A Turning Point

I am days away from being 5 months pregnant. In some ways this has been an incredibly fast 5 months, but in others, it has been ridiculously slow. The slow part has to do with the not feeling so good. But ever since we were in Montreat, I have been feeling a lot better. On Friday night, I was watching some kids who happen to have a really old dog who has basically lost control of her bowels (which I did not know going into the situation or I might have all of a sudden become "busy"). After cleaning up a big poopy mess and not throwing up, I figured I was feeling pretty good. So yesterday I decided I would try to not take the anti-nausea medicine and see what happened. I felt pretty good all day. I had a moment or two of weird feelings, but who doesn't have that occasionally, even when not pregnant? I just had a little snack and felt much better. Today was even better than yesterday. I am not ready to flush my pills down the toilet (or whatever you are supposed to do with an unused prescription) but I am so thankful for the fact that I have been feeling much better. I have been feeling the little babe kick lots so that has been really fun too. We haven't exactly told Tripp yet, since his concept of time is not that great. We told him just a few days before leaving for North Carolina that we were going, and I quickly lost count of the number of times he asked when we were going, how long till we got there, where we were going, who would be there....(I think you get the point). I guess it wouldn't be completely fair to not tell him till I go into labor just to avoid answering a bunch of questions, but we at least decided to start talking to him about babies in general. Maybe in the next month or so, when I start to really pop out, we will talk about it more. In the mean time, he just thinks I am funny for changing outfits multiple times in the morning in the mostly futile attempt to find something that looks ok. It is quite assuring though, that when I put on a new outfit, he looks up at me and says "You look so nice Mommy." That sure helps boost my ego.

In this new found state of good health, I seemed to have found my cooking skills again. I whipped up some delicious pasta, if I do say so myself, the other night. It could have been that it was pretty "regular" tasting and that our taste buds have become accustomed to some pretty lame excuses for dinner in the past 5 months, but I really do think it was some delicious pasta. If you don't have the America's Test Kitchen Cookbook, you really need it. I made that pasta the other night, then home made mac 'n cheese last night, a chocolate cake last week and have a few more recipes on the menu for this week. But tonight, I am trying to outdo myself one more time. I am attempting some home made chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches. The recipe is from my newest Martha Stewart magazine and it looks delicious. I had a helper this afternoon while I made the cookies. I needed to distract this helper from actually helping me since the first thing he did was pour a very large amount of baking soda into my just perfectly measured flour, so I gave him a snack and some measuring spoons to use to eat the snack.

It worked well and he even got to be my taste tester (except his ability to taste test cookies is about as good as his ability to help me decide which outfit looks best. No matter how the cookie turned out, he proudly announced, "This is so tasty Mommy").

I didn't exactly fill him in on the part about making these cookies into ice cream sandwiches later, but I am pretty sure he is not worse for the wear. Nelson and I however, are about to enjoy some of this:

chocolate chip cookies

plus ganache

plus chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream

equals this

Yum.