10 days down...

It's a little over halfway through the two weeks wait and we've succeeded in keeping ourselves occupied.

At the weekend, we visited A's sister (who is now officially two weeks overdue.) As is traditional for us whenever we fly abroad, it started with a near-tears moment of stress. We had made it as far as the check-in desk when I realised that my printed boarding pass was in fact paperwork for our Peruvian Christmas. Ryan air is really strict about having your boarding pass with you when you check in.  It was either pay £70 (twice what the ticket cost) to have a new one printed or call the new lodger and ask him to drive across the city with less than an hour to spare.  In the end, we appealed to the young assistant manning the customer service desk. We got our boarding pass printed on the sly and then after all that excitement, headed for Starbucks - where, I regret to say, I succumbed to the siren call of caffeine. It wasn't the last time that weekend that we broke our pact to reduce caffeine, either.
We were only there for a day and two nights but it was nice to be spending time with family. They even took us out to a nice bar on Saturday night (my virgin mojito was made with lemonade, which I hadn't tried before. It was pretty good)

I've been trying to reduce my stress levels recently, after a friend pointed out that I was having some pretty near-miss catastrophes at work from being too distracted by other stresses (To be fair, that's more to do with the fact that our store breeds stress. On Monday for example, a cage of frozen delivery didn't get put away within it's allocated time and we lost nearly £100 of ice-cream - guess who had to answer for that) I'll admit that I may be wound a little tightly at the moment. Maybe it's that I'm aware of this try being the last until after the new year and I know it wasn't much of a pitch. Maybe it's that we're getting closer to our Peru holiday and I'm getting nervous about meeting A's parents - given that I'm the first girlfriend they've met (that they know of) - whilst they're still wrapping their heads around the idea that their daughter is gay. I don't know. I just know that on Tuesday, I was so wound up that I messed up making macaroni, resorting to straining the roux where I hadn't had to in years. I had a good cry over that; then pulled myself together before A came home. I even managed a giggle, as thoughts came to me of how close we had come to re-creating the scene from the 'Little Women' sequel, 'Good Wives,' in which poor John arrives home with company, unaware that his loving and dutiful wife has made a real wreck of the kitchen trying to make jam and is ready to blast anyone who dares ask how her day went.

And last night, we had a room change around. The new carpets that we have been bugging the landlord about finally arrived whilst I was at work.  When I arrived home, A and vecina had switched furniture between the living room and the lodgers' room. So now they have the bigger room but we have a private living room - which is better all round as I think all parties were starting to feel the strain of sharing that space.
A new wardrobe that we had arranged for the lodgers came a few hours afterwards but it had to be sent back, as it didn't so much resemble a wardrobe as a large box.  The fixtures were all missing.  There was a solution though(!)  When the alternative arrived, I had taken refuge in our new living room (which at this point still resembles a rubbish tip) and I could hear the guys trying to manoeuvre the wardrobe up the stairs from halfway across the flat. A told me later that it was clearly too big for the narrow stairway that leads up to our flat.  Did that stop four grown men from trying though?  This falls under the category of 'you can't tell men nuthin.' After ten minutes of trying(!), they decided between them that the best course of action was to take it apart and re-assemble it in the room.

Today is, thankfully, a day off. I had all weekend off, Tuesday off and a (slightly) less stressful daytime shift yesterday but I am still ridiculously grateful for a whole day to unwind. Between the mild nausea, cramps and breast tenderness coming on we can either expect a positive test next week or a particularly unpleasant period.