Where have you been?

Hello, dearest readers.  Where have I been?  Well, I've been sunk into a morass of crazy wedding season business and personal misery.  (And to top it all off,  I found out just now, as I was going to add photos of some of my newest work, that all of my photos from May have disappeared from my iphoto.  WTF?  Fabulous.  Losing photos is really sucky, especially if they were photos of something new that I've already shipped out.  No way to recover that.)

And what has caused me to be incommunicado for the last month and the shop to be closed for the last week or so?  I should probably start at the beginning!

I think I last left you with a hopeful post about our house hunt?  Well, that is progressing, with all of the normal ups and downs and backs and forths that are typical for the house buying process (at least I assume they are, since I have never bought a house before I wouldn't know otherwise).  We had the inspection, which went well, and then the appraisal which went less well.  It didn't appraise for our agreed upon purchase price, so we had been on pins and needles for a while until we found out just yesterday that they have agreed to sell it to us for what it appraised for.  Yay!  We should be moving in around the 10th of next month.  The first order of business is to get the new studio all ready, so I can move everything home.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  No sooner had we put in an offer on the house, and had it accepted and scheduled the inspection, than a fire broke out in our condo building and burned down half of the place.  Luckily (for us) it wasn't the half that we lived in, but we were driven out by the smoke damage and general unpleasantness of being in a building that is half burned down.  I was at work when the Shop Monkey called me to tell me about it.  The first thing he asked me was if both dogs were at work with me (which, thank god, they were).  I had almost not taken them with me that day.  I can't even imagine what my mental state would have been if I hadn't.  As it was I was in tears, imagining all of my possessions as ashes.  All of my letters, and drawings, and my wedding ring!  But we got really lucky and nothing was ruined (and nobody was hurt!).  We just had to pack up 2 pugs, 2 kitties, and one sickly Bean and ship them over to the in-laws for 2 weeks.


And that leads me to my third piece of news.  I'm pregnant!  And I've been feeling like total SH*T!  Seriously.  Being preggo is not for the faint of heart.  I can't even tell you how hard it has been to scrape myself up off of the bed and slime my way into work.  Things were staring to look up last week, but today has seen a recurrence of ghastly nausea and general I JUST WANT TO DIE horribleness.  Yet, here I am, soldiering on, sipping my anti-nausea fruit smoothie.

And would my pregnancy announcement really be complete without an overly intimate glimpse into my uterus?  I think not!

 (My apologies if you came here looking for jewelery eye candy.  I know that a grainy photo of a creepy alien child isn't exactly shiny diamonds.  But this is my blog, so you'll just have to put up with a few ultrasound pics.)

Yesterday was my first real midwife appointment and in the morning I had scheduled an ultrasound.  There I was, floating in the semi-darkened room, blissfully peering at my baby for the first time.  The tech was clicking away, taking photos and measurements, and I was laughing at the little squirming movements and sweet little squid features.  Then the tech asks me, oh so casually, if this is my first ultrasound with this pregnancy.  Immediately suspicious of the worst horrifying possibilities, I answer yes, and ask why.


Does anyone care to hazard a guess at what the below picture might be?

Then she says, because I think I just saw another baby.  My first reaction?  I KNEW IT!  And then she adds, hold on, let me make sure.  And I was so nervous that it wasn't going to be true!  My heart had in that tiny moment already attached itself to that second baby and it would have broken (broken!) if it had been a mistake.

But no!  She sort of scrolled over to the right, and there it was, plain as day.  A second baby!  So, there you have it, dear readers, I'm having spontaneous twin babies.  Due in December.