No more drama allowed!

Last week, after having that whole swine flu scare, ( and being nervous about every cough or sniffle) I had to have my 28 week Glucose tolerance test. They told me that I could eat a normal breakfast before, just not sugary stuff like a candy bar or something....which, by the way IS my usual breakfast. So I had to settle for some toast instead. Then I went and had the test done, and it came back high! So, when this happens, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have gestational diabetes, it just means that you have to go have another test done that is a fasting test where they give you the drink after fasting for 12 hours and they take blood samples every hour for three hours(which really means four because they have to have a baseline sample to make sure that your fasting glucose is normal.) So anyway, fortunately that one came out normal because the gestational diabetes diet is a lot stricter than any diet I have ever done and I don't think it would have been so good for me because I'm a really bad sugar tooth.

Other news:
There are some pretty big fires burning up the mountain in New Harmony, which is just south of here. New Harmony is actually in our stake, and we received a call from David's elders quorum president on Saturday to ask if we could have people come to stay with us because they were evacuating New Harmony. Most of the people aren't actually leaving because they are concerned about their homes. The new governor has declared some type of state of emergency for the area. They are actually likening it to the California wildfires that have been a problem for the past few years. So far, I think there have been three homes burned to a crisp.
It's been very smoky in town. It looks like there is a big cloud of fog everywhere you go, but it's actually smoke. It has been so thick, you can actually look directly at the sun and it looks bright red. It has also been raining ashes at our house for the past couple of days. Everyone I've talked to who is actually helping fight the fire (I'm not, because I'm a pregnant fatso.) says it's not getting better because the wind is creating very difficult fire behavior. Pretty crazy. All of this started from a lightning strike that's actually been burning for a couple of weeks, but got out of control some time Saturday. I'll take some pictures to go with this post and put them up too.

Swine Flu Blues

I worked a night shift last Sunday, and during the shift my partner and I were paged to help with a Life Flight because the Cedar City Airport is shut down for the whole month because it is having its runways repaved. Because they were not able to fly, the Life Flight crew opted to drive to Cedar from St. George and use one of our ambulances to take the patient to Dixie Regional for further care. My partner and I went to the ICU to help move the patient over to the ambulance equipment and then turned the patient over to Life Flight for the transfer.
At about 5PM on Tuesday evening, my supervisor from work called to let me know that he had just received word that the patient was a confirmed Swine Flu patient, and because of the exposure, I needed to get to work med as soon as possible to be evaluated and to start Tamiflu treatment as a precaution.
Tamiflu is a class C drug for pregnancy. This just means that no tests have been conducted on pregnant humans, however in tests on pregnant animals, Tamiflu has created complications either with the fetus or the pregnancy. Class A is considered safe. So, with all of that, I've decided not to take the Tamiflu for now, unless I actually start to have flu symptoms. Swine flu is thought to have a 5-7 day incubation period, and I'm on day 7 now. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
But one thing that is probably more interesting, in the context of how serious these pandemic type flu viruses have the potential of being, is how many people I may have exposed, just in the time before I knew I had been exposed. They are predicting that during the flu season, the mild strain of Swine Flu will mutate and have a possible 50% mortality rate, so think about how scary this could be.
On Monday, I stayed home most of the day but probably most important to me, was that this was the day I would have exposed my family to the virus. Later that night, I went to a summer party with the Cedar Fire Department. Cedar City only has one fire department, so think about the implication that one infected person could potentially have the ability to disable that entire entity in a community.
Tuesday morning, I had a twenty seven week appointment with my OB. While sitting in the waiting room, I could have exposed several more pregnant women, as well as Dr. Gatherum and three of his office staff. I found out that evening about the exposure, but this is only day two. Most people don't have the luxury of being told when and where they might have been exposed, and with such a long incubation period, most people wouldn't be able to track their exposure.
I'm not going to go through the rest of the days of the week, but I did have a lot of things scheduled last week and would have possibly exposed a long list of people before even showing any symptoms. Kind of scary to think about, don't you think?

Our Summer Camping Trip

It's hard to call an overnighter a "camping trip," but that's about the level of adventure we are up to these days. On Monday afternoon we went up to the Jackson family property to stay in a tent, make dutch oven enchilada's and cobbler, and do all things camping.
When we got there we walked around the property and walked down to visit the pond. We had Scooby with us and as soon as he saw the sheep, he thought he had a job to do and set off chasing after them. Then we went and set up our campsite.
After we had our tent set up and the air mattresses blown up, we could hardly get Mckinley out of the tent. She called it her cave and wanted to do nothing the rest of the day but sit inside it and read her animal book to her 3 baby stuffed animals. She even begged us to let her put her Jammies on.
We went on a nature walk with scotch tape around our wrists, sticky side out, and made bracelets with some of the very pretty things we saw. We even found a very rare snipe feather! Mckinley's got dirt on it and nothing would stick to it after that, so she took it off. But poor David got stuck doing this girly activity and with another girl on the way, there will be plenty more where these came from.
We started making dinner when we got back to our campsite. This is David cooking the Enchiladas. This has become our traditional camp food. They turned out really good. We also made peach cobbler, another favorite. Yummy!

While the food was cooking, we had a little family night lesson with Mckinley about holding to the rod. We then went and held to our own "rod" that led us all through the trees with a treat at the end. See the rod? Haha.
After dinner, we sat by the fire and watched two owls swooping around us. It was so quiet, the only thing we could hear was an occasional sheep bleating. Mckinley finally got to put her jammies on, and was so happy to read a story together. As soon as we told her she could lay down, she was instantly asleep. (but she was snoring like a little brown bear, so we had to wake her up and give her a Benadryl to clear her nose out.)
We woke up the next morning, ate some cereal, hung out for a bit, then came home. Mckinley is a camping queen now and didn't want to leave. We will have to make sure to get back up when the leaves are changing.
Scooby loves camping too!

100 days to go and some fun snacks!

Mckinley and I made some really fun snacks just barely. These are edible fish aquariums!

It looks kinda gross if you don't realize that the blue water is actually just colored cream cheese, not icing, spread over four club crackers. If you soften the cream cheese a bit in the microwave it becomes more spreadable. Then we put aquatic "plants" made out of celery on the bottom of the tank. The "sand" is crushed rice crispy cereal. Mckinley wanted to make a sand castle in hers, so we used more club crackers for it. We finished the project off by adding a school of baby goldfish. Yumm! If you wanted to do a sweet version of this snack, you could make a zoo of animal crackers,(substitute icing for the cream cheese if you want.) We had a lot of fun making and eating our aquariums, so see what creations you can come up with.



Another fun thing about today is that we are now just 100 days away from when our baby is due. It feels like this time around I am having more fun with the pregnancy because I haven't felt sick much, and we already have just about everything that we will need for the baby. I'm also not in school this time, so that helps keep my stress levels down. Mckinley asks us every day about her little sister and is so worried about the whole thing. We have been doing a lot of reassuring with her because she already seems to be feeling a little displaced. She has been our baby for so long that I think she is worried that she wont be anymore. Don't worry Mckinley, there is plenty of love to go around. We have been very relieved to see our ultrasound and see that everything seems to be going really well with the baby. I was having trouble with one of my kidneys at the beginning of the pregnancy and wasn't able to take prenatal vitamins. So it was reassuring to see that she was healthy.
None of my regular clothes fit. I had to resort to bigger sizes and maternity clothes about a month and a half ago, whereas with Mckinley, I only had two maternity outfits because my regular clothes stopped being comfortable just a couple of weeks before I had her. Much different this time. I can tell I'm going to get bigger with this baby. This is me at 25 weeks and five days. Tomorrow we will be in double digits. Woo Hoo! (oh yeah. David says my face is fatter than usual. Nice.)