55 year-old Queens, Drunken Behemoths and A very hungover Sarah

I went to the Britney Spears concert at Allstate Arena last night. Yes, me, who went to her first Dave Matthews band concert 2 years ago, and usually prefers places like Ravinia... However, 5 months ago I had been toasted enough to say "oh my gosh I think that would be so much fun!" to also call my sis and rope her toasted-ass into it, too. Fast forward to now: We're both pregnant, can't drink at the concert, and don't listen to Britney Spears unless we've got our iPods and are on ellipticals at the gym :)

So, we met Sarah C., Jes, Liz and her friend Barb at the Residence Inn in Rosemont, and much to my hoped pleasure, it was closer to the entrance of Allstate than some of the parking lot was. Nice! The non-pregnant girls boozed it up a bit, then we headed to the concert. We ended up having great seats, thanks to Kermit, Liz and Sarah's planning, so that was nice, except there were people in our seats when we got there. So we just kind of sat a few seats off, and waited for them to (hopefully) move so we could sit where we were supposed to.

Well, the Pussycat Dolls opened and closed, then the group of girls in our seats left (assumingly to get booze). So we moved into our seats, and then they came back a short time later. They were all WASTED, but seemed to slowly make their way past us to their seats. One of them kept slurringly asking me if I was in the right seat (shw wasn't being unfriendly), and I said "yes, this is #27, you're in #26, right next to me." So, we're enjoying the pre-show when all of a sudden this huge behemothly tall woman starts yelling in my face "okay-- get the FUCK out of OUR SEATS!!!" I was like "OH MY GOD what the hell is going on???!!!" So then another one of her monstrous friends comes over and joins in the argument, and Sarison turns and starts in with "whoa! Calm down-- we're in the right seats!" Keep in mind Sarah and I are both stone sober, and I had double-checked our seats. So then Sarah disappears to go get security, and I'm stuck in the middle of the Jolly Green Giants and Barb who was trying to save me. I was thinking to myself "what the hell is going on??? I'm so confused!!!" Sarah didn't come back with the security person because she was like 80.

It ended up getting settled as fast as it started, but yes, we totally almost got in a fight, totally sober, with a bunch of scary drunk huge women. In retrospect, it was actually kind of funny...

The rest of the concert was good-- raunchy, but good. Very interesting people walking by, and quite some hoochtastic outfits. Back at the hotel we pigged on chips and french onion dip, and listened to Sarah C. (who had drank the equivalent of 5 shots worth of tequila, plus beer and wine before) talk about her mannishly muscular arms and how she doesn't want them to look bad in her wedding dress. Quite amusing.... Until this morning when she woke up and looked like Death had run her over with a 10-ton semi :)

Kind of nice to feel all fresh and be free of hangovers in the mornings for the next 5 months... :)

Dreams 4/25 & 4/26 and Engagement!

Dreams:

I dreamt that I was back at Augie, but it was more of a big open field. But at the same time I was in Lundahl's upper gym, playing basketball (well, actually I was sitting on the bench). Every time we would run to one end of the gym, we would hear all this yelling, and I kept telling the other girls "oh, that's just the DONs doing pledging activities." (I think I was thinking about this because Andy had talked about DON pledging earlier in the weekend). Anyways, I can't remember exact detals, but it turned into me and a couple of other people hiding in the hills of the fields from some guy trying to kill us! Weird... So then all of a sudden my Grandpa Preston drives up and gives us the "pretend I'm not here, stay quiet" look, and goes and "takes care" of the guys trying to kill us! So scary. Somewhere my mom was in the dream, and I actually think she was one of the bad guys, but I can't remember exactly.

In real life I lost a St. Gerard medal that my mom gave me, and I am really upset about it. In the dream, I was putting ads up on Craigslist and in the paper trying to find it.

In real life I had watched E! True Hollywood Story on Growing Pains, and I kept dreaming that Kirk Cameron and his wife were trying to change everything in my life. So weird...

Engagement!

So, Andy surprised Sarah with a proposal this Saturday, and of course she said yes! He had arranged for both of their families to be at dinner without her knowing, and then for all of their friends to be at Irish Pub later on in the evening. It was a great celebration, and we now all add another wedding to our lists for next year! Who's next???

Other news:

Squirrel is growing! It's about the size of an apple now, I guess, and we have an appointment with Dr. Barnabei on Friday morning. I'm not quite as comfortable in my clothes at the moment, but not big enough for maternity yet... Soon!

1st Tri Screen plus Dreams

This morning we had our 1st Trimester screening tests at Children's. We first had an ultrasound, and it was so surreal to see the baby! According to the tech and Doc, everything (from what they can tell now) looks perfectly fine. The baby even totally moved around for us, which was so cool! The tech says "you've got a little athlete!"-- and I said "Yesss!" We will have to wait for our "official" test results, but for now we're happy. After our ultrasound we met with a genetic counselor, who put us at ease that I will be okay giving birth. We went over our ethnic backgrounds to see if we're prone to any particular issue, and really we're not. And most of all, our concerns about what happened to Sarah happening to me are pretty uneccesary, at least for now. So that was good. "Reassuringly pointless" is what I've been saying :).

Dreams:
I was at some big auditorium place and I was on America's Next Top Model. So was Michael... He went first down the runway, and looked like a total goof, waving his hands in the air because he had no idea how to walk. Then I had to go, and I did a really good job, despite the fact that I was the shortest one there. They had this whole system for the runway that you were assigned a specific color, and when your color was listed on this map thing, then it was your turn to walk. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and I looked really pretty. Weird.

Then I dreamt that someone had driven by our house and stolen Scotch. I recognized the car when I was driving down the highway, so I turned around and followed it, until it pulled off the highway onto a deserted dirt road. It stopped, so I pulled over and pulled up to it. When I got to the car, there was Scotch, on the lap of the passenger. I said "that's my dog! Give him back!" and the lady says, very nicely, "no this is our dog, and we are keeping him." I said, "you're crazy, come on Scotch," and he promptly jumped into my car. We were back on the highway and that was it.

Dreams 4/1/09

I am going to begin jotting down some of my dreams that I have, since I keep forgetting to write them down in my journal. Plus, I type faster than I write. Excuse the choppy format, because it's hard to remember each detail.

First dream: I was on vacation with my mom and Sarah, and it was implied in the dream that Harrisons were around, too. Sarah had picked Puerta Vallarta to go to because there was some concert going on there. My mom and I were alone and she was telling me how she didn't like the place because it was too busy and it wasn't tropical enough. I kept telling her that we should have gone to Playa del Carmen because there were less people. We took a shuttle-boat through a jungle-like lagoon area to get to the restaurant, that I think could only be reached by boat. When we got there, it was like a Carlos and Charlie's type of place-- and very busy. We had to share a table with a couple of guys, and Sarah finally showed up saying she was loving the place. The concert was going on outside of the restuarant, and it was really loud and there were thousands of people. We left the restaurant and started walking through a series of planked pathways across the water, but they were all flooded so we called our shuttle-boat driver back. He picked us up, and took us on a ride through the lagoon, and we saw two huge alligators in the water. He thought it would be cool to get the boat bucking up and down so we would get close to the gators, which we didn't like, and were very scared. When we got close to one of them, it tried to bite my arm, and got a little bit. My mom was really mad at the driver-- he just thought it was funny. That was the dream...

Second dream: I was laying in bed at around 5am, when I got really bad stomach cramps (in real life I had just woken up with the same thing, so I had a hard time distinguishing between the dream and reality at first). I got out of bed, and called my mom because I knew she'd be up, and I wanted to ask her advice. She told me to call the doctor to make sure it wasn't anything pregnancy-related. So I was getting off the phone with my mom, when I heard our back door open. Skip and Scotch were in bed, so I was scared. Scotch growled a little, and in walks Kathryn Gray-- wasted! It was funny. She had said she was out with friends drinking (but I can't remember the rest of the details). She was acting really silly, and I told her that it was a great fun thing to do the last night before her last year of college started. She started feeling bad because it was so early in the morning, but I told her it was okay because I was already up. She started getting really sleepy, so she pulled out the pull-out bed from the couch (which we don't have in real life), and crashed. That was the dream...