13 Weeks Pregnant

Sorry I’m late with this again! There’s a lot going on, and most of it isn’t fun. I’ll start with the baby, though.

There isn’t a lot new going on in there, but…I’M IN MY SECOND TRIMESTER!! The first one flew by. Baby is apparently the length of a Nutter Butter, or about three inches, crown to rump. Vocal cords are forming, and the head is becoming more proportionate to the body. We get to hear the heartbeat again in a week, and I can’t wait!

I still haven’t told my students yet. I planned to last week, but since I’m really not showing yet I decided to wait longer, at least until after next week’s appointment. I can tell that I’m not as thin as I was, but it isn’t obvious to other people. I did get to try out my belly band last weekend. Most of my pants sit kind of low, so I have no trouble buttoning them, but I have one higher-waisted pair of corduroys that I could BARELY fasten sucking in, so I left them undone and used the belly band, which was surprisingly comfortable and stayed put well. Glad I bought them!

I measured my belly and weighed myself, which I plan to do at the end of each trimester. Pre-pregnancy, I was 112 pounds and my waist was 26 inches, though I can't remember if I was measuring my true waist or not. Now I am 113 pounds and the biggest part of my belly is 31 1/2 inches around. I think the lack of weight gain is due to muscle loss. :-(

Now for the not so fun stuff. Bills. Bills, bills, bills. We keep getting medical bills we weren’t expecting. Remember that appointment I had in mid-August? I wanted to just get a physical and get my thyroid gland checked since it had come up low on a previous blood test, and I knew hypothyroidism wouldn’t be good in pregnancy. Well, it cost us $500, which wouldn’t be quite so annoying if it had been worth it, but there was nothing wrong with me. There never is anything wrong with me when I go to the doctor. I swear I’m never going again. I’m going to call them today to see if they can possibly reduce it. I know they’ll let me pay it in increments, but even so, it’s still $500.

Since this was not the first time we’ve received a bill like this, it was sort of the last straw for me. Very upsetting, but very motivating. We need to make more money if we ever want to dig ourselves out of the financial hole we are in. It would be nice if we could sell our house, too, but we have no control over that, which is also very frustrating. I could go on forever about that, but I won’t, because you know what I mean.

So…how can we make more money? We had a long talk about it and told each other, as we have before, that we both have talents we are not utilizing. Travis could be selling paintings, and I could be getting playing gigs. The problem is motivation. We are both lazy. Travis likes to paint, but he says he would rather write a book, which has the potential for a more lucrative outcome, but one that is much less immediate. He has finished paintings that he could sell right now if he made the effort to advertise somehow. It’s also hard to let go of something that you put so much of yourself into. I get that. I adore some of his paintings, but I know someone else would too, and maybe they would pay a good amount of money for them.

Travis’s laziness is more forgivable than mine, though. He has a full-time teaching job that is exhausting. Who can blame him if he doesn’t feel like doing much when he gets home? I’m lazy for no good reason. I’m sort of an all-or-nothing person. If I get up late, which happens a lot, I feel like I’ve wasted half the day already, so I might as well waste the rest of it. I know that’s faulty logic, but I guess that’s just how my brain works. When I get up at a reasonable time, around when Travis leaves for work, I get a lot done. This morning I got up while Travis was in the shower and actually made him a bacon, egg and cheese English muffin to eat in the car. That never happens. Poor Travis usually doesn’t eat anything all day until he gets home, because lazy me doesn’t pack him a lunch either. Anyway, I’ve gotten a lot done this morning: two loads of laundry, tidying up, figured out dinner… can I do this every day? We’ll see.

Travis set a goal for both of us yesterday: we will each spend at least an hour a day either exercising or practicing/painting/somehow bettering ourselves. (Exercising is another thing we’ve been lazy about.) I think I’ll try to spend a half hour exercising (don’t worry, I won’t go overboard) and an hour practicing and/or reacquainting myself with my music history book. I might give myself Wednesdays off since I teach eight lessons on Wednesdays.

I’m going to make myself available for Christmas gigs on Craigslist. I did that last year and got a few (though unfortunately I had to miss one because our steep driveway was covered with ice). Then by the time Christmas is over, maybe I’ll have some other music ready to perform. I could do weddings, but they make me SO nervous! A wedding is the one day in someone’s life you do not want to mess up, and being nervous makes me mess up…so it’s a vicious cycle.

This isn’t JUST about making money, though. I know that if we both stick with doing what we’re doing and nothing more, we’re going to look back someday and be disappointed. We’re just getting by. We want to do more, and be more, and we need to start on that path before we bring a baby into it. So the clock is ticking. Here we go.