Confidential to Mr. E: If your overly complicated Martha Stewart pain in the ass birthday cake is not finished by the time you get home...

it's because of this blog post you harrassed me to write.

In other news, I'm thinking I might have to bite the bullet and buy some maternity overalls. Even though I'll be honest with you, I'm really not an overalls type of girl. First of all, they remind me of something one or all of the cast members of 90210 would wear. Can't you just see David Silver walking down the halls of Beverly High with only one of his shoulder straps fastened? Also, I may still be suffereing residual childhood overall trauma, because as a little kid I could never get them unfastened when I had to go to the bathroom and even when I did get someone to unfasten them for me, one strap invariably ended up dipped in the toilet. And then Mr. E came along and he has such an aversion to women sporting overalls that he begged me never to wear them, and I didn't even own any overalls at the time so I was more than happy to oblige.

Overalls are actually only one of two things Mr. E begged me never to wear, the other one is that weird combo piece of clothing where it's a skirt in the front and shorts in the back. I am not as deeply disburbed by this fashion oddity as he is, but I do find it sort of weird and also, doesn't it seem like it might be bulky? And besides, what's really the point? Are you that worried that someone might see your underwear? I mean, maybe I'm weird, but I just don't care that much if someone sees my skivvies. Perhaps it's because I wore a catholic school girl uniform skirt for 13 years and we wore them so short (rolled up at least two times after you left the house) that after awhile you just didn't care who saw what. It was kind of liberating now that I think about.

But back to the overalls. Mr. E and his opinions on female fashion trends not withstanding, none of my damn pants will stay up anymore. The myth of maternity jeans has been proven here, I'll say that. They just don't really work that well in practise. Either they are so tight that the elastic waistband hurts me and gives me this weird squeezed chub stomach look which by the way is super flattering, as you might imagine, or they are semi comfy and they fall down when I walk. So I think it's either cave in and buy some maternity overalls, or maybe we could all start a fashion movement to bring back suspenders. Knowing my luck, they'll be sweeping the nation NEXT winter. So yeah. Suspenders, anyone? Anyone?

Test

Bland and Blanderer

Yesterday morning I woke up with heart burn so severe that it made me throw up three times. Three separate times. I really really really hate throwing up, so at this point I'm pretty desperate to do whatever I have to do to make this a one time thing.

The main thing you can do to prevent pregnancy related heart burn is to change your diet. And I totally tried to sleep on four pillows last night so my head would be elevated and all that and it's just not happening. What this means is that the short list of things I can actually eat that don't make me feel sick OR throw up just got even shorter. No tea, no spicy food, no caffeine, no tomatoes, no chocolate, no carbonated anything, no acidic juice, no pineapple, no greasy food, nothing fried. I already couldn't eat much dairy without dire results, eggs make me sick, and I need to have protein at every meal. It's really looking like turkey on plain bagels for the next two months, and it sucks.

I suppose if nothing else it will keep me from gaining too much weight in the final stretch, but it feels like a particularly harsh insult that this comes at a time when I could finally eat a few more things, and at Christmas time. I have elaborate meals planned for Christmas and New Year's and Mr. E's birthday and none of them have "bland" as their central theme. Of course I've already done all the grocery shopping for these meals, and even though I know it's probably a bad idea, I won't lie, I might just have to find out the hard way that homemade chex party mix and acid reflux don't mix. I can't help it - I have never made Chex Party Mix from scratch and I am inordinately excited to do it, and I have three giant boxes of Chex in my cupboard, so screw it, I'm making it. In other news, I am a loser, and I love salt.

In case you were wondering:

Christmas Morning breakfast: cinnamon rolls and virgin mimosas
Alternate Princess Nebraska Non Barf Version: plain oatmeal,Maalox

Christmas Dinner: gingered prawns, grilled italian beef served sliced over rocket, rosemary garlic olive oil pototoes, and brownies, menu stolen directly from Nigella Feasts
Alternate Princess Nebraska Non Barf Version: plain oatmeal,Maalox

Mr E's Birthday breakfast: Potatoes, sausage, eggs, toast
Alternate Princess Nebraska Non Barf Version: plain oatmeal,Maalox

Mr. E's birthday dinner: Newsom's Country Ham (this is his christmas present from my mom, and I am not lying when I say he has not shut up about his country ham for months now. He REALLY likes ham. To be fair, this is some GOOD ham.), biscuits, cucumber salad, cheesy potatoes, ambrosia salad, and apple tart for birthday cake.
Alternate Princess Nebraska Non Barf Version: plain oatmeal,Maalox

New Year's Eve Dinner: roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, sauteed whole peas, and strawberries, pound cake, and whipped cream for dessert. Completely non seasonal, completely don't care.
Alternate Princess Nebraska Non Barf Version: plain oatmeal,Maalox

And now I'm off to feast on some oatmeal and maalox, and find a recipe for White Pizza.

Finally a day off

Not much is going on right now. I'm really relieved because we are DONE with our holiday hoo ha. We've had visitors or been visiting somewhere since November 4th, my brother left on Thursday and then we had two holiday parties to go to, and now we are done. The shopping is done, almost, although Mr. E is out buying my present right now, but all of our other shopping is done. So this weekend I am really looking forward to sitting around and doing nothing. Actually I'm looking forward to doing that for the next two weeks.

Pasta Queen asked how I made the peppermint strand...it's pretty easy. I just bought some of those starlight mints, and then threaded a larger sized needle with red embroidery floss, and then sewed through the twisted section of the plastic wrapper on the mint, on each end of the mint. So the embroidery floss goes through one side of the wrapper, over the back of the mint, and through the other side of the wrapper. Then just string the next one, and so on. I was worried the weight of the mints might cause the thread to tear the wrappers, but it's been fine. I did try to go through the thickest twisted part but it hurt my fingers too much after awhile so I just tried to get as close as I could to the twist in the wrapper. Does that make sense, at all?

What I've Been Doing Instead of Blogging