I had a bunch of paragraphs in my head but now that I sit down to write, I think most of them are gone.  I will try anyway.

I went to Atlanta last weekend to attend a Catholic homeschool conference on Friday - it was free, and there was some encouragement from the speakers and some good deals on some books I can make use of with the girls.  My heart wasn't totally in it, as with most things lately.  I am trying to get motivated to do some things.  That sounds vague, I know.  My girls' Little Flowers girls group will be having our end of the year tea party this coming weekend, and I have been trying to get into the planning of that and do some fun things there.  So I started making up menu cards, made certificates for this year for the girls who earned all their badges, and sewed the remaining badges on Cecilia's sash.  Gotta do Caroline's soon.  I have been feeling like I let Little Flowers slide this year and haven't been making it as fun as I could, with a little extra thought and effort... it is hard because I was leading the December meeting when I started miscarrying, so of course that meeting was crap... I knew in my heart what was happening as that meeting began that day, even before confirming it at the ER with an ultrasound.  I still haven't gotten an ultrasound image from the hospital; I know I want to have it but I don't have it in me to get it right now, either.  I am still finishing the school year and then want to throw myself into reorganizing the rooms in the house and planning for next year, and I hope to find the motivation to get myself occupied with that.

When you lose a baby and are approaching what would have been that baby's due date and you are still not expecting another baby, you have to take comfort in the little things.  While in Atlanta, I went shopping with my mom, looking for a dress for her to wear at my brother's ordination party.  The one in the above photo is one she bought but doesn't think she will fit into in a month, so she let me try it... and it works.  Score one for a new dress with no effort.  Then we found a few more cute summery dresses at Steinmart, so she bought them for me.  Retail therapy - being able to buy regular clothes is a small perk, but it not only makes me happy to get a new dress, but also deeply sad, because I shouldn't be fitting in regular dresses right now.  I should be hugely uncomfortable instead.  But the dresses are nice, so there's that little bit of comfort.  One thing to be able to enjoy.  Thanks Mom for the dresses.

So, I saw a good doctor in Atlanta who understands how hormones in women work (why is that such a hard thing to find in a doctor???), and she tested my progesterone levels for the post-ovulatory phase of my cycle.  She found that my progesterone was low - ding ding ding, we have a winner!  Finally, proof to what I already suspected due to symptoms I have been having.  So I will go on progesterone supplements next cycle for ten days and stay on them once I get pregnant, if I ever get pregnant again, that is.  feeling pretty pessimistic about that currently.  Feeling pretty mad at my body too for it failing on me... I have been taking a vitamin for months now that is supposed to help correct low progesterone.  Many people report success with that.  Not me, apparently.  If my progesterone is supposed to be 10 and it is 7.5 during the luteal phase, then I think it is pretty safe to say that this has not helped me, so I am going to stop taking it and switch to a raw food based prenatal multivitamin.  I am wondering if I should add some fermented cod liver oil too.  I am pretty angry that I have been eating so healthy along with this supplement specifically targeted at my problem, and it is not helping.  It makes me want to throw in the towel.  I am not eating processed foods at all, I am eating very few grains (and when I eat them they are soaked or sprouted, generally)... basically I am eating the best I can afford.  Apparently I spend like 21% of our income on groceries - and that's not including stuff like toilet paper; that's just food.  So we will see what the progesterone does.  Maybe it will be the answer after six months, three doctors, and lots of reading on nutrition.  Along with continuing what I am doing otherwise...

...like buying grass fed beef.  On Saturday in Atlanta, I went to a farmers market to pick up half a cow I ordered.  A quarter of it just barely fit in my deep freeze, and the other quarter was for my friend's family.  We each got 60 pounds of ground beef... and much, much more, as you can see by the above glance at my freezer inventory.  I see that I forgot to include the kidney.  I don't know what to do with beef kidney, but I am sure I will figure that out.  Lots of organ meat from grass fed animals - see?  Nutrient-dense diet.  Somehow it's not enough, though.

Here is the full deep freeze.  Since this picture was taken, a pound of ground beef and a chuck roast have been used.  Up next: bacon liver meatballs and sausage patties I will attempt to make from ground beef and heart.  And probably some bone broth.

So this post is also a photo dump from my phone.  This is the entrance to The Real Mandarin House, family restaurant of my youth.  When my family went out to dinner when I was a kid, there were no requests made, because we knew we were going to the Mandarin House.  And that we would be getting Happy Family whatever dinner.  Sadly, it has closed, after over 30 years.  I noticed when we were going to Trader Joe's.  Now I will mourn it alongside the former Wolf Camera.

 I have been swimming laps at the pool at Berry, I am sure I have mentioned before.  Lately, there has been a water aerobics class taking place in the other half of the pool on Thursdays.  Now, it should inspire me to see these old ladies moving around instead of wasting away with inactivity, but it is actually a little depressing... you are swimming laps and look over to see ladies in their 70s wearing black tennis shoes and shorts in the pool, slowly transferring weight from one foot to the other like they are going in slow motion to the beat of Tina Turner's "You're Simply the Best."  Somehow that is depressing to me even though it is impressive at the same time to see them dedicated to exercising there every time.  Maybe it is depressing to me because I can still move faster than that and one day I won't be able to do so.  When the instructor calls out, "Now let's cross the pool!" and they all jog in slow motion the 20 foot distance through the water like it is the culminating difficult part of the workout, I just feel kind of blah inside.  But then, I feel like that about lots of little things lately.  baby birds are depressing... why do their babies live?  How come they have babies with no problem?  Then I felt bad for thinking that about them when a crow stole the eggs from our backyard mockingbirds.  But yes, the pool... they play music for the water aerobics class, and it is often the same set of songs, unfortunately.  Rod Stewart makes frequent appearances.  Or whatever an auditory appearance would be called.  I knew I never liked Rod Stewart, but I never realized just how much I disliked "Maggie May."  And I always realized how much I hated "Forever Young" and have had to be reminded repeatedly, unfortunately.  To make this more torturous, this is a pretty new pool with state of the art speaker technology... there are speakers in the pool.  Like under the water.  And when you are swimming, every time you come up for a breath, you hear the distant speakers across the pool, and then you go back under and hear the tinny, no-bass blasting music.  Brain confusion ensues.  Rod Stewart does not belong in my swimming pool, thank you very much.  I try to pray the chaplet of divine mercy while swimming and can get through it twice with time to spare... when the music doesn't distract me.  Try praying the chaplet with Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" playing underwater... it probably borders on being sacrilegious.  I never realized how truly annoying those Wah wah wah wah wah's could be.  A few weeks ago, I thought for a split second that an Alice in Chains song was starting - I liked their music in high school, so I was almost excited, and then realized that if they did play Alice in Chains, anyone swimming laps would probably just give up in despair in the middle of the pool due to the deeply depressing music and just drown.  Thankfully it turned out to be something else that was annoying enough to keep up my motivation to keep swimming to work out my irritation. 

a break for a photo since that paragraph is already way too long: Lucy cuteness!!!

My baby is too big!  I am feeling very close to her lately, and she is so very sweet... when she's not whacking Caroline in the forehead with a baby doll, that is.  I am feeling very loving to her despite those kinds of things.  And very protective, too.  Also of Cecilia... she had a headache a few nights ago, and I was secretly freaked out and paranoid that she had a brain tumor or something... because do seven year olds normally get headaches bad enough to make them lie down crying?  Then Chris reminded me that the brain has no feeling, so it couldn't be that.  Then Caroline was 25-30 feet off the ground in our maple tree, and I was like, eh... I guess you should come down; that's kinda high.  My motherly protective instincts are whacked right now.

So anyway, back to the boring story I was telling about the music at the pool... tonight, the music was a little different.  I came in and Rod Stewart was ending, yay!  Then they played the Rolling Stones, so I was cautiously optimistic.  Some other not-awful song... and then... Styx.


Oh well, they were almost doing well before they plummeted to a new low.  At least it wasn't "Lady."  Then they might have had to clean up puke from the pool, ha.  I fully agree with Homer Simpson here.  But then they redeemed themselves a bit by playing Tom Petty.  It was a song I didn't recognize, but you can't mistake Tom Petty's distinctive central Floridian hick accent localized to the Gainesville/Ocala area, even when playying through tinny underwater speakers in an Olympic sized pool.  That dialect is found nowhere else.  And then they crashed out by ending with the grand finale... a Phil Collins song.  Now, I love me some sappy 80s love songs Phil Collins like "Take Me Home" and "I Don't Wanna Know."  But not the sappy cheesy Phil Collins songs of 1990 such as the one that was played, "Another Day in Paradise."  It makes me think of "We are the World" or the New Kids on the Block's "This One's for the Children."  Gag.  So there is my analysis of the senior water aerobics class, because I know you really cared deeply about that.

A new printer!  It was so big that we put it on the bottom half of the desk and moved the books to the top shelf.  Soon this will all go in the living room somewhere... not exactly sure yet how I will manipulate everything to fit nicely in there.  The old printer was leaving random marks on all the papers.  It was time for a new one.

I am truly so excited about my brother's upcoming ordination.  I am hurting that I won't be pregnant at it and so I am mad that it will be tinged with sadness for me... I told Chris I shouldn't have so arrogantly assumed I would be pregnant again by this time, but he said it's not arrogance, it is logic and reasoning based on several past pregnancy experiences.  But I know it will be a very exciting weekend: the ordination, followed by a dinner reception, and then his first Mass.  If you are in the area, some to St. Jude for the 2:30 Sunday Mass to see his first time ever as a priest celebrating the holy sacrifice of the Mass!  I might just cry, and I don't usually cry at weddings, but this is my baby brother who I sort of helped to raise.

The ordination is by ticket only.  There are only four men being ordained, but the tickets are still quite limited.  His three nieces age five and under are becoming lap babies for the event so they won't have to use tickets.  An ordination is a truly beautiful event, full of all the liturgical splendor that is the Catholic faith... and I hope it will light a fire in my soul because I have been feeling pretty bad at praying lately.

Random food pictures... Trader Joe's sells these canned clams.  We made clam chowder a few nights ago, with raw milk, yum.  So it wasn't as raw after I heated it, I guess, but I did so gently, not to a boil.  Yes, that is clam juice in the Pyrex... some of it from the cans goes in the soup.  Better than Mountain Dew (okay, so that's crab juice, but still, it's funny, and I thought of it as I was reserving the clam juice):

I kept looking on the box for the "serving suggestion" message, but apparently they don't intend for flowers to be a suggested side dish to these enchiladas.  I used to eat these like once a week when Caroline was little... it was like a treat to myself when she was napping.  I randomly bought a box earlier this week, either to reminisce, or because I was so surprised to see it at Wal-mart that I couldn't resist and bought it out of amazement.  Sometimes I get in a rut with what to make for lunches every day... apparently this will save me one day in the future.  Me, not my kids.  So I will still have to use half my brain to figure out what to feed them.

Real men do their own car work.  Don't trust a man who doesn't know how to do an oil change, that's my expert advice.  I'll close by bragging on my awesome hubby, who fixes the car.  And is left-handed.  Just like Phil Collins.  And now you have a random trivia fact to revel in the knowledge of.  Yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition... my standards must be falling or something. And now to work on Tim's slideshow for his ordination party reception... like I should have been doing in the first place.  The night is still young, and I am already up to about 2009, so only a few more photos to go (by few I mean 50, probably).