Team Grammatikii

This month has been rough. Not for me, personally, but I have had to watch some of my dearest friends go through some serious crap. Family issues, lay offs, break ups, mental health problems, buried secrets, and on and on and on. It started a few weeks ago, and then kept snowballing. It kind of all culminated by the end of last week when I got a flat tire during my lunch break, and was stuck downtown until someone could come and get me. At least I had the good sense to get my Dairy Queen blizzard first or else some pregnancy hormones might have gone crazy. Is my flat tire a big deal? Nope. Not at all. Those things happen. But after watching and hearing and feeling for my friends through all of their BS the last couple of weeks, it was really the last thing that I was hoping for. And I think everyone knows sometimes your head space just gets too full of CRAP, and then everything seems like a huge deal. Sometimes they are, but most of the time it's just stuff getting blown out...

Just a little one! D's travel scheduled changed, so we were able to move up the BIG appointment! Now it's Wednesday, November 16. I know, I know. It's only two days. But the sooner, the better! AND - we are only 35 days away from 8 days of beachy heaven! What a great fall!

Just a quick update! We had our 16 week appointment today. The Little Newton is just cruising right along. I was a little concerned when our doc was looking for his (I still maintain it's a HIM) heartbeat. The last time she did, she didn't have to look at all! This time he was hiding in the back corner, and didn't want to be bothered. She searched him out though, and there it was. WHOMPWHOMPWHOMP. Everything is looking super duper. We did choose to go ahead and do the non-invasive Down's Syndrome screening. It's just some blood work that does some basic testing. We should find out those results next week. I do have to put in a good word for Nurse Blood Drawer. Typically, I HATE getting my blood drawn. I have chubby arms and deep veins. I always ask them to please just skip trying my arms and go straight to my hands. It's just easier (and less painful) that way. They don't really listen, and end up sticking each arm a couple of times. Eventual...

So, Daniel and I are normally big travelers. We visit his fam in Germany once or twice a year. We try to add on an extra stop in Europe each time we go. We do lots of weekend trips to see our friends and family that are spread across the country. Some people like sports tickets, some like seeing concerts, some like TVs or whatever. We like to travel. And this little Newton is getting his wings early! In the next few months, we are going to be crazy people. Two weekends ago we kicked off the insanity by visiting one of my FAV places, Denver. Fortunately, this fav place has one of my BFFs of 10 years, a handful of more close friends, my favorite foodie places, and shopping zones. We went specifically for the Great American Beer Festival . If you haven't heard of it, check it out. A crap load of brewers, tens of thousands of people, and we volunteered to pour for the brewers. So we got in free, drank free (well, not me), and got to people watch for HOURS. I highly recomme...

For those of you who haven't heard, I will soon be getting more roundish. Baby Grammatikos will be making his/her appearance on or around April 2, 2012. (That makes me about 14 weeks along.) One of my good friends calls me Figs. (There is a reason, but it's either ridiculous or I can't recall. Or both.) And she started calling it Fig Newton. Now we just call it Newton. So, from here on out, the he/she shall be Newton. Daniel and I could not be more excited. We have both always wanted a kid (or kids but we will see how this one goes), and God worked out this timing pretty much exactly how we wanted it. It happened a lot faster that we were expecting. So...good for us? I don't know. I didn't believe it for a long time. I took three tests, and waited the agonizing four weeks to go to the doctor to get a real test. And then, sure enough, we saw it. There is a little bean in there. Well, now it's a lemon. But you know, it's actually in there. I had a ...

Some of you may know, but most probably don't that I have something called Synaesthesia. It's super super interesting. It involves synapses in the brain that fire....weirdly. Not really incorrectly, but on different paths than normal. There are numerous forms of this...tasting shapes, feeling colors...etc. My form is grapheme or color synesthesia. Wiki has a great page on the whole thing. It's a much more condensed version of Cytowic's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia Anywho...grapheme. I read letters and numbers in color. I have for as long as I can remember. I figured out about third grade that other people didn't, so I never talked about it. Until doing some Young Life training, and one of the leaders and I got into a convo about it, and she showed me a magazine article. I am part of synesthete.org and participated in a small study they did. it involved being shown 150 different letters and having to choose the color they were, in two different scena...

6 days. 147 hours. 8867 minutes. 5320549...48...47 seconds until VACATION. (No, I didn't do the multiplication on my own. I have an app for that.) Next week, we will head to Germany again. This time we will be joining with a large group of the family to celebrate my mother-in-law's 70th birthday. As some of you know, this was supposed to be a big surprise. Alas, it was not to be. I had blocked all my German relations on Facebook save for one. The one I COMPLETELY forgot about. Daniel's GOSSIPING cousin. And after successfully keeping the secret for four months it got blown to smithereens in seconds. The good news is that my MIL was already VERY suspicious, and now she has cause to be excited and sanitize every inch of her home until we arrive. This will be my fifth trip over the Atlantic. That's weird to think about. Five times? Have we even been together that long? Sometimes it's hard to wrap my head around what my life has become. I randomly me...