Must love pugs.

Between nesting and cleaning something else has been on my mind – nurturing.

Kevin and I are already proud pug parents, as everyone knows, hence the blog title love, life and PUGS.
Our pugs are our little fury soul mates. Their little brown eyes steal our hearts everyday and make it easy to get past all the pug fur that covers our lives.

This past month they have been acting a little funny. Needless to say they know something is up. Besides the growing belly I am sure they are perplexed by mom and dad’s crazy cleaning, nesting, home project madness – if anything they have been irritated by it (we are interrupting their pug naps). Not only that but the once bare second bedroom is now filled with bright colors, a crib, a rug (aka the pug play mat), and lots and lots of toys that squeak, rattle and roll that they aren’t allowed to play with.

Humphrey, my little BFF has been especially attentive. He is fascinated with my new belly button and would spend the day licking my swollen legs and feet if I let him. Our vet says it is a reaction to my swelling and his attempt to take care of me. He wakes up with me and puts his chin on my belly when heartburn or now contractions keep me up at night. The only way he could be a better dog is if some how he could figure out how to rub my feet!

Maggie has been super attached to Kevin and running to him for everything. Within two seconds of Kevin walking into the house and Maggie is on Kevin with her head tucked under his chin with her little tail thumping away. She sleeps on him, follows him around and waits for him all day by the window when he is at work.

We have never been away from our dogs for more than 2 nights, which was almost three years ago when we went on a vacation sans pugs. Kevin and I have not been away from them for a single night since….I don’t know what they are doing to do the three days I will be in the hospital…better yet I don’t know what I am going to do! Is it possible to include your dogs as part of your birthing plan?

In order to ease the separation anxiety for our fur babies (and me) I have been spending a little extra pug one on one time with each of them. I cuddle each of them a little longer. Throw the ball a couple more times than I normally would and sneak them cheese out of the fridge more than I should.

Hopefully all this extra TLC will help when not only do mom and dad go away for three days but we bring back their brother, Noah.

Hopefully they will forgive us one day.

Basketball & babies.

It looks like I am good at growing a baby. I am at 37 weeks and little big Noah has grown to measure at 40 weeks (full term).

(I feel like this would be an appropriate time to insert a general warning to anyone that didn’t fare well in health class, gets the ebbie jeebies hearing about anything lady part related or doesn’t want to ever know what a mucus plug is – aka men, this is your warning you may want to stop reading my blog from this point on until Noah arrives.)

Kevin and I went to my 37 week appointment yesterday. Gone are the days where we joyfully made our way every two weeks to the doctor for a quick listen to the heart beat and a run down of my questions.

No. Now it is Kevin dragging me like a wild dog on a leash into the doctor’s office and blocking any and all escapes. Now my visits entail a full exam…the embaressing, you already feel like a whale but here get undressed and use this piece of tissue paper to attempt to cover yourself and the doctor will be right in to violate you exam. Everytime. Kevin told me (the shyest most modest human on Earth) it isn’t any thing to get worked up about it is just her job. I then asked him to remember that statement when he hits the age where he needs a prostate exam. Point made.

At this visit not only did we learn our incredible hulk child was big enough to be considered 40 weeks, we learned that I am 1.5 centimeters dilated and 75% effaced. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means it is go time (or soon will be).

I will not lie, I was sort of (a lot) freaked out by this. I am already for go time, but I still need to nest! This isn’t Cinco De Mayo, my oh so hopeful “labor day”! I still need twigs for my nest!

I couldn’t understand why Kevin was so calm after hearing all of this and he responded, “well, that is about 6 days away from the 21st (his guess), so according to that you are right on schedule.” My response, “are you crazy, this isn’t a basket ball pool!”

After hearing the news I have been going through waves of nesting. There is the clean the baseboards with a q-tip nesting level and then there is the sit in my nest level. I have only been in gather, clean and organize mode (aka crazy pregnant lady mode). I didn’t know there was another level of nesting. I have had this odd instinct that is the exact opposite of every other instinct I have had. To sit, relax and quietly prepare myself for Noah. I have coined it the “sit on my egg” part of nesting.

Monday we will have an ultrasound to see just how big Noah is getting and where we will go from there. I guess I should have listened to Kevin when he told me “labor day” would be the 21st. He did after all win his college basketball bracket.

The day we found out he was measuring 40 weeks, not surprised. It looks like I am having a toddler!

My name is Dominique & I am a sleep eater.

I never thought that I would hit the stage in pregnancy where trips to the fridge would out number the trips to the bathroom. This trimester is taking a lot of fuel to get through and I have been happily munching my way through it, well for the most part.

Pregnant women are always portrayed on television at two o’clock in the morning in front of an open fridge hammering away at leftovers and eating peanut butter out of the jar with their finger like they just won a battle on Survivor and had been starved living off of rations of rice, sand and banana leaves for the past month. I hadn’t had any crazy midnight cravings and Kevin hadn’t been sent on any midnight store runs. I thought I was pretty lucky, then the third trimester belly monster got me.

I already am a sleepwalker, well eater. This has caused me, Kevin and when I lived at home my family a lot of trouble. My entire life, since I could crawl I have been going places in my sleep and usually for food. The problem is I am like a sleep walking ninja so I am at the will of my sleepwalking psyche. I normally move stealthily through out the house to my gluttonous goal, devour it and then retreat back to sleep unknowing of my fourth meal until the morning. I am not a sleep cleaner. I usually leave little wrappers, food out on the counter or a trail of my midnight feast.

Unfortunately this habit has gotten the best of others and me throughout the years. Like the time I drank nail polish remover because I thought it was water in a bottle and my mom had to spend the night trying to explain my sleep drinking fiasco to the poison control operator who was convinced this was a cry for help. Or the time Kevin woke up covered in chocolate icing because utensils and sleep eating don’t mix and I apparently ate a good sized serving of left over birthday cake and left a good sized portion of it on my hand and crawled back into bed frosting my husband in his sleep.

Luckily pregnancy makes deep sleep nearly impossible and my sleep eating days had taken a 7 ½ month break. But those nights are gone, the third trimester has awoken the sleep-eating beast and she is back in action. There is just one big problem. Third trimester sleep eater meet third trimester heartburn. When I sleep eat I don’t eat normally. For example, my mom once caught me eating mint grasshopper cookies with (as in one on top of the other) nacho cheese Doritos (tasty, right?). These midnight munchies have now brought on another nightly episode, a 2 am husband mad dash for the tums.
A couple of nights ago my sleeping self was victim to a bag full of chocolate donuts, orange juice and spaghetti. Now I didn’t do anything crazy like mix them in to some sort of soup that you would see on Chopped (like that combo isn’t crazy enough) but once they mixed in my tummy they really didn’t agree. The two o’clock in the morning dash for tums turned into a flash back of the first trimester nightly night-sickness dash for the toilet.

In hopes of taming the sleep eating beast Kevin prepared a much blander, healthier, midnight snack of peanut butter crackers and left them on the dresser. He also made me switch sides on the bed and moved the dresser making a maze making so I would have to crawl over him in my sleep to get out of our room. Eight months pregnant, I am pretty sure even my ninja sleep walking skills would be challenged to maneuver over him.

This morning round one goes to Kevin. The dresser wasn’t flung with pregnancy strength across the room, Kevin and the pugs weren’t crushed in any attempt to get out of bed, I apparently took the bait of the peanut butter crackers since only crumbs remained and there wasn’t a two o’clock in the morning retaliatory strike run to the bathroom or for the tums.

So far so good. Now lets just hope night two goes just as well and lets all cross our fingers for Kevin that he isn’t crushed tonight or that he finds out what it is like to wake a pregnant sleepwalker!

Maybe I will make him a midnight rescue kit to throw at me in case he wakes the hormonal sleepwalker of doritos and mint cookies?

 

*For any media inquiries please email DominiqueTeall@yahoo.com

Blinded by love.

Have you ever found such a bargain that your brain forgoes all rational thinking and you act upon your shopper survival instincts (which tend to have a prescription of rose colored glasses)? Yeah, that’s me. Which brings us to the story of the set of kitchen blinds that were 9 inches too small for our windows.
I found them at one of my all time favorite stores, The Christmas Tree Store. Don’t let the name fool you, I did. For about a year I drove past the oddly decorated building which looked like it had been plucked straight from the North Pole which in July is a little off putting. I figured it was a store that was geared toward Christmas fanatics year round. Don’t get me wrong Christmas and I have a very special (semi-fanatical) relationship but I reserve my holiday mania from the first leaf falling to the New Years ball dropping. It never occurred to me to go in the store until I received a flyer in the mail.
The Christmas Tree Store is much like an outlet store (talk about the way to my heart). They have everything you could imagine from all the stores I love, including blinds. I had been on the hunt for a pair of natural bamboo stick blinds for our kitchen which happens to have custom 105 year old windows, which don‘t play nice with today‘s common blind measurements. That basically translates into…$$$. Well shopping there one afternoon a couple of months ago I stumbled upon exactly what my heart had desired. They were originally priced at $80 a piece and were on sale for $5.99. I grabbed them and dashed to the check out…not thinking (or letting myself think) that they were not going to fit no matter how much my heart willed them too.
I got home and rushed to the kitchen with the blinds still in there boxes and held the box up to one of the windows, and that should have been that. I should have returned them to the store after seeing they were almost a foot too short for the window. That is what I should have done…but this is what I did.
The next day I went back and got the last set they had. I raced home and retrieved my gardening tools and a measuring tape and had at it. Yeah…$18 dollars is a great steal for blinds, not for a pile of bamboo sticks on my living room floor. I had to make this work. Kevin came home admits my venture to see me and our living room covered in sticks, dust and blind string. There are few things men want to walk in on there wives doing…crazy home projects (while holding 2 foot long garden shears) is one of them. He offered to help and when I said no, he took a big sigh of relief and told me it was probably for the best that I didn’t because he had no idea what I was doing and told me not to get hurt.
Cutting a million little sticks in a straight line in exactly 9.2 inch strips is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, but I did it. I felt victorious. I grabbed my drill and a couple of brackets and screws and mounted blinds together and hung them…and was left with this unsightly result.

To say the least not the look I was going for. We tried to cover the gap with curtains, pulling them up, down, gluing them and nothing seemed to work. Then one day I had a design epiphany.

I picked up some ribbon, preformed blind reconstructive surgery with some hot glue and scissors and was left with a result that I am proud of (ok, in love with)…

So..add 1.50$ worth of ribbon to my $18 dollar total (and a little bit of labor) and I still think I got quite the steal!

Clean Streak.

I tend to freak out over holiday’s. I deck the all the halls in our house, buy thirty pound turkeys, put my tree up two weeks before I even start to thaw the thirty pound beast and usually bake my first batch of Christmas cookies when the leaves start to change. Maybe that is why every single year the weekend after Christmas I gather every ornament, every light, every strand of tinsel, and unhang our stocking with haste (and care). The weekend after Christmas you would never know that one weekend before it looked like an elf threw up happiness, jolly, and Yule tide cheer all of over our house. Taking it all down is like a cleansing from all of the chaos my mind and body have been through during the holiday season.
I imagine that holiday shopping and preparation is a lot like child birth our brains have an uncanny way of forgetting the incredible amount of stress and pain we go through because in the end it is all worth it. (Note: I will look back at this some time in May and probably want to smack myself for even comparing child birth to shopping) The malls, the lines, the stress, the hunt for the perfect gift, the crowds, the traffic which is usually accompanied by weather that makes shopping trips more like dangerous treks through a frozen tundra all are made worth while when that special someone opens that special something you found for them. In that second you forget you went to 14 stores, searched online and practically sold your soul to find that gift, seeing them open that gift makes everything else seem trivial.
This year between baby appointments, work and family visits we had zero time to shop. In fact on Christmas eve, eve I was shopping at 12:30 in the morning. Don’t get me wrong there are perks to being pregnant in the dead of winter (ie the extra belly insulation) but dealing with holiday stress layered with pregnant emotion and fatigue isn’t a good combo. I may have looked big and jolly but I wasn’t always feeling so jolly just big. So this year after all the wrapping paper hit the floor I was ready to purge the holly and mistletoe and go back to my pre holiday life.
Every year I get a couple month head start on my spring cleaning. I think it started with the first year we had a real tree and the forty seven million pine needles I had to retrieve from every nook and cranny in our house (we found pine needles for months after the tree was long gone). It inspired some sort of O.C.D. cleaning spree that has now become tradition (even with our fake tree).
This year combine that with nesting and it is a little crazy. We have our storage containers ready…that is if you are lucky enough to be considered storage (there is a major donate or trash move going on in the Teall house). This just goes hand in hand with one of our new years resolutions this year to calm, declutter and organize our lives (more on that later).
So here I go, uncaffinated, unable to bend over and with the energy of a zombie ready to tackle our house room by room. Wish me luck!