Hello, Meat!

Pregnant Christine and Non-meat Eating Christine could not exist together in one body. I caved into meat (specifically bacon) around week six into the baby growing process.

What started out as a 4 week experiment turned into a 128 day lifestyle challenge. And it was going great.

Until the "morning" sickness hit.

During week four I was feeling great, tempting fate, and believing that superior baby-carrying genes from my mother (a woman who should teach classes on being a Midwestern super mom) made me impervious to morning sickness. In fact, I didn't totally believe in morning sickness. I started to think it was some crazy rumor that women perpetuated for access to unlimited spousal sympathy and ungodly amounts of ice cream. But oh, how I was mistaken.

Before getting knocked up my meal favorites were always beans, green things and eggs. Matt was out of town so I went to the grocery store and stocked up on all my favorites. YUMMY! About two days after buying it all, my hormones lurched into overdrive and even opening the fridge made me gag. LITERALLY. The smell of leafy greens is, at this point in my life, the worst smell in the world. I had bags of lettuce, celery, spinach, spinach dip and spinach wraps. Opening the fridge released it all into the kitchen and made me want to barf. And lets not talk about the beans and eggs. My throat closes up at the thought of it all.

It all went into the trash, untouched. There was no time to feel guilty over throwing out all that fresh, perfectly fine food. It. Needed. To. Go.

In the meantime, I couldn't stop thinking about fried chicken. None of this was looking good for the non-meaty challenge. For a week all I ate was some combination of cheese and carbs.

Mac and cheese
Cheese bread
Cheese quesadilla
Cheese pizza

Meat needed to come back. I neeeeeeeeeded it. I completely understand that it is possible for ladies to have wonderful, healthy pregnancies on vegetarian diets. But I'm not one of those ladies. I needed bacon, chicken and hotdogs. And now that I'm eating it again I feel like I'm having an easier time balancing my meals. Not having those gag-inducing items at the center of my plate makes it easier to stomach them. I still have a major issue with leafy green things but I'm finding other vegetables that I can stand.

I still think that animal production is bad the the environment and bad for our health. I still think the way meat is processed is alarming and disgusting. I feel bad about eating it, but I'm eating it. You can judge accordingly.

Big News

It has been FOREVER since I wrote on here for one very specific reason. The one and only complete thought that I have been capable of mustering for the past month is: Holy hell, I'm pregnant. But I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog about it. I am becoming less and less a fan of blogging. I love other people's blogs, I'm just tired of my own. Plus, after almost two years of doing this I'm not famous yet, so really, what's the point of continuing?

I decided though that I might as well write about it. If nothing else, it gives me an outlet where people can voluntarily read about the ongoing state of my uterus. I have an issue with posting constant ute updates on Facebook. No one cares. No one. I'm a pregnant woman and I don't even care about other random preggos' fetus updates. If I'm not a prime audience for that, then who is? I like the idea of putting it all in one place where people can see it, or not. Their choice.

Moving on...

So far I think my pregnancy is pretty typical. I've had a couple doctor's appointments so far and it all looks normal. The fetus was a grey blob last time I saw it, roughly the shape of a kidney bean. It had a flickering little heartbeat. Weird. I don't like calling it a baby yet. Because it's not. It's a kidney bean with a heartbeat, not a baby. We've nicknamed it Huckleberry Hound or sometimes just Hound for short. Much like the way we refer to the dog. (I already feel bad for the ways we are going to mentally damage this child.) We tell Ringo, "There's a new hound on the way, better get used to it." But I don't think he fully grasps the baby concept yet. What did I really expect from a creature who eats his own poop for snacks?

So far this process is at once extremely exciting and extremely terrifying. The pregnancy was a little, shall we say... unexpected. Turns out when you're drunk and you tell your husband, "I'm 99.9% sure I'm not going to get pregnant on this particular day, so go ahead and hit it without a condom," it is very unlikely that he will argue with you. And P.S. you can be very wrong about those odds.

Movie Binge

Matt and I have been on a movie binge the last couple of weeks. Chalk it up to the weather, being completely bored, and completely tired of going out and spending money. We have watched:

(500) Days of Summer
Paranormal Activity
It Might Get Loud
Dexter Season 1 (about half way through)
March of the Penguins
Pan's Labyrinth


I would recommend all of the above, except maybe Paranormal Activity. It's a great movie if you love being so creeped out by your house that you force your husband to stand outside the bathroom door while you pee. But if that's not your style, I would suggest skipping it.

(500) Days of Summer is definitely one of my new favorite movies. Can we talk for a minute about how adorable Zooey Deschanel is? She is my style crush. Her wardrobes are worth committing crimes for. The blue coat she wore in Yes Man was ahhhhmazing.

This girl found a picture of it. She knows what I'm talking about. There's a really close one from Calvin Klein at Dillard's. Swap out the buttons with something flashier and you too could have a Zooey coat.

I wish I could have a focused sense of style like that. Jen and I were discussing the topic a couple of weeks ago. Most days I struggle to make it out of the house on time and I don't think about what I'm wearing. I also work in the basement of an office building with 40 IT guys, so I don't think any effort I make would be noticed. (Some chick from upstairs did call me "The Girl With The Cute Hair" one day so that made me feel good especially considering I'm seven weeks out from my last hair cut and dye job.)

But back to the movies... after looking at coats, everyone should go look up It Might Get Loud. Great movie. Technically, it's a documentary. But please, don't let that scare you.

Year of Goals - #8

Make a summertime wreath.

I'm am kicking ass so far with that list I made!



This was easy and cheap. I used a $2 straw wreath from Hobby Lobby (shrink wrap still on) and wrapped it up with some houndtooth Christmas ribbon. I hot-glued on some Princess Lasertron inspired felt flowers, hung up with a piece of thin ribbon, and bam! A wreath! I already had the stuff for flowers so I think I invested a total of $6 into this project.

And it looks like it's worth at least $8.

Year of Goals - #24

Reduce my book collection to only my favorites.


I love buying books. But after a while it starts to be a problem...

Both of my book cases are full and I don't exactly have room for a third.

Books are your friend until you need to move. I've moved my books to three different homes and the thought of moving them again in the future is terrifying. Last time they took up an entire car load on their own.

Some of them I bought in high school when my tastes in literature were a little... experimental.

I tell myself that I'll read them more than once but in 10 years I've never found the time to reread anything.

I want a Kindle but they're expensive. Selling books is a good way to fund one. :) Have you seen these things? I was soooo against them until about a week ago. I thought that digital books were a sin. But then I saw my sister-in-law's and I fell in love with it. The screen doesn't look like a regular screen. The "pages" look like scanned in book pages so they're easy on the eyes. There's also no glare on them.

Matt and I did the same thing with our CD collections a couple years ago. We saved our favorites then dumped everything into iTunes and sold the discs to Homer's. It was such a good decision. Getting rid of such a huge pile of stuff is freeing. I'm very anti-stuff these days. I like to decorate and furnish my home, but the collections and closets and drawers full of junk is so annoying. Purge! Purge I say!

California Trip, Part 1

A couple of weeks ago I visited California with Matt and some friends/family. We also visited 1600 miles of I-80 along the way. Holy. Hell. Four of the five people I went out there with are in a show that was touring California, thus the reason for the trip. And thus the reason for driving.

Have I ever mentioned that I get car sick? Because I do. Right around hour 16 I thought I was going to lose my mind. I didn't take friends' advice and get a motion sick arm band thingy before we left. It turned out to be a big mistake. Driving through the mountains was incredible though, despite the head spinning and gut churning. It is so very beautiful. The complete opposite of what I see on a daily basis at home in Nebraska.

Our first stop in California was San Francisco. We did a lot of the usual stuff. We ate at Taqueria La Cumbre, home of the Mission style burrito. I gorged myself on seafood. I drank so much coffee I returned home with my caffeine addiction at Threat Level: Orange.

We visited Haight-Ashbury, which was a less than wise decision. There are some really great stores in that neighborhood. I found an awesome t-shirt boutique, Loyal Army, where I bought several things. I also had my husband buy me a ridiculously overpriced belated Christmas present. Everybody, I'd like to introduce you to my Orla Kiely purse. Orla Kiely purse, this is everybody.



It rained a lot which sort of sucked. Considering it was -27° in Omaha the week before we left, a little rain was tolerable.





We also decided to go out to Alcatraz. So, after two days in a car, then two days of driving around a freakin hilly city in the back of a Tahoe, I got on a boat. I have never in my life put so much effort into not puking. I was looking at some pictures I took from the ferry and just thinking about it again made me nauseous.

But it was pretty once we got there.



And creepy.



I'll continue the post tomorrow... Too much bloggy for one day.

Blog Love - Part Deux!

And in other news...

Some friends and I were baking around the holidays, got a little high off the sugar, and started using a cookie press to ice cupcakes. It started out as a joke... but got picked up by Cupcakes Take the Cake.



Check out Sarah's Cuppitycakes Cupcakery blog. She's a bonefide professional cupcake maker. Jealous? I am!



Also, some of my wedding photos got picked up over at Bride Tide. Apparently, I was on to something with the plaid wedding dress. Who would have known? I'd like to take credit for being a trendy bride, but really my dress designer found the fabric on the clearance table for $2 a yard. We both liked it and went for it since she needed a bazillion yards to make the skirt.