In which I rant and ramble too much...

Sorry all, apparently I am a terrible blogger. I don't feel like we've accomplished anything exciting yet so it's hard to be motivated to write! Also my big excuse it that I had the flu last week. Nothing like a good welcome to Virginia than getting the flu for the first time in 10 years, while pregnant and knowing no one other than my husband (at work) within a thousand miles! Luckily though either time or tamiflu or both worked wonders and it was a short lived course. I'll blame my poor blogging habits on that for now. Anyhow, here is a smattering of updates from the past week (or two...).

Baby updates: So I've sort of plugged myself into my prenatal care, though we've had some bumps along the way. I had a new OB appointment for myself with one of the NPs to transfer care last week, which proved invaluable when I needed someone to send me in a tamiflu prescription. Although I was given some bizarre medical advice (macrobid is not a pyelonephritis treatment, nor should you empirically treat someone who is pregnant for pyelo just in case! get them to a hospital if you think that's what it is. /rant) overall I got what I needed. Tyler and I did a tour of L&D, as I'm still feeling unsettled with delivering somewhere that I know nothing about. L&D was redone about 6 months ago and is incredibly swanky. The triage rooms almost put the delivery rooms at Swedish to shame. The tubs (in the tub rooms - there are only 4) have LED lighting so you can labor in a pool of rainbow water. However, the postpartum rooms are next on the renovation list and are terrible. They will be where I will be pining for Swedish! They're Spartan, county hospital like rooms. On the bright side, if I win the lotto and feel like I need more pampering, the hospital does have 5 hotel like suites that you can pay $420/night extra to stay in the ritziest hospital room imaginable, complete with private nurse and chef.

The main snafu that we've run into actually is when I went to my first Centering appointment yesterday (group prenatal care visit model - we were in a Centering group in Seattle), we found out that to deliver with the midwives I have to sign on to a nonmedicated birth plan, hook, line and sinker. They will not accept an open mind to my delivery experience, if I want to deliver with them I need to hire a doula, attending birthing classes, read their reading list, etc and have no intention of having anything other than a nonmedicated birth. They are very proud of their 15% epidural rate. So this is very different from the midwife group I was at in Seattle - where they would support whatever kind of birth you wanted (obviously unless you were going to try and talk someone into scheduling an elective c-section, which I don't think anyone will do these days). So, as I had fully intended on making use of advanced in medicine and getting an epidural at some point in my labor, apparently I am not hardcore enough for the midwives and will have to have a physician delivery. Which, you might ask, doesn't seem like a big deal, especially because I am a physician and have delivered many babies - and feel like I do a good job of it! The issue is that there are no family docs that deliver at VCU (which in all honesty would be my preference, but I was hoping a midwife delivery would be the closest I could get on the East coast), and it's a teaching hospital. So I'm going from the crunchy granola supported and attentive delivery that I had hoped for (yes, with an epidural included in that - I've seen plenty of epidural midwife deliveries that were lovely) to likely being managed and delivered by an OBGYN resident (thank goodness I'm not due in July at least!). Which may turn out to be lovely, and really in the end all I want is a healthy baby, but I keep having fears of the stereotypical East coast obstetrician delivery in which I will end up with an unnecessary section because they aren't patient enough to let my body do its thing. Not to mention instead of getting to know a small group of practitioners so I will have a somewhat familiar face delivery my baby, I will have a pool of residents on shifts that I have never met managing my care. But, delivering at VCU makes the most financial and convenience sense for us, so we'll stick with it. Their Centering program is a bit abbreviated so I can still stay in the class, and then fill in my individual appointments with one of the docs (the judgey midwife did at least give me a list of the crunchier OBGYNs). The Centering group also doesn't seem super social, although it isn't filled with teen moms like I had feared! I'm hoping it will improve. I'm starting to get a little stir crazy with my only non-spouse social outlet being dog owners at the dog park! Though to be fair, they are very chatty.

Okay so this ended up being a very long update that probably no one read through, so I will save the rest of my updates for later. In order to include some photos - we did get the crib assembled! Although I forgot to take a photo after we got the mattress in.

And we got a rug (not pictured) for the nursery. I have grand plans for the dresser/changing table and closet organization, but I need to wait until I'm getting paychecks again before we go on an IKEA spree. I've also been having, hopefully irrational, fears that we will not have enough clothes for our baby. I can't figure out how you're supposed to calculate how many onsies and outfits and socks you need for each size! And do babies really need pants? How can I shop the clearance racks and buy outfits in advance if I have no idea if I'll have a 95%ile or 5th%ile baby? And where do people buy cheap baby clothes? I've gone to several consignment stores and unless I was dead set on only Ralph Lauren dresses, Target still seems to be the better choice. Worst case scenario we'll have a wild jungle baby who will run around in a diaper only (although I guess I also need to start buying the cloth diapers we need! maybe she'll have no diapers and we can litter box train her?) and we'll just bundle her up in blankets when we go outside. And I have no idea how cold it gets here in the winter. Do 3 month old babies wear winter coats? I think I can see why I have stuck with furchildren so far, they come with built in clothing and I don't have to make sure we have enough pairs of socks for Rue or if the cats need to wear pants when they go out in public.

Anyhow, your reward for reading through all of this is a video of Rue trying to decide if she will be like a Virginia dog and lay down in the baby pools at the dog park to cool off.

Couches, Mattresses and Thunder, Oh My!

So the most important update since I last posted is that we now have a couch. Or rather a love seat and soon to have a couch. Bought them from a friendly family on Craigslist who happens to have a truck, and took pity on our couch-less plight and agreed to deliver the love seat to us yesterday when we realized it wouldn't fit in our CRV and the original plan was he would deliver both on Sunday because that was when he was getting his replacement couch. I think so far the cats are the happiest about this situation, although they had seemed very happy sleeping on the futon in their domain in the office prior to this. I supposed the lack of cat fur on the couch presented a problem they couldn't resist conquering.

Our next excitement is to pick up our new mattress set today! Although it just started to thunder and we're picking it up ourselves - strapping it to the roof. So I hope it has a very sturdy cover on it! The mattress is long overdue and it will be nice to be back in our bedroom as we've been sleeping in the guest room on our old bed as we were getting too old and creaky to sleep on the air mattress.

Updates in terms of work. So far Tyler is enjoying his internship, he is having a very long orientation process but is having fun getting to know his co-interns and figuring out all the nitty gritty of internship. He is again the only guy in his intern class, also the only one from the west coast, and the only one married, with a kid (on the way) or with pets. Apparently we're just as boring as you can get! Except for the west coast part of course. I'm still adjusting to the fact that there is no food waste pick up here and feel horribly guilty putting corn cobs in the garbage, and am very weirded out by styrofoam take out containers and grocery stores handing out plastic bags like candy.

For my work - I have completed 1 of 4 non-patient based trainings before I get to start my mentored/shadowed working shifts. 3 of them are on weekend days so it's a rather scattered process. I got to learn all about the crazy EMR (electronic medical record) this clinic system has and started learning their protocols. I'm still having pangs of guilt (what is with the guilt issue here? maybe I have a problem) giving up my full spectrum training for a year. I'm going to miss well baby visits, they don't do well child exams under the age of 7; IUD and Nexplanon insertions, the idea of a non-OBGYN doing them boggled the mind of my training nurse so much that I thought she just didn't understand what I was asking at first; doing joint injections and taking care of pregnant women, amidst other things. But - everyone seems very nice and things are going more smoothly than I had hoped in terms of figuring out my upcoming maternity leave so that's good news.

Our unpacking (or rather my unpacking, I have turned into a stay at home house organizer for these couple of weeks) is going well and it's starting to feel more like a home. We just got our crib (thanks Mom and Bradley!) and are hopefully getting a rug (from Craigslist of course) for the nursery today so my nesting urges are kicking in and I'm getting pretty excited! Judging from the kicking, Baby Laney is psyched as well. Or maybe she's just telling me I need to find more quality tacos because we haven't found anything measuring up to our taco bus in Seattle yet.

Apparently I can upload videos - so here is one from the dog park this morning (snuck in before the temperature reached the 90s), the tail end of some zoomies from some poor yard deprived pups (thanks to Malcolm for his tasteful closing act). I'll have to get the video of Rue with her acrobatic ball catching from Tyler's phone now that I've discovered this capability!

We're alive!

Whew. So apparently setting up house is pretty exhausting. You'd think since this is the 6th move that Tyler and I have done together so far (definitely not recommended) that we'd be experts and it would be no big deal. Not so. Plus we have the wild card of not knowing this city at all, so it took us a while just to figure out the grocery stores we should be going to, where the closest Costco and Trader Joe's are, how to get to said places, and then multiple back to back Target trips and Amazon prime orders! We did find the closest dog park on the first day and the dogs are very happy that it's only about half a mile away. We have become avid Craigslist fiends, and have already secured a new-to-us dining room table set and desk for Tyler. However, we are still missing a couch, which is apparently more difficult to coordinate than we had hoped. We did buy ourselves a brand new queen mattress set which we will pick up tomorrow, and are very excited about graduating to a grown up bed (from our full sized) and deflating the air mattress! Additionally, so far the only damages from the move have been cat related (lost a glass tupperware and a shirt due to Sitka, and another shirt due to Koda - of course both my shirts, the cats decided I needed more ventilation in this hot weather) and even our crystal was unpacked unscathed.

Initial impressions of Richmond:
- either the people here are very friendly or the Seattle freeze is real, or possibly both, they also really like pregnant ladies
- my blood is an extreme delicacy for all biting bugs here, and I have had to develop a strategy of covering all exposed skin for after-dinner dog outings and recently acquired a non-DEET hippy bug spray which will hopefully become my new favorite perfume, and not just a new flavor for my frequent flying customers, but currently I look like I have a lower extremity urticarial disease
- one should never, ever see the temperature read in the 3 digits, and yet I think that will be something we see on a weekly, if not sometimes daily basis here
- more road than cars, the only traffic we have encountered was when we saw an accident blocking the interstate on the opposite direction, otherwise Tyler has rejoiced at the efficiency of moving from point A to point B in the car, which is good since we have criss crossed the city doing errands almost a dozen times now
- inexplicable miles of shopping centers and strip malls, driving out to a furniture store we knew had a mattress sale we passed almost half a dozen small dodgy looking mattress discount places, and then had 4 more mattress stores within a few blocks of the first one we checked out for comparison shopping
- no taco trucks, the baby and I are very disappointed so far that we haven't found a replacement for our taco bus, but are making up for it in ice cream so far
- I'm not sure I'll ever stop being amused by fireflies

Hopefully next weekend we'll feel like we're settled in enough that we can explore the city in a non-shopping capacity. We did walk to the nearby park to watch the big city fireworks display on the 5th which was a lot of fun. I will leave you with a few photos of our container being dropped off and the opening reveal, and the current disarray that our house is in - which hopefully will be much better by next week. I am excited for some real nesting and starting to get the baby's room together!

Office/back-up guest room/cat domain

Kitchen

Under the stairs dog nook

Living room (sans couch) + dining area

Our bedroom

Not pictured:
- guest room, as it's mostly a giant room with an unassembled bed
- baby room, currently acting as Tyler's ironing room, since we still have a giant list of baby things to get and arrange before it will even vaguely resemble a nursery, one box of baby things does not make a nursery!
- giant mound of unpacked boxes! I think we're about 80% through our boxes now

The Final Push

Okay, so now for some retroactive blogging. So I last left off at the wedding. The next day we got up bright and early with the hopes we could arrive in Kansas City at a decent time to visit with Jordan and Sarah. Jordan is Tyler's childhood best friend, who moved to KC to live with his girlfriend, and her parents graciously allowed us to stay at the house for a night with our menagerie. Unfortunately, one snafu we didn't take into account with our driving plans was the time zones we had to cross! So almost every long drive involved losing an hour as well which did not help morale.

At any rate, we got up early (sadly couldn't persuade any family to join us for a 7am breakfast before we left - for the best as we were barely awake!) and set off. We first had to stop and get a better strap for one of the cargo carriers as our roadside rope wrapping was a bit subpar. Luckily we found an auto shop across the street from a bakery so that took care of breakfast too. Then we drove into town a little bit to let the dogs blow off some steam at a dog park. They of course thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

We then set off on our 9 hour drive to Kansas City, which was mostly uneventful other than initially underestimating the amount of caffeine Tyler would need - but that was easily resolved with a gas station Mountain Dew stop. Gross. We arrived at Sarah's family's home and the dogs were delighted to find a yard to run around in and the cats set up shop in the furnace room, excited to have more square footage than a bathroom and showed their joy in rounding up a herd of rubber bands for us. Sarah and Jordan graciously had picked up BBQ take out for dinner and we ravenously devoured our food. We had a little bit of time to catch up before we had to crash and hit the hay before our last long drive the next day.

We met Sarah's parents the next morning as we ate cereal before dashing off. Jordan even made an apparently rare early morning appearance to see us off - loading us up with Mountain Dew and pupcakes from a dog bakery for the dogs. The cats did initially try to strike and hide when we tried to load them up, but when it became clear that the alternative was to be abandoned forever they quickly pretended that nothing ever happened.

Our 12 hour drive to West Virginia ended up covering 5 states and we made such good time that task-master Tyler even let us sit in the Subway for lunch instead of eating in the car on the way! The dogs definitely started feeling the increased temperatures and Rue spent a while panting into the cat crate, making sure they stayed hydrated.

We enjoyed seeing the arch in St. Louis and the change in billboards as we crossed state lines. Although to be honest, that long in the car is pretty much torture so we were really excited when we reached our final Motel 6 in Charleston, WV. Luckily this was our last stop, and so even the fact that I had to wake up at 5:30am so we could leave town by 7:30 was not horrible when I could remind myself this was the last leg, and we only had 5 hours to drive. Although when I got up it literally took 15-20 minutes of running the shower until I got hot water, but at least I got hot water eventually! But it was a dicey 15-20 minutes. My hot shower in the morning is very critical to my mental health.

As a side note - the reason it takes us 2 hours to get ready in the morning is that we have to walk the dogs, feed them out of their food balls, clean the litter box and then because the cats always wait to use it until it's cleaned we have to then clean it again to pack up, load the cats and the litter box into their crate and haul them out to the car, pack up all the things we took out of the car because we didn't want to leave them in there overnight (game consoles, computers, important papers, etc), do the regular people things in the morning like showering and dressing, fill up water bottles, load up the dogs, scout for anything left under the beds and then finally lift off! We eventually got it down to a science, but it was still a slow science with lots of trips back and forth to the car and heaving around heavy cat bodies (to be fair, one heavy cat and one skinny one).

Highlights on the drive to Richmond included some entertaining side routes google maps took us on to avoid tolls in West Virginia, realizing that the forests were not on fire - just covered in some mist from all the humidity and the cool morning temperatures, and finding the cheapest gas we have yet - less than $3.50/gallon! We eventually arrived in Richmond at our rental house exactly 10 minutes before our scheduled appointment with our landlord for our walk through and getting keys - how's that for punctual? I will leave you with this awkward and unflattering selfie we took when we arrived, and a photo of the dogs and our luggage in our new living room. And of course Sitka, who was incredibly well adjusted (to our surprise) the entire trip, but when faced with an entire empty room to explore experienced a bit of Stockholm syndrome and didn't want to leave his prior captor.

We Made It!

Okay so we actually got into Richmond yesterday, and I also didn't write about the last 2 days of our trip. Apparently the degree of my fatigue from being stuck in a car with carefully scheduled bathroom breaks is inversely related to my motivation to write about said experience, as well as my inspiration for photographing it!

But we made it! And our shipping container arrived today! And we have internet! And Tyler started his job! And I'm officially in the third trimester!

After all those exclamation points I will leave you with a photo of exhausted puppies, decompressing from their week of stress, and tomorrow will hopefully actually write about the past few days - because I know you are all on the edge of your seats (don't be, it's not that exciting).