"I made granola" is a very Earth-mother, hippy-dippy, peace-and-love thing to say, and I relate to none of those things. I suck at separating my compost, I get road rage, and I don't want to share the land.

But I do love a little granola sprinkled on my yogurt, and I don't necessarily like it to be laden with fat, sugars and crazy chemicals.

Mixing it up.

Granola is so easy to make yourself, and so simple to modify to however you like it, there's not really any need to buy pre-packaged stuff from the cereal aisle. I was able to whip up some applesauce granola on Saturday using ingredients I already had on hand at home, with a few little adjustments to a recipe I found online, and it turned out great.

Here's a link to the recipe I used, and here it is with the modifications I made, just because I didn't have some of the stuff in the cupboard but I really, REALLY had a hankering for granola:

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups oats
• 1 cup nuts (pecans, walnuts, almonds) (I used almonds because that's what I had on hand) 
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds (I used pumpkin seeds instead. Work with what you got, kids!) 
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds (I skipped this because I didn't have any) 
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 TBSP honey
• 1 TBSP vegetable oil
• 1/3 cup raisins (I didn't have raisins so I used craisins instead - any dried fruit/berries would work well)

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 300F.
• Mix together your dry ingredients, minus the raisins, in a large bowl. 
• In a small saucepan, warm the applesauce, honey, and oil over low heat. 
• Mix the applesauce mixture into the oat mixture and stir to coat everything. Spread the mixture onto a 9x13 baking pan. 
• Bake for 45-50 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes, until granola is a deep brown. Remove from oven and stir in raisins. Let cool before eating! (I didn't)

Crunchy yums!

30 weeks - 31 in one day!

Here's our (very blurry) 30-week picture - 30 weeks and six days, to be exact. We had our monthly checkup yesterday morning - the last of our monthly checkups. They're now switching to every two weeks. So far, all is well in babyland. The baby weighs about three pounds and its head is facing down, its bum is on the right, and footies are on the left. I had thought the bum-bump was its head, so I feel a little bit better now because I've been feeling bad about sleeping on my right side, worrying that I've been putting the poor little thing on its head for hours, soo this comes as a relief.

Physically I feel great and I have no complaints at all. Emotionally I'm a bit of a wreck. We have two months to go. TWO MONTHS. Cycle 17 of America's Next Top Model will still be on and we'll have a baby. I have purchased dairy products with expiry dates that are after my due date. I could be drinking the same coffee creamer I had for breakfast today when I'm a mother, and I won't even get food poisoning. This is not OK. I've never been so excited yet scared for anything, ever.

Staying asleep is starting to become a bit of a thing, in that it never happens for more than a couple hours. Last week Peter brought me a body pillow to help me sleep more comfortably, and it's been a huge help, except it creates this kind of puffy brick wall barrier between us in the bed. Rolling over is a bit of a production where I wake up, decide I want to actually roll over, heft the pillow over myself and then grunt and heave myself over to the other side. Sexy. When I sleep it's this weird straddling/cuddling of the pillow. I can't even see my husband on the other side. I'm going to name the pillow Peter 2. Or Al the Alligator. One of the books I've been reading, The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy, likens rolling over late in pregnancy with a body pillow as wrestling an alligator. She's right! I've never wrestled an alligator but I can only assume this is exactly the same.

Here are some other random tidbits from the past week:

Very scientific and to-scale drawing to show you how the baby is positioned.

-A (presumably) homeless man congratulated me yesterday, which I thought was pretty sweet. At least it was nice in comparison to the douche-lord at Starbucks two minutes earlier, who, the split second I closed my laptop, raced over to my table and asked "Are you leaving?" and then hovered while I packed away my computer and power cord, notebook, phone and water bottle. Seriously, guy. Fuck off somewhere with your frappuccino while I get my act together and waddle out of here.

-The Eddie Bauer Soothing Comfort Playard was designed to make new parents cry, sit on the floor and question their ability to raise a child when they can't even fold up a playpen successfully. "How was ALL THIS in THAT box??" I wailed. More than once. Soothing comfort? Maybe for baby. Not for us.

-I was practicing putting a stuffed bear into our carseat and if it were a real baby I'd have dislocated his/her arms and potentially crushed his penis (if baby is, in fact, of the penised variety).

-Out for a walk with Pete and the dog last night a car full of hooligans drove by and some 16-year-old screamed out the window at us, "You know that's my kid, right?" Stay classy, Sackville!

Here we are at 29 weeks and five days...which is crazy close to 30 weeks, which seems very DUN DUN DUUUUUN and homestretch-ish and frighteningly close to D-day. Our little bebe is now the size of a squash, which I find to be very unhelpful, thebump.com!! There are approximately 45 different varieties of squash! We want specifics! Is it a spaghetti squash? A butternut squash? Help these clueless kids out.

So, what's been going on in fetus land? Baby F has been getting the hiccups a lot lately which I find just adorable. He or she is active as ever throughout the day (including right now) and in the wee hours of the morning. Often, the movements feel more like rolls and flips, but once in a while there'll be a crazy flurry of really fast kicks and jabs.

Knock on wood, I've still been feeling great. I've been going to the gym as usual, pretty much every day, and eating normally too. I have a doctor's appointment next Tuesday and am anxious to see if I've gained weight. Even though baby is growing and is measuring right on track, and I can see my bump getting bigger, the scale isn't really budging. I'd only gained a pound over the course of my last three monthly appointments, so we'll see what's up next week. As long as the baby is healthy and measuring properly, I don't really care. As of my 26-week appointment I'd only gained about 10-12lb total.

I'm definitely getting more paranoid and protective of the baby. Last week, I stepped on a dog toy on the stairs, my feet flew out from under me, and I landed on my bum - hard - and skidded down four or five stairs. I was really shaken up and paranoid and of course I ran right to the trusty Internet to see what the geniuses on pregnancy forums recommended. (Side note: if you ever get knocked up, you should probably just avoid all computers. Don't even look at them.) After reading half a dozen horror stories about falls and their consequences I hysterically called 811, which is a service we have in Nova Scotia that links you to a registered nurse and essentially tells you whether you need to be seen by a doctor. She asked a lot of questions and reassured me I should be fine, and told me which symptoms to watch out for. I felt better after calling and better still after baby kicked and punched the daylights out of me for the next hour or so.

I also felt my first Braxton-Hicks contractions the other day - not fun. Anything ute-related sends me into a tailspin. Keep cooking, baby!!

A lot of girls get a real pregnancy "glow" and I don't feel like I have that. My skin's been haggard and dry no matter what I do, and I get ridiculous random breakouts. My hair doesn't cooperate. On the plus side, my nails do look better and stronger thanks to the prenatal vitamins.

Other things to note: Bending over is starting to suck, sleeping on my side is getting old, no strangers have touched my belly yet (WIN!!) and I've still been able to avoid buying maternity pants (DOUBLE WIN!!) Maternity clothes are atrociously expensive. Who wants to pay $40 for a t-shirt that's ugly and only going to be worn for a couple months? Not this girl.

Our nursery bedding arrived the other day - I'll post pictures once the nursery is 100% done but here's a picture from the website. We settled on owls. Unisex, cute, and not done to death.

The first full day of summer feels like an appropriate time to talk about bathing suit shopping, no? In less than two weeks, we'll be packing up the car and heading to the cottage for a full week of eating nothing but fried clams and barbecued steaks, smearing on Hawaiian Tropic and reading dozens of trashy magazines and teenybopper novels in the sand.

My idea of heaven...except this means I have less than two weeks to find a new bathing suit.

I hate bathing suit shopping at the best of times. I hate fluorescent lights in dressing rooms that make me look like a mottled, pasty white witch with translucent skin. I hate when the tops sag and the bottoms dig in, painfully obvious reminders of where I'm lacking and where I've got more than enough. I try to go right after a workout and before mealtime so at least I don't have the added bonus of a post-meal pooch sticking out and making me feel even more like clawing my eyeballs out of my head.

You know how you're not supposed to go grocery shopping hungry? The opposite is true of bathing suit shopping. BE AS HUNGRY AS YOU CAN.

Here's the thing. Once I get to the beach I'm OK. The hateful fluorescent lights are gone, the sun is shining, and you can dig a little bum-hole in the sand (NOT HOW IT SOUNDS) to make yourself look skinnier when you lay out. You can take advantage of things like strategically-placed towels, artfully draped sarongs, layers upon layers of self-tanner and huge sunglasses to help distract from any flaws. Usually I have an initial uncomfortable hour or so where it's like, "I should NOT be this undressed in public" and then I get drunk comfortable and I'm good to go for the rest of the summer.

But the trying on of the suits? Harsh, harsh, harsh. When I die and go to hell I will spend eternity wearing a slightly-too-small bikini in the Winners dressing room. And Nickelback will be playing in a continuous loop, and there will be only boiled ham dinner to eat, and the room will be full of cats.

Anyway, this year there's the added bonus of having what is currently a mango-sized bun in the oven, and by July who knows what type of produce it'll have grown to. Now we've all seen pregnant ladies rocking the bikini and looking amazing and cute but this girl normally refuses to eat any bread for 36 hours prior to a beach visit - I don't think I can deal with my stomach sticking out this much, even if there's a baby to blame. Which leaves me with a few matronly options: the one-piece and the tankini.

My soul just died a little bit typing those words.

So, I'm sitting here googling maternity swimsuits to see what amazing options we can come up with.

I started off at Thyme Maternity.

While this suit is adorable, I don't think I can have the mango exposed like this. I just don't think it would be cute. I don't have a big preggers belly yet - it still looks like a potbelly - so I can't get away with flaunting motherhood when I more closely resemble a slightly troubled girl at the tail end of freshman year after a few too many drop-kick-me-Jesus parties with the football team and hungover McDonald's feasts the next day.



Motherhood Maternity was next on my list, and this one-piece caught my eye. I like the pattern and the style is a little more interesting than your basic tank suit:



Old Navy's Canadian website doesn't offer maternity options anymore. WTF? Canadians don't reproduce? However, the American website has a black one-piece halter suit that I like and some tankinis that aren't totally vulgar as well. In fact, for this summer I maaay even be able to get away with buying a tankini top in the regular section, just a size up, and pairing it with bottoms I already own.







After writing this post I actually feel better, not worse. There may actually be a suit for me out there. If I have any luck finding anything I'll share it here. Just don't expect pictures of me modeling it.

Sometimes I feel like I eat all day long or like I'm constantly putting food in my mouth.

I have a pretty rigid eating routine on work days:

8:00 AM - Breakfast
9:00 AM - Coffee when I get to work
10:00 AM - Snack
12:00 noon - Lunch
3:00 PM - Snack
7:00 PM - Dinner

Is that a lot? I know you're supposed to eat every few hours but sometimes I feel like quite the heff, eating every time I turn around. I don't understand how people can skip breakfast and go all the way to lunch without eating anything. I would actually die. If my little routine gets interrupted (for example, there's a morning meeting and I can't have a snack until 11:00) I get UPSET. The whole day is off. I like my routine. In a chaotic world, it's one of the few things I can control. I like knowing that I can eat a snack at 3:00 regardless of what else is going on.

None of my meals are usually huge - for example, today for breakfast I had a peanut-butter-banana wrap, morning snack was a Special K bar, lunch was a soup and some trail mix and a soy latte. I have an apple for my afternoon snack. Dinner will probably be a stir-fry or leftover noodles and there better be a brownie to top it all off. Maybe that's a lot of food. Maybe it's not.

I almost always bring lunch from home, unless there's a lunch outing with my coworkers or with friends. Usually it's a salad, sandwich, or soup. I have been on quite the soup kick lately - two minutes in the microwave and you're good to go. When it's minus-22 outside, a nice hot soup can be a comfort halfway through the day. If I make a sandwich, it's always either peanut butter/banana, grilled veggie, or turkey, because those are the only kinds of sandwiches worth eating, IMHO. (Unless it's grilled cheese, but you CAN NOT bring a nasty ass soggy cold grilled cheese and eat it hours after grilling). Salads are awesome because you feel all vicarious and healthy eating them, but then you're ready to gnaw your own arm off an hour later. I like to put nuts on them (TWSS) and goat cheese and other proteiny things that probably make my "healthy" salads nutritional disasters.

So now that I've dorked out over food, tell me your eating habits. I want to know if anybody else follows a facist regime when it comes to eating, and also, if you bring your lunch, what do you pack? Gotta go, it's 3:00 apple time!