Magic pillow

Being pregnant has been such an incredible experience. I really mean that. Even though I was there when both of my sisters were pregnant twice and I was there while a bunch of my friends were pregnant and I had heard stories all my life, there is SO MUCH that I had no idea happened to your body, to your psyche and to your spirit during pregnancy. I know that my friends and family were not holding out on me. Having been there now, I know that a. you think some stuff is just too unimportant to talk about, b. you think some stuff is too weird to talk about and c. you think people will get sick of hearing you talk about it so you just keep it to yourself. Some helpful information I have gotten from people I know but a lot of it I have read about. I like being very educated on any subject that I am a part of. I have even learned some things from medical publications that my own high-risk doctor didn't know. I really feel like I might be an expert on this pregnancy thing. For me, anyway. The really strange thing about pregnancy is that a lot of women share a lot of the same symptoms. Then again, a lot of women are really very different from others. Most differences in symptoms has to do with your body and mind and how you react to different hormones. It was interesting for me to find that what you eat and what medications you don't take and how often you exercise are the basics for being able to control how horrible you feel, on a general scale. Of course there are major exceptions as sometimes women have problems way out of their control from the early stages of pregnancy. Then you just have to sit your happy bum in the bed until the doctor says it's time. The greatest thing about educating myself on this whole having-a-baby thing is that it takes a lot of the fear and anxiety out of it. I have just been able to relax pretty much from the beginning. I still get a little nervous about the episiotomy and I hope I don't have to have one. Lucky for me, there is a lot of information out there about how to prevent it. Wow! I digress.

The only real negative I have experienced, aside from the early, occasional nausea and early, extreme fatigue, has been lower back pains on the right side. (By the way, I had read a book very, very early in my pregnancy which informed me of how much exercise plays a part in getting you through that fatigue stage. It really worked. It is hard to make yourself plow through when you feel that tired but it was so worth it and I always felt better because of it.) The back pain seemed to increase with running as I got further into my pregnancy and by month five I was really feeling some pain. I couldn't sleep well and then I would feel pretty bad the next day from lack of sleep. I had a hard time getting up from a chair or out of my car. I couldn't walk fully erect during most evenings. Warm baths didn't seem to relieve it either. Aaron would rub the painful spot when it got too bad to deal with. Luckily that did help long enough to get a few hours of sleep.

Aaron has this client, Natalia, who had twin boys three years ago. She met Aaron last week to pick up a machine she had ordered. When she got out of the car, she said, "I have something for you," and pulled out this enormous pillow. Aaron had not even told her about my recent struggles. She just knew and even said, "I figured she would be getting pretty uncomfortable by now." Blessed, sweet, wonderful Natalia!!!!!

This pillow takes up half the bed at least. It also puts a border around me so there is no more snuggling for poor Mr. Ferrell. I am sure he is glad to get his sleep back, though. The pillow is like a mini recliner for your bed. All that it is lacking is a cup holder. Oh, it is so perfect! I have slept so soundly since I got it and, miraculously, I have no more back pain during the night or most of the day! I honestly haven't slept all night for months until the magic pillow entered my life.

After I ran yesterday evening, the pain was back and I got worried. Just not knowing if it will only get worse as I get bigger causes worry. I can handle it for now, but it does border on overwhelming at times and I have tried very hard not to take any kind of pain reliever since I got pregnant. It appears I have nothing to worry about, though. (Knock on wood.) After my run, I picked up the house, watered the garden, made dinner, did dishes, fed the dogs, put up the chickens and duck; all the while my back continued to hurt. As soon as I crawled into bed the pain started to subside. This pillow allows you to position yourself just right to completely alleviate the back pain. It is just amazing!

So that is the very long, drawn out story of my magic pillow. If you are pregnant or know somebody who is, I highly recommend this for you or them. This particular pillow is a LeachCo Back n Belly pillow. You can find it online for seventy bucks with shipping. I have not seen this exact pillow in any of the baby departments I have been in so online may be your best bet.

Sweet dreams!

~Shan

Sticking around la casa

This week, Aaron and I have lived outside our normal routine and it has been so nice. Usually we are go! go! go! from the minute I get off work until we go to bed at night. The routine is usually:

Get home

Change clothes

Let the dogs out

Clean a little or water/weed the garden while he finishes his FedEx's

Love on animals

Grab gym towels, water bottles and gym bag

Head to FedEx and drop packages

Go to the gym

Go to dinner

Sometimes run some errands after dinner

Go home

Feed and put up animals for the night

Work on projects or finally relax

Shower & hit the hay

But this week has been:

Get home

Change

Water or clean

We run around our town vs going to the gym

(he has finished his FedEx's early, dropped them off and returned home by the time I get there)

I make dinner while he works on his race car trailer

Clean up

Feed/put away animals

A little lovey dovey

Lights out

So much better! Plus, I already had almost all the food for three night's dinners at the house so nothing's going to waste this week.

Aaron says it's getting us ready for when Small Ferrell comes. We'll be used to being home and eating there instead. It will be winter when she arrives and I don't want to drag her out in the cold while she is so small. I am looking forward to playing with my old recipes again and coming up with some new yummy stuff for dinner, too.

Aaron finished redoing his trailer last night and is almost ready to race in a week and a half. I am so excited for that. He hasn't raced all season. He has been so busy working to sock away money for the baby. He has worked late almost every day and all weekend since we found out I was pregnant. I am glad for him to get to work on his projects now, relax and have fun. He totally deserves it!

Tomorrow I will tell you all about the pillow that has saved my pregnant life.

Ciao for now!

~Shan

Small World - Big Belly

Here I am, days away from my third trimester with Small Ferrell. Aaron took this picture of me at the Alliance Run in the Dark 5K race this past Saturday. We moved his sister, Caron, out of her home in The Colony most of the day and got home just in time to get ready for the run. It was such a beautiful day!

Josh, our neighbor across the street, went with us. He has ran a few times with Aaron but has never been able to finish a 5K run without walking. This was his first race. He paced himself better and was able to finish without walking! I was so proud of him for trying. Aaron did well. It wasn't his personal best by any means but given that he's been training around an ankle injury and not ran more than 6 times in the past 6 weeks, I thought he did great. He even beat our other neighbor, Alana, and her boyfriend. Both of whom are in their early 20's and run marathons. I was so proud of Aaron as well. Mostly I was proud that he actually gave his ankle time to heal. The old Aaron would not have been patient enough to wait it out. Instead he has packed in his cardio on the elliptical. The race was a success for me, too. I finished without walking and, even though I am SO MUCH SLOWER than normal, I wasn't turtle slow. I can deal with it for now. For the first time in a long time I got passed by more people than I did pass. That was irritating but I am keeping my eye on the prize and my heart rate in check! Paula Radcliffe I am not but I won't give up. Everything I read reflects years of research showing that women who continue to safely work out during pregnancy have much easier labors, healthier and more content infants and a shorter period of recovery. I am all for all of that!

So here's where the small world comes in. We show up at the race, register, put our shirts in the truck and then find a place on the lawn to plop down and stretch. Aaron and I spotted the cutest puppy either of us has ever seen. I went over to talk to its owner; this really nice, dark haired lady. She told me the dog's name was Walter and he was an 8 week old French Bulldog. Aaron said if they stayed that size he'd have about 15 of them. Anyway, she asked about my pregnancy and said she was impressed I was still running. She said she ran during her pregnancy until the last few months when it just got to be too hard on her and then she switched to stairs instead. I have been doing a lot of stairs on days that my lower back is killing me. She said she experienced an easier labor as well and encouraged me to keep it up.

Later, I looked over and saw our neighbor, Alana, talking to that same lady. I hollered at her and she came over to chat. She said the girl with the dog, who is friends with the lady I was talking to, is Alana's boyfriend's sister. Imagine that!

Then, during the run, I got passed by this barefoot runner. He wore a shirt that read, "I run naked on sharp, pointy objects." He was only naked on his feet but that made me laugh. Shortly after mile 2 I passed him back. He seemed to be in a little bit of pain, feet-wise, so I joked, "do you need some shoes?" He replied, "More like a piggy-back ride." I showed him I was already carrying one in the front. We both laughed, I ran on, and then I'll be danged if that shoeless runner didn't pass me back with about a 1/2 mile to go. I could never catch up and I was bummed! :)

I told Aaron about him and his funny shirt. He was amazed that someone could run that far and fast with no shoes. The next day I got a message from my friend, Amanda, asking if I had talked to a shoeless runner at the race. It turns out he lives down the street from her and while lunching together, she told him that I had ran that race and I was pregnant. He figured out it was me who had talked to him along the way. Super small world!

I am getting anxious for Small Ferrell. She moves so much now which makes me feel relieved and connected to her. Today I bought her a pelican water pitcher for rinsing her hair in the tub. It's cute and reminds me of my Gramma Gale's rhyme...Oh what a bird is a pelican. It's beak can hold more than its bellycan. He puts enough in its beak to last a weak and I don't know how the hellican. She never cursed so we would gasp when she would recite it. It always makes me smile to remember her saying it.

Guess I'll take my vitamins now. Arrivederci!

The Tree

The house I grew up in was previously occupied by the Jones Family. They had a son, Homer, who was born sometime around the turn of the 20^th century. When Homer Jones grew up, he became a successful business-man, dabbling in cattle and oil the old-fashioned Texas way, and then he married Frances. They built a house right next door to the one he and I grew up in so I knew them throughout my childhood and adolescents. When Homer was a little boy, he planted a cottonwood tree in the backyard of that original house. I grew up under that cottonwood which, by the time I came along, was huge. My dad set up our trampoline under the umbrella of that magnificent tree. I can remember countless afternoons of lying on my back on the trampoline, watching planes make their way to DFW and staring at the blue sky between the green, waxy leaves. Oh, those leaves! If you have never heard wind through a cottonwood, you are missing something special. It is a uniquely distinct sound and because I grew up with it, I can feel at home almost any place I run into it. In fact, the day I realized I was in love with Aaron, I had been lying on the dock at the lake while he worked on his boat, listening to the nearby cottonwood dance in the wind. Also, my favorite place in the whole world is the Grand Canyon. On every hike I have been there, just as I am feeling beaten by the desert, I stumble upon a lone cottonwood perfectly placed for me to rest under until I find my strength. Cottonwoods are a part of my life.

Walking home from school or a friends’ house, I could always spot that tree from blocks away. My parents have very green thumbs and they took great care of all our trees, bushes and plants. Our cottonwood was taller than most other trees in our neighborhood. The squirrels played on its long branches and made a home in a knot-hole way up high. The birds flitted in and out of the tree or perched on branches and sang us lovely songs. It was a perfect shade tree and it protected us from the cruel Texas heat, summer upon summer. It was a wonderful yard to live in with our tree towering above.

Years after I moved away, my dad spotted a large snake climbing the tree. He saw the snake work its way to the knot-hole where the squirrel family dwelled. Over the next couple of weeks he kept an eye out for the snake. Instead he saw less of the squirrels as, one by one, the snake consumed them or scared the survivors away. Knowing my mother’s fear of snakes, he waited to report the events to her but realizing the snake would likely reappear to her shock and horror he finally divulged the information. He continued to watch for the snake but apparently it had moved on during the night or some other time my dad was not holding a vigil at the base of the giant cottonwood.

My mother could never grasp the concept that the snake was gone from her yard. My dad tried to explain that the squirrels were gone and there weren’t any other animals so the snake was gone, too. It didn’t matter to her. Her skin would crawl each time she stepped foot into the back yard and gazed up at the tree.

One week my dad went away to a funeral in Arkansas. My mother stayed behind. It was a beautiful time of year. Spring was coming on and she had lots of work to do in the yard; work that she loved. She and my dad had gone to the nursery, the days before he went out of town, to get some new flowers and things for her garden. When I went to keep her company in my dad’s absence, I noticed that all the new plants were still in their pots sitting around the patio. I asked her why she hadn’t started working; wondering if she was fearful of a late frost. She finally, sheepishly admitted that she was terrified to enter the yard without my dad there to protect her. I tried to coax her outside to do what she loved and enjoy the wonderful weather but she would have none of it until he returned.

It wasn’t long before we all realized that even with my dad back home to be the snake guard, my mother was never going to be comfortable with the snake tree. She started making strange observations about how old the tree was, that it was self pruning and dangerous, that it just didn’t look as nice as it used to. For a short while we brushed it off but soon it was obvious she wanted rid of the tree. Her final argument was that one of the branches was likely to fall off of the aging tree and knock my dad unconscious or kill him. So as crazy as it sounds, (because it is!) my dad had the tree cut down to settle her nerves. My nerves, on the other hand, were shot! I couldn’t believe that they would cut down a gorgeous tree with so much meaning to our family because of a snake that nobody had seen any sign of for months. I cried and begged them not to do it but it happened all the same.

To my surprise, the very afternoon that the tree had been cut down, I came home from work to find the entire trunk sitting in our back yard. It was incredible and I cried some more. Aaron had listened to my tearful pleas to my parents and had known for years how much I loved that tree. So much so that his very first purchase after we wrote the contract to buy our home was three tiny cottonwoods of our own to plant around our property. Upon learning that my parents were actually going through with cutting it down, he commissioned a wrecker service to bring it to our house. The trunk weighed so much that it nearly tipped the wrecker over when he tried to load it. I was overjoyed to have it with us.

Years before I had been to a fireside talk at Grand Canyon. We all sat on logs in a circle around a park ranger while he told us stories of the canyon. Aaron and I decided to mimic that to an extent. We set the freshly cut log in the center of our back yard, built a fire pit out of beautiful Austin stone in front of it and circled the whole thing in limestone underfoot. Year after year we gathered on the log to roast marshmallows, watch the fire and talk with family and friends. It was one of my favorite things about our house for the nine and half years we had it.

Sadly, at our last Halloween party, the top of the log started to cave in. It seems the sun’s rays did some harsh damage to the very tree that used to protect me from them. Upon closer inspection the next day we determined much of the log had rotted. Aaron thought some wood could be salvaged and he devised a plan to keep parts of it and make something out of it later on. He contacted a saw-mill where he learned how to cut it and where to deliver it and how long it would take to get back. I wasn’t quite ready to cut it up, though, and instead would drape thick blankets over it if we were going to sit on it to keep from sinking into the cracks.

After this past summer of incredible heat and no rain to speak of since I can remember, the log deteriorated even more. I knew Aaron was right when he indicated it was now or never if we wanted to be able to salvage anything from the log. So last weekend he dragged out the chainsaw and got to work on the tree. First he carefully cleaned out the rotted top and middle by hand. We were astonished when we lifted parts of the tree trunk and felt how light it was now. Then he rolled it over to get a good look at the remains and see which parts were worth saving. Luckily, before he put the log down in the yard, he placed pavestones under it to protect it from the ground. Doing this saved the underside of the trunk so only the top, exposed to extreme heat, was rotted. Finally he trimmed a very small amount off the end of the trunk. What was left resembled a canoe and I immediately thought, "I could float in that." My parents came over soon after and that was the first thing my mother said as well.

True to form, Aaron’s brain was busy thinking about what to do with the log. He had changed his mind on having the saw-mill chop it up and was now set on finding a way to keep it in tact the way it was. He has always been really creative and he can imagine things coming together much better than I can. After pulling the log to the front of the back yard, he carefully power washed it. Then he left it in the sun to dry out again. After that, we went inside and sat on the counter in the kitchen, which we do often; each one of us getting a corner on either side of the sink. He looked up at the ceiling around the rooms and told me he thought the hollowed out log would look great hanging from the ceiling as a light fixture. I thought it was the perfect idea! I have been lit up inside ever since. I can’t wait to see it in our home, lighting up the room, just waiting for someone new to come over to hear about its life.

According to my dad and Aaron, we can coat the log with oils that will protect it and keep it in its present condition for as long as I’m alive. Unfortunately it is just too soft a wood to withstand Texas summers outside. But I couldn’t be happier that we had it to perch on around our fire for almost a decade and now it will shine on inside with us.

When I think about all that Aaron has done to preserve this piece of my own history, without my ever even asking, my heart overflows with gratitude. It is just one of the countless things he does for me, and for others, to try to bring happiness to our lives. He is incredibly giving and such a wonderful friend. I love the way his mind works. I was at work when it struck me just how much he had done with that log so I sent him a message thanking him. I told him how sweet and thoughtful he was. He replied that he loved me and thanked me for saying that. Finally he said, “I’m glad you are the kind of person who likes that kind of stuff. You’re sweet.” Talk about melt your heart and make your day! How lucky am I!