The Wilhelmsen Botanical Blog

Does anyone else wish mother nature would make up her mind?  The warm weather is nice but it seems a cruel trick to keep throwing snow days into the mix.  I am glad at least that the snow melts quickly because it is so warm.  This past week went pretty well.  We will be pretty busy from now until Lucas is born.  On Monday I heard about playgroup from our upstairs neighbor and she and I went with our kids in tow.  I tried to get to know some of the other moms a little bit but there were so many moms and so many kids that it was hard to really talk to anyone.  Aiden enjoyed running around outside and getting to know the other kids.   The other momentous thing about Monday is that Brandon started training at Vangent for the census job.

Tuesday evening I turned Aiden over to his dad for a few hours while I went to the Relief Society Birthday party.  The food was good and my friend and I reminisced a bit about our childhood.  Wednesday wasn’t too momentous.  We did take Brandon’s bike to get it fixed because he will be riding it to work twice this week so that I can use it.  One for a dentist appointment the other for a mommy and Aiden date (depending on how he feels/sounds).  It was a bit costly to repair but having a second means of transportation will be good.  Another thing I did early in the week (I don’t know what day) is that I made strawberry truffles from scratch (see photos below).  They were quite tasty, the strawberry flavor wasn’t very strong but there was a hint of strawberry and I really liked the texture of them.

Thursday was my 36 1/2 week ob appt.  Everything still looks good, we are a go for inducing on the 2nd of April (provided my cervix goes from being 1 1/2 cm. and 50% effaced (which is what it is now) to 2 1/2-3 cm. and 75-80% effaced, the doctor said he is confident that I will have no problem), and want to thank everyone ahead of time for being so willing to help us out with Aiden while I am in the hospital (and thank you to my mom for watching Aiden during my dr. visits).  Thursday evening we took Aiden swimming at a local middle school.  He is a little fish and loves the water but doesn’t understand when it is too deep for him and wants so badly to be independent in the pool.

Friday Aiden woke up with a cough.  It was wet sounding in the morning but by evening sounded dry.  Of course by evening he had a fever of 103.00 so we gave him some ibuprofin and a blessing and put him to bed.  I worried about him all night but he was fever free by morning.  He was however still coughing so I took him to After Hours medical care.  They checked the routine things and also checked for strep throat and the flu.  Aiden did really well with the strep culture, he just gagged a little bit and that was that.  The flu culture didn’t go as well though.  They had to swab his nose and it hurt a lot and Aiden got really sad and it took him a little while to calm down.  I was proud of him though.  It could have been much more difficult for the nurse to get a swab.  Turns out that Aiden does indeed have influenza type a.  The doc said it could be either regular seasonal flu or H1N1.  Thankfully we caught it with 24-48 hours of his first symptoms so the doc gave us a prescription for tamiflu which will shorten the duration of the sickness.  Needless to say we spent the weekend in and none of us really had a lot of energy so we mostly took it easy.

Aiden has had bursts of energy when his fever breaks so during one of said bursts he enjoyed hiding in this cardboard box.  On Sunday we celebrated Pi day by eating berry tartlets and I grumbled periodically through out the day about how much I dislike daylight savings time.  Our veggie of the week was asparagus, we ended up not making the risotto that we had planned for Saturday evening but we did have a ham asparagus gratin earlier in the week that was pretty good.  To me asparagus kind of tastes like green beans.

Well, I guess I will end this blog by giving you my list of things I have learned during my 2nd pregnancy.

1.  Chasing after a toddler while pregnant is hard, but doable.

2.  EVERY SINGLE PREGNANCY is different regardless of the gender of the unborn baby.

3.  Heartburn medications cause water retention while pregnant and this leads to lots of swelling.

4.  Bowel discomfort and round ligament pain is normal early on in the pregnancy as well as in the last trimester.

5.  Being 1 1/2 cm. dialated and any percent effaced at 36 weeks means absolutely nothing.

I hope that everyone has a good week.  It seems like maybe the spring weather is finally here to stay.  I guess we will see, thanks for reading!