I stopped in at the local supermarket on my way home from work to get a few things for dinner.

Teenage Check-out Chick: Is this celery?

Me: Erm, no it’s shallots.

A moment later…

TC-oC: Are these Lebanese Cucumbers or umm… normal ones?

Me: That’s zucchini.

Honestly, what does her mother feed her????

I just got my results back for the swine flu swabs that were taken on Monday — negative! Ham sandwich, anyone? I have to say that I’m tired of being sick. Don’t get me wrong, I love laying on the couch and watching tv as much as the next person but after two days of it, I’m ready to do something else now.

This is bloody brilliant!

I did a quick pregnancy test on Friday morning and got a big fat positive almost immediately. The line was very dark, even for a cheap ebay pregnancy test. The husband has been sick so he wasn’t getting up to go to work but that didn’t stop me from barging in, flicking on the light and showing him the test strip. Needless to say, he is very very happy.

I was very reserved with my last pregnancy and although it didn’t end the way we’d hoped, I’ve decided to really enjoy every day of this pregnancy. On Saturday morning we drove out of the city to Cobbity which is a little town south-west of Sydney and walked around their markets in the early winter morning chill. It was very country; there was a lot of fresh produce (carts full of pumpkins, cauliflowers, spinach, etc) and lots of knitting, crochet, quilting, paintings, etc. I bought a circular quilted play mat that has a hidden drawstring around the outer edge so it pulls up into a storage bag for the baby toys. Perfect for a quick pack up when visiting friends and family. :)

I had to go back to the IVF clinic this morning to have my levels tested. The results came back this afternoon: the beta hcg was 3936 and progesterone was 189! I thought I was about 15dpo but I guess I’m further along than I thought. I have another appointment to see the professor in three weeks and he’ll do an u/s then. No wonder that line was so dark! I mentioned my numbers on a preggo forum that I frequent and the general consensus was multiples but I’m trying very hard not to freak the fuck out think about it. LMP was 2 June, I had a blood test on 22 June which showed I’d ovulated but a couple hours after the blood was drawn I had the telltale CM so I don’t think ovulation could’ve occurred all that long before. The betas were done on 6 July. Based on that, I don’t think I was more than 15dpo but I’ve been wrong before so who knows. My previous doctors didn’t order betas before so I didn’t know what was high. The clinic nurse only said that they want to see numbers higher than 100. Based on LMP, EDD is 8 March. I’ll just have to be patient until the ultrasound in a few weeks.

Inevitably I’ve caught a cold and given that I work in public health, I was sent to the influenza clinic to be swabbed and sent home. Apparently there’s a blanket directive to give all health workers Tamiflu on development of flu symptoms. The clinic doctors decided against giving me Tamiflu because I’m pregnant and while they are generally saying that it is safe in pregnancy, there’s not a lot of research to support that claim. I’ll stay home tomorrow again and wait for my stupid swab result.

I stopped by the haberdashery store on my way home and bought some extra green thread so I can use some of my sick days to finish my quilt. Now that I’m pregnant it seems that I’ve got such a short amount of time left to knit all the stuff I want to make for the baby. And uni starts up again in a couple of weeks. Must get cracking!

Once upon a time (about twelve years ago) there was a girl (me). She signed up for an evening college course to learn the ancient and magical art of quilting. Unfortunately for the girl, the weekly class was filled with older (old) women all of whom were members of the quilters’ guild. They took the art of quilting very seriously and stitched the entire quilt together by hand. The girl was a little surprised and disappointed by this. She was very much of the opinion that if there is an easier and faster way of doing something, then by all means it is better to do it that way. However, she perservered with the tedium of cutting out the quilt pattern pieces and hand-stitching each one together. Unfortunately, time as always was relentless and the weeks flew by but she had made precious little progress on her quilt. With two weeks of the course remaining, she spent the weekend hunched over her vintage Waltons Celestial sewing machine (circa 1976) until all of the quilt pieces were joined together. The girl was enjoying working on the quilt and would have loved to continue assembling it but she needed further instruction from the instructor so she packed it away until the next class. On the evening of the class, she hurried in to the room and excitedly unpacked her work-in-progress and waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the other women arrived for the class and the instructor visited each table to comment and give further instructions… until she reached the girl’s table. What happened next would stay with the poor girl for years and years to come. The teacher sucked in her breath quickly and hissed something about her having MACHINE SEWN the quilt instead of using the traditional hand stitching method. Two women at the next table over heard the teacher’s exclamation, their heads turning and gasping in shock. This gasp was also over heard by the women at the following table and they too gasped in disbelief. A wave of gasps and hisses moved through the room until all eyes were fixed on the girl. The teacher declared that the girl would unpick the offending stitches immediately and left the girl to stare dumbly at her beautiful quilt and fight back tears of humiliation. She never returned to the class and the quilt remained in the back of the cupboard until several years later she gave it to a friend of a friend to finish. She never saw it again.

As for the Waltons Celestial sewing machine, it eventually developed a nasty case of incurably bad tension and given its age, it was deemed not worth repairing. The girl’s husband gave her a wonderful new Pfaff sewing machine for her birthday; a special sewing machine that came with all kinds of fancy quilting extras, not that she ever expected to use them. She brought the sewing machine out occasionally, though it was usually to fix a fallen hem.

Fast forward to modern day (last Monday night to be exact). The girl is a little older now (just a little) and a little wiser (what am I saying, she knows everything; just ask her!) and had felt like doing a little creating, or nesting, or maybe just something a little different from her usual knitting. This desire coincided with a 20% off everything sale at her local haberdashery store. After an hour of dragging bolts of fabric around the store to compare colours and patterns, she settled on a selection of quilting fabrics in greens and browns and matching thread. The fabric sat on her dining room table for much of the week while she considered the possible patterns for her future quilt. On Saturday she prewashed, dried, trimmed and ironed all of the fabric and then today she spent the morning carefully cutting many (oh so many) five inch squared umm squares. Next she arranged the squares in various patterns until she settled on one that she really liked. It was almost lunch time and the girl decided to take a break from her quilt to make some pikelets for lunch (her husband’s favourite). After lunch she started sewing all of the squares together and was having such a great time using the fantastic quilting features on her near-new sewing machine until, incredibly, she ran out of green thread! She vowed to buy more thread during her lunch break tomorrow and will finish sewing the last row of squares together, before sewing a brown frame and then a slightly wider green frame around the assembled squares. Then she’ll just have to sandwich the quilt front, batting and backing fabric (a tasty green paisley) and free-motion stitch them together, then sew on the binding and it should be finished!

The end.