Don’t you just want to jump into that painting?!?! Man I do!
Hello my fellow Tired Troopers!
Let’s talk date night ❤️
One of our priorities as a couple is date nights… do they happen often, no, not hardly! But, we try for it, so they do happen sometimes! We made this a priority when we decided to start trying for kids. We didn’t want to lose the “us” in our relationship after kids. You need to work to keep the strong foundation you built together before kids. I feel like you and your partners relationship is the foundation and your kids are the skyscrapers being built above your relationship. It needs upkeep and maybe an extension to travel even deeper into the earth… corny, but i bet u keep that visual in your head! Which is my goal!
Now, not excluding my single Tired Troopers here – your foundations are just as strong whether it be you and a divorced/former partner or just you. But you have to work at it, and if you’re working on yourself, that is all you need! Take some “me time” instead, treat yo’ self and use some of that time to check in with where you feel you are and run through the exact same steps.
My family has this tradition of saying our favorite, funniest, or most meaningful memories at birthday dinners of whoever’s birthday it is! You should try this, it’s really fun! So, in keeping with that theme, I started asking my hubby what his favorite thing about our relationship is, what he thought needed work, if there was anything he would change of he could, etc. when we went out on our anniversary dinner. It’s a nice/fun way to make sure you’re on the same page with your relationship.
Now that we are parents, IF we make the time and IF we get to go on a date we inevitably talk about our kids. It’s going to happen! Shoot, the first couple dates we took when the kids were a few months old we both grabbed our phones and went through every single picture we had of them, showing each other, the whole, “Remember this?!”, thing. It was hilarious! Our first few nights off and that is all we wanted to do!
Now, when one or both of us bring up the kids on our date night, we ask each other parental questions to make sure we are still on the same page. Our short term goals, long term goals, anything we need to change up? What’s your favorite thing about being a parent? What’s your least favorite? Actually that last question prompted an awesome upgrade to our household early on! The kids were only a few months old and i asked Hubby what his least favorite thing was and he didn’t hesitate, he said, “Bottles, washing bottles, hands down!” I had no idea! Hubby washed the majority of the bottles, but he was fast, efficient and never complained, so I thought it wasn’t that big of a deal. Good thing I asked! The next day I ordered a fancy bottle washer (which I NEVER would have otherwise) and it ended up being a complete game changer for us! It’s honestly one of the most important baby related items in our home! For more info pop over to my Affiliates & Product Reviews Page and search Bottle Washer.
Anyways, I wouldn’t have ever known what a big deal this was for him OR it would have quietly built up and turned into resentment, which no one wants! So, yes, this is a fun dorky “game” to play at dinner on your precious time “off”, but it has become a very important part of our relationship and it’s even more important now as new parents! You don’t have to do this on every date night, honestly you shouldn’t! But, every now and then pick a date to play the “questions game” to check in with each other. Or if you take yourself out or finally have some ME TIME, use it to check in with yourself, you’ll be glad you did and your kids will only benefit from it!
It might feel weird, or stupid, or nerve wracking at first, so here are a few downloadable questionnaires to get you started! You can use these questions as discussion points, or each fill one out while you’re waiting for your appitizer and swap them to see how each of you answered! These are just suggestions to get the ball rolling, feel free to make them your own!
Yes, the “Pet Rock” is a real 1970s novelty item created by Gary Dahl. No, I didn’t have one of these… my bizarre pets were much weirder!
Hello Tired Troopers!
Have any of you ever had or maybe currently have a weird pet?! Well, buckle up, because I bet you one if not all of these weird pets are weirder than any you’ve had or even heard of!!! I’m such a weirdo! 🤦♀️ I’m telling you these are just bizarre!
There used to be a concrete irrigation ditch that ran straight through a park. And I mean straight through it. Honestly it was super dangerous because it ran right through a huge grassy area and the entire area was sloped, so if a kid or dog or whatever were running you honestly could miss seeing it and fall right in! Idk who’s bright idea that was, but it was definitely there when I was a kid! I just recently took my kids to that park and I’m happy to report it has been completely removed!
However, it was there when my sister and I were kids, so of course we played in it! In doing so, we found out that teeny tiny snails lived in the underwater grasses that grew on the sides of the irrigation ditch. We showed our mom and she harvested some and put them in our beta’s fish bowl when we got home. It was super cool for us as kids and super cool for mom, because she figured the snails would help keep the bowl clean, win, win! Which they did, until our beta fish started devouring them one by one! Uh, oh! Then, Mom had another idea, maybe they sell bigger snails at the pet store. That way it would still help the bowl stay clean and our fish couldn’t eat it!
And voila, she got a larger snail, about the size of a large marble. It was super cool to look at it as it crawled all along the sides of our glass fish bowl, and it did a good job of keeping the bowl clean too! It ate left over fish food and a water plant Mom stuck in there. Life was good. My little sis became so attached to it that it became “her” pet. She named it ESCAR-GO. Yes, even as children we knew what escargot was because our mom ordered it for us once on a trip. Which in itself is a funny story, see my blog, “My Sister’s Published Story”, if you’re interested…
Well, sadly, snails don’t last forever, so ESCAR-GO passed away. Mom couldn’t bring herself to toss it without letting my sis say goodbye, so she put it on the windowsill until we got home from school. We ended up having a little funeral for it and everything! We dug the tiniest cutest little grave, sis made a card for the snail, Mom said some words… When my sister went to place the snail into its final resting place, it, uh, slurped out of its shell and landed splat into the hole… sis was shocked, I started laughing, sis looked at me and I said, “It’s ok, look! Now you get to keeping his shell to remember him by, he doesn’t need it anymore, so he gave it to you.” Phew! Tears and crisis averted! It was just so cute, until it became absolutely disgusting and hilarious! We still laugh about it to this day!
Now, I’m not excluded from the “weird” pet club by any means… I’ve had a couple… one was an ant farm. Ok, not too weird, but man, when I was little and found out what an ant farm was I just thought that was the coolest thing! To get to see them build their little tunnels and do their ant thing up close?! Magic! So, Mom being the best Mom ever, got me a little ant farm kit. Now, this was back before you could order anything off the internet, so I don’t know how she pulled it off, but she did! I was so excited! We followed the directions and days went by, then weeks, and nothing happened! None of them built any sort of home, nothing… i have no idea why it didn’t work, maybe my kit was missing the queen? Who knows, but it was a huge dud and disappointment!
My mom was also in the “weird” pet club as a child and also a victim of disappointment from it. Back in her day there were advertisements on cereal boxes and in the backs of magazines where you could mail in for random “cool” kid things. She came across an ad for Sea Monkeys! Um, magical!!! The ad was magical too! This is how they marketed these Sea Monkeys:
I mean, are you freaking KIDDING ME?!?!?! Of course any little kid would do backflips to get these things!!! Absolutely magical!!!!! And it says they’re easily trained?!?!?! Whaaaaaa??? I can literally hear the millions of kids now going, “Pleeeeeeeeease Mom?! Plllllllllllleeeeeeeeeaaaaaaassssssseeeee?! I’ll take care of them I promise! Look! It’s only $1!!! Oh pleaseeeeeeeeeeeaaaasssseee Mommy dearest?!?!?!?!”
Well, my Grandparents sent in for these for my bright eyed Mama. She said she was so excited when they finally came (through snail mail). She set up their little habitat and followed the Manual of Sea Monkey Care. Then, when she finally saw some swimming around she looked super close and they were… bugs! They weren’t the adorable fantasy creatures pictured on the box! Her little heart was broken! Grandpa had to explain to her that they were in fact, brine shrimp. How horrible, right?!
If you don’t know, this is what a brine shrimp is – Nooooooooot so magical, huh?!
And back to me again… in the 4th grade our teacher brought in crawdads for us to learn from, science, etc. She kept them and used them in class for a few weeks and then had an “adoption program” to let us kids try to take them home as pets… well little me thought that was just too cool! I don’t know, maybe it was the fact that my teacher churched it up by calling it an adoption that you had to apply for… Who knows! But I wanted to adopt one of those little crustaceans!
I went home and asked Mom, she said no. (Of course, right?!) But I begged and pleaded and made all the promises and we weren’t using our fish bowl at the time… well, I wore her down and she agreed! I was so excited! Probably because of the “official” adoption part… pretty genius of my teacher, really. So, with the adoption paperwork finalized 🤦♀️😂 I came home the proud parent of a crawdad. We stuck it in our empty fish bowl where it had all it could ever need… or so we thought!
I named it Cee Cee. Well a few weeks later I went to check on Cee Cee one morning aaaaaaaand she was gone! What?! How could that even be possible?! I ran and told my mom and she came with me and yep, fish bowl was definitely empty… oh crap! So we looked around on the counter, on the floor, etc. Nothing. Then we heard a noise coming from the kitchen sink, but still no Cee Cee. Then, we heard it again!
Somehow that little 💩 jumped out of the fish bowl, crawled into the kitchen sink, and fell into the garbage disposal!!! Oh NOOOOOO! Mom grabbed some kitchen tongs and tried forever to fish Cee Cee out of the garbage disposal. Nada. Then, she figured, well it’s got to be good and pissed at this point, maybe it will grab onto the tongs and I can pull it up. That worked! She got Cee Cee out and back into the fish bowl. We stuck a book over the top to be safe.
Well Mom convinced me that it was time to let Cee Cee go, obviously it wasn’t happy in the fish bowl, so I agreed. We ended up releasing it at the duck pond at the same park that my sister and i had harvested those tiny snails! Don’t worry, it was the perfect habitat for it! Big ol’ pond, not too deep, tons of food. It was a crawdad’s dream! So, happy ending for Cee Cee!
Ok, I saved the “best” and “weirdest” for last… my sis and I loved going to the pet store! I mean what little kid doesn’t?! It’s like a tiny zoo/aquarium with all sorts of tiny animals available to bring home?! Yes, please! Well Mom had a thing for Beta fish, they were small, pretty, you could only have 1 at a time, relatively clean, low maintenance fish PLUS my sis and i got to “have our own pet”! Again, win-win!
Well, one day we are at the pet store when i see a tank full of jumping crickets! What?! What are these exciting little things?! I have NO IDEA how I convinced my mom to buy me these damn things, but she did! She bought me crickets! I had no idea at the time that these were actually just kept as food for the reptiles! You know, the actual pets! Ugh! Well, because they were sold as food, they were all put into a clear plastic bag filled with air and tied off. It was like having a balloon full of these bugs! She also bought me a small plastic tank to house them in because obviously I couldn’t keep my gazillion new little pets in the plastic bag! I told you this one was the weirdest!!! By far!!!! And it gets worse…
A few days after getting my little cricket buddies, somehow the lid came off and my bedroom was FULL OF CRICKETS! I freaked!!! Not because my pets all got loose, but because suddenly my bedroom was full of creepy crawly BUGS! It was like the moment they escaped, I realized they were icky bugs! My mom caught most, but it was impossible to catch all of them, so for a few weeks I would wig out when I would hear one chirping it’s little cricket song late at night… ewwwww. Whole thing still gives me the heebie-geebies! And no joke, to this day, I’m afraid of crickets!
One of my roommates in college was a gay guy. Usually I don’t feel the need to necessarily list sexual orientation, but it helps set the scene of just how important the situation was…
One evening I was in the living room and I heard him scream from his bedroom. I ran back there and asked if he was ok. He yelled, “COME HERE!!!” (He was in his bathroom…) I went in and he was standing in front of the sink holding the back of his head. I got real scared and said, “Oh my gosh, are you ok?!” He said no and dropped his hand and turned to show me his head… there it was, he had accidently cut a perfect lawn mower type swath of hair off of the back of his head with his clippers!
I immediately went from panic to complete relief and laughed because i was expecting to see a gaping wound! He goes, “C’mon this isn’t funny… haha… WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?!?” I said, “How did this happen?” “The clipper guard fell off.” “Ok, well you can’t cut the rest of your hair to match, because then you’ll be bald! Sooooooo… Hmmmmmmm… Ooooooo, ok, you can wear a ballcap!” “Girl, I can’t wear a ballcap.” “Why not?! You can borrow one of mine!” (Side note, you all know I’m a huge tomboy and ballcaps are my go to for covering up my hair instead of taking the time to wash it. A tried and true tactic that I absolutely love and 100000000% continue now as a Tired Mama!) Anyways, he goes, “GIRL, I can’t wear a ballcap! I don’t wear ballcaps.” I tried to convince him to just wear one for a few days to let it grow out, but he refused. He had an image and a style to uphold and apparently a ballcap did NOT fit into it!
Ok, so plan B… “Let’s see… Ok, I can feather the sides of the swath so you won’t notice that there is a huge chunk of hair missing!!” He goes, “Are you sure you can do that?” “Um, sure, yeah, no problem.” He looked at me like girrrrrrrrllllll you’d better be right!!! So I grabbed the clippers and put my hand on his shoulder to steady myself and went, “Holy crap, your back is completely wet!” He was so worked up and worried about this that he had broken out in a full body sweat! Like drenched! Too freaking funny!!! I was super nervous too! I definitely didn’t want to make this situation worse and to screw up a young gay man’s hair in his prime, yeah, naw! Definitely not something you want to do! I started real slow… and… it was working!! I was able to feather the sides so that you honestly couldn’t see the missing chunk of hair anymore! Thank God, crisis averted!!!!!! 😅 sooooooooooo that’s Stefawnnnnn’s origin story!
After that Stefawnnnnn took a hiatus for a long time. I didn’t even realize he existed yet. I’ve always joked about having an alter ego, but he didn’t have a name, style or even gender yet. That was until covid hit. Ah, yes, the horrid period surrounding 2020… yikes! Well my mom, sister and I went twice a year to get our hair cut and colored ever since I was 13. Never in my life did I ever think I’d even come close to actually doing hair. I mean, I have had the daydream of being a hairdresser, and how much fun that could be! But the thought of messing someone’s hair up?! No thank you! However, like I said 2020 hit and mom, sis and I had long unruly locks and serious roots to deal with. So, I did some research. Thank you internet!
We have always been a fan of Sally’s Beauty Supply, it’s basically a store for hairdressers. It has everything, which can be really overwhelming when you aren’t sure what you’re looking for… anyways my sis said she would go there and pick out her colors if I was serious about trying to do our hair. Yeah, I mean I think I am… I’ll try my best! Which was enough for her. Luckily, I know my sister and I know her hair! She has course, super thick, super curly hair. It’s gorgeous!! And I’ve heard her complaints over the years of hairdressers not knowing how to cut and style her hair. “Normal” haircuts don’t work for her, because while it might look perfect when it is wet and straight, the second that it starts to dry and curl the cut just doesn’t work. So, with that in mind and the little bit of research I did, I decided to initially cut her hair to get some length off, then told her to dry and style her hair. That way it would curl (cause I had just taken a lot of weight off) and I could dry cut the rest.
I have to admit the first cut was terrifying, but after the initial cut and she styled her hair, I was really confident in the dry cutting because I could see each curl, where they landed, and I could shape it how she wanted! I felt like Edward Scissor Hands and went to town!!! That’s when she got nervous lol but I just kept saying, trust me this looks AWESOME! Well, a snip, snip, here and a snip, snip, there and voila! B-E-A-U-tiful! She looked in the mirror and lost it! This is the best my hair has ever looked!!!!!!! Oh my gosh I love it!
As this developed, so did my alter ego, Stefhawnnnnn. He’s modeled after the Ms.Mary J Blige SNL skit by Bill Hader. Hence, why he always wears a scarf… he needs something to flip dramatically here and there… lol! And it’s also where I got his name, Bill Hader plays one of my all-time favorite characters, Stephon! And that’s how Stephawnnnnn was born! My alter ego Drag King if you will… 😏
This went on for a while, where i would come over and color and cut her hair, until she said, “would you want me to cut yours?” Um, yeah, cause it was all the way down to my butt! But I had reservations… but we were a few glasses of wine in and I said, “Fine, you can cut my hair.” So she does… and she cut too much off the back, so she had to “even it up” aaaaaannnnnndddddd I ended up looking like Lord Farquaad off of Shrek! Oh holy balls, what did you do?! But I didn’t say that because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I graciously went home and cried lol luckily, I hardly ever wear my hair down, so I just rocked a tiny pony and my normal ballcaps until it grew out.
But, now I had to figure out how to cut my own hair! Giving myself highlights and an ombre was hard enough in the mirror! I was terrified to try to cut my own hair! On someone else i can see everything, on myself I’m relying on the bathroom mirror and a hand held mirror! Yikes! I found a do-it-yourself video posted by Pick Up Limes and the way she did her tutorial seemed kind of doable… so i tried it, by myself, in my bathroom, pausing the video and copying each step… it turned out PERFECT! It’s been 6 years now and I love the cut so much it’s all that I do!
Now my mom, sis and i all get together for a hair day! we watch mama mia, then mama mia 2, then sex and the city, or any other chick flick. But we ALWAYS start with Mama Mia! We drink wine and laugh and I cut and color all of our hair. It takes all day, but we just have an absolute BLAST!
My sister now constantly gets compliments from people at work and when they ask who does her hair they are shocked to find out it’s me! Then they say they didn’t realize I went into hairdressing, and are super surprised when they find out I actually didn’t, I just “picked it up, no big deal…”💁♀️LOL
I kick into my alter ego, Stephawnnnnn and get to work! It’s cute too, if Mom or Sis start to question my methods, the other one goes, “Just let Stephawnnnnn do his thing! She’s never been wrong before!” Btw, Stephawnnnnn acknowledges he and she as pronouns ❤️ Never in a million years would I have thought I would do something like this, but it is so much freaking fun!!!!!! Wine, chicken flicks, hanging with my mom and sis and letting my alter ego out! What could be better?!
So, as you know from my About Page, I’m a lucky mother of twins! But you also know I didn’t think I’d ever feel lucky for having twins… Twins run in my family… on both sides… so I guess chances were pretty good I’d end up with twins…? BUT I DID NOT WANT TO! Because of that, my immediate family thought it was funny to joke about it. Which I did not think was funny. I’d actually get pissed. I was dead set against it. So much so that I’d make a joke about giving each half a medallion at birth, then years later if they ever found each other again, well that’s just a good day for everyone… (Yes I’m THAT dark, yes, I stole this joke from the show Friends, it was hilarious, so i used it!) Hello?! It fit perfectly! The funniest jokes have some truth to them after all…
So, if twins ran on both sides of my family, why was i so against it?! Welp to put it plainly none of the twins in my family had good relationships with each other. One set grew up and chose completely different religions, which would have been fine, but they doubled down by not respecting each other’s beliefs… yikesx1000. Another set were absolute polar opposites. One was sweet and gentle and kind, the other was crazy and lashed out and ended up in prison… yikesx10000000. The other set was just plain weird and again one ended up being the sweet caring one while the other was mean and judgmental. Barf. Now, I’m a big believer in nature vs nurture and I know that parenting (or lack thereof) contributed to a lot of how they ended up – but still, having seen first hand how multiple generations of twins turned out resenting each other was enough to freak me out and completely turn against the thought of it!
Then, growing up I also had multiple sets of friends who were 2 years or less apart from their siblings. This caused major, major, issues with schooling, crushes, sports, academics, practically everything! YIKES, YIKES, YIKES!!!!!!! NO THANK YOU!
Now, I’ve also met twins who were complete 1000000% best friends, but sadly that wasn’t the norm that I had witnessed…
Now, back to parenting… my mother is not perfect (no one is). BUT, she always wanted a close relationship with her sister that she never got growing up, so she was bound and determined to make my sister and I close. Which took A LOT of work. Everyone would always say, aww you two are so close, you guys, like, never fight. Well, we were close, but we fought, of course we fought! We were siblings after all! And the 3-year-age difference was big when we were little. Mom would dress us in the same clothing, just different sizes and different colors, but always matching, ugh!!! I really grew to resent this. I didn’t want to be dressed the same as my 4 year old sis at 7! Then there was the whole I didn’t want my ‘lil sis constantly following me and my friends around and copying my every move! (Today I LOVE when she copies me, so sweet – what a compliment!) But back when we were really little it was just annoying sometimes! Then, the tables turned lol we got a little older and I would get bored and want her to go play sports with me outside, well she became a bookworm and only wanted to sit and read. So, it goes both ways!
My mom stuck by her guns through it all. One of her more genius tactics was to literally make us “kiss and makeup up”. It didn’t matter where either! We’d start bickering in the store, nope! You guys kiss and make up, right here, right now! Mom kept this rule up so long that once we were older I’d smile and look at my sister and go, “ok” and go in open mouthed! This grossed my sister out and we’d both end up laughing. So it ended up taking us from fighting together to laughing together. That tactic isn’t perfect for everyone, but it sure worked for us! Now that we are full-blown adults our mom constantly jokes about how our closeness comes back to bite her in the a**, like when we out vote her or gang up on her, but it’s still all in good fun. I’m not going to do exactly what my mom did, but I’m absolutely going to work just as hard as she did to ensure my kids are close. They both lucked out and got a built-in best friend for life, they can’t take that for granted! I’m definitely going to take my mom’s core principles and see what works for my kids.
You also know from My Precious Poppy post that I lost my first pregnancy. So, when I got my hCG test results and it was so much higher it gave me a lot of hope! I just kept talking to my little baby in my belly saying, you hang on, you just stay in there! Well I dusted off my copy of What To Expect When You’re Expecting (I purchased that book the first time I got pregnant… then threw it under the bed out of heart break when I lost the first pregnancy…). I also found the book, Bringing Up Bebe, which I fell in love with! Well one night I was up late reading Bringing Up Bebe when I put down the book and just thought about how lucky I was to finally be pregnant again and how if this was twins – well… that wouldn’t be the worst thing after all… I couldn’t believe it… from dead set against it to huh, that might actually be kinda cool… what?! But I was actually… kind of… hoping… deep down… that it would be… twins! I was absolutely SHOCKED, but it just felt right all of a sudden. Like a warm hug, or a new crush, that’s the feeling I had.
Well the amount of time they make you wait between that first pregnancy test and your first ultrasound is criminal! My positive pregnancy test was 12/28 and my first ultrasound was 2/4. I get it, I did the research, u need to typically wait at least 8 weeks to be able to confirm the pregnancy via ultrasound.. blah blah blah… I was uber impatient lol I mean, it took FOREVER to get pregnant the second time! Then, the day finally came!! I was equal parts freaked out, scared and excited. Small side bar here – if you’ve never had an ultrasound typically the first one is done with a vaginal wand ultrasound. You don’t get the belly one until your farther along. I didn’t know that, my sis (a nurse) told me that would happen. So luckily I was able to tell my husband as well so at least we were both prepared. Cause that would have been a shock lol! You want to put what, where?! That’s not what they show on TV! 😂
The ultrasound started and there was a big screen TV up in front of us showing what the tech was seeing on the computer screen. Well just like the movies it’s all black and white and wavy. It didn’t look like anything or at least we couldn’t make sense of anything. Plus I couldn’t see anything either, so I immediately started panicking thinking I lost this pregnancy too because to me it looked like a vast empty void! Well the tech is looking around and making small talk… “Is this your first pregnancy? Oh wow, first kid for both of you, how exciting.” Then she got real quiet. Like stopped talking all of a sudden. I looked at the screen and actually saw something… it looked like 2 circles, but again I had no idea what we were looking at! I held my breath, was there a baby in there or not?! Was there anything in there?! It felt like 20 mins of silence when it was actually like 15 seconds in reality. Then she goes, “Huh ok… yep, ok…. See that? There’s TWO babies in there, yep that’s two.” I immediately started crying tears of joy. My husband goes, “I knew it!” I laughed, but sucked it up real quick cause with every cry/laugh the camera jumped and I needed to see these two little miracle babies!!! There they were, baby A and baby B. Unreal! She printed us out a few pictures.
Side bar: Baby A is always the baby that is closest to your cervix, and therefore will be the first born whether you have it vaginally or via c-section.
Hubby and I were on cloud 9 and in shock sitting there with a photo strip souvenir of actual proof that not only were we 100% pregnant, we were going to have TWO BABIES! We rushed right over to my mom’s house to show her. I decided to just hand her the strip of pictures instead of telling her it was twins to see her figure it out for herself. It took her about 5 seconds and she yelled when she realized and looked at us shocked, then cried happy tears. Funniest part was that she looked back at the pictures and goes, “Fetus C?! There’s a Fetus C?!” We laughed and told her the ultrasound tech messed up and accidently put “Fetus C” on one of the pics, and she couldn’t figure out how to change it, so she just told us to ignore the C, it was really just A and B. Too funny!
One of my favorite, albeit frustrating, sayings is “When you make plans, God laughs.” Welp I never had any intention to have twins and would legit get mad at the thought of it. But, God knows best and we were blessed with two perfect babies! And in hindsight, I hated being pregnant. You’re always tired, hormones SUCK, and my food aversions were the worst. Only cool thing was feeling the babies kick. Oh, and not having to “suck it in.” For more info read my blog on What Pregnancy Is Really Like/What They Don’t Tell You About Being Pregnant and my blog Don’t Suck It In. But with how long it took us to conceive the second time and the fact that I was a geriatric preggo, (I was 35) we might have not gotten the chance to have a second child. Yes, we were definitely open to adoption, but we were blessed with exactly what we were supposed to have. Not preaching… Buuuuuut, If you’re the least bit interested in God, try talking to him, it’s an amazing feeling knowing the Big Guy has your back. He’s sure proved he’s got mine! My babies are walking proof! For more info see my blog: Got The Holy Spirit, It’s Not What You Think…
These are my actual little miracles first pictures ever!
(See Fetus C???)
Ok, so now you know… if you see this ⬆️on the screen, CONGRATULATIONS, IT’S MULTIPLES!!!
Side note, later on in our ultrasounds one tech said that sometimes with “twin” pregnancies there are actually 3 in there, but they don’t figure it out till later cause they just keep thinking they’re seeing 2… um, yeah, we only ordered one, ended up with a buy-one-get-one-free situation, so we’re good… but this freaked me out for a while lol any of my fellow Tired Mamas who had triplets or above you are one tough Mother —!!!!!!
Let’s get into hot flashes! Ah, yes, the lovely feeling of being on fire and there’s nothing you can do about it… what fun! Growing up my poor mom always ran hot, but then when she went through perimenopause she discovered hot flashes. It. Was. Awful! She would get hot flashes allllllllll the time and there wasn’t anything to do but wait it out. Well, flash forward to after I gave birth to my twins and I started having hot flashes!!! Whaaaaa?! All I had to go off of was my mom’s pregnancy experience and she never got hot flashes until perimenopause. Well, surprise! It can happen!
Hot flashes SUCK! You’re hot, yes, but it kind of feels like hot sweats and then cold sweats (like the kind you can get when you’re sick). First it’s hotter than balls, and you sweat… A lot! Then, when it passes, you freeze because your body returns to a normal temperature, but you’re soaked because of all the sweat. So, you end up freezing!
I can’t tell you how many times now that I have woken up drenched in sweat! Like soaked! It’s just so uncomfortable! I was told these would subside after I stopped breastfeeding, but that was 3 months ago and I am still getting hot flashes on the reg! Ugh!!!
One time my sweat rolled down the small of my back in bed, which woke me up and I flipped because I thought it was a huge spider! Argh!
I actually ask my husband all the time, “Is it hot in here, or is it just me again?!” 99.999999999% of the time he confirms that yep, it’s just another hot flash…! Bleh!
I actually got sick once about 6 months ago and I didn’t realize I was getting sick because it just felt like I was having my normal hot flashes… nope! Hot flashes are THE WORST.
I sure hope these stop soon… but it would be my luck that these post-partum induced hot flashes stop right as my perimenopause ones start! Ugh, I sincerely hope I get a break in-between!!! I’ve actually started carrying around a big folding fan! Thank you Drag Queens for making these fans “fashionable” again… I owe you one!!! 🤗 Clackity, CLACK! …If you know, you know 😏 😉 😎
