She Does Better

Emilie Burke

A Baby Update

// Baby

Reading Time: 2 minutes

That’s weird to write. Even at 19 weeks. I can clearly see my growing midsection, consistent vomiting, and mood craziness to validate that I am, in fact, growing a human, but it’s still hard to wrap my head around.

Every time I go to the doctor, it still feels like a surprise when I hear a heartbeat. Maybe that’ll change with the anatomy scan? Right now, it all still feels like a not-real thing.

July 14

Because of C’s deployment, I’ve done an attempt at being sure to capture my growing size via pictures. I thought about doing weekly “Bumpdates” but I don’t want to.

I do, though, want to share with him this experience of my body transforming, in support of our growing family. That being said, this same transformation has some weird mental effects that I don’t really know how to articulate.

July 25

For someone who has cared so much about her waistline, it’s weird to be okay with, even celebrate, my burgeoning size. It’s not that I’m not grateful for this experience. I am. Oh my goodness, am I! We are so excited for Baby S, whatever they may be, but this has been a mental struggle I didn’t anticipate having to wrangle.

July 25

I finally got some maternity clothes. Just a couple of dresses and a pair of jeans. I love love this black dress. I got it from a StitchFix box and will definitely order another maternity box soon.

Bun in the Oven. Fully Baked December 2020

// Baby

Reading Time: 4 minutes

We’ve been slowly trickling out the news since April, but I’m so so so excited to widely share that Casey and I are expecting Baby Schario in December 2020.

We are so so so excited. I thought I’d take this 15 week mark to share a bit about what it’s been like so far, how I’ve been feeling, and keep track of the memories I want to keep track of.

I first took a pregnancy test that wasn’t clearly a no on Wednesday, April 15, but it also wasn’t a yes. I had taken pregnancy tests before, and they were pretty obviously no’s, but this one just looked slightly off. I showed it to C who thought I was nuts and said it looked like a no. The next day, my stomach started hurting, and I figured it was cramping, so no big deal.

When on Sunday, I still hadn’t gotten my period, I figured I’d take another pregnancy test. This time, the results were pretty quickly positive. I didn’t believe it, so I took another. And another. By the third, I was out of pee and in shock. I went downstairs and told Casey I needed him to go to the store to buy another test. Because of the state of the world (COVID, after all), we order a Shipt grocery order of anything just to hit the free delivery minimum ($35) for that evening. He describes me here as “freaking out”, but that’s not how I remember it.

The cheesiest cheeses in the world and a whirlwind of emotions on April 19

And so, at barely 4 weeks pregnant, we found out that we were going to be parents.

Week 6 and still looking like a before picture

The first trimester was not that kind to me. Almost as soon as I found out I was pregnant, I was sick. I was nauseous ALL of the time. I didn’t want to eat. The only thing that brought me comfort was ICE COLD water. Bland foods, ginger, teas- nothing helped. I would eat something because I’d get hungry, get sick from it, then feel terrible. “My stomach hurts” was a nightly phrase poor Casey had to just hear over and over. When heartburn started, I just vaccilated between heartburn and nausea, and I’m not sure which was worse. I napped most afternoons. All in all, I lost 5 lbs over the first 12 weeks.

With COVID going on, my doctor’s office suspended the “confirmation of pregnancy” appointments, in favor of only bringing pregnant women in at the 8 week mark. At the point, we did a heart beat check and ultrasound. I had been having dreams of multiples, so I was a bit relieved to find out we were having ONE baby.

June 4 and starting to feel like a human again – Is this a baby or a food baby? Good question.

I did notice that I lost interest in reading. From April through mid-June, I don’t think I red 10 pages total. Don’t ask me why, but I just didn’t want to read anything at all.

My doctor warned me that because of my previous size, I would probably start to show early since my body has to do less stretching. But, this picture is probably a food baby.

As I transitioned out of the first trimester, I definitely started to feel more human again. I still vomited pretty often, but I wasn’t nauseous. The heartburn got better.

My mood stabilization got way worse. I get sad. It’s hard to explain, but for no reason at all, I just get an overwhelmingly debilitating, life-sucking sadness that leaves me without the ability to anything but lie there and cry.

June 29, 2020

If you know I’m pregnant, maybe I’m starting to show. If you don’t know, then I probably look like I gained a couple of pounds. That being said, I am still below my pre-pregnancy weight. Current weight (at home): 139.5

Books I’ve read: Expecting Better by Emily Oster
Books I’ve ordered and am waiting for: All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior

Books on my list:

  • Nurture Shock by Ashley Bronson
  • Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth
  • You are your child’s first teacher by Rahima Dancy
  • Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg

Gender-wise, we don’t want to know! I’ve long dreamed of the gender of our baby being a surprise, and I was able to convince Casey of it, so Baby Schario will be a “they” until they are born!

Solo-summer #3 isn’t solo anymore.

27: A day of favorite food

// Personal

Reading Time: 3 minutes

For the first time in five years, C was around for my birthday. The last time C was around for my birthday was 2015, immediately after graduating from college.

Last picture of me at 26

I don’t need to add to the “2020 is a weird year” chorus, but this year’s birthday was definitely different from historical ones. I had built a bit of a birthday tradition- go get a massage, go get a mani/pedi, order delivery for lunch/dinner, and spend most of the day reading a book while sitting outside, hopefully at a pool. Well, with the global pandemic going on, I was trapped inside. Luckily for me, C made the day extra special, and, much to my stomach’s pleasure, he made it a day of my favorite food.

For breakfast, I wanted to order a Chicken Fried Steak from Cracker Barrel. It’s not my favorite food, but it seemed pretty indulgent and, thus, birthday-appropriate. Instead, they stopped taking orders as I was sending the order, so we ended up ordering Crepes from All Things Chocolate in Richmond Hill.

For lunch, we had burrata, red roasted peppers, and tomatoes with balsamic vinegar and basil.

I had the brilliant idea that we would pick movies all day based on the cast and use one movie’s cast to drive to the next one. I wanted to start with Tom Hanks, so at Casey’s suggestion, we started with Charlie Wilson’s War. That had Julia Roberts, so next we watched Mona Lisa Smile. Mona Lisa Smile includes Julia Stiles, one of my faves! We ended with Save the Last Dance. We had talked about branching off Kerry Washington but were movie’d out at that point.

For dinner, Casey ended with a fancy surf-and-turf featuring my favorite scallops! I could have just eaten those scallops for dinner! They were so delicious. These were the absolute best scallops Casey has made to date. Rib eye, scallops, and asparagus- fancy schmancy.

only birthday picture

Month 3 of staying-at-home is a weird time to celebrate, but C made it special. Twenty-seven already started a bit stressful, but one day at a time.

Previous birthdays:

  • 26
  • 25
  • 24 (I chronicle all my birthdays going back to 18 in this post.)
  • 23

Vacation Log, Day 6

// Life Lately

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday, I made the decision that I wouldn’t take two weeks (16 days) off work but instead just one and savor the 9. Changes to C’s schedule make it more reasonable and to say that I feel great is the understatement of the century. Shorter, more frequent vacations are my bread and butter. I know this. Why don’t I do this more? Alas, the questions of the universe.

After my morning todo list session, I was off to do all the things I laid out. The real accomplishment of the day was that I fiiiinally got all the things off to my accountant. Thank goodness the tax filing was extended because the irony of finally sending my stuff off to Eric (at Accountlancer.com! Strongly recommend!) on April 15, Tax Day, is not lost on me. The fact of the matter is that the digital stuff had been collected for some time, but the print-only stuff had been paperclipped in a pile for a while and needed to be scanned. That’s what I was really putting off. Yesterday, I finally downloaded a random scanning app from the iOS store and I was off to the races, well, ish. I scanned things. They were saved in HEIC format and then I needed to message them to myself because Airdropping them kept them in HEIC format. PDFs or PNGs only plz. /rant

Okay, other things about yesterday: it was a great balance between lazy and productive. I read through page 132 (a chapter short of my 150 goal) of *The Internet* and read a chapter of Little Women. I paid a ton of bills and cleared out everything that had been sitting on my todo list for a while in terms of household logistics. I cleared out my Todoist and email inboxes, which are not to be understated accomplishments! The power of tidiness and decluttering to an orderly mind is not to be understated, and that includes digital tidiness and digital decluttering.

I decided on The Newsroom as my new solo show, as I suspected I would when I was writing yesterday. I forgot how short it was, but that Aaron Sorkin inspiration sure is delicious.

Yesterday’s weather was a bit of a downer, but it’s fine.

Today’s todo list:

  • Read 1 chapter of Little Women (Chapter 39)
  • Read some of *The Internet*
  • Read 10 pages of Startup Boards
  • Budget audit
  • Personal Documentation audit (for both of us)
  • Review of joint calendar
  • Start working on dbt contribution
  • TD Zero
  • Automate goodreads –> S3bucket
  • Maybe think about how to automate freewrite –> blog post A bit of an ambitious list today but I don’t hate it.

Vacation Log, Day 5

// Personal

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I raved about good sleep just a little too soon. Clearly. As I’ve been up since just before 5. At least this was not nme waking up because of a dream or anxiety. I was just fully rested, which is fine.

Yesterday afternoon, I finished the day with another hour spent in the sun. Afternoon sun, of course, is different from morning sun and that pushed my a bit over the edge. Only 3 hours later I texted my mom, “Want to see a picture of my sunburn?” and she was confused until I replied with exactly that. I spent a cumulative 2 hours in the sun. The good news is I’m not feeling it and the Latin in my kicked in overnight, turning the red into brown.

When C came home from work, we, you guessed it, through on some Westworld. Season 2 has been interesting. In some ways, it reminds me of Game of Thrones, where you find yourself rooting for a character only for them to die or turn out to be something totally different.

We decided on sushi for dinner, which was an adventure in itself. After nearly a dozen calls trying to find a restaurant that was open, we settled on Sushi Time Towa. I have to say, in the 2 years we’ve been living in Savannah (February 28, 2018 was the day we moved here!), this was, by far, the best sushi we’ve had here. Even though Montgomery Crossroads is ~20 minutes from Georgetown, it will probably be our go-to from now on.

This morning, I woke up and made myself a french press of coffee. When I realized that I was going to be up, I thought I’d try to watch sunrise, but today’s grey skies and rainy weather made that impossible. I did was the sky light up which is always a beautiful way to start the morning.

I plan on making today a bit more to-do listy than yesterday was (or any day of this vacation has been). I would really like to break page 150 in my primary current read- Brian McCullough’s How the Internet Happened- and make progress on the other two open books I have right now too. For Little Women (what a slog!), I’m on chapter 38 of 47. If I suck it up and do 1 chapter a day, I could be done before I go back to work. For Brad Feld’s Startup Boards, twenty to twenty-five pages per day feels totally reasonable. That’s a lot of reading, but… why not?!

Given today’s rainy disposition, it also feels like a good day to just make progress on the myriad of things on my todo list: bills to pay, paperwork to send my accountant, Todoist tasks to clear out, and a dash of email to get through. It’s probably also be good to put some laundry away, but also maybe not.

I hope to get one, if not two, open source contributions in this break. It’ll be good to spend some time working on that too. I don’t expect I’ll have actual time to code today, but picking an issue, laying out a plan, and setting up my environment is always a task and a half.

I’m thinking about restarting Newsroom. I need a TV show that I’ll watch alone and I’m all caught up on the things I’ve been watching: Grey’s Anatomy and The Walking Dead. It’s not a really a background show, though, so I’m not sure it’s best for my current use-case. Hmm, definitely more to think about here.

So my brief to-do list for today as I’ve roughly laid out:

  • Get to page 150 in How the Internet Happened
  • Read 1 Chapter of Little Women (Chapter 38)
  • Read 25 pages of Startup Boards (starting page: 25)
  • Pay Bills
  • Send tax paperwork to accountant
  • Clear our Todoist
  • Inbox Zero!
  • Lay out an open source contribution to make
  • Decide on a new show

Depending on how adventurous I am feeling, maybe I’ll also make it to CleanEatz to stockup the freezer, but also maybe not because we do have plenty of food (more than usual) and I need to get back in the habit of cooking.

Tomorrow, I should probably get us back on the budget bandwagon.