{ ty...hay...avy...linc...& wee-little ash }: April 2011

I'll just go ahead & be a tad bit narcissistic,

I've really missed myself.

I am really an awesome person when playing the real me in real life.

But when playing the role of wretched, pregnant lady, good golly it's a bad show.

If I had to describe the past 4 months in 3 words, I'd use:

first and foremost...#1- barf

I got so annoyed with ralphing, so bugged by it that even though I knew I'd feel better sometimes by letting it out, I held it in just because it was inconvenient and annoying.

#2- sensitive

I'm pretty thick skinned. I pride myself on never taking offense. I'm pretty good at letting rudeness towards me roll off. Not the past 4 months. What's the deal-y-o?!?!

#3- exhaustion

I tried to coax my kids into lots of tv, to quote Ashley, "A Disney channel-induced coma," but no dice.

Avy can only watch a few shows before she starts to let out weird screams & shrieks.

That's her subconcious way of telling me she needs to get a life.

& Linc, well, I have $100 to the first person who can get him to sit down & watch 5 mintues of a show.

Needless to say, there is no sit down time, not even for a tired, green, ol' hag like myself.

Before I move on to the more uplifting, rivetting portion of the post, I do need to give some shout-outs to the folks who have made my existence survivable the past bit.

Obvoiously Tat is first, but I'll get to that in a sec.

But thanks to the friends who have brought dinners, stopped by & stolen a kid from me to give me a free afternoon, & to those who have offered help in many other ways.

How blessed I am to have friends to care for me & my family when I sure as you know what couldn't do it.

But enough about me, let's talk about the rest of the Tatwoods.

Tyler J:

He had a birthday! Yay!

Like a fabulous wife, I threw him a raging party & bought him lots of gifts that he's always wanted.

I spent 3 days baking & decorating him the most perfect cake.

& I wrote him the sweetest, most romantic note in his card.

NOT. It's all a lie.

I was a terrible wife for birthday number three-four.

There was no party.

No presents.

His "cake" was cookie ice cream sandwiches that I made from cake mix & Safeway brand ice-cream.

I didn't give him a card.

However, Avy saved the day.

She threw together a little party for Pops by making him a pinata, wrapping up kitty & some other fave guys, & drawing him a picture.

Bless her party-girl heart.

In other Tat news, he got a promotion at work, he's slowed down on hobo-stove making & become addicted to researching gas mileage & how much our car depreciates in value with every mile we drive, but most of all, he's been the world's greatest dad & hubs the past few months.

Honestly.

No lie.

He has pulled more than his own & my pregnant weight around here.

He gets up at night with Linc the stink, he wakes up early so I can sleep in.

He doesn't complain that there have been many, many cold cereal type dinners.

On a lucky dinner night he gets oatmeal...with toast!

He's listened to my many moans & groans about how sick I've been, & hasn't once told me to,

"suck it up, we all have problems," as he often likes to say.

Thank you, Ty Ty. You're the greatest.

Avy:

She's been up to the usual 3.5 year old antics.

-You know, the ones where she collects special treasures & brings them all into my house.

(these are just from today)

-She's been busy at preschool, gymnastics, & soccer.

I'll be honest, she's awesome at gymnastics.

She can hang on to the rings like it ain't nobody's business.

But soccer, well...she struggles.

She no likey.

There are often tears during soccer.

Thank Heavens it's over after next week.

We won't be signing up for several, several more months...if that.

-She got her first real flower bouquet from a boy.

Her sweet buddy Collin wanted to get her flowers. So he did.

Thank you, cute Collin! My kitchen table looks radiant!

-She still says the darndest things.

Me: Aves, I'm going to Target while you're at school. What kind of toothbrush do you want, Dora or Princess?

Avy: It doesn't matter. Just get me whatever's on sale.

Go girl.

Me: You need to eat more veggies Ms. Avy. I think it's been weeks since you've eaten anything green.

What's the deal?

Avy: Mom, I would eat them but you don't buy them anymore.

Touche. Veggies made me vomit for months. I steered clear.

I did finally buy her some zucchini the next day & as promised, she ate every last bite.

That's good parenting right there, folks.

Linc:

-Bumping & bruising his adorable little body everywhere we go.

-He's obsessed with any kind of ball. Many nights he will even request a ball to sleep with.

(often a baseball, Grandpa Bird, you should be proud)

-He loves our morning walks. He always needs to have a "wower" (flower) when we pass the yellow flower bush, & after I give it to him, he always requests, "Mo! Mo!" So he gets 2 flowers on every morning walk.

It's adorable. I'll be sad the day he stops asking for mo wowers.

-He's taken a liking to using the big potty.

Trust me, I am in no rush to potty train that lil lad, but when he became obsessed with wizzing all over the house every time the diaper came off, I thought why not stand him on the toilet & see what comes.

Low & behold he went. & he goes everytime I put him on there.

He always wants to wear Avy's unders, so I threw these hotties on him one afternoon.

Much to Avy's chagrin, they didn't stay dry long.

-He loves babies lately. Like really loves them.

More than Avy ever has.

He says, "behbeh" & goes straight for the eyes.

Best Baby ever Cousin Georgia:

Adorable Friend Holland, but no pic of them together because he needs a hovering adult near him when he's by her...he really likes to reach at her:

#3 in the womb:

-Even though this little bean has caused me much awesomeness since January, I still love it & am getting more & more excited.

-This one's a mover & a shaker.

As I type I feel lots of kicking & dance dance revolution type moves going on .

-We find out next week what's in there!

My bets...99.99% sure it's a girl.

I always leave room for the possibility that I'm wrong, but I'm pretty convinced it's a litl lady.

My gums bleed

I've been repulsed to veggies

The pukes

The frequent urination

Already feeling the heartburn

All the good stuff I remember while pregnant with Avy.

-So for the purpose of documenting this strange, long story, here's how we found out we were pregnant in a very unusual way:

I had been having some weird stomache aches mid-January.

Nothing alarming, but unusual enough to make me go to the doc.

I went to urgent care one Monday morning just bc I didn't want to wait for an appt & Tat had a few hours in the am that he could be home with the kids.

Anywho, at the appt, they took some urine, blood...all the exciting stuff.

The doc came back in the room & said,

"hmm...you're tests are showing up positive for pregnancy."

Me, "Come again? Impossible."

So I called Tat all surprised & excited.

The dr. wanted to do an ultrasound just to make sure nothing else was causing the pain.

I sat in the waiting room after the ultrasound for a long time.

I then went into a room to wait for the dr; one of the rooms that is just behind a curtain.

As I'm waiting, I hear the dr yell right outside my room to another dr,

"Hey Doug, how would I explain a molar pregnancy to a woman?"

So there I am sitting in a room, finding out that I have a molar pregnancy, whatever that is, & anxiously waiting to hear what it is from a dr who doesn't even know what it is.

He came in the room and his first words were,

"You have a molar pregnancy. That's when instead of a baby forming, a mass of benign tumorous tissue forms in its place. It's not malignant, but it needs to be removed promptly. You will be having a d&c in a few days & can't get pregnant for a year. That's about all the information I have on it."

I suddenly felt really dizzy & thought I was going to pass out.

I laid down on the bed & called Tyler, & told him all I knew about it.

I went home & on the way home called my mom in tears telling her I needed her to come help because I would be having a d&c in a few days & was scared & needed her stat!

After I got home, we researched the crap out of what a molar pregnancy was since I had NO IDEA still what was going on, & the highlights of what I found were things like this:

-although it's not initially cancerous, the tissue can quickly become so.

-the tissue of molar pregnancies has been known to spread throughout the body & often cause different cancers in the lungs.

-after a d&c from a molar pregnancy, you need to have your hcg levels checked every week for close to a year to make sure the tissue doesn't grow back.

-in the inistance where the tissue does grow back, chemotherapy is often used to kill all the tissue.

You can imagine how fabulous I was feeling at this point.

I remember laying in my bed, crying, serioulsy thinking that I was about to face a huge battle to save my life & I could possibly die. I kept thinking about Tyler & the reds & how I just wasn't ready to leave them yet. I know that sounds utterly morbid, but when I had no clue what in the world was going on, it was easy to jump to the conclusion.

GOOD GRIEF!!!

Thank heavens for my fabulous mom who flew out at 7am the next morning & my fabulous ob/gyn who has a brain.

She called me the next day & said,

"I'm not going to schedule a d&c just yet, because your hormone levels aren't off the charts like they should be with a molar pregnancy. Come see me tomorrow."

So we visit the heaven-sent Dr. Hua the next day.

She said there were no definite answers yet, but she wasn't fully convinced it was molar. She said it could be molar, it could be a miscarriage, or I could just be pregnant.

Holy cow, so now, again, there's the possibilty that I'm just pregnant.

She asked me to do 2 different blood tests throughout the week to track my levels & then by Friday she would know what was going on.

So I made lots of trips to the office the next couple days.

On that Friday, she said all my tests were showing levels of a normal pregnancy so she did an ultrasound.

Sure enough, she saw a tiny little start of a baby in there.

She handed us some ultrasound pictures and said,

"Congratulations on your amniotic sac!" :)

Wait, what?!?! So now I'm pregnant again?
No mole?
No tumorous tissue taking over my body?

How the mistake?

She was trying to be very "professional" about the other doctors' HUGE mistake, but it was obvious she was totally disgusted with them.

So in the ultrasound at urgent care, the doctor & whoever else looked over the images saw what looked like a bunch of grapes, which is what a molar pregnancy looks like, but they failed to notice the amniotic sac in there too.

Dr. Hua said the "grape-like" mass was just blood cells, & she couldn't believe that they would have told me it was a molar pregnancy, etc...

So...needless to say, it's been a crazy pregnancy since January.

I am anxious, & in all honesty, given the odd-ness of how it all started out, very nervous about the big ultrasound next week.

So there you have it.

That's the story of #3.

In other news of the past month since I've blogged,

-I'm driving my trip to London & I love it.

Although I would have loved to go see my Heather friend, with Tat's work sched & the weirdy pregnancy, it just wasn't working out.

So instead I begged & persuaded Tat into a new car.

-As if I were in a heavenly dream, Brookie cookie came to visit last month.

We hit up the zoo

(mesmerized by the giraffes)

Hobee's

candy store

ice cream

Happy Hollow

dinner on Austy

It was so great to have her here!!!

-We went camping a couple weeks ago.

It was freezing cold at night, & I mean insanely free-to the-zing.

Other than the potential for frostbite, the rest of camping was really fun.

-We took a trip to UT & spent a night in Viva Las Vegas.

Tat's parents are now on a mission at Cove Fort in Utah, so we went for the farewell.

It was so wonderful to be there.

I love my in-laws. I really do.

What a perfect weekend.

(cruising in the Rhino)

(catching water skeeters)

(tat's dad asked him to prune the apple tree before we went home.

you can imagine how serisouly he took the task.

all youtube vids of apple tree pruning have now been viewed at least once)

-The day I started feeling like myself again, I promised Avy I would take her pony riding the next day to celebrate us all making it through the depths of my horridity.

We drove down to Half Moon Bay & the farm was closed.

Uh-oh. I had to think of something fast.

So I made it sound like pizza at Round Table & playing at the beach was as good as winning the lottery.

The reds bought my line & we had such a fun time.