So… to get reacquainted:

We’re pregnant!! Baby boy is due at the end of August. No, he doesn’t have a name yet. Nothing feels right… I keep asking him what his name is, but he isn’t sharing. I have around 8 weeks left… I feel pretty good physically. I am really enjoying this experience. My only complaint is the swelling – my feet don’t fit in my nice roomy sandals anymore. (Someone at the clinic called them “cuuute!”) Oh, and my right hand has gotten all carpal-tunnel-y (swollen, numb/tingly, likes to drop things). Both are annoying, but perfectly normal for this stage. Much more concerning is all the stuff we haven’t yet accomplished as far as getting the house ready. Must. get. moving. Soon.

Olivia is 7 and thrilled to have a baby brother coming. She’ll be in the second grade in the fall. We still love her to death. She stays busy practicing her reading and writing, and drawings lots and lots of pictures for everyone she’s ever met.

Harry’s cooking at Whataburger again. Night shift sucks, but at least he has work. I’m still working for the same oil & gas company, praying for some prarie chickens (sage grouse?) to get out of the way in Wyoming so we can have our leases and start drilling already. We’re back in my mom’s house, which isn’t too stressful for anyone most of the time. We’ve still got 3 cats, just not the same 3 as when I was writing before. Stitch disappeared a few summers ago. We still have Ashes (7) and Kiko(5), and they have a new little (ha) brother named Harley(3). He weighs more than the girls do put together.

Aaand… that’s basically where we all stand. Pretty boring, I know.

I feel like I should add a warning label before I finish up… So, fair warning: if you hang around you will likely encounter thoughts and discussions about natural child birth, breastfeeding, cloth diapering, babywearing, and so forth… I am a crunchy mama in the making. And very excited about it!

10 dozen brownies made by my mom (need about 10 dozen more)

First batch of pumpkin cookies (7 dozen, came out beautifully)

Second batch, bleh!

Third batch, perfect. Current total, 16 dozen. (Hopefully that’s all of those.)

Next up, the rest of the brownies. Afterwards, about 15 dozen oatmeal raisin cookies!

It helps if you um, use them.

I just pulled the first pans of the second batch of pumpkin cookies out of the oven (the first batch came out brilliantly), and they didn’t seem to be baking properly. The others took about 11.5-12 minutes. These I gave nearly 18 minutes and they were still wet in the middle and not browning. I noticed when I started spooning them onto the pan that the dough seemed wetter as well. What’s the deal?

I taste one, and it tastes…. floury? Well, that doesn’t make sense. It tastes like it has too much flour, but if I had miscounted my 5 cups of flour and, say, used 6, the dough would be drier, not wetter.

Hmm….

Finally I notice my many pre-measured bowls from last night sitting on the bar, and it dawns on me.

I didn’t put the baking soda/powder/salt/cinnamon/nutmeg mixture in them.

Anybody want 7 dozen really plain, flat, floury pumpkin cookies?

I found myself wondering, whatever shall I do with my time now?! But, I found things to occupy me – catching up on my non-Blo blogs that I had neglected, message board friend, and um, that job type thing that likes to compensate me for paying attention to it.

If you’ll remember my horror the other day regarding our baking endeavor, you know what the title of this entry is about. (Hey, some bloggers Blog Through Birth, and I don’t have anything that pressing going on, so I’m working with what I have.) I decided to blog this insanity to keep myself in the habit of posting. Above, you can see all the goodies assembled neatly.

We have orders for 13 dozen Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies, 13 dozen Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, and 17 dozen Blonde Brownies. My mom made the first 10 or so dozen brownies for me tonight to get me started (thanks Mom!:D) but tomorrow, I’m on my own.

I measured out the ingredients for the batches of brownies my mom cooked to make life easier for her:

And the cats had to be held at bay (which left too much time for Harry to, erm, powder their noses):

Hmmm… I was going to measure out ingredients for a few batches to get started with in the morning, but I think I should just hit the hay. Stay tuned for whatever exciting happenings there are tomorrow!

(Ooh… this is the first post I’ve written in a month that didn’t need to be placed in the NaBloPoMo category.. it feels strange not to check that box, like a part of me is missing!)

Thirteen habits/obsessions I developed
during NaBloPoMo

13. Checking my SiteMeter daily hourly.

12. Checking my email/Dashboard for
comments hourly.

11. Waiting until the eleventh hour (literally!)
to post.

10. Surfing the NaBloPoMo Randomizer.

9. Bookmarking more “new reads” than I could
ever actually come back to (see #10).

8. Saying, “take a picture of ___ so I can blog about
it!” to my husband (though he rarely complied).

7. Trying to get people to visit my blog (hi
everyone!).

6. Trying to get people to start a blog (hi Jenna!).

5. Starting and drafting and deleting a ridiculous
number of posts.

4. Looking for worthwhile memes to fall back on (but
using very few!)

3. Answering a shocking number of questions with,
“Um, yeah, but I have to blog first.”
2. Checking the NaBloPoMo page for new prizes.

And finally…

1. Thinking about next year’s NaBloPoMo!

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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I obviously forgot to find some wood to knock on when I wrote that.

Harry took a few nice sparkly pre-order sign up sheets for baked goods with him to work today. He called me at 8am to tell me he’d filled up 3 pages and had made more copies. He called me at 10am to tell me he’d hit up another building down the way (still part of his company) just for good measure.

He took 51 orders from 36 people.

We tallied up orders over the phone on his lunch break. Next week, I’ll be making roughly:

3-4 batches of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies (approx. 6 dozen cookies per batch);
4 batches of oatmeal raisin cookies (approx. 4 dozen cookies per batch); and
6-8 batches of blonde brownies (approx. 3 dozen brownies per batch).

I think it’s a really good thing NaBloPoMo is over tomorrow.

I really can’t think of anything worth asking for. Sure, I’ve got a ton of cds and dvds I wouldn’t mind having. It just doesn’t seem like any of them are worth wasting a request for a gift on.

Oh, bother.

When Harry went back to work on Friday, I sent a large pan of leftover cookies and brownies and some of my mom’s fudge with him. The pumpkin cookies went lickety-split, and he got several recommendations that we sell them in the coming weeks. So, even though it sounds like lunacy to me, I guess we’re selling pumpkin cookies.

To me, that meant making up a batch or two, packing them up by the half-dozens, and sending him off to work with them. But he’s wanting to take it so far as getting pre-orders, and being much more organized about it. And then somehow, the pumpkin cookies multiplied and we’re also selling my personal favorite, blonde brownies, along with an old recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies that I ate tirelessly in college, but haven’t actually made since I graduated.

I hope we’re not getting in over our heads.

But, I knew I couldn’t skip submitting this picture when I took it yesterday.

I almost skipped this Hunt – I just kept drawing a blank. But the best ideas come when you stop looking, right?

I was goofing around on the computer, Harry and Olivia were watching Veggietales. I heard Harry quietly say I needed to come look at them. Seeing her laying with him nearly brought tears to my eyes, and I instantly had my “Time” portrait.

Without expounding upon the history too much, I’ll try to explain. Harry didn’t know Olivia existed until she was nearly a year old. We were newlyweds, still sorting out newlywed things like finances, and newly graduated things like jobs. With these and the new stresses of child support and custody proceedings, along with living 150 miles away from Olivia and her mom, we only saw her about 5 times during her second year.

Olivia’s mom and I look a bit alike, so she took up with me pretty well. But Harry had alot of discouraging moments because she just didn’t know what to do with him. Her primary caregivers – her mom, grandmother, aunts and great aunts – were all female, so she really wasn’t sure about this foreign creature that kept coming around. There was lots of screaming and crying and frustration for a good long while.

She’ll be 4 next March. It’s taken alot of persistence and even more patience, but we’ve been rewarded with less and less frequent reminders of where we started. We’ll never forget; but every successful moment we can capture puts it a little farther behind us.