My Pinterest Love Affair

I admit it, I'm in love with Pinterest. I adore having a more organized way to save crafts and party inspirations - it is SO much easier to follow a link represented by a photo to retrieve an idea than looking through a list of obscure text links. Most of all, the OCD organization freak in me (she has REALLY surfaced since I finished residency and have more time to breathe) has been making the most of Pinterest to help with my recipe filing and weekly meal planning. I shuffle recipes between boards titled "Recipes to Try", "Favorite Recipes", and "This Week" to make the most of my tech savvy recipe box.

Any recipe I come across and want to try out gets dumped onto the "try it" board. After I've made the dish once I decide if it's a keeper (or not!) and either shuffle it to the favorites board or delete the pin (so I'm not tricked into making it again if it was a dud!). My favorite organizational use for Pinterest is my "This Week" board where I plan meals, snacks, lunches, breakfasts, etc that I plan to make the following week. It takes some time to put it together, but it gives me easy access to all the recipes for grocery lists and they are easy to find when I'm in the kitchen cooking.

Tonight I made this delicious salad I pinned from Iowa Girl Eats. This will be make it's way onto my favorites board:

Summer Fruit and Grain Salad 

with local fresh grown blueberries, tomatoes, basil, mint, and green leaf lettuce.

Catch-up

In the past 7 months my posting has been sporadic at best, so I'm going to try to very briefly turn personal for a few minutes and explain what's been going on. Oddly enough, just when I finished residency and thought I'd have more time to blog (something I really enjoy) things got messy. I couldn't put words to what I was going through and couldn't ignore it, so I just didn't say anything at all. Now, with some perspective I'm ready to let it all out. To force myself to keep the shortest format possible, here's my recap of the past 9 months:

November - First full month home as a "stay at home mom" between residency and my new job. The good was that I found out I was pregnant (very carefully planned and intended, right on schedule). The bad was that I was struggling with being home full time and found bug and I didn't know what to do with so much time together (she was becoming spoiled and bratty and I was becoming restless).

December - First month at my new job and bug's return to daycare. The good was that I LOVED going back to work and bug and I were much more appreciative of each other (plus the holidays and all those other fun December things). The bad was that I ended up in the ER (first time as a patient, not a doctor) and found out I was having a miscarriage. I handled it well at the time, but slowly decompensated over the following months.

January - The good was that I continued to be happy at my job, bug readjusted to daycare and things with my body were slowly returning to normal. The bad was that I became obsessed with trying to predict periods, ovulation, etc and started to put pressure on myself to get pregnant again.

February - The bad was the first half of the month when I took multiple pregnancy tests that came out negative and became irrationally MORE frustrated as I felt out of control of my body. Outside my little bubble, my mother-in-law was having health concerns as well which made me feel even worse that I was upset about something minor and "normal" with myself when she was going through a much scarier time. The good was that we took our first "just us" vacation to the Great Escape Lodge indoor waterpark and the end of the month I found out I was pregnant again! 

March - The bad was that I started having similar symptoms to the last time I miscarried and ended up as an emergency fit in at the OB office. On ultrasound they couldn't see the baby and presumed I had another miscarriage. For a week I was absolutely miserable, convinced we would never have another child and worried that something was wrong with me. The good was that when I went back for one week follow-up they DID see the heartbeat and things leveled out and normalized (no idea why I bled or why they didn't see the baby the first time). Other good things included my mother-in-law having a successful surgery with a good outcome, my wonderful husband turning 30, fun celebrations related to that, and a new baby being born in the family-)

April - The bad was that I was still a nervous wreck and worried that the pregnancy was going to "disappear" again. Unlike my first pregnancy when we talked about it all the time and started making baby name lists, we barely mentioned it as if our silence would somehow protect the little embryo as it grew. The good was that our big bug turned 3! and as I neared the end of the first trimester we finally became more confident that things were OK and told our family the news.

May and June - No big "bad" events for us (a close relative had a repeat of my December though which stunk). My practice was growing and growing, bug was happy and healthy, and bunny bunny (nickname given to the baby by our bug) has continued to grow. We finally started to feel confident that the baby is well after a handful of ultrasounds and lots of activity that I started being able to feel at 17 weeks.

July - A really great and busy month for us - family vacations and picnics and parties, taking bug to her first Phish show, I turned 30 (yikes!), and pregnancy is still treating me well as I near the third trimester.

So that's it! In retrospect it sounds a bit less dramatic than going through it was (which is good!). Now I can file all the "bad" away as life experience and am ready to go forward as a happier and stronger person...