Tag I'm "IT"

I’ve been “tagged” by my friend Gina. I’m IT! Being IT means I have to divulge 7 random facts about myself, which is fun:-)
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1)Since Gina talked about peeing on pregnancy sticks, I’ll share my own pregnancy test stories.
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First time – Jordan. I “knew” I was pregnant even though it was technically a surprise, and we were using multiple forms of birth control… everything short of dressing Chris in full scuba gear. I can never do anything without doing it in excess, so I started by peeing on one – positive. Then I bought every other brand in the store and got a full array of different colored double lines, plus signs etc.. I bought Chris a card, a little pair of baby socks, and put them along with a few pregnancy tests in a small “you’re going to be a daddy” gift bag.
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Mikailey, I also “knew” before it was even time to know. She was planned so I waited as long as I could possibly stand it. I drove to the CVS near Taco Bell and bought a test, but I was so sure I was pregnant I didn’t want to go home to take the test. I had 2 year old Jordan in tow and I brought him with me to the Taco Bell, bought him a choco-taco ice-cream and had him eat it in the bathroom while I peed on the sticks in the stall. Getting my double lines as expected, I was able to avoid a two trip afternoon with a cranky 2 year old. We went and got the baby socks, the card, the gift bag, and I presented it to Chris when he came home from work.
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The twins – lol, we *thought* we had this down to a science because apparently I’m obnoxiously fertile. We planned on a June baby, which would have given me enough time to graduate in May and take the summer off. So much for planning, lol. This time around we wanted to be exact in our timing, so I made the choice of buying an ovulation predictor kit. Hmmm, still not sure if that was a good idea. I had never used one before, but sure enough it told me when I was ovulating and we took care of business. Only one problem – you’re supposed to continue testing after the “peak” to confirm that it was the real thing. As expected, the line got lighter but then exactly three days later it got really dark again. Figuring I was just not a seasoned OPK user, I woke a very sick Chris up (poor guy had a fever, strep throat and bronchitis) showed him the line and dragged him out of bed. Only about 12 days later when I was already puking my guts out did it occur to me that I may have ovulated TWICE. Was it even possible to get pregnant twice on two separate days? Nah, I thought I must be imagining things! Chris went out and bought our ritual baby socks when we got our positive pregnancy tests because I was already feeling like crap.
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Chris hadn’t planned on going to that 8 week appointment where they confirm the pregnancy and look for heart beats with the special ultrasound (you know the one ladies, lol), because he had a *very* important business meeting. I didn’t mind, I’d been through this twice already and I’d bring home pictures. But by 8 weeks I was *sure* I was having twins. I just knew it in my gut (which wasn't holding anything down, by the way!). I called Chris the morning of the appointment and told him he HAD to come because I was having twins. He got a lot of crap at the office, but made it to the doctor’s thinking I was crazy. He joked with the nurse that he was just “making sure I wasn’t actually having twins” and she reassured him that the chances of that were slim. When two heartbeats appeared, Chris turned as white as a ghost. He was holding a 4 year old Mikailey and didn’t drop her, but kind of lost a grip and let her slide down his leg to the floor. The twins had separate membranes and placentas, so it was clear they weren’t identical. At that young age, when measurement is very precise, they measured exactly 4 days apart in gestational age. I asked the doctor if it was possible to conceive twins on two separate days, three days apart. She confirmed that yes, it is possible. Sperm live for up to 72 hours, and the cervix doesn’t close as a result of being pregnant until an egg is fertilized. I ovulated twice on different days and both eggs got fertilized. Of course enough swimmers from ovulation day 1 might have lived to fertilize both eggs regardless, but my advice to those who are planning on one baby – don’t “try again” if you notice that you ovulated twice!!

2) While on the subject of babies, I’m going to reveal a secret that only a few close friends and family knew until now. We sold the twins’ names on ebay for $10,000. No that’s not a joke. Here’s how it went down. I was 16 weeks pregnant and we saw a story on the news about a woman in CT who auctioned off her baby’s name on ebay, at first just trying to think of a name in a fun way. It ended up selling for 10K to goldenpalace.com – the internet based casino that advertises by doing crazy ebay auctions because they can’t legally advertise any other way. They named her, of course, GoldenPalace.com. They are the ones who bought the “Virgin Mary grilled cheese” for 70K and made worldwide news. They paid somebody else 10K to tattoo goldenpalace.com on her forehead, which is a rotten deal if you ask me. I did some research – they usually *never* buy the same weird thing twice. I did some more research. In CT it costs $200 to legally change a name. If you make a mistake in the hospital, however, you can correct the spelling and get a new “original” birth certificate for free within 2 weeks. So up our auction went – “Name our twins – buy one get one free!” and for 10K we promised to name the babies what they wanted, provide copies of the birth certificates and one picture of the babies in GoldenPalace hats. We doubted they’d notice the auction or do the same thing twice. It was just a joke really….until they emailed us and then called. We did it! Yes, within 5 days we got 10K wired to us from an off-shores Caribbean account. We were financially hurting in a big way at the time, and despite the negative publicity we got (although it was always just in theory, we *never* did a news interview in person), we didn’t feel like we did anything mean – their names would change, and this would make it possible for us to buy them what they needed and put a down-payment on a place with more than 2 bedrooms.
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Now here’s the funny part. One twin was supposed to be GoldenPalace.com and they couldn’t figure out a name for the other. Better yet, they forgot to make us add in to the auction the little term “publicity rights” which would mean they could put our stuff on their website (they just assumed we'd want to because most people who sell to them like the attention) – we never allowed them to put our auction or the babies' pictures or birth certificates on their infamous website. Within a week they bought triplets’ names, and then soon after came the Pope’s old car. They forgot about us!!
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All through the pregnancy we debated about who was going to have to go to town hall and say “oops, I meant to spell Noah like N-o-a-h, I’m not sure how I spelled it GoldenPalace.com, can you just fix that?” Kind of embarrassing, but whatever, the look on their faces would have been priceless.
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The casino spends money like it’s going out of style and loses track of what they are doing. Being an honest person, I emailed my contact person 6 times asking what I was supposed to name the second baby. They mailed the hats and gave us GoldenPalace.com t-shirts for pictures, but the guy didn't get back to me until AFTER the babies were born! Ooops. Abby was supposed to be GoldenPalace.com and Noah was supposed to be GoldenPalacePoker.com... but we were already home from the hospital (not my mistake - I was induced and gave the guy the exact date!!) The guy was a little worried about not remembering to do his job, so we scanned in the babies birth certificates and altered the PDF’s to make it look like they got their assigned names, and that was it. I'm sure the guy wasn't especially pushy about getting us on the website considering his over sight. Instead, he told me he'd be happy to just let it "die out." I spoke to him a year later and he said his boss never even looked at the birth certificates or pictures. The babies never went on the website, nobody ever knew it was us, we never really named the babies.... and the funniest thing was that they didn’t care one bit. 10K was like pocket change to them. They sent us two of the biggest flower/balloon arrangements I’ve ever seen to congratulate us after the birth and then it was over. I never heard from them again. I can’t figure out how to post a picture of the auction site we saved because it’s in explorer and expired on ebay (you can see it at my house though if you wanna) but here’s the goldenpalace ebay website http://www.goldenpalaceevents.com/auctions ….which we are NOT on. How we got $10,000 for *nothing* still amazes me. We sometimes call Noah "Poker" which confuses people, but now you'll know why if you hear me call him that:-)

The secret GoldenPalace.com babies

3) Hair: Also stealing one of Gina’s topics. They say Brittney Spears was crazy for shaving her head, so I’m not sure what this is going to divulge about my mental health. Brittney’s got nothing on me. When I was young I wore my hair in short spikes with a tail. Hmmm, I wore my hair in cornrows as a teenager when I was living in a placement. Nobody cared that I was the only white girl, the kids just liked doing cornrows when they were bored. At about 20 I dyed parts of my long hair purple and wore the purple parts in skinny braids with beads which kind of mixed in and looked nifty. Then I cut my hair again and wore it in all sorts of colors, my preference being blue or purple. I stopped that when I was pregnant with Mikailey because I just couldn’t carry it off with my big belly and swollen face. My last interesting hair style was dread locks, which aren’t easy to do on straight white girl hair, but I managed. I liked my hippy look but finally cut them off when they got so heavy that they were hurting my neck! They are also a *high maintenance* hair style for a white person, requiring constant rolling, especially at the roots where the hair grows out straight and doesn’t immediately want to join the dread-head.

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4) Piercings: even more boring. I pierced my nose at 13, leading to my expulsion from Christian school. I never got why they thought God would care if a ring was in my nose instead of my ear, which apparently is cool with God. I refused to remove it and so got kicked out of school. Oh well. I also of course had tons of ear holes, which I eventually just took out because they were annoying. Next, after Jord was born I got my eyebrow, tongue and belly button pierced. They eyebrow ring wasn’t done right (too shallow) and kept working it’s way right though the thin skin. I got it redone for free twice, and the same thing happened. It hurt each time it worked it’s way out, so I just gave up. The belly ring came out when I was very pregnant with Mikailey and I never bothered to put it back in… figuring I’m in no shape to show it off anyway. The only remaining piercings I have are the nose and tongue ring. All of the piercings looked extreme when I got them (they weren’t so common then!) and I kind of lost interest as everyone started to get pierced.

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5) Tattoos: I have a purple Ankh on my belly that I got done on my 18th birthday. I’d advise all 18 year old females to avoid getting tattoos on their bellies – they never look right again after a pregnancy. I also have a ring of rainbow colored Ankhs on my ankle. The tattoo guy questioned me if I really wanted a rainbow around my ankle, pointing out that rainbows are for gay pride and I wasn’t gay. I had to insist that I knew this and *still* wanted a damn rainbow. This particular tattoo is known as Chris’ glasses, because not knowing that he had recently gotten a prescription for glasses, I spent our last savings for the week on the tattoo impulsively. Oops again. He had to wait a month until we had money for his glasses. Until he got his glasses, every time we went for a drive, he’d insist that I put my ankle on the dashboard “to help him see.”

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6) I haven’t done anything illegal in a long time. I *did* however do legal drugs on my “girls only” trip to Amsterdam when Jordan was four and Mikailey one. I was obeying the law, I had no kids with me, and we weren't driving. I bought magic mushrooms from an actual drug store called “Conscious Dreams,” right out of a refrigerator! Each package of fresh mushrooms was in a neat plastic container just like the ones in our supermarkets, and each type was labeled with the intended effect. I chose “a mellow and light trip” rather than a more intense one. I thought I understood the world for a few hours, but it faded. I felt pretty deep and wise for a while though, lol. I also went to coffee shops, many of them, and experienced an enhanced enjoyment of Tibetan monks doing a performance near the Van Gogh museum among other things. While stoned on the funny Amsterdam trollys listening to all the Dutch speakers (Dutch sounds kind of goofy under any circumstances) I was never under the illusion that I was experiencing "heightened consciuosness" by the way - I just couldn't stop giggling, much to the chagrin of my buddy. At any rate, I came back from that vacation in a good mood:-) I won’t say anything about my fleeting “deeper understanding” of the world experiences before kids.

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7) I used to go to concerts. I saw the Dead once (the second to last concert before Jerry died) at Highgate VT. It was crazy! There were almost a half a million dead-heads camping in a huge air field in a town of about 50,000 people. It was an experience I’ll never forget. I’ve been to many Phish shows (without kids) with my buddy Kozmic Mary. I won’t talk about altered consciousness. Again, they were events you can’t imagine unless you saw them. Hundreds of thousands of hippy’s camping for days, makeshift shops, people doing crazy stunts, the Guiness record for the most nude people in one picture (I avoided that one). At the Oswego concert there was a Ferris wheel, buildings built to look like big blocks of Swiss cheese where you could climb up and sit in a cheese hole, 100 foot tall marshmallows on sticks randomly placed for no apparent reason, buildings with “trip rooms” where they had all sorts of weird gadgets and toys... that sort of thing. All very surreal and fun and weird. I took Jordan to see Phil Lesh at the annual Gathering of the Vibes while he was in kindergarten. He didn’t seem to notice that a lot of people were stoned (I was NOT) and quite frankly, I think he might be destined to grow up in to a hippy. He had a great time hanging out in the kids area with the other tye-dyed kiddos, exploring the tye-dye painted VW bus made just for kids to play on, and dancing like a fool with other kids at night with his glow sticks while the grown up dead heads did their thing – walking around in huge funny costumes, dancing while juggling fire, selling their homemade stuff etc.. I haven’t been to a concert since the summer before we decided to get pregnant with the twinkies. Oh well, I think I’m too old now.