Pregnancy Update: 27 Weeks

I am in the final days of my 2nd trimester.  That is so hard to believe.  It seems like only yesterday I was happy to be starting  the 2nd trimester and now it's almost gone!  Here are some things I have been loving/hating lately:

Loving:
-Feeling the baby move.  I swear it is doing Tae Bo in there sometimes.
-Brad talking to the baby. It's adorable and hilarious, because he talks to it like it is an adult. I have a feeling   that he will continue to speak to it this way after it is born.
-Fruit.  I gorge on fruit -- it's a little embarrassing, the sheer amount of fruit I can eat in a day.
-The "Your-Baby-is-as-Big-as-This-Vegetable" emails.  This week it was a rutabaga.  I'm not even sure how big that is, but I was proud.
-People being nice to me at the grocery store. I had a guy offer to carry my 20-pound bag of dog food to the car for me.  I declined, but it was still a nice gesture.
-My nails, which are stronger than they have ever been in my life. I've always had weak, peely nails, but they are so hard now that they're difficult to cut.


Not Loving:
-Sore, swollen feet.  At the end of the day, my feet hurt and my toes look like mini sausages.
-The heat. Good lord, the heat.  See also: sweating.
-Breaking out like a 14-year-old boy. 
-People asking me if I can sense what the sex of the baby is. Dude, I don't know and I don't want to know -- that's why we are keeping it a surprise.  My mother asks me this question every single time I talk to her. Every. Time.
-Pregnant lady rage. It is a real and dangerous thing.

This weekend Brad is staying in town (!) so I am hoping to go out to dinner, see Batman, and hang out with my love. We haven't seen much of each other lately and I miss it!  I am also going to make a mobile with paper lanterns that I bought from a shady website.  If it works like my brain thinks it will, I will share.

Clay Matthews Bars

About a year and a half ago, when the Packers beat the Steelers in the Super Bowl, my parents (who understand my love for Green Bay Packers' outside linebacker Clay Matthews) sent me a box of Wheaties with Clay's photo on it, like so:

This has been unopened in my kitchen cupboard ever since.  Brad has been trying to throw the box away since it arrived, knowing that I would probably not eat them.  Since they expire next month, and I can't let Clay's legacy go to waste, I made a batch of Clay Matthews bars today.  Behold my crappy iphone photo:

And if you'd like to also make Clay proud, this is how we do it:

Clay Matthews Bars

Ingredients:

6 cups of Wheaties FUEL cereal with Clay Matthews' photo on it

11 ounces of marshmallows

~1/4 c of extra virgin coconut oil (see what I did there?  This is not the standard krispie-rice cereal bar recipe, no!)

Melt 3 TBSP of coconut oil in large pan over medium heat.  Take another little glop of it in your hands and coat a 9"x13"pan.

Add marshmallows and let them melt. Actually let them get a tiny bit carmelized/brown -- you will see faint swirls of caramel-colored marshmallow in the mix. This is a delicious thing. Just don't let them burn to the bottom of the pan. Stir, stir, stir.

Mix in cereal.

Pat mixture into pan. Let harden to room temperature. Eat a little corner piece, then cut the rest into squares.

                                                                            ---

This weekend, Brad and I and our friend Dave are headed up to beautiful Snowshoe West Virginia, here Brad will be participating in some ridiculously long mountain bike race, and I will be eating Clay Matthews Bars -- hey, the baby needs FUEL.

Someday I'll tell you about the time that I was 6 months pregnant and it as 100 degrees every day and we didn't have power for a week.