Pregnancy Update!

Hey all!

   I just wanted to share that this past Monday, I hit my third trimester mark! So far everything is looking great. We are expecting another girl and are planning on naming her Emma Claire. Both are family names we thought would be great to honor. It took three ultrasounds to confirm she was a girl because she is such a wiggle worm! That's alright though, I absolutely love the kicks! A fun little reminder of what's to come this December!

   Just to update on how it's been going so far... My blood pressure has been absolutely perfect this time as well, just pray this pregnancy doesn't also end with preeclampsia! I passed my glucose test at 16 weeks, however they are making me retake it again at 28 weeks. That does have me a little concerned as the nurse said they wouldn't be doing it again unless they felt they should. *sigh* Anyways, I will continue to pray that I do not have gestational diabetes! 

   I did go to the ER a couple of weeks ago because I was experiencing very bad cramping and turned out that I was experiencing contractions for about a 9 hour period. It was so painful it had me crying. I couldn't sleep the whole night. Fortunately, everything was okay. The nurse explained I just have an irritable uterus. So that was scary but I wasn't bleeding and it all resolved on its own.

   One more thing I wanted to touch on quickly is my weight gain. I am very proud of myself this time around. I just hit 11 pounds gained so far this pregnancy.  I was told to gain 11 to 20 pounds for this pregnancy and I actually feel like I can do that! My last pregnancy however, I went overboard. I gained 70 pounds. I did retain a lot of water, but I was so sick in the beginning that I was losing weight. Once I was able to keep more food down, I took advantage and ate everything in sight. This time I have taken a much healthier approach and know better than to over do it.

   That's really all that I have to report about for now! Thanks for checking in!

--bree

Baby No. 2 Coming Soon!

Hi everyone!

    I know, I know... I took a little break from blogging recently. I have a teething soon-to-be 7 month old daughter and she is a little ball of energy. She is quite the delight, but as of March of this year, my hubbz and I have learned we are expecting our second child! I know what you're thinking.. "Didn't she just say she has a 7 month old?!". Yes! I know, call us crazy but it is happening and the two of us couldn't be more thrilled!

    I am currently 13wk2d along! So I have just entered my second trimester. I swear the first trimester goes by in the blink of an eye, and right as you enter the second, the stuck in the mud feeling comes over me and the rest of the pregnancy drags by! This is the hard part for me. For the next 7 weeks or so, I will have to endure the long wait of finding out the gender.

    In my first pregnancy, while carrying my daughter, Nora, I was literally sick up to the point of delivery. The nurse would come in with a cup of water for me because my magnesium drip dried me out completely. My throat stuck together and my lips were chapped and I needed water just to talk! But, unfortunately for me, as much as I love guzzling basically only water regularly, when I become pregnant my body just seems to be sickened by it. Couldn't tell ya why, honestly. But as I laid there delivering my daughter, there I was vomiting up water continuiously. (TMI, sorry!) However, so far in this pregnancy, I have only been sick less than 10 times. Unlike the last pregnancy, I crave spicy, hot wings and popsicles and now cannot stand grapes! I traded out for things I never even touched from one thing I could snack on all of the time. But that is pregnancy for you!

    I cannot wait to do updates, even if nobody ever reads this! It will be like my public pregnancy journal to go back to and reminisce on. I'm sure plenty of women can relate to some of the things I will be sharing! I will post ultrasound pictures when I can and keep it real honest. Let's admit it, pregnancy isn't that glamourous so some embarrassing things are bound to happen!

Baby Size Status:  Kiwifruit

Fun with Foreign Languages

здравствуйте! Hej! Hello!

    So it has been about a month since I have last posted anything and I'm sorry! So much has been going on and don't worry, I will catch you up in a later post. Anyway, I thought I would write about a hobby of mine: studying foreign languages!

    I have always wanted to be fluent in a language outside of English. I grew up with my Popeye (Pépère), a Frenchman and always wanted him to teach me his native language. My mother on the other hand had planned on me learning Spanish instead and told him he could not teach me French. I was so mad. I wasn't allowed to learn it at home or at school. I knew Spanish would always come in handy when looking for a job, but why couldn't French? My family is French. We take trips to Montreal all of the time. I thought, "What good will Spanish do me up here?". I really wish I could've learned. 

    But I went on to start studying Spanish in the 7th grade. I studied through the 11th grade. I took the Honors Spanish courses and always passed with an A. I'll tell you what though, I hardly remember a thing! I was never passionate about the language. I was always bitter I never got to choose on my own what I wanted to speak. In my senior year I took off learning a language in school. I had more than the required 2 years to get into a 4 year university afterward and with a very packed senior year schedule, I didn't feel continuing Spanish was necessary for me. The desire to learn a new language had dwindled for me as I entered my final year of high school.

    I had been taking an internship course, interning with my former kindergarten teacher and some special needs teachers at the local middle school. When the course had come to an end, my teacher had handed me this flyer for a job at a Montessori School part time and told me I would be a shoe-in candidate for it. I called up and ended up getting the job. I was thrilled! When I was introduced to the students, I had noticed many of them were bilingual, and one or two were actually trilingual! Mind you the students ages ranged from 3 to 6. I was blown away.

    One child knew English, Spanish, and was working on Italian. Two brothers spoke English and Korean. One girl spoke English and Russian, and another young girl spoke English, Crotatian, and Russian. There were other kids who spoke a second language but just off of the top of my head, those are the ones I remember the best. I was blown away. If only my mother had let my Popeye teach me French when I was young I would have had it down. But seeing this had rekindled a flame inside of me. A desire to start learning a new language on my own.

    I started with Danish. I picked it because it was different. I am a quarter Danish and I thought it would be great if I ever got to visit the country. My grandmother and her family are from there and not many people know it these days. It isn't a language that is taught in American classrooms. What was cool about it was that if you could learn Danish, you could basically speak Norwegian or anything in the surrounding area because the Scandinavian languages are all so similar. I began studying. I gave it a fair shot but I just wasn't seeming to pick it up like I had hoped.

    I then tried a little German on my own. I immediately was not interested. I just couldn't see this sticking. So once summer vacation before college had come, I signed up for two summer language courses. Polish and Russian were the languages. I decided I would try both for a class or two and drop one once I figured out which one I was most interested in. Polish was pretty cool (and I may go back to it eventually) but Russian just stuck for me. It came a lot easier. I picked up the cyrillic alphabet a lot quicker. I learned print and script in a day. I could read things and vocabulary work was easier for me. I will admit going into a Russian class was very intimidating for me (especially when the professor speaks 4 languages and her accent is super tough to understand). I thought I could never learn it in a million years, but I enjoy learning more to this day! My fiance, Scott and I took another course together last summer and practice together still. We were expecting our first child at the time and wanted her to be bilingual in something that we could help her learn. So far we are thinking we will teach her this. Unless my hubby takes up German. We will just have to wait and see when she is at that age!

Just wanted to give a little shout out to my awesome Popeye. He is by far the coolest grandparent a girl could ask for! The goofiest man alive and the guy who used to teach me profanity in French so my mother never knew what I was saying if I stubbed my toe or something ridiculous like that. Love you! :) 
 

Finding Non-Scamming Online Jobs is a Real Struggle!!!

Hey Everyone!

    Today I am writing with a bit of frustration. I want to help bring in some income, even if it isn't much. I am a stay-at-home with a beautiful almost 5 month old daughter. I won't be getting a job in the future because we will be homeschooling our children. Or that is at least our plan. Anyways, I have been online for about 2 weeks now looking at all kinds of ways to make money online. I even thought about getting creative to make money like selling stuff on Etsy. But in order to make the products I'd want to sell, I'd have to spend a few hundreds that I don't have to get the materials!

    So what's a momma gotta do to make some legitimate extra cash to help support her family these days? I have gotten excited over a few different sites. One was just sending e-mails to people and you get paid for each email and could make thousands of dollars a month doing that apparently. However you would be getting the people you e-mail to buy something that really isn't anything and I wouldn't feel right about ripping someone off!

    I have gotten pretty good at finding the bad in all of these sites so far. I use a website that just has you enter the site you're investigating and shows you how legitimate it is/isn't. I also like to Google reviews and use the BBB (Better Business Bureau) and check out their ratings. Don't be fooled by a lot of these so called "get rich quick" schemes. If it looks to good to be true, it probably is. Especially if it promises all of this money for doing hardly any real work. Just think about that.

    So I won't be looking for online jobs anymore. Don't get me wrong, there are jobs one can do from home that aren't scams. You can do data entry or calls or even write for people or companies. Look at actual job sites for those. Be smart about it and if you have to pay to be a part of the action, it most likely is not the real deal.

    As for myself, I think I will continue to give my blog a real chance. Many people these days make a good side income from blogging. I am no Lauren Conrad with my blog by any means, but that doesn't mean people can't enjoy or relate to my topics of conversation! If someone would ever comment on any of my posts, I would love to interact with my readers!


Have a Sparkling Day!

--Bree

Blink 182 Story

Hey everyone!

Today I am back with another fun little post. This time I pieced together a little paragraph sized story using Blink 182 song titles. Hope you enjoy. Maybe you can try doing some, too!

Dammit Josie, Don't Leave Me! You Always say that it's Time To Break Up, but please! What Went Wrong? You've got me so Down. I've been Up All Night, well After Midnight and I'm Lost Without You. For crying out loud, you're Wasting Time. Just Give Me One Good Reason why you're Feeling This way. I always feel like I'm such an Easy Target in these situations and you act like your Heart's All Gone. I just hope tomorow you'll change your mind and there'll be A New Hope for us.

Now I probably could add onto this, and I may in the future. For now though, it works! I hope you all enjoy these silly random little posts. I thought it would be my form of entertainment for you all on this blog! Please keep stopping by if you enjoy my content and feel free to comment leaving your thoughts!

Thanks!

--Bree

Coldplay Story 1

I used to have fun doing these things when I was younger. Figuring it would still be just as fun as it was back then, I decided to share a few of these with you. I'll do a couple within the next few weeks. I like to make silly stories out of song titles from bands! Maybe some of you will like these posts enough to create your own or request a band I do the stories with and leave them in the comment section below!

I used Coldplay as my inspiration today, and I will probably have one more from these guys soon. Enjoy!

Careful Where You Stand for you may get Lost! If you do find yourself in Trouble, A Sky Full of Stars could be your guide, your Atlas. It may lead you to the Cemeteries of London where Death and All His Friends gather at Midnight. Yellow Sparks will be the Warning Sign of the Spies who will come at you like the Speed of Sound. If they attack, it'll be like A Rush of Blood to the Head. Then they will have the Princess of China preform the Chinese Sleep Chant on you. You may see White Shadows appear, and perhaps even feel like you are Up With The Birds. It may even Hurt Like Heaven. But fear not, Moses will part Oceans to find you and Fix You. I hope this story doesn't send you a Shiver.


If you like this post, feel free to follow or subscribe to my blog! You can all feel free to follow me on Bloglovin', too!

Thanks for reading!

--Bree



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It's Scott's 21st! Party!

Hey everyone!

Today is my hubby's 21st birthday! Finally, we are the same age again (well we're only 4 days apart!) but it is an exciting time for the two of us. It has been an eventful last 6 days as every two days was something to celebrate for us all. 

Last night we went down to visit Scott's family to celebrate our birthdays together. It was a fun night for everyone. We had special homemade spaghetti and meat sauce and buffalo chicken dip as requested by my man. We all hung out and had a great time just catching up with one another. After dinner we all waited on the delicious ice cream cake that we all later destroyed... Hey! Who doesn't LOVE a good ice cream cake though, am I right?

To get to cake however, we had to first open our cards and gifts! We both had really sweet, heartfelt cards from his parents and on the inside was a gift card to Olive Garden and one for the movies! His sister then handed us a card that the younger siblings all signed. She was hinting left and right for the two of us to get on making baby no.2 already! The older siblings also handed us another card with a gift card to TGI Fridays. Finally, we cut the cake and all sat down in the family room to watch the new episode of the Walking Dead.

And so to celebrate tonight, we are headed to Olive Garden and straight to the movies to see Kingsman: The Secret Service. I will most likely order the same lasagna I get there every time, but I'm mostly in it for their salad and, of course, their infamous bread sticks! I probably won't toast to his birthday over red wine. I hated the red wine I had over Valentine's Day. Maybe we can try white wine together and split some tiramisu!

Happy Birthday, Scotty. I love you! 

Feel free to wish him a happy birthday in the comments below!

Thanks for reading!

--Bree