The Countdown is On!

 Well, today I am 38 weeks and 4 days pregnant. Baby is due in less than two weeks. 

AAAAAHHHHH!

Lol. 

We have all the basic necessities ready - except for a reliable doula - I got one but things don't seem to be working out. She was super responsive and great in the beginning...via phone...but I haven't even met her in person yet nor do I have the contact information of her backup doula and she's barely responding to me. Apparently she caught covid about two weeks ago and I guess I should give her grace for that, but...it's crunch time and I'm getting worried. 

She said she would call me yesterday and didn't - I don't even have her full first and last name. Meh. Thank God my friend Kim wants to be there with me when I give birth - Cal is worried he might not be able to stay conscious. 

But on to the better things. 

I graduated! On December 16th...and I now have a master's degree in science communication! I have a big-girl job as a science communication specialist, and I ACTUALLY ENJOY WHAT I DO! This is awesome. I'm so grateful. 

I got hit with the nesting bug super hard last week, lol, and deep cleaned my entire office (it was previously a bonafide disaster), put together as much as I could of my birth center bag, packed the diaper bag, and organized the bedroom. I also got rid of all the empty Amazon boxes that had been sitting in the hall for weeks. 

Today is my last day of work before I go on maternity leave. Unfortunately I'm three weeks short of qualifying for FMLA (paid leave), but oh well. It is what it is. If I had started my job on July 1st rather than August 1st I'd qualify, but like I said, it is what it is. Thank God I make enough big-girl money that I've been able to save for the weeks I'll be off. 

We'll be alright. 

My mother-in-law showed up this past weekend. She'll be spending 3-4 months here in the city since her second home upstate costs too much to heat during the winter months. I secretly think she just wanted to be here when the baby is born because she's afraid she won't get much of a chance to be around the baby otherwise. Also, it is in fact really expensive to heat her home up there. Hopefully her and my sister-in-law can manage to keep the peace between them - that's been my biggest concern about her coming back. 

Hopefully. 

Oh yeah. She also brought her six dogs with her...so now the house has four Yorkies, two Great Danes, and three cats. And only one of the dogs is trained to go outside to use the bathroom. 

Lol. I guess at the end of the day I made my choices and knew what I was getting into and now I have to sleep in my bed the way I made it, as my mother used to say. It's true what they say about how when you marry someone, you marry their whole family. Welp. 

We're going to try to move out within a year or a little more, though. 

So! Pregnancy symptoms! I often wake up at night with Braxton Hicks contractions that are NO FUN. They feel like period cramps...but like burning too. But then when I go empty my bladder and drink a ton more water they ease up, and baby isn't here yet, so I guess they haven't been the real deal. 

It's VERY difficult to get out of bed now, and it's also a pain to get back in. I get up between 4 and 5 times a night to use the bathroom, whether I drink water throughout the night or not. But if I don't, I get woken up by Braxton Hicks multiple times a night. So I drink water. 

I get hungry every two to three hours - ravenously hungry - so that's a thing. This week I feel like I've been getting hungry more often than that...so maybe baby is going through a growth spurt. There are hiccups almost every day, a few times a day (baby's hiccups, not mine), and squirms, kicks, stretches, and occasionally punches to the bladder every few hours. Oh, and I've experienced the joys of lightning crotch now. 

They really meant it when they said "you'll KNOW when it happens to you." Yikes. It's like a lightning strike - in your crotch. And even when it happens four or five times back to back, each one still strikes you off guard and makes you flinch. Pregnancy, amirite? 

Let's see, what else? 

At the last ultrasound (two weeks ago) baby was estimated to weight 6lbs, 13oz. So baby is probably pushing 8lbs by now. I have another ultrasound scheduled for tomorrow morning, and a non-stress test. And a midwife appointment. And Cal has a dr. appointment in between those two. Hah. Last week we had one dr. appointment each day every day of the week, and this week we have them all piled in on one day. Guess we'll see which is better, lol. 

I got my TDaP shot last week and also chose a pediatrician's office. It's nearby and seems really great, ticking all the boxes we care about and a lot we didn't know we cared about. Gosh. I'm hungry again. I just ate at 8:00 this morning and now it's only 10:00am. Also, Cal is awake now and hasn't eaten yet...guess I'm off to get us some grub! 

We need to go grocery shopping today, too. 

Laters!

33 Weeks

 33 weeks along...only 7 weeks to go and it both feels like this is taking forever and like it's flying by. 

Oh yeah. And cal and I both caught covid this week. 

Sigh. 

You know what's weird? I know I have a crap ton of stuff on my plate to finish up so I can graduate and get things ready for the baby and everything, but why do I have such a hard time giving myself grace and forgiving myself for shortcomings? 

Like, I'm literally 33 weeks pregnant AND I have covid. I feel like sh*t. I have no energy. I also feel awful on top of the no energy. Yet I'm beating myself up for the unopened Amazon packages, for the unwashed dishes, for the lack of mental focus...and feeling like I'm a bad wife/person in general. 

If there were ever a time to cut myself some slack, it would be now, would it not? But I only have five days to complete my master's capstone project (when I got all my official instructions I only had two weeks). 

I need to change my...what's the word? Priorities? No. I need to set boundaries for myself and stick to them. For too long I have had the habit of taking on too much on my plate at once, and I also have issues that make it hard for me to cope with that. 

Like, I was raised to be a people-pleaser, by a people-pleaser. Who had serious anxiety issues and I suffered the brunt of them. So I never learned coping mechanisms. I had to figure them out on my own, and I didn't even get allowed to use them properly. 

Being pregnant has brought up a lot of thoughts about how I don't want to be anything like my parents when it comes to being a parent myself. Yes, they did their best with what they knew, but ugh, where do I even begin? They treated me like I was a parent to them. They made me their marriage counselor from the time I was less than ten years old. I grew up feeling like every time they argued, it was my fault somehow. My father relied on me WAY too much, from when I was a teenager I went grocery shopping, paid the bills, cashed his checks, listened to his marital problems and stresses and tried to give him advice (he would literally come home from work and talk to me instead of my mother about his day), I did the laundry...and I know some of these are life skills that a child needs to learn, but not in the way that I did. It got to the point where now that I'm married and have moved out, he is learning to do all this stuff on his own. He didn't even know how or where to go grocery shopping, or how much food cost. 

He would tell me story ideas over the dinner table, tell me to write them up, and send them to Warner Bro's as movie ideas, but how should a 15 year old know how to do that? What's to stop Warner Bro's from stealing the idea? Wouldn't it need a lawyer? Or a thousand other nuanced things? Where would I find their contact info/who to contact about story ideas? Who would read the contracts/do all the communication back and forth? It's not that simple. And then he would blame me for us not being rich - saying if I were to just have written down the story that he told me in fifteen minutes over dinner once - then we could be millionaires and own a house. 

But that's how his ideas always go. He gets a half-baked idea, tells it to me, and expects me to make it happen so that his dreams can come true. Always in something that I have zero interest in, too - so it would take away time from what I actually want to do with my life. 

Sigh. 

Anyway. My point is, I really don't want to be like them. I don't want to care what other people think, because really, how does that affect me? As long as I'm doing what's right, it doesn't matter. There will always be busybodies and nosy people and those who think they have a right to be super involved in your private life. Which they don't. 

That being said, my dad doesn't even have the right to be super involved in my life anymore. And I'm rather annoyed with him and rather annoyed with the fact that I still feel like I need to not disappoint him.

I have to enforce my boundaries.

And learn to give myself grace. 

I'm tired of typing...I think I'll get some rest. 

update

 The presentation went well! I had several people approach me randomly in the hotel after the fact to tell me they enjoyed it and would be checking out The Link. 'Tis awesome. 

And I'm so glad it's over. 

I think I've reached that point in my pregnancy where I'm over it. I'm always feeling full, yet I get hungry every 2 hours or so, I'm always thirsty, and there's no such thing as a comfortable position to sit in unless there are at least two pillows involved (same goes for lying in bed, except make that three pillows). 

Walking hurts (round ligament pains and a baby who likes to hang out in the "bottom of the barrel," as the midwife put it) and just adjusting myself in my chair or rolling over in bed gets me out of breath. I have to sleep in satin so that I can glide when I try to turn over, or else it's pain that feels like my groin is being torn in half. No, I'm not being dramatic. 

I'm ready to go to sleep for the night by 5-6pm (like utterly exhausted) and I'm frequently nauseous, probably because I always feel so overstuffed. I've discovered a ton of stretch marks on my hips and under my boobs (oh yeah, the boob soreness is returning, slowly but surely. Probably milk production). 

What else? I get up to pee at least three times a night, if not more. 

But on the bright side? I get to feel my little jellybean moving throughout the day and night. It's so cool and weird to think that there's a small person inside there...a person who is part me and part Cal. So weird. SO cool. 

We're finally starting to stock up on things that we need for the baby (with ten weeks left before my due date). We've got a crib, a car seat, and a glider (I feel like I may have mentioned this already), a breast pump, some nursing bras, a 5 pack of 0-3 month onesies and a going home outfit in both newborn and 0-3 month sizes. We've got bottles for when I have to go back to work and leave milk with Cal, we've got a couple of potential names (boy and girl names, because the gender will be a surprise) and a few swaddles/a blanket. 

I've asked Cal to assemble the glider when we get back from this trip, because the hotel room has an armchair that makes life infinitely better, lol. I need that at home, too. 

Once November 15th comes and goes, the completion discount on our registry will kick in and we'll be able to start buying some of the things that people haven't bought (because I'm paranoid that no one will buy stuff until it's almost too late - fine, maybe it's nesting kicking in) and we'll get it at a 15% discount. 

I'm thinking to go to Walmart and look at baby clothes there - I've discovered that things are quite cheap indeed at the mart of the wall. We need diapers and wipes, and a baby carrier. I'm still hoping someone will buy that off of the registry, though - that thing is like $80. 

A lot to still be done, but I'm starting to get excited now, and I'm also totally ready to not be uncomfortably pregnant anymore lol. It's only going to get more uncomfortable, unfortunately, leading up to labor as the most uncomfortable...and there's only ten weeks left. Yikes. 

But it'll be worth it... :)

Nervous

 So you know the drill, I usually write when my mind is too full and I'm stressed somehow. 

I've got a presentation coming up at a science research conference, and I feel utterly underprepared and like...just terrified of speaking in front of people. I keep telling myself it'll just be like improv, I'll go and talk and it'll be over with and it'll be a learning experience, but that's not helping. 

I'm anxious because I have to travel for it. It's in Virginia, and I'll be spending four days in a hotel and even though the presentation is literally 30 minutes out of 4 days...it feels like that's all I can think about. 

I'm anxious because I'm 29 weeks pregnant (I'll be 30 weeks on the day of the presentation) and I get out of breath easily - and I worry that I'll sound gaspy or raspy or that it'll make my presentation look bad. 

I worry that because my presentation is about the website that I run, that I'm not talking about anything important, it's basically just an advertisement, and I don't like that. 

I worry about leaving my cats here and them running out of water because my sister in law adopted a cat off the street and I think she doesn't give him water...because he comes upstairs several times a day to drink the water from our cats' dispenser. 

So I'm writing this post to do an exercise from CBT that my therapist taught me...you write what the worst case scenario is that you're worried about, and then you work your way down from 1000 to like, 50 in terms of anxiety. 

So. It feels like it's all I can think about and like it's the entire weekend. But really, it's 30 minutes, and I don't have to use up all of the time. 

I feel unprepared, like I won't have enough to say, or will forget what I'm supposed to say. But I have a speaking outline. I have a powerpoint presentation. And I'm not going to use notecards - that was a huge thing that was making this more difficult.

I'm worried about being short of breath during the presentation. But I've decided I'll let them know I'm pregnant from the start, and to expect that that might happen. I'm also going to build into my presentation notes times when I should pause and breathe. I'm also prepared to catch myself tensing up and I will relax my shoulders, hold onto the podium, and breathe. 

I'm worrying that my presentation isn't worthwhile enough, that the attendees won't get anything out of it. But I'm in complete control of what I say and what I offer them. They're going to be finding out about The Link, which is a resource for them to learn actionable tips to do better scicomm. They're going to be finding out that they can get experience creating content, and hopefully they'll feel inspired that they can contribute to making the science communication space a more diverse place. 

I feel a bit better now. 

I'm worried about the cats having enough water, but I'm going to block off the staircase so the other cat can't come upstairs while we're gone. 

I have an outfit planned out for the presentation, and I know what to expect that the environment will be like. 

I know that I should dress business professional, that it'll be 76 degrees that day, that there will be a podium with a mic and I can have my notes and my powerpoint on google drive, and that I should get to the room 15 minutes early. 

It's less than an hour out of the entire weekend. I've got this. It's less than one hour out of my entire life. 

When I'm done with it, I can completely focus on just grading (catching up with grading, technically) since I've been teaching a class this semester (oh yeah, I'm never doing that again), and prepping for maternity leave. 

We're at the finish line, now. 

I can do this. 

21 weeks in

 I'm 21 weeks pregnant now, and you can finally kind of tell. Like, my belly is too big to just be overweight, but it's still not that perfect D shape. The jelly bean is fully formed now, not just a little tadpole with flippers and a beating heart. It looks like a whole baby in there on the ultrasounds. It's kinda mind-blowing. 

We could know what the gender is by now, but we've decided to have that be a surprise. We'll find out when the jellybean gets here. Oh! And news! I got the scicomm position that my supervisor left! I started on August first and I love the work. It's great. It's fun. It's awesomeness. 

I run a scicomm website called The Link, and well, I don't feel like going into a bunch of detail about it right now, but suffice it to say that it's a great platform for connecting science communication research to practice. 

The morning sickness (actually, the all-day sickness) lasted for about ten weeks. It was bad. I was barely functional, everything I smelled made me gag and want to puke or pass out (although I only puked once), and it led to me having to postpone my masters capstone project into the fall. So rather than graduating in the summer, I will hopefully be graduating in December of this year. 

It's so weird to see my body changing. I've got stretch marks all over my breasts and the top of my belly (was it really worth it for the bigger boobs? I'm questioning it...) and I'm the heaviest I've ever been in my life. I weigh 224 lbs now...but I'm tall, so it doesn't look horrible. It's just...weird. I can't bend over easily anymore and rolling over in bed or standing up from a chair is uncomfortable to the point of pain. (Apparently that's normal and it's called round ligament pains). 

My skin gets super dry and itchy...but at least I can eat most things again now. The nausea is gone, and I found a new prenatal that doesn't make me feel ill...it's called Ritual. It even has a pleasant citrus flavor to it (and it's a vegan capsule!). The only problem is that my organs are beginning to be squished, so I get full really quickly and overfull very easily (my brain still hasn't adapted to the fact that I can't eat as much at one sitting as I normally could) and then I'm uncomfortable for several hours. 

Adjustments. 

Today I tried on one of my workout jackets and to my utter surprise, I couldn't even close the two sides of it to zip it up! I took a video, because that's definitely a milestone, haha. Oh...and yesterday I felt the jellybean kick me...for sure. I've been uncertain the other times I've felt things because I have an anterior placenta, which means the placenta is at the front of my belly and cushions any movement I would feel. But this time, I saw my belly MOVE, and I was resting my iPad on top of it and my iPad jumped, too!

Pretty darn cool. 

It's weird to think that there's a little person in there. Someone who has a personality and will one day be a functioning member of society. They're literally inside my body right now. Doesn't make sense. 

Still cool. 

Anyway, I'm gonna go and do stuff that I have to do for scicomm stuff (don't feel like it because I'm tired, but I already got a one week extension, so I need to make the best of it...yeah today happens to be the deadline of that one week extension, ugh, I know). 

Laters!

SO many updates

 Wow.  

I knew it had been a long time since I wrote on here, but almost two years? That's a record, even for me. 

Where do I begin? haha. Maybe I should do a summary run down...let's see. 

2020: The covid pandemic hit. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others... and BLM. A lot of working at Starbucks. New York banned plastic bags. Fully in swing with my Masters in Science Communication, finally. In November, Cal took me to spend a weekend at a tiny house resort upstate and it was UTTERLY AMAZING. While there, my brother jokingly mentioned that Cal and I could start our own resort...and we took it seriously. On the way home, we started looking for properties.

2021: 

January 2021: Calvin and I decided to use our covid relief stimulus checks and the covid-related unemployment he was getting to save to buy property. We started watching a ton of videos on what to look for when buying property and how to build tiny houses. My dad got hurt at work: broke his hand and tore something in his shoulder. 

May 2021: Combined, we'd saved up $5000. We happened to see a 1.3 acre property on Zillow in VA for $8000 that looked pretty good, and I said you know what? We should go see it. So, on a whim, we drove 9 hours to a tiny town in the bottom of VA and had a look at the property, and while we were traveling, the price dropped from $8000 to $6000. 

We bought it. Cash. 

July 2021: Calvin asked me to marry him. I said yes. (cue happiest happy music). The same day, my niece gave birth to her son, and the next day, my childhood friend Kim gave birth to her second daughter on her kitchen floor (el gasp). All are healthy and thriving. We started taking trips to the property to plan out what work needed to be done on it - it's undeveloped land, just trees. No water, electricity or septic installed. However, there is public water at the street, and electricity available just across the street. During one of our trips, we realized that Google maps had really lied to us, and our property was MUCH narrower than we'd previously believed. If only we could have the property behind it, too....

August 2021: We looked up county records to find out who owned the property behind ours, and it turned out it was two little old ladies in their 80s. Sisters. By this time, we had saved up another $7000, so we decided to ask them if they would be willing to sell. A point in our favor was that they were land-locked, which is what it's called when your property is surrounded on all four sides by other people's property and you have no way to get to it without crossing someone else's land. They initially asked for $9000, but we told them that we had $7000 in cash and we owned the property in front of theirs. They agreed to the $7000, and in September we closed on our second property, 4.7 acres. 

September 2021: We became the proud owners of 6 acres of land. We also applied for and got our marriage license. The past few months were also a whirlwind of helping my dad, taking him to therapy and doctor's appointments, and dealing with workers comp lawyers.

October 2021: WE GOT MARRIED! It was a beautiful little event, technically what you'd call an elopement, by a lake in Central Park. Only a few guests were there - our closest friends, a few family members. My dad and Kim's mom were the ones who did our vows - and Kim's mom was so happy, because years ago she had asked me if she could be the one to marry us when the time came. The next day, we took a mini-honeymoon to VA to work on the property and to have some time to ourselves. We got to know the couple who owns the farm behind our property, and they were so excited to find out we'd just gotten married, they had us over for dinner, gave us a tour of their house and property, let us feed their donkeys, and ride their 4x4. It was really fun. 

November - December 2021: Nothing much happened.  I live with Calvin now in his mother's house (she's moved upstate into her new home). His sister lives downstairs and we have the whole upstairs to ourselves. I was finally able to bring my kitties to come live with me and they're as happy as can be. Married life is good. Really happy. Wait...nothing much happened? Not true lol. In November I got really sick for 3 weeks with what might have been a flu but felt more like covid. During that time, I helped my dad apply for a mortgage and we all went down to VA because he put an offer in on a house and it got accepted! But he backed out at the last minute...sigh. Cal and I are still scratching our heads on that one. He could have been a home-owner right now. 

Other 2020-2021 things that happened: I got a scicomm internship and it turned into a fellowship after that. SUCH FUN! Finally doing good, real scicomm work. I did my first actual research, too, and wrote up a paper that is nearly ready to submit for publication. I got interviewed on Instagram live by two scientists about the scicomm that I do, and my page grew significantly. I randomly started an aesthetic cozy gaming instagram account in March 2021 and it grew, well, not exponentially, but WAY faster than I remotely expected. I also started a scicomm podcast. :D

2022: 

My how the time flies. 

January 2022: Can't think of much. I know it was good. 

February 2022: I hit 1000 followers on my gaming account and I launched an Etsy shop, Gamer Noir Collective, selling stickers and prints with Black girl cozy gamers in mind. It did really well at launch, and the occasional order still trickles in. This was my last semester of my masters program, so I was really focused on that, plus working in the scicomm fellowship capacity and loving it. 

March and April 2022: My internship/fellowship supervisor left her position and got a job with the EPA (how cool is that) and trained me to take over. I've been filling in for her since she left, and I applied for the job vacancy, too. I was on a science and society virtual panel (one of 3 guest speakers) at the Bay Area Science Festival and I got interviewed by Kid Pundit (a 10 year old prodigy on YouTube) about scicomm and the CDC. Went to my supervisor's going away party and met everyone in person for the first time, AND found out the school of journalism director speaks fluent Swedish. We totally bonded and had a whole convo in Swedish/Norwegian. Also...my period was late...for the first time ever. 

May 2022: On May 6th, I took a pregnancy test. IT WAS POSITIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my gosh. Just, oh my gosh. We've caught up to the present time, now. May has been a whirlwind of morning sickness (oh so bad) and finding a midwife/OB. Calvin is excited and when asked, says he's basically feeling "all the emotions" which is the same for me. I finally had my first prenatal appointment yesterday, May 31st, (they took 7 vials of blood, the darn vampires) and had my first ultrasound too. DUDE. The little jellybean has a beating heart. You can SEE the heart beating. It was surreal. Calvin recorded it and even though the technician told us that the printer wasn't working, she tried anyway, and it printed!! So we have a photo of our little jellybean. This is so....wow. Happy-making, as the Pretties would say. I've gone through so many emotions since finding out - panic attacks, excitement (I made an entire registry the first week after I found out and then skeeved myself out somehow and haven't wanted to look at it since - don't worry, I know it's still early so the registry is still private). I've broken down and ugly cried twice since the morning sickness got real bad. For the last two weeks I've been non-functional. It's been all day, every day, with nothing really helping and I haven't even been able to throw up to get some relief. 

Strangely enough, though, I forgot to take my prenatal one day this past week, and the next day I was almost fully functional. I didn't take it that day either, and by the third day I was fine. Come to find out, prenatals make EVERYTHING WORSE. Nausea, constipation...ugh. So I asked the midwife what to do, and she told me she's not surprised - apparently all I REALLY need is folic acid and a decent diet. So as of yesterday I started taking just a folic acid supplement, and I'm really about to throw those prenatal vitamins in the garbage. Two weeks of my life in misery, and for what? SMH. I'm still dealing with the constipation...

But yeah. There you have it. Today is June 1st, 2022, I'm a married woman, happy, and about to become a mama. The little jellybean is due mid January of next year. Hah. After all I've battled with...who would have thought? You know...it's true what that therapist said in the meme online...counter your negative thinking with "What if everything works out? What if all your hard work pays off?" And what Mark Manson said (or maybe it was someone else he was quoting - and I'm paraphrasing from memory) "Unless you are completely dead: mentally, emotionally, and physically, you cannot anticipate your life 5 years into the future. So get over the conflict about your life's direction and take risks. You cannot lose what you never had, and most losses are in the mind, anyway."

And the one that's helped me the most, because it's really worth remembering and implementing: Stop worrying about what could go wrong and start focusing on what could go right.

After all, if there is even the slightest possibility something could go wrong, that statistically means there is a possibility it could go right. 

Love ya. 

my mind is cluttered

 Too many thoughts...too many changes at once.

Is this what life is? Struggles and changes and floundering around and being unsure and never really knowing what you're doing or what you're going to do or what you're up against or how to deal with things? 

Never-ending change? 

Side note - speaking of change, I don't like the new layout for the blogger new post page. 

meh. 

Cal believes in Jesus. This is awesome. This is better than I ever hoped or dreamed or imagined or expected. 

He's started reading the Bible, almost every day, and he's making changes in his life. He's trying to stop cursing, and he's asked so many questions about everything he's read that it's made me very happy. 

It's also made me very unsettled. It's strange to hear him say "all praises to the Most High," and it's scary to watch him get up to the parts in the Bible that are all about patriarchy and women must be silent and so forth. 

I'm afraid that it will make him judge me. Heck, I feel judged, just because he's read the parts about women should have long hair and men shouldn't. Now I know this means he will probably never grow his hair out again once he cuts it for school - oh yeah. He's going to a marine merchant school in Maryland and he's going to be gone for 6 months at a time. 

[insert saddest face possible here]

But on the bright side (there are many bright sides) he says that one good-length voyage would be a down payment on a house that he had shown me on Zillow. He also wants us to get married one day, and to be able to buy and move into our own house "very soon" afterwards. 

So these are good things. Bright sides. 

I need to remember them when the pms fears and thoughts of insecurity kick in. 

Thoughts like, what if he didn't really mean it? why did I have to ask? does he really love me? am I pushing him into this? will this all work out? can I handle having him so far away for so long? what am I afraid of? what if he's not meant to be with me and realizes that while abroad? how do I cope with not celebrating Christmas or the idea that we're actually hebrews? 

It's a lot. 

Then again, it's always a lot. That seems to be what life is: a lot. 

Well, he's got a plan now, and he was talking about saving money and I was saying how when he's on the ship, there won't be anything to spend his money on, and he went "well in our situation, if we were paying off a mortgage, the money would be coming out of that account." 

So. 

Why do I need to reassure myself so much? Why do I start doubting things so quickly? How do I stop? 

I need cuddles.