoliating, everything feels great. I seriously need to have that done on a regular basis. Even if I felt a bit like a beached orca every time I was washed down with warm water.

I came home to find my wonderful soon to be husband going over the house with a bucket of water, a rag, and a Mr Clean Magic Eraser. We decided that the house must be EXTRA CLEAN before all our friends and relations see it. So we wiped down and/or dusted every surface possible, including the baseboards and windowsills and moldings. House is now shiny. Very shiny. We’re proud.

Paul’s friend Rachel and his brother Steve also got in today. Paul met them at LAX, got Steve his rental car, and then sent them up here, while he himself waited at the Alaska terminal for my mother to get in. Then he brought Mom back here, so we could all go for dinner at Chichen Itza before I took Mom out to the Westside to stay with her best friend from high school out there. Steve and Rachel have also headed back out, leaving us to unwind a bit. So now it’s just us, in our clean apartment, left alone to get a good night’s sleep before the mayhem REALLY begins tomorrow.

Yay, mayhem. I’d better go rest up for that.

Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

I admit it – I’m being smug. My wedding is on track, and all the tasks that need to be done at this point are done or scheduled. My house is reasonably tidy – and I have the non-wedding day off tomorrow to finish getting it cleaned in anticipation of the wedding invasion. I’m not particularly freaking out over anything. I have been a bit snappish today when I felt overwhelmed, but I got over those moments reasonably fast and apologized to my soon to be husband.

Actually, I also snapped at a bridesmaid who was folding programs sloppily, but she was folding them a little tipsy, and should have been doing a task requiring less accuracy. IS THAT SO WRONG? OK, a few misfolded programs won’t matter much, but they didn’t HAVE to be misfolded.

Regardless, I’m proud of myself. My wedding is under control, and I managed to get to this point while working full time and being pregnant. For the most part, I have kept my wedding out of my job time, and with the exception of this past Friday, spent almost no time during workdays on wedding tasks (I spent a good hour of Friday on the phone or emailing vendors, because it was one week before the wedding). I have relied on Paul to help, and worked in the evenings on our wedding. I have completed items on my tasklists for the wedding and only devoted attention to time-sensitive or important baby tasks, instead of getting distracted by the pregnancy I will have three months after the wedding to address. And in all this, I have managed to keep the house from getting too cluttered, and clutter is a definite weakness of mine.

Mostly though, I’m proud of myself because I have thought everything through and paid attention to the project, and applied a level of task-based discipline to my wedding that I don’t think I would have had a year or two ago. I’ve demonstrated a level of organization that doesn’t come naturally to me, because I am a total absent-minded professor type at heart. I’ve received such positive feedback from my friends on this accomplishment, especially when a half-dozen of them were here tonight helping assemble programs. I haven’t so much worked hard on this wedding as worked smart, and I’m very happy about that. Of course, it helps that I have had a ridiculously awesome fiance who has worked as hard and as smart as I have, and who has taken on a partnership-sized share in our wedding.

And yeah, I’m tempting fate by taking such pride in all this – but that’s because I’m irrationally superstitious. And because the wedding hasn’t happened yet. I’m happy with where I am right now, one week before. I’ll be ecstatic if everything goes as planned, and I can write an entry a week from tomorrow about how smoothly everything went, and how happy I was with how it fell into place.