Giveaway! Yoplait Greek Yogurt

Welcome to my very first giveaway!

My Blog Spark recently asked if I'd like to try the new Yoplait Greek yogurt. I have a friend who had raved about Greek yogurt, so I was excited to give it a try.

With 12 grams of protein -- twice that found in leading yogurts-- new Yoplait Greek nourishes from the inside out. Available in four delicious flavors, Strawberry, Blueberry, Honey Vanilla and Plain, the brand’s newest offering has a unique thick and creamy texture with the unmatched taste expected of Yoplait.

Unfortunately, the morning sickness set in soon after I agreed to do this and dairy isn't high on my list of "edible things" at the moment, so I turned this over to Josh and the kids to taste test for me. All three of them LOVE yogurt, they go through so much of it, I have a whole cabinet of empty yogurt containers I use to store leftovers in. They decided on Strawberry and Honey Vanilla and it was a big hit. Sierra says it was "more solidy-er" than regular yogurt, which can be helpful in minimizing messes with the kids. They all liked the taste and the smoothness. I like that each 6oz cup has 12 grams of protein--my midwife recommends that I follow a high protein diet during my pregnancies and this would help me reach my daily goal.

Yoplait has a $0.30 off coupon available for downloading so you can try Yoplait Greek Yogurt too!

THE GIVEAWAY:

One reader will win a Nourish Your Inner Goddess gift pack (shown above) and coupons for two free cups of Yoplait Greek Yogurt.

HOW TO ENTER:
Leave a comment letting me know what flavor of Yoplait Greek yogurt you'd like to try.

Limit one entry per person.

Giveaway is open until 6pm CST on May 3, 2010. I will use random.org to choose an entry and that person will win. I will post the winner on my blog and will email you directly if you leave me an email address (or I already have it). The winner will have 48 hours to claim their prize before I draw a different winner.

FTC Disclosure: My Blog Spark and Yoplait provided me with information, a gift pack and free product coupons as well as a gift pack and free product coupons to offer one of my readers. All opinions expressed are my own.

Slowly Improving

I've managed to eat and drink reasonably well this week. I went back to see the doctor Monday and was still feeling pretty cruddy at that point. She made some diet suggestions and switched me to orally dissolving zofran. I'm doing a lot better than I was, but not super great yet. I am eating a decent amount and drinking juice and I feel like the nausea is improving. I think I'll be able to stay out of the hospital and this will pass soon.

I have some exciting news...I'll be hosting a couple of giveaways on my blog. The first one should have gone up last week, but I was just a tad preoccupied ;-) I will get it up tomorrow or Saturday, so check back to enter!

Hospital it is

I did end up in the hospital Thursday morning. To say I was in bad shape at that point is a huge understatement. Two and a half days, 7 bags of D5NS (saline with some sugar added), and roughly 10 injections of zofran later, I'm back in my own house, sitting up, drinking on my own and feeling fine aside from the general anxiety that I might crash again without my trusty IV. The good news is that I'm 9 weeks along today and theoretically, the hormones (and the sickness) peak around 10 weeks, then get better. That is about when I started feeling better with the girls and I so very much hope it's the same this time around.

Still Sick (of course)

You may have noticed the lack of quilting updates. That would be because puke stains aren't quite the kind of embellishment anyone wants on a quilt, so I'm staying away from my pretty, oh so close to being done, masterpieces....or mediocre-scrappy-pieces, whatever.

I'm still sick. Well, "sick" is a vast understatement. Yesterday, I actually decided that a few days in the hospital on an IV would be NICE. Having had both a hospital and home birth, I choose home birth hands down because I HATE HOSPITALS. I hate the routines, I hate the loss of autonomy, I hate the germs, I hate the "because we said so" procedures, I hate the "informed consent" that really isn't. I see hospitals as great places for major lacerations and heart attacks, not pregnancy and delivery. But yesterday? I was ready for an IV. I know how to put in an IV catheter (on a dog, anyway...can't be that much different) and was fully willing to do it myself, but seeing as how I lack the supplies, the hospital was seeming like a mighty fine option. By the afternoon, I was feeling better and more hydrated and decided if I could get myself through until Monday, maybe the doctor will just run a bag of fluids in me in the office without having to go to the hospital. To make that even remotely possible, I had to change something though.

My handy dandy watch allows me to set 3 different alarms, so every two and a half hours last night, my alarm went off, and I forced myself to reach into the little cooler Josh had put by the bed and get out two chunks of cheese to eat. Not exactly pleasant, but oh what a difference it's made this morning. I wasn't starting from square one this morning, it was more like square two--and that was a nice place to be. I ate a bagel with cream cheese and a few grapes for breakfast and it was mildly enjoyable. If I could just get one bite of something down every 5 or 10 minutes, I think I could even get to a point where I'm not really sick.

People have asked me if I was this sick with the girls. It's hard to say....With Sierra I slept most of the day for a few weeks and lost 15 pounds (and no, I don't have 15 pounds to lose....I think my pitiful weight gain throughout her pregnancy contributed to the pre-term labor with her). With Sedona, I took Zofran and Phenergan on a regular basis, which got me to work, but I still lost a fair amount of weight. I don't have issues with lots of vomiting...sure, that happens, but for the most part, if I can get it down, it stays down. My problem is food aversions. I was talking to my mom yesterday and came up with the perfect analogy--imagine you were really sick and someone put a poop sandwich in front of you...yes, poop...and told you that if you'd just eat it, everything would be fine. Gross, right? Yeah, well just about everything in the world is a poop sandwich to me right now. And what is mildly okay one day, is unbearable the next, so I don't even have a list of tried and true favorites. I'm holding out hope that since the pattern is relatively similar to what I had with the girls, I will also be pretty much all better in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I've been on self-imposed bedrest...another thing I've insisted I HATE ever since I did almost 11 weeks of it with Sierra, but I just can't imagine doing anything else at the moment.

I'm a Crappy Pregnant Lady

I suck at being pregnant. I love babies--nursing, rocking, even changing diapers. Toddlers? My most favorite age (so far). We'll ignore the frustration that is 3 and 4 year olds. 5 year olds that are so proud of doing for themselves and helping others? Awesome. But being pregnant? It pretty much sucks. Each time I've told myself I'm going to appreciate every second. We lost our first pregnancy and I feel some deep seated karmic debt there--I SHOULD appreciate every second. I know firsthand what it feels like physically and emotionally to suddenly be cured of the ills of pregnancy and it ain't pretty. But no matter how good my intentions, my appreciation lasts for all of 2.6 days. I just don't like being sick. I can handle the exhaustion, the sore back, the waking up all night to pee, the sore boobs, the itchy skin, the feet in the ribs, even the pre-term labor (if and when it pops up). But the being sick? That's got to go. I have no idea how the hyperemesis gravida ladies do it.

And the thing is, I'm not even technically sick. I haven't thrown up a single time, which means I'm doing "better" than I did with the girls. No, I just feel like I'm going to throw up any second...and it lasts pretty much all day long. If I can force myself to eat, I do okay and the food stays down, I've just gotta consciously will myself not to gag with every single bite. I really, REALLY don't want to eat (which is not conducive to curing nausea). I have seriously considered if there's a doctor out there who would put me in a medically induced coma and tube feed me for a few weeks. See? Weeks. Not even months. If I follow the same pattern as previous pregnancies, I'll be good to go by the first of May. I'm such a wuss.

And while we're on the topic and I'm in such a jolly mood, I'll go ahead and answer a lot of the speculation I'm hearing....yes, #3 was planned. No, we were not trying to get a boy (a boy would be fine, but we're really kind of hoping for another girl). And no, we aren't planning on anymore after this.

50 Books in a Year

Every year on my birthday, I start a new list of books with the goal of reading 50 books in the year. This past year, I finally reached my goal...just barely! I finished my 50th book ON my birthday! So here is where I'll keep this year's list. You can click the links for the 2009, 2008 and 2007 book lists.

Past Reading
2006:
30 books
8,222 pages

2007:
37 books
14,326 pages

2008:
41.5 books
15,072 pages

2009:
50 books
16,199 pages

1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I know this is supposed to be the hot new series, but I really didn't think it was worth reading. You start out with a couple hundred pages of Swedish names (sorry, but hard to keep all those straight) and background political/economic info. Throw a brutal, graphic, unnecessary rape scene into the middle, and then the very end of the book finally gets good. Actually, the ending was good enough to almost make me think about picking up the next book, but the beginning was so incredibly miserable (and I heard the next one has a slow start too) that I just can't bring myself to do it. (600 pages)

2)Nights in Rodanthe by Nicholas Sparks. I'm not a big Nicholas Sparks fan and this was a typical Nicholas Sparks book, so there ya go. Love story following by impossibly sad ending. The main couple in this one is an older, divorced woman and man. They meet by chance and get a weekend together. (256 pages)

3)Cinderella Man by Marc Cerasini. This was one of the books available on the book shelf at a recent Country Inn and Suites stay (love that hotel!!). It's been a fun read about a depression era boxer named Jim Braddock. I'd like to see the movie now that I've read the book. (288 pages)

4)Floating in My Mother's Palm by Ursula Hegi. I picked this up at a garage sale, because I had already read another book by Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River. This book was written before Stones from the River, but has a lot of the same characters and there is overlap. The book is set in post WWII Germany and told from the point of view of a schoolgirl. It's a very enjoyable read, but there's not over-arching plot line, it's just a collection of stories about the town and the people in it. (187 pages)

5)The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. This was a book club pick. You follow the narrator from her teenage years up to adulthood and see her lessons, and failures, in love. While it made sense, it really irked me that the writing style was so choppy and immature in the part of the book where she's the youngest. Since that's the beginning of the book, it just got off on the wrong foot for me and never seemed to improve. (288 pages)

6)Not My Daughter by Barbara Delinsky. This is a fiction story about three girls in a small town who make a pregnancy pact. One of their mothers happens to be the high school principal and was a teen mom herself, which adds an interesting twist. This was the first fiction book in a long time that I really, really liked and couldn't put down. (352 pages)

7) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Katniss Everdeen is a teenager in a post-revolution America that is controlled by "the capitol". In a show of power over the citizens and a reminder to them never to revolt again, the capitol takes two teenagers from each of 12 districts and puts them in The Hunger Games each year. The teens are expected to fight to the death until only one victor is left. While the book is plenty gruesome and at times graphic, it does bring up some really interesting food for thought about revolution, political power, and "group think" as well as things like self-sufficiency. This book had me hooked from the very first chapter. I read the whole thing in one day and couldn't wait to get the next book. (384 pages)

8) Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. In the second book of the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is back and the capitol is not happy with her. The book focuses on how the capitol is targeting her and hints at another revolution rising up. Just as interesting as the first book, I also read this one in one day. (391 pages)

9) Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. This is the last book of the Hunger Games trilogy and it's just as good as the first two books. In this one, Katniss has become a symbol of the revolution and the rebels and the capitol battle for control of the country. (400 pages)

10) When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be by Amy Wilson. This book was laugh out loud funny. It reads like a collection of blog posts put together and any mother who's vowed to feed her children the best diet possible, then found herself handing over a box of lucky charms to buy herself 15 more minutes of sleep on a Saturday morning will find plenty to identify with here. (272 pages)

11) The Treatment Trap: How the Overuse of Medical Care Is Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent It by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Singh. I'm not an easy patient. I don't have a problem saying "no" when I disagree with a doctor or doing my own research (and I have the science background and the resources to really research, not just type things into google). I know that a lot of modern medicine is practiced the way it is because "that's the way it's always been done" and not because it's evidence based. So, I was an easy audience for these authors. All that said, there is some really good and eye opening (and well referenced) information in this book for those who may still be operating under the "doctors are the unquestionable authority figure" paradigm when making their medical decisions. (240 pages)

12)The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This was another book club pick and it was a very interesting non-fiction read. The book tells the story of the woman HeLa cells (which have been used in research labs all over the world for decades) were taken from. It's hard for me to tell because I already knew about the cells and how they're used, but I feel like there is enough background in here for anyone to understand the science. The majority of the book though is about Henrietta Lacks, her family, and issues of medical consent. The short story: Henrietta Lacks was treated for cervical cancer in the early 50's. Some of her tumor was cultured and it was discovered that her cells could be kept alive indefinitely under the right conditions. We call this tissue culture and her cells have been being reproduced and used to test various scientific theories ever since. The really sticky issues are that she never knew her cells were kept and since that time, companies have profited hugely by selling her cells. Meanwhile, her descendants don't even have health insurance. Definitely one of my favorite book club picks so far. (400 pages)

13)The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This was a book club pick back when I was so sick in the beginning of the pregnancy. I went ahead and read it recently because everyone said I'd really like. It is a post-apocalyptic setting and a man and his son are trying to make their way South before the weather gets too bad. Whatever has happened to the world, everything is covered in ash. There are no wild animals, no fish, and plants won't grow. So the only things they can eat are canned goods they scavenge out of abandoned stores and houses. To make things worse, groups of people are hunting other people to eat. I get why everyone thought I would like it--it's a survival tale. I had two main problems with it though. The first is that it's the most depressing survival tale imaginable. I mean, eventually, the food will run out and you can't grow anything, so it's impossible to truly survive. Secondly, the story just starts and just stops. There's no true beginning or end. You don't know what happened to cause the situation and you don't find out what happens in the end. Some things are open to interpretation, but I'd really rather have some sort of beginning and end. (304 pages)

14)In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan. This is the follow up to The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I read back on my 2007 book list. I have been wanting to read this forever and it was pretty impossible to get to the top of the wait list at the library, but right before we traveled back to Montana from Texas one of my book club buddies surprised me with a gift card to get it for my Kindle so I could read it on the trip back. After reading Omnivore's Dilemma, you almost feel just beat down about the food options available, but In Defense of Food comes along and gives you some rules to follow, the main one being "eat food". Which doesn't seem so hard until you realize that so much of what we call food is a conglomeration of artificial this and ethoxylated that and comes in a box. One of the clarifications he puts under that particular rule is to stick to things your great-grandmother would recognize as food. These rules are the backbone of the book and well worth reading and considering. He also discusses nutrition science and recommendations quite a bit, how they're formed, what they mean for the consumer, and what you should do about them. I know quite a bit about how our food is produced, how it gets to us and how it's regulated and there are A LOT of things I'd like to change about our diet--ideally opting out of the entire dang system--books like this help me take baby steps towards a better diet for all of us! (256 pages)

The Big News

For those of you who didn't see it on Facebook, Sedona has an announcement to make:
Yup, Number 3 will be joining us sometime around Thanksgiving (well, likely a week or two earlier given my history). We had an ultrasound this morning and saw a flickering heartbeat and all the lab work has come back great, so things look good! This affects our moving plans slightly (as I alluded to a while back)....we planned this out so that hopefully I will be over the majority of the morning sickness by the time we leave. I mean, really, who wants to heave all the way through a 30 hour drive? We are also loosely considering the possibility of coming back to Texas to deliver with the midwife who delivered Sedona. We trust her completely and that's a big important thing in childbirth. We have already lined up a midwife in Montana and we'll see what we think of her, but the option is still on the table at the moment for the girls and I to spend roughly 2-3 months down here in the fall. So, we will still be moving as planned, we just may be having an extended vacation down here later in the year.

Oh, and quilting? I'm still working on quilting, but between utter exhaustion, increasingly frequent nausea and the girls being home full time, a lot of that work has centered on thinking about things (as opposed to actually DOING them) for the last week!

A Quick Update

I know, I know...I've disappeared. We had a great time celebrating Easter. The girls and I went to a friend's house on Friday to have an egg hunt, and we had my parents over Sunday for an egg hunt here at the house. When Sierra ran out into the yard, one of her shoes fell off she was running so fast. We tried to stop her and she yelled, "I don't care! I'm getting eggs!" and did the rest of the hunt barefoot. Of course Sedona had to be continually prodded along, she wanted to stop and eat the candy from each egg as she found it. With the new handy dandy DSLR, I ended up with over 100 pictures, but I'll just put 4 of my favorites up.




On Tuesday, the girls went back to school. When we arrived that morning, there was a sign posted that school would be closed for the month of April starting the next day. They attend a very small Montessori School with only one teacher. She has a family issue to take care of (VERY valid to close the school), so I have the girls home with me unexpectedly. I'm slightly stressed about it, which is ridiculous---they were home all last summer, and they will be home indefinitely starting in June. I think I just do better with a little time to mentally prepare! We brought home Sierra's books from school and I will spend some time each day homeschooling her starting next week. Even though she's really far ahead, she is in Kindergarten now and a whole month without any school work seems a bit much (aside from the typical summer break).

With all that going on, I just haven't worked on the quilt like I should. I have the Spindrift top completely pieced and as soon as I pick a fabric to use (going to try to use something I already have), I will do a post on borders. I have sewed all my sashing to my blocks for the Scrap Happy quilt, but I still need to sew each row together and put all those together to make the entire top. That one doesn't have a separate border, so it will be ready to quilt at that point.