it appears that i have lost the ability to sleep at normal hours like.. at night.. when ben is sleeping. i keep taking these awful naps during the day and when i say goodnight to ben i am stuck wide awake until the early morning hours.

i have read until i am bored, poked at youtube, poked at apps on my ipod, attempted to just lay in silence in the dark… nothing seems to be giving me that lovely sleep that i want. i mean i guess i don’t really need it since i sleep though out the day but it would be nice to sleep at night and be awake during the day since that’s ben’s current driving schedule.

instead i will just sit here, and eat dried apples, and stare at the internet until i’m sick of it.

this is not cool! 24 weeks pregnant i look less pregnant than i did at 23 weeks! at least in these photos.. i FEEL super pregnant and heavy and all that jazz, but… where the hell did my belly go??

Preggo Summary For 24 Weeks:

this week vincent decided that i needed CHEESECAKE, because it was mother’s day, and obviously he loves his mommy so he demanded CHEESECAKE, there would be no joy in the world until CHEESECAKE was found. i spent the whole week without CHEESECAKE… ben’s mom finally brought me some on sunday, needless to say, there is only one piece left.

other than that, not much going on. kicking is stronger and in different places. i swear the other day i felt actual feet not just random bumps.

in other mother related news, for my late mother’s day present, ben brought me this:

no teddy bear or flower arrangement would suit me.. .he knows me well…

i fell asleep somewhere around 9pm last night, woke up once at 11pm and messaged ben that i had fallen asleep, then promptly fell asleep again and didn’t wake up till 12am. my pregnancy has been like a case of narcolepsy O_o i keep having crazy sudden naps… if i sit down for too long on a comfy surface you better believe i am going to sleep.

but now its past 4 in the morning and i am wide awake. i’ve been productive at least. did some house wifey things, attempted to wash dishes and was sprayed by a mile high geyser when my faucet decided to detach itself from the sink. lovely… it appears that if i run hot water though it for too long it somehow separates from the sink, i have no idea why but yeah.. not fun.

i’ve already gotten a few mother’s day well wishes on my facebook and it makes me feel weird. melancholy would be the best way to describe it i guess. i am happy, i’m celebrating my first mother’s day as a mom instead of just a daughter, but its sad that my own mother passed away just before mother’s day last year. my relationship with my mother was very turbulent, especially in the last years of her life, but i do have fond memories of her and i do wish that she (and my father) could have stuck around for them to be grandparents.

i do however still have ben’s mother. i am very thankful to have a mother-in-law that likes me. ben and i are taking her and her boyfriend doug to see dark shadows on monday for late mother’s day (ben won’t be home until monday afternoon so no plans tomorrow). dark shadows is sorta another sad thing though, as it was one of my mom’s favourite television shows and i have fond memories of her recording it off of the sci-fi channel for me to watch when i got home from school. i think she would have enjoyed the movie, even though it has nothing to do with the original show.

ben and i will be buying some flowers to put on mom’s grave for mother’s day when we go up to my doctor’s appointment on the 22nd (my doctor’s office is very close to the graveyard where she and dad are buried)

in happy mother type news, my sister-in-law and brother found out on the 9th that they are having a boy as well. they have decided to name him gary dean, after my father. she is due on september 17th so hopefully i will be recovered enough by then to cheer her on.

its actually almost week 24 but i was getting out of the shower tonight and realized.. holy crap i am pregnant! (and holy crap you can totally tell there’s a stolen hotel towel in the background)

well duh.. i mean yeah i’ve been pregnant the whole time but i’ve been battling the “you just look fat” belly syndrome. FINALLY its starting to look properly pregnant. i am pleased.

preggo summary for this week:

not much to tell, besides finally having pregnant belly, i suddenly want to eat all the cake in the world, and its really really hard to abstain from that. vincent’s kicks have been getting stronger and he is starting to wake me up with them once in a while. other than that, its been pretty uneventful, which is FINE BY ME!

i’ve spent most of today keeping to myself. going between normal emotions and then sudden moments of deep thought, reflection, and crying.

for those of you that don’t know me, today is one year since my mother passed away. the whole thing was a shock to all of us. it happened suddenly, and to a point i still don’t know what happened. i found her face down on her bedroom floor, she had fallen, hit her head on the bed frame, and was unresponsive. an ambulance took her to the hospital, where i waited for hours, slowly going crazy from panic attacks, begging people to come pick me up because i needed to get away from the hospital. no one came, all i got was “we’re praying for you” messages.. which i’m sure to some people is comforting, but to me, it was slightly insulting…

i sat in the family waiting room of the ER for hours, finally a nurse who was kind enough to understand that i needed to get away from there offered me a ride home. she even bought me something to eat.

my brother and sister in law, who were living in ohio at this time, came home immediately, when they transferred mom to the bigger hospital, they let me rest and they went to see her. i’m grateful that my family understands that hospitals and me do not mix, and they understood why i wasn’t going with them.

my mother was pronounced brain dead, we made sure they did as many tests as possible, and then we honored her wishes, and took her off of the machines keeping her alive.

our life after that was hard. i was unable to find a job, my brother and sister in law moved back to help me take care of things, and they too could not find jobs. we were on the verge of complete disaster.

its still shocking to me that all this was only a year ago, and how much has changed since then. just one year ago i was miserable, wondering if i had an actual point to life, if i was ever going to get out of this pit of depression and feel like a human being again.

and the strangest emotion of all, is knowing that if my mother had not died, one year ago today, i would not be having a baby in just a couple of months.

ben found me on facebook, just after mom’s death. he was the one who helped me move when we moved in with a family friend. and in a way, i really do think that he saved me. but if mom had not died, he probably never would have gotten in touch with me. life would have remained as it was. and i would not have vincent kicking me in the tummy right now.

life is a very strange thing. i am so very thankful for the people who have been there for me while i was struggling, and i am so glad that i am finally smiling again. this day will always be a deep wound, but i have a lot of love and support to bandage it.

i finally came across a solution that allowed me to continue downloading my mists of pandaria beta and i had a bit of time to play! i know everyone and their grandma is making a pandaren but dammit, i have waited for pandas to come out since WoW began! hell i’m even a member of “The Pandaren Empire” guild on the ayrgos server, so yeah.. i’m a fan :p

and you cannot really deny the fact that they are FRIGGIN ADORABLE LOOKING

so yeah.. panda… i’m very pleased so far with the beta. i like the monk class almost as much as i love my death knight!

blizzard has also done something WONDERFUL with looting which makes me super happy in pants. now if i kill a group of mobs, when i loot one of the group after their death, THE LOOT FROM ALL OF THEM IS THERE! no more having to run around looting each individual mob after a fight. SO HAPPY!

i can’t drive, but ben is a bit of a vehicle collector, and he has lots of choices in what he drives. trucks for heavy work and toting things around, and a couple of awesome older cars to drive around in style. obviously he needs insurance on the vehicles he drives, which can end up being pretty pricey. now that i’m having a baby we are looking for ways to cut our spending so we’ll have more money for our son. i’d hate to be the naggy wife and tell him to get rid of some of his vehicles, so instead i’m looking into cheap auto insurance so he can keep driving his favourites and not pay a bunch to keep them road legal.

it can be tough to find a good insurance quote, and especially hard to gather them all together to compare prices and make sure you get the lowest price, so there are great sites out there that let you enter some information and find all the insurance agencies available in  your area. then you can compile your quotes and decide which company would be best for you.

so that’s my project for this week while ben is out on the road. i’ll be finding quotes and comparing prices so that he can decide on the best company to go with! then he gets to keep his cars, and i get to ride around in awesome vehicles, like his 1970’s pontiac grand prix. i’m a sucker for old model cars… anything made before 1980, you have my attention!

this sort of thing will also come in handy when our son reaches driving age, though that’s not for a REALLY LONG TIME.. he’s not even born yet :p but someday we’ll need to insure his car as well, and we’ll be able to find something affordable then too.

i was busy with ben and then doctor appointment, and other stuff, so i didn’t post week 21 D: and now its week 22… internet mom things are hard to remember…

so anyway…

preggy summary for week 21:

not much to say this week, having strange dreams about future times with our son, but that’s pretty much it. no strange cravings, no more nausea, i seem to have hit a plateau. we had our monthly doctor visit and everything is normal. he’s perfect so far and the doctor was able to find his heart beat really easily this time! we’ve felt lots of kicks and ben has even been able to feel them, which is the sweetest thing to watch in the world.

my best friend from high school presented me with the motherload of baby stuff… literally. clothes, toys, a sling, a boppy pillow, a really nice crib, and some great books, including one which i have dubbed the baby instruction manual. basically an AAP book on how to take care of your baby.

while many others are celebrating the drug related “4/20” i choose to use this day to remember something that changed a lot of people’s lives for the worse.

today is the anniversary of columbine. and while it hits the people involved more closely to home, it affected plenty of people in other places as well. when i remember what happened today, i not only mourn the lives of those who were murdered by these boys, but the boys themselves, who were bullied until the reached their breaking point. i know, its a controversial thing to say, that i feel bad for these boys, because they did kill people. but as someone who has been bullied i can see why they did what they did.

the aftermath of columbine hit home on many levels. my friends and i were already bullied for being “weird”. we dressed the way the goth kids at the time dressed, we listened to marilyn manson, we didn’t play sports, we weren’t in clubs. after columbine everything was worse. there was a paper that went around, stating “warning signs” for kids in school that might be potential ticking time bombs. the papers did not mention anything about how faculty could stop bullying between students, or promote any kind of tolerance. instead the paper had a list of key points that made the faculty worry about certain students, and treat them differently. this is what happened to me and my group of friends.

the day after columbine happened, i did my best to stay out of the way, i didn’t want to draw attention and i didn’t want to really deal with what had happened. unfortunately it rained that day, and my only coat was, of course, a trench coat. it was green and i had no intention of wearing it past the front door, but the harassment began on the bus, not just the normal “hey devil girl” remarks but more cruel insistent remarks that i had guns on me, bombs in my book bag, people saying they were afraid of me because i might kill them. note that i had at this time never displayed any amount of violence in school at all. i turned up the volume on my cd player and ignored them until we got to school.

at school i removed my coat, fell in line with my group of friends, and walked to my locker. as per normal ben escorted me to class but there were a few classes where we did not go the same direction, so i had to face the hallways alone. there were more comments, about how i was going to blow up the school, someone asked me if my shot gun was in my locker. i had a melt down in the hall way between 3rd and 4th period, and ended up in the office. the faculty blamed me, because i wore a coat that was long. it was raining, and i was not going to go to school without a coat on! several parents had apparently called in that day asking for the removal of me, ben, and some of our friends. they threatened to remove their child from the school system if their demands were not met. thankfully the school could not expel us without reason, and the principal was able to diffuse that situation, but it was insulting, and humiliating, to be treated that way. these people had never met me, they knew nothing about me, all they knew is what their kids told them. this incident went on to be published in the local paper for some ridiculous reason. our names were not given but we were described and you could tell who the article was written about.

school was never the same for me after 4/20. i was abused more by my classmates, and a lot of faculty treated me like a walking bomb. our prom that year was very soon after columbine and someone had actually called in during the day to tell the principal that we were hiding guns in the trunk of ben’s car and we planned to shoot students from a hill as they left for prom early dismissal. as we were leaving that day (those with prom tickets got to leave early) we had our bags and vehicle searched by the principal and resource officer. ben was also searched again when we arrived at prom that evening. his dad threatened to sue them if they tried that ever again, and we never had to go though it again, but once more, humiliated, when we had done absolutely nothing wrong.

my senior year i wrote a paper on why columbine happened. we were supposed to pick a controversial subject, and so i chose what i knew. i explained what caused the attack, how people could really prevent another one, and i also shared some of my experiences with both bullying, and the treatment that came after columbine. my english teacher loved the paper so much she was speechless, and wanted to keep a copy. i hope that it opened the eyes of some of the faculty members there, but i will honestly never know.

these days kids seem to be more intent on killing themselves than killing their classmates, but the cause remains the same. what needs to be done, to save these kids, is to stop bullying. teachers, and other faculty members, need to stop letting this stuff take place. they need to punish the kids who are harassing others. parents need to pay attention to their kids, not just the ones being bullied, but the ones doing the bullying. its not just a thing kids do. its abuse, and it hurts. it leaves an indelible mark on you that you remember forever. now that i’m going to be a parent myself, and put my kid though 12 (or more) years of social interaction, i worry, but i also hope that things will change. and i will be there to change them. i will support my son as he goes though school, and i hope that he will not have to worry too much about bullying from his peers OR the faculty members. i will fight for him if i have to. i am not afraid to stand up to anyone.

i think this video sums up everything:

so last night i finally got my beta invite for mists of pandaria. i purchased an annual pass for world of warcraft when it was announced at blizzcon last year so that i could make sure i was invited to this beta, as well as get the free copy of diablo 3 when it came out. i figured annual pass purchasers would end up getting in before anyone else, but to my dismay it has taken forever just to get into the beta! half of my guild was already in, playing, and leveling for weeks ahead of me!

but last night it finally came and i thought the worst was over, the waiting was over, and i will finally get to play with the god damn panda bears. i have crappy internet, so i tossed the downloader on when i went to bed, expecting to have it to at least half way downloaded by the time i woke up. instead i was greeted with a downloader error, and my download had only gotten to 3% done while i slept

it appears to be a common problem among a lot of people trying to get into the beta, and no solution seems to be working for me. currently i’m pretty much done with the whole thing… as i do not have the internet capable of dl’ing it in any swift amount of time, and going to bed with it on seems impossible thanks to the error that shuts it down while i am incapable of restarting the download.

i will still most likely purchase the MoP expansion pack, because i cannot resist the temptation to play a pandarian, but i am honestly very irked at this beta test. i have been beta testing games since 2001 (ragnarok online) and this is the second time i have had a shitty beta experience where i couldn’t get the game to download properly. the first being the more recent Final Fantasy MMORPG.

at least diablo 3 comes out next month.