A is for Beautiful

To the vast majority of you who voted in yesterday’s poll, you were absolutely correct. I’ve seen Batman, The Mummy, and Wall-E all within the last month and in my opinion Wall-E was by far the best of the three.

The Mummy was absolutely terrible. Seriously, awful bad. Batman was so-so. Dark? Definitely. Action packed? For sure. Left open for the sequel? Of course. But in my opinion, Heath’s excellent acting wasn’t enough to keep me on the edge of my seat and make me ignore the roll-your-eyes ending.

Wall-E on the other hand, I was expecting very little out of. As Sarahsouth would say, it was AB FAB. It was predictable and cute, which normally would not make for a good movie in my mind. But the fact remains that Wall-E kept me pondering for days and that’s my family’s criteria for a good movie. We still walk around my house saying, “Waaaalllll-EEEEE” and “Eeeeee-vaaaa” in funny robot voices and we saw that movie a month ago. Plus, we got to take Julianna with us and that was fun.

Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about some other stuff.

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Well, I went to the doctor yesterday and while I didn’t see my OB I did see a brand-spankin’ new doctor at that practice (as in Monday was his first day). It was my first check-up since the D&C and my first check-up at home. Everything checked out fine and the routine pregnancy test I took was negative so that was good. So what’s the problem? The problem was that at first he told me that I would have to wait 6 months before trying for another baby.

When I heard six months my jaw probably hit the floor. I was expecting him to say something like 2 to 3 cycles since I have known MANY people that were able to start trying again after 2 or 3 cycles. He explained that if I were 40 then he would say go ahead and try after 3 months because of the affect of age on fertility, but since I’m only 30 years old the standard textbook directions say wait 6 months and that’s what he advised.

Then! Then, he started talking to me about contraceptives and needing a prescription for the next six months and I was all, Whoa-slow-down-there-buddy-and-wait-just-a-minute. He said something about was this pregnancy planned…? So, yeah, after talking to him about this pregnancy and how long we tried and how regular my normal cycle is, etc he agreed that we could start “trying” again after three months. Phew!

He did say that if I were to get pregnant earlier than what was recommened then we would obviously just take it as it came, but that in order to lower the risk of having a miscarriage again he would still wait at least 3 months.

You all know I’m a little impatient, right? Can you imagine my family having to deal with me over the next six months if he had stuck with the textbook?!

Anyway, the bottom line is that it was a good visit. Everything is fine and we’re going to start trying again in about 3 months. Yay!

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Today, I have accomplished a ton. Well, I’m sure when I make the list it won’t seem like it, but at least it feels like I did a lot.

• I finished unpacking.
• I finished the laundry.
• Loaded and unloaded the dishwaser and then loaded it again.
• Hung up all of Julianna’s clothes, including the ones that were just sitting in her closet before we left.
• Wrapped a present.
• Cleaned Julianna’s bedroom.
• Caught up on all of the message board posts from when I was gone and cleared out my google reader. (*Not important I know, but NOT an easy task.)

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Ugh! I’ve started a diet again. I figure if I have 3 months in which I can’t get pregnant then I might as well lose all I can before then. I’m down four pounds since Monday. I still have about 30 to go. :( Wish me luck you guys!

Chapter 1:

My parents left the beach a week before we did and then eventually some of Jonathan’s family came down. After spending the entire month with Julianna, Nanna and Pap were having a little granddaughter withdrawal as they were back home alone. We tried to talk to them on the phone at least every other day and one time Jules was having so much fun with whatever it was she was playing with that she didn’t want to call either of them. So to encourage her a little I said, “Doodlebug, Pap’s dying to talk to you. Let’s call him, please.” Then began my daughter’s first lesson in idioms. She said, “Pap’s dying?”

So that was interesting. Trying to explain to a 2 year old all the intricacies of the English language can get tough!

Chapter 2:

She’s become quite the smart @$s. Jules has this book that came from the Chick-fil-a kids meals that she absolutely adores. It’s called The Cooking Book. She also has The Rainy Day Book and The Sunny Day Book but she hasn’t managed to collect all 4 books in the series and this fact disturbs her greatly.

She asked us on Sunday if she could go to Chick-fil-a to ask them for The Party Book. (Actually, she said, “I need to go to Chick-fil-a. I need to get The Party Book.”) We tried to explain that CFA is closed on Sundays and she replied, “I need to open it!”

Chapter 3:

Every time lately that I say Julianna’s name in conversation (but not talking directly to her) she says, “You talking about me, Mom?” Like I said, she’s becoming a smart butt.

Anyway, when we were on the way home from the beach the other day she started asking for a snack just as soon as we got in the car. When I explained to her that we would be stopping shortly in Laurinburg to eat lunch she adamantly exclaimed, “I not want a LAURINBURGER! I want CHICKEN NUGGETS!” I thought it was so adorable that later at Wendy’s I was telling everyone what she said and Julianna just looked up at me and said, “You talking about me again, Mama?”

I guess I should stop telling her stories in her presence and instead just put them on the blog, huh?

Chapter 4:

My sister kept Jules the other night and later that night I got this email from my sister:

Jules sat down at the computer last night and said “I’m going to send you an email mail, Whitty”

I know what family she comes from :)

Chapter 5:

We were reading this book the other night and Julianna kept asking me to say some of the more difficult animal names for her. Of course, I was more interested in the mom’s group message boards and I was half-reading with her. Bad mommy, I know. Well, if we got to one that she couldn’t really pmounce I would say, “Can you say kookaburra?” and wait for her to respond.

So after a while she got really irritated with the way I was “reading” with her. I am semi-paying attention when I hear her say, “Can you say owl, Mama?”

Well, we made it home safely and it’s so good to be here. As we were packing up the car to leave the beach Julianna threw a few little fits because she didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to come home either, but back to reality has to come sometime, right? And she gave us plenty of entertainment on the way home, but more of that in a minute.

As you can imagine, I had a TON of stuff to get done quickly after being gone all month long. There were a few things that I should have taken care of before I left and I never got them done so I took yesterday and Monday to work on those things. Plus I had the usual grocery shopping and such. Now I’m starting on the laundry and trying to get things put away. I have a stack of bills to pay and no money to pay them with and I have been following up on my job leads which are going nowhere fast. Today I am going to work on filling out a substitute teacher application with the school system.

Fortunately, my sister took Julianna for one night since she had missed seeing her all month so Jonathan and I got to have a date night. (So nice! I slept until almost 9 am!!! Can you believe it?) We ate dinner at a very-overpriced restaurant that we had a gift certificate for and then used our movie certificates and went to see The Mummy, which was HORRIBLE. Seriously, it was one of the worst movies I have seen in a while. As the hubs said afterwards, “You’ve gotta see a bad one every now and then” so it’s OK. It was nice to have the night to ourselves. It helped ease the stress of having a sudden overwhelming amount of things to do and made the transition from vacation a lot easier.

On the agenda for today:

• laundry and putting clothes away
• working on a few blog designs for some people
• find out which days of the week I enrolled my daughter in preschool this fall
• write a few thank you notes
• wrap a present
• catch up on work emails and find more job opportunities

What are you doing today?

Today Julianna got to do something that she’s been longing to do all month. When we first got to the beach and we first rode down Highway 17 and Julianna first laid her eyes on Planet Hollywood you would have thought it was Christmas morning for all the squealing that took place in our car. Ever since that day she’s exclaimed in her deepest Southern accent, “Look ya’ll!” every time we’ve driven by that place. We’ve had to promise her over and over again that we’d take her there one day. Of course we all speculated that it was going to be a huge disappointment to her since it’s really just a restaurant, but nevertheless she still wanted to go even when we explained that little fact to her. She would call Daddy on the telephone and tell him excitedly that she wanted him to come to the beach and take her to “Planet Earth.” And today was her day.

Actually, when we pulled in the parking lot we saw a parked cop car and a policeman escorting a man wearing a shirt and tie out the back door in handcuffs. So yeah, that was interesting.

Anyway, we first went in the gift shop area since my dad wanted us to buy Jules an overpriced T-shirt. Unfortunately, they don’t sell kids T-shirts and the $10 ones were sold out in size Small. Besides, Julianna didn’t care much she just wanted to go on in the place.

When we did finally go in the restaurant, Jules was mighty impressed with the ceiling and all of the decorations. She especially liked the airplanes that were flying around and he Power Ranger character. We walked up the big staircase up to the bar area and he was craning her neck the entire time trying to absorb all of the stuff going on around her. She was enthralled.

After we had seen it all we went outside, back down the huge front staircase and she was just smiling. We got to the bottom of the stairs and she immediately started dancing to the music that was playing over the speakers.

A fun outing for a two year old and we didn’t even spend a dime. Pretty nice.

Untitled from c525600 on Vimeo.

So far this month we have seen a wide variety of fun things at the beach.

We have seen:

• fish
• dolphins
• turtles



• ducks and swans



• sailboats



• pelicans almost the size of a jet ski
• and my favorite, a first for me to see this - both ends of the same rainbow

God is good all the time.