Feed me

My stomach is directly connected to my mood.  Empty stomach = bad mood.

When I worked at EY my coworkers knew that if they wanted me to remain pleasant through the late nights of tax season I needed to eat dinner before 6 pm.

Right before we got engaged Nate asked my coworkers (who helped him with the proposal) to, "Please make sure Katie eats dinner."  I guess he worried that empty stomach = no wedding.

So one of the perks to being pregnant and then nursing was that I did not need to feel guilty in the slightest for eating on Fast Sunday.

Today I informed Nate that I need to start fasting again, now that I can no longer use nursing as an excuse.  His response: "Oh my."

Transient

Growing up I moved a lot.

Utah.

Ohio.

Indiana.

Texas.

Virginia.

Texas.

Utah.

Four years after my family moved to Utah my dad retired from the Air Force and my parents stayed in place.  I, however, went away to college two years after we moved to Utah.  While I stayed at the same school, I moved to a new apartment every single year.  After I graduated I moved back home for a year.  Following that year, Nate and I married.  In our three years of marriage we've lived in three different apartments.

Suffice it to say, I move a lot.

So, without further ado, I will announce that I am adding one more state to my list.

Maryland.

Narcolepsy

Ever since I went to college I've had trouble staying awake the entire way through movies.  I honestly haven't seen the end of some movies in years.  And once I watched Pirates of the Caribbean for the umpteenth time and came across a scene I'd completely forgotten was in the movie because I was usually asleep by that point.

So the other night we rented the new Sherlock Holmes movie from Red Box.  About twenty minutes into the movie I held my hand up in a stop sign/time-out signal and made Nate pause the movie.

"What on earth is going on??  I am so confused!" I said.  I was watching the movie intently but I just couldn't quite follow it.

"Well, you remember the first movie, how there was the bad guy..." Nate trailed off as he saw me shaking my head.

"I fell asleep during the first movie."

"Oh, right.  Well, do you remember when we watched the TV series?"  I just looked at him.  "Oh. Right.  You were asleep," he said.  Then he sighed.  How to explain what was going on?

"Well, basically, there's a professor who is making evil plans but they don't give us enough information in the movie to figure it out."

So with that explanation I proceeded to watch the movie.

I don't remember when I fell asleep.  It was probably about fifteen minutes later.  I didn't wake up until the end credits.  Poor Nate.

Differences 2

I went to lunch with some friends the other day who asked me to tell them the truth about labor. Did it hurt?

Well, I had an epidural.  So it didn't hurt at all.  Some people say they can feel pressure when it comes time to push.  Not me.  I had the infamous Walt, an anesthesiologist who really knows how to numb you.  When the nurses found out Walt gave me the epidural they looked at each other knowingly and said, "You won't be walking until tomorrow."  Even my doctor turned off the IV an hour before Porter was born once he heard the name Walt.

But that's beside the point.  Labor.  Okay.  Recovery?  Well, maybe I should have told them about that instead.

After going to lunch I mentioned the conversation to my mom.  She directed me towards this lovely blog post that sums up 10 things you were never told about what happens after you give birth.

I read the article and laughed until it hurt.  Why?  Because it was all true.  (If you haven't gotten pregnant yet, you may want to skip the article.  Otherwise you may NEVER have a baby.  If you are already pregnant, TOO LATE.  If you've been pregnant, you too will laugh.)

When Nate came home from work I told him about the article.

Me:  I read this blog post today about ten things you're not told about having a baby.  It was pretty funny and true.  It made me feel better about some of the things I did after Porter was born.

Nate: Like what?

Me:  Well, one of them mentioned how you might be very angry with your husband.

This is number seven on the list: You might hate your husband.  To set the record straight, I never hated Nate.  But there were times I was absolutely livid at him, usually in the middle of the night.  As the author of the post said, "you might stare at his peaceful sleeping face at 2 am and wonder what the hell the point of him is and how can [he]...just lie there sleeping like that while you try to get your baby to sleep for the umpteenth time."

Yep.  

There may or may not have been a time or two when I very angrily threw the covers off of myself and hard onto him when I got up to tend to Porter.  Or a time or two when I slammed the door as I took Porter out into the family room to nurse him.  In the morning I'd feel guilty about my little temper tantrum and I'd wonder what was wrong with me.

So in the aforementioned conversation I told Nate how one of the commenters said she once was so angry at her husband in the middle of the night that she started throwing things at him.  When he finally woke up he couldn't figure out why there were random things like shoes and books in the bed with him.  It made me feel better to know that maybe my irrational slamming of doors was a hormonal thing, not just a bratty thing.  And even if it was just bratty, at least other women had the same issue too.  

Nate:  (laughing) I'd forgotten about that.  But I do remember now that you would do things like that in the middle of the night.  I'd wake up confused and think, 'Did Katie just slam the door?  She usually only does that when she's mad.  And I didn't do anything!"  It took me a few days to realize that might be the problem.

Exactly.

Christmas Project

The last day of finals Nate came home and solemnly said, "I'm going to grow a Christmas beard."

And so he did.

He stuck through the itchy phase just to (reluctantly) shave it off on Monday night before school and his internship started.  It came off in stages which we documented for our posterity and for our loyal blog readers.  (Okay, the blog part was my idea, not his.)

I married a statistician

Today Nate came home from school and told me that the statistics students each set up a bracket for March Madness.  Nate isn't terribly interested in basketball so he's not too familiar with the teams.

His plan to fill out a bracket:

1. Ask a friend questions about the likelihood certain teams would win.
2. Write a program on the computer that simulates flipping a coin.
3.  Weight the coin based on the information he received from his friend.
4. Use the results from his program to fill out his bracket.