Chinchilla, anyone?

So last Wednesday my friend Anne Marie and I headed to the Natick Mall, which is one of the poshest malls around, complete with Neiman Marcus, Juicy Couture, and Anthropologie, with Gucci coming soon. It was a lot of fun, but I'd have to say one of the highlights was stopping in Neiman Marcus to use the escalator. "This store's really expensive," Anne Marie told me. I saw a tank dress with beads on it (about 20% of them were already falling off) and said, "Ok, I'm guessing this dress is $80." I grabbed the tag and it was $350! I started laughing it was so ridiculous. We started pulling things off the rack just to see how expensive they were. The best, though, was when we went upstairs and checked out the fur coats. I'm not joking: there was a chinchilla fur that went for $32,000. "That's a mortgage right there!" Anne Marie gasped. We must have spent a half hour in there, addicted to the rush of ridiculously over-priced items. The weird thing is that so many of their clothes really were in bad shape. If I'm going to spend $350 on a dress (which I most obviously am not) I'm at least going to expect the beads to be stable! I just couldn't believe where some people's money goes. p.s. I do have to admit, however, that chinchilla fur is the softest thing I have ever felt in my life! (just not $32,000 worth soft!)

All by my lonesome

So Eric is in Boise this week and I am alone for the next several days. I went grocery shopping and picked up some sweet & sour chicken, as well as some strawberries and whipped cream, a treat for me! Hey, I know Eric's getting spoiled by his mom so I figured I'd indulge a little too. Several of you have asked me about my pregnancy so I figured I'd take some time and share with you the highlights.
1. The cravings: ok, for those of you who haven't seen me in a while but will in the near future, prepare yourselves. I am huge. I'm not talking just tummy huge. I'm talking arms, face, back of the neck, legs, and cankles huge. Which is fine, I mean I'm pregnant, but I just want to warn you. It's not exactly a pretty sight. But there is a reason for this: my cravings. These would be potatoes, meat, potatoes, meat, and more potatoes. Oh, and on top of that, anything extremely fatting or life threatening. No fruit or veggie cravings here. The strawberries I bought are supposed to help remedy that (of course notice I had to buy the whipped cream too).
2. Work: everyone at work says to me, "i don't know how you can be on your feet all day doing massage and being pregnant!" Well, the way I can do it is that I have to! I just use all my extra body weight to reeeeally lean in on the pressure, and bingo, the client's just received a deep deep deep massage, and all I've had to do is sit on them (just joking). Today a client came in and looked at my belly and said, "give me all the pressure you can." Well, whenever someone says that to me, watch out! This little prego therapist isn't as harmless as she looks! The whole massage he was wincing (but said he loved it), and during the massage leaked out, "you're a strong woman...." Yes! Mission accomplished. Never challenge a pregnant therapist! But seriously, sometimes it's hard but I'm really doing alright at work.
3. The sex of the baby: we aren't finding out. Eric thinks it's a girl, but really we have no idea.
4. Names for the baby: so for those of you who don't know, we are choosing to name our children after trees. At first it was mountains, but there weren't enough names I liked to stick with that idea, so we switched to trees, one of our favorites of God's creations. As to what those names are, well that is going to stay a surprise too! But just for fun, if you'd like to throw in some tree name ideas, they would be fun to hear. Just please leave the name Dogwood out!
Well I think that is all the juicy stuff I can think of for now. We just had our first birthing class last night and loved it!

New York City, Baby

So as some of you know, one of my pursuits in the last 5 years of my life has been to visit New York. I have almost made it several times, but my dream was finally realized last weekend when Eric and I made it down there with some friends of ours, Dan and Lisa Hadley. What can I say? It was so much fun and I absolutely loved it! It was a quick trip, and probably for the best, because by the time the bus pulled out of Manhattan for Boston, the four of us were a bunch of wet noodles. I mean we were exhausted! But it was well worth it! As you can see, I was squeezed pretty tight into my rain coat, and by the end of the first day my ankles were completely non-existent because of edema. Basically my calves ran straight to my feet. I wish I would have gotten a picture.
So these were my impressions, for those of you who have never been there. There seemed to be things going on on every corner. Chinatown was packed with shoppers and street vendors, with all kinds of fruit for sale that I had never seen before! I wanted to try everything. Rockefeller Center had it's ice skating rink open already, and for a moment I wished that I could have skated there. I would love to go back during the Christmas season. Eric's not a crowd person at all, and even he enjoyed it. Anyway, it was cleaner than I had imagined, although we did spend most of our time in Manhattan. We stayed the night in Brooklyn, with some of Dan and Lisa's relatives, and it was actually a pretty quaint little area. By the way, the pizza and hot dogs are as yummy as you hear. Bottom line: if you don't mind being on your feet, by all means go!

Speaking of budding plants....

So I was thinking today of that broccoli and it reminded me of one of my apartments at BYU. It was by far my favorite; we lived in the loft of an older home, and my roommates were like my sisters. Anyway, the linoleum in our kitchen started to have these little raised areas. It almost looked as though there were bubbles underneath. One day I looked down at the corner of the bathroom and kitchen and there was a cluster of mushrooms. Now I have to say that we had previously had mice in this apartment, and as disgusting as that is, the mushrooms were even worse. Fungi growing in your kitchen! It was a serious invasion of my living space. There might as well have been a bunch of conspiring thieves in the corner. Anyway I ended up laughing so hard I had to take a photo. Mushrooms ended up breaking through the linoleum in random places, until eventually the landlord pulled up the entire floor and replaced it. Talk about gross!