30

I have set a new-decade resolution to cease and desist with all gossip. Saying something critical about someone, particularly when I would not say it to the person directly, is cowardly, tasteless, and insane.

I need a form of self-flagellation if I mess up. Something that stings, is relatively simple to execute, but not corporeal. I am open to suggestions.

In the meantime, if you hear me say something about someone that I wouldn't say to them, feel free to give me a quick slap.

Happy new decade!

The real deal

I turn thirty next week. I love my birthday and have always been committed to celebrating thoroughly. Last year on my birthday I was pregnant (miserable, and too large to fit into my birthday suit! Horrors!) and had to work for twelve hours. It was a real dud.

So this year I have been contemplating how to commemorate my glorious thirtieth birthday. What I came up with proves that my youth is already long gone.

1. Force Ryan to run errands with me. This includes babies r us (to buy an ergo), ikea, and JC Penney portrait studios (to pick up the holiday card envelopes they forgot to include with my order).

2. Force Ryan to help me clean the den and/or basement.

3. Maybe go out to lunch or something.

That's what I got. I'm glad I had so much unmitigated fun in my teens and twenties. These days, I'm apparently all business*. I hope I don't want to clean the bathroom when I turn forty.

At least I'll be running errands in my birthday suit. That thing makes a party out of anything.

*Upon a re-reading of this post, I realize that it's not so much business I'm into as forcing Ryan to do my bidding. I can't help it. I'm an oldest child.

Milestones

It seems that some parents rejoice when their child, especially a firstborn child, passes important milestones. Not me. This child has started practically begging me to eat solids, and I just keep trying to nurse him. It's so easy, so convenient, so inexpensive, so metabolically favorable.

And now the little sucker has started crawling. Mobility is proving just as problematic as I anticipated. He just wants to eat electrical cords.

When he walks, I quit.

Grievances about my lower half

I'm posting this from my phone and have no idea where the photos will show up. Forgive me if it doesn't make sense. I'm in the process of learning to use my phone as my only link to the outside world.

I take issue with the following:

According to standard distribution charts for white, American females, I am a of approximately average height and weight. Why, then, are all pants minimally five inches too long? I recently purchased six pair or jeans at Unique Thrift, sweet purveyor of nearly-free clothing, and every one requires either a seamstress or impractical shoes. If I am average, it seems there could be at least one pair that would be in the ballpark. Perhaps I should wear only capris. Better cold ankles than tripping. This reminds me of canned pumpkin, sold in 29 oz. cans when everyone knows that all pumpkin recipes call for one cup (8oz.) or maybe two, if you're lucky, but never 3 and 5/8. But that grievance has nothing to do with my lower half, so, moving on...

to my next point. The aforementioned pants represented sizes four through ten. This is four different sizes, for any readers unfamiliar with women's sizes. The size four pants are roomier than the size eights. This is simply madness. Men's pants are sized in a sane way, according to their measurements. Even a difficult to size man, like my long-legger spouse, can hope to find pants if the numbers are right. Women have to take an entire store into the dressing room. I am renewed in my zeal for my fondest dream, that all the world wear zip-up jumpsuits, like auto mechanics. Practical. Comfortable. Easy to size. Why is nobody on board for this idea? Probably because they are too busy trying on pants and freezing leftover pumpkin.

And finally, I went to the gym today and did a routine of exercises specific to my glutes. Only. Just butt exercises. Because mine is a full six inches south from where I left it when I got pregnant. To my knowledge, the baby does not gestate in ones derrière. Why, then, does mine look as though someone let the air out of it? If anyone needs me, I'll be doing hack squats.

Those are all my complaints. In other news, the kid has a tooth. He does not care to show it off, and thus must be forced. He likes his dad. So do I.

Over and out.

Happy Halloween

Last year we celebrated Halloween with a 400 lb. pumpkin. It was a real big pumpkin.

This year we only had a twenty pounder. Just a little pumpkin.

Happy Halloween :)

Emergency preparedness

I am newly, blissfully addicted to Pinterest. It gives a person the distinct sense of having accomplished something when, in fact, all she has done is lain in bed so her kid will stay asleep.

Pinterest has given me some anxiety. I fear I will fail to thrive as a mother and human being if I do not purchase a sewing machine and a laminator. I am now aware it is possible to fashion upwards of twenty different homemade wreaths for even the most mediocre holidays. And I am more keenly attuned every moment to the impending apocalypse. We need food storage. Survival training.

And all I do is watch my kid sleep.

But sometimes a person realizes she may be unduly complicating things. In fact, the ability to complicate simple things may not only describe a pastime, but a defining personality trait.

Think with me on this. Is there anything I need in a 72 hour kit besides a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of gatorade, and a small firearm.

I eagerly await your input.

My identity

This morning, I woke up in the bed where I co-sleep with my exclusively breastfed child, changed his hemp cloth diaper, and set about my primary objective for the day, which is cleaning my carpet with this non-toxic, homemade method. I ran out of salt, so I went to our locally-sourcing natural foods market, traipsed around with my kid in a sling while wearing vibram fivefingers, and took home my salt, plus some chocolate almond milk, for a treat, in my reusable canvas bags.

But I'm no hippie.

In college, I was frequently teased for being a fake hippie, because I was. I listened to phish CDs I bought at barnes and noble, rather than bootlegged myself on tour, in the Toyota previa I purchased, rather than a vintage VW bus. I ate vegetarian food I bought at target and Costco. I wore Birkenstocks purchased via amazon and had shipped to my air-conditioned house.

It has been a life of conflict and hypocrisy.

This is why I am grateful for the green mommy movement. Never before have my interests in Eco- and health-friendly lifestyle choices been so beautifully blended with my uptight and neurotic personality. Now I can keep orderly and extensive boards of recipes, DIY projects, and unschooling ideas on Pinterest. I can follow vegan cooking blogs on my google reader and read then on my iPhone while I'm nursing. It's AWESOME.

I am not alone.

Relatedly, if obliquely, I have had a few observant friends mention the obsolescence of my blog title. Touché, I am indeed no longer childless (though I have also not been a housewife for four years and nobody noticed; perhaps therein lies a commentary on female identity perception in the US). However, I am contemplating new options. The blog does need a new name. A couple that now spring to mind are:

1. Amy's breastaurant: all-you-can-eat, open 24/7

2. No Regrets: Trading a life of ease, luxury, and lunch dates for a life of domestic servitude without a moment's regret

As you can see, I'm having trouble coming up with something I find as punchy as Childless Housewife, but I'll keep working on it.

The more things change

The more they still have a fat head and a concerned look on their face.

First photo taken 6/11/11, second photo taken 8/9/11.

Baby's firsts

I think The Kid had his first successful rollover yesterday. I did not capture the event, as I was not excited about it. Mobility=hassle. I've seen parents of toddlers. They're busy trying to keep their kids from killing themselves.

There have been a couple other firsts, however, about which I was thrilled. The first was his first playdate. He is going to have to learn to love hanging out with other kids so I can hang out with their moms.
I think they enjoyed it, too. They seemed to share some perspective. Like they were looking at life from the same angle, if you will.

Both boys are robust. However my child is only two weeks older than the other boy and looked substantially bigger to me. This is not surprising. He weighs 17 lbs 5 oz. Now I know why he kept hollering for more food in utero. He had plans for those calories.

The other first is that this morning, I discovered baby's first dreadlock. It is small, but unmistakable.
This was acquired in the night. A person has to be serious about their tossing and turning to dread their barely-existing hair while they are asleep.

I am here to verify the tossing and turning.

He does sleep occasionally. Here is proof:

I still prefer him awake, though. The kid knows how to party.

That is all. Forgive the lack of funny stories or flowery prose. We're a little tired around here. Tired, but good. Actually, great. We are all just great.

The Kid is a good idea.

Should've named him Winston

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:
I suppose all we can hope is that his command of language is sufficient to obscure the effects of his whiskey habit.

He isn't always grumpily impersonating world leaders of the twentieth century, though. Here. He smiles.

More cute photos by Kat Audette here. (If you want more crappy iPhone photos, you'll have to keep checking here.) She is a talented and delightful person; if you need photos taken in SLC, I'd recommend her!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Housewife

The above photograph is of Kate Winslet starring in her role as Clementine is the surrealistic film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One fun motif in the film is Clementine's frequently-changing technicolor hair.

The above picture is of Muriel, the Disney princess more readily identified by her bright red hair than the fact that her lower body is piscene. She is a cartoon.

What do these characters have in common? The same thing they share with me: surrealistic, cartoonish, unnaturally red hair.

The above photo is of me yesterday. I bought henna because, based on my consultation of the internet, I thought it would be good for my hair and might infuse it with a reddish cast. It sounded like good, clean, herbal fun.

I should have known to take herbs seriously after the cohosh incident.

The instructions indicated that the henna could be left on the hair for 2-4 hours, which affirmed my belief that it must not be too potent (otherwise, they would give a more specific timeframe, I assumed).

Thankfully, the box also provided some assurance. "The hair may appear to be a very bright color at first, but will fade to a natural shade of red in 3-4 days."

I hope they're serious, but I'm trying to be cheerful. See?


In other news, in trying to avoid an allergic reaction to latex, I forewent the gloves included in the henna kit and gave myself an oompa loompa hand. My hand has faded now to an almost-normal shade, so hope springs eternal for my hair. The baby is included in the shot for contrast as well as to make this post more enjoyable for my mother.

Counting my blessings

Babies make the best faces before they have muscle control. It's awesome.

I have many blessings to be thankful for. Too many to name or even conceptualize. I am probably not aware of 99% of them.

But there is one of which I am keenly aware. I AM NO LONGER PREGNANT.

I may not have slept more than three consecutive hours in six weeks, I may have needed bonus stitches in my sitting parts three weeks postpartum, I may have a case of mystery eczema that might preclude eating dairy (mixed blessing, I know), I may not be able to wear non-maternity pants for another several months, I may be insuranceless when my Medicaid runs out in two weeks, I may be unable to return any of the phone calls from loving friends wanting to check in because any minute a squalling baby may demand milk from its original source, but I DON'T CARE. Because I, my lovelies, am not pregnant.

There is no bliss to match the bliss of not being pregnant anymore. Some women feel lovely and fecund and mysterious when they are pregnant, but for me it was just a series of new kinds of pain and discomfort, compounding one another's effects over a forty week span and ending in pain that defies description. So I'm happy it's over. Real happy!

In other news, Forrest and I had our six week postpartum visit yesterday. He weighed in at an impressive 12 lb, 4 oz, meaning his weight has increased by 50% while mine has decreased by 25%. When our midwife announced Forrest's weight, I looked surprised and she, gesturing to the visible fruits of lactation, said, "Well, he is feeding at one of the seven wonders of the world!"

My boobs rival Giza's pyramids. Literally and figuratively.

Life is good. I'm not pregnant, I have a sleepy, hungry little nursling, and spring is springing just as I am regaining hope of eventual mobility. Things are looking up around here.

Visitors welcome :) I only work 6 hours a week!

40 weeks

As of five hours ago, I am forty weeks pregnant. I think my water may have broken at 3:00, but no contractions yet. Unfortunately, I can't seem to go back to sleep. Ryan fell back asleep as soon as I told him to. Men have it easy.

I would find it very satisfying if this child is born on his due date.

3:00 water trickle, call midwife and mom. try to sleep. fail.

Get up and play around online. Read funny blog. Have a few intermittent contractions.

7:00 puke.

Nineteen days later, I'm back to edit the post I began the day before I gave birth. Sorry. Newborn=timewarp. It's all for the best. I already have amnesia setting in, which should spare you some gore.

So, as you can see from the above post, begun but never finished, I went into labor on my due date, March 31. Kind of. It was slow, disorganized labor, with lots of several-hours-long breaks and easily managed contractions. I enjoyed this early labor stage until 1:00 pm the next day, April 1, when my midwife invited me to her office to talk about options, since my water may or may not have broken (in retrospect, I think it was a break in the forebag, for those who like details about other peoples' amniotic sacs). She did the obligatory exam and reported that I have a "favorable" cervix (3 cm dilated, 80% effaced, "nice and soft and stretchy") and that I might benefit from her "labor blend", an herbal tincture featuring the wondrous cohoshes, black and blue. She explained that the labor blend would act like a push-start to a car: if my body wasn't ready for active labor, nothing would happen, but if we were on the brink of something real, it might help things get into gear.

I threw it back like a shot of tequila with nary an afterthought and delivered a baby four hours later.

When I think of myself swilling it down now, it is as though I see myself smilingly compliant as I am strapped to the front of a train. Sure, I'll take that cohosh! I didn't want to breathe for the next four hours anyway!

I began having more intense contractions shortly after taking the dreaded labor blend and by the time I got home I was in active labor. Ryan called the midwife.

Ryan: "Uhm, I think this is getting kind of serious"

Midwife: "Well have her get in the shower. Sometimes that can space the contractions out a little bit."

Ryan: "Ok"

Me [on all fours on the bed with my face buried in the mattress]: "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"

It was evident to Ryan that I wasn't going to make it to the shower. He called the midwife back a few contractions later and we headed back to have a baby.

Thankfully, my little brother drives a Crown Victoria, aka living room on wheels, aka Birth Chariot. I did not deliver the baby in the car; that is not where this is going. I did, however, ride the six miles to the birth center on my hands and knees in the back seat, wailing my pretty little head off. Little brother said he felt like he was in a movie. I did not feel like I was in a movie. I felt like I was in another place, a place where snowballs don't fare well.

We arrived at around 3:30 and I somehow pitched and roared myself inside. It was nothing graceful, I assure you. As soon as the midwife saw me, she exclaimed "Oh! Now this is a woman who is working!" and started the water in the giant tub.

Ryan began explaining the situation.

Ryan: "The contractions started getting bad when we got back home..."

Midwife: "You mean they started getting good when you got home!"

Sadist.

I got in the tub as soon as it was ready for me, planted myself on my shins and hands, a la The Little Mermaid (who, incidentally, Ryan identified the other day as Muriel, to my unending amusement and delight), and didn't move for two hours. I labored, loudly. I knew from reading a bazillion birth books that low noises are more helpful in labor than high-pitched shrieks, so I compromised by making the loudest low noises known to man. I was so loud I couldn't hear what people were saying to me. It was sort of shocking how loud I could be.

And sort of satisfying.

They say some women like labor and some women like pushing. I only liked when it was over.

I will say only this about the sensation of labor pains. If you had hit me on the hand with a hammer as hard as you could, I would have considered it a minor distraction.

Forrest Michael Lee was born at 5:30. He was very small when compared to other human beings, and very large when compared to the size of the body parts from which he recently emerged: 8 lb 10 oz.

Ryan, my friend Jami, my mother, and my midwife attended the birth. Other than the fact that it was mind-meltingly, horrifically, painful, it was perfect. There are not words to describe what it meant to have each of them there, so I won't try. It's not blog material anyway. Blogs are for writing that your husband thought the Little Mermaid's name was Muriel, at least that's what this blog is for.

After my whirlwind delivery I felt like exhasuted, broken, garbagey garbage. To say I was spent doesn't begin to capture it. I was still in pain. And I soon discovered that the price of a quick, efficient labor is that a person better learn to nurse lying on her side because she isn't going to be sitting for awhile. I'll leave it at that.

I still can't sit.

The baby was, of course, the foil for all the misery. He was a peaceful little beauty and neither Ryan nor I slept all night because we couldn't stop staring at his little face. I congratulated myself on a job well done, as I had created a close to perfect baby (he has a tongue tie, but we like him anyway, even if he is a little chompy about the nursing) out of pizza and Berry Berry Kix. Not bad.

The first ten days after the birth were idyllic, minus the not sitting and getting chomped. My mom stayed with us while Ryan and I got our sea legs and she fell for the boy, hard. We're going to have to figure out a fiscally responsible way to get her to move to Utah because if we don't I think she might not make it. We all just stayed in the house staring at the new little face. It still hasn't gotten old.

When I was in the throes of pregnant misery, working 40-50 hours a week as I gained seventy pounds (in spite of frequent vomiting, making the accomplishment all the more impressive) I told myself that when the baby was born all I would do was lay in bed for the first two months and nurse him. At the time I thought I was kidding, or at least exaggerating, but here I am, nineteen days out, and that's all I've done so far. I barely check my email. I haven't called Medicaid to tell them the baby was born. I have only left the house three times, for appointments with doctors. I have been exclusively wearing a black track suit. And I'm not fixin' to change my schedule any time soon.

So that's the story. There aren't too many details because it was pretty cut and dry. And fast. It was really fast.

With a happy ending.

Limericks

I once lived a semester in London
With some co-eds; one was a most fun one.
"Just keep eating!" she'd cry,
with a gleam in her eye
When we finished I looked like a rum bun.

And now, though I weep, scream, and shout,
my fetal, tyrranical lout
Will recant the same cry
That my friend once lived by
Forcing me to eat 'til I pass out.

Who wouldn't choose cheese over heaving?
Pie and pancakes, their looks are deceiving.
Though they bode for ill-health
To me they suggest wealth
For soon salad's all I'll be receiving.

A good sign, I think, that I have moved from haiku to limerick. Indicates more sleep is happening.

Forty weeks Thursday. Two and a half weeks max until I expel the venemous placenta of destruction.

In case we are not friends on Facebook, I should mention here that Ryan and I went to Babies R' Us on Saturday and the woman standing behind us in line, a mother of two, asked if we are expecting twins. Some may take this as an insult, but I choose to frame it as an acknowledgment of a good job done resplendently. With the help of cheese and pancakes.

The Truth About Pregnancy

Everyone I know is pregnant.

Ok, not everyone, but I have been co-gestating with over ten people. Two weeks ago, the first gave birth. The second, yesterday, and today, the third.

I would like to be next, please. I have to write about 15 more pages, and then it's baby time.

Before becoming pregnant, I marveled at the great desire of women at full-term to go into labor, the most notoriously painful of all human experiences. How bad could pregnancy be, that women would drink castor oil while riding horseback on a trampoline in hopes of instigating the most painful thing they would likely experience in their lifetimes?

It's becoming clearer with each passing day.

I have been neglectful of documenting my expansion. It's hard to photograph oneself when one feels as though most disease states would be preferable to one's current condition. However, Ryan has captured a couple of moments on his phone which I will now share with you.

If I were the sort of person with dignity, I would post only this picture, taken at 37 weeks and three days:But, I am here to tell you the truth. The whole truth and nothing but. I am here to be honest with you, even at the expense of my very dignity. Also, I am not above a self-deprecating joke. For these reasons, I share the following, taken the same day as the photo above:

There. Now you know what pregnancy really looks like. That face. That outfit. That abdomen.

I would post a picture of my profile, the kind where you get the gut from the side-view for maximum effect, but standing is too hard.

38 weeks tomorrow, and my last day of work. Next week, come hell or high water, I will finish writing and then have a baby. Even if I have to do it on the back of a trampolining horse while swilling castor oil.

Designed by Mother Nature?

When I searched for Nursing Tops on Amazon, they recommended THIS. Amazing.

A Birthday and a Bed-room

Over the holiday break I acquired a new addition to my birthday paraphernalia, as I mentioned in January. May I remind you about the birthday headpiece:
My brother's birthday is this coming Thursday, so Ryan and I invited him, as well as my sister and her man, up to the house for dinner. Naturally, as soon as he walked in the door, he was greeted by the birthday headpiece. I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, because he unflinchingly put it on his head and wore it the rest of the evening.

Is it just me, or should I be surprised by everyone uncomplainingly walking around with a stuffed cupcake perched on their noggins?

I was thrilled. I don't know which I love most: birthday paraphernalia, costumes in general, or bossing people around, but this deal with the headpiece fires on all cylinders.

We had a lovely evening. I made my brother a red velvet cake, as this is his favorite, except I made a healthier version, wanting to spare my unborn the evils of egregious red food coloring. This was something of a mistake, as the cake tasted distinctly of beets, which are among the few foods my brother finds unpalatable. Oops. I'll remember that next year. I hope it really is the thought that counts. Beet cake is kind of an unforgivable birthday blunder.

The greatest victory of the evening, for me, was having several men with substantial heavy lifting abilities in the house at one time, as I had a fiendish plan I was physically unable to execute.

When I was in college, a friend of mine had a sibling born into her family. I remember visiting her parents' home and noticing that they had a king sized mattress on the floor with a twin mattress right next to it. They told me that they had a "family bed" so that their little one could sleep by them instead of in a separate crib or room. I was immediately taken with the idea and considered the possibility of taking the family bed to the next level. A bedroom, I thought, could be exactly that: a room for bed.

Wall to wall bed. All bed all the time.

I didn't give it much thought in the following years as there were no little people whose sleep options required consideration. However, a recent combination of events have brought the notion of a bed-room back to the forefront of my mind.

1. I got pregnant.
2. We inherited a bed from Ryan's parents, who upgraded, and found ourselves with two king-sized mattresses and one bedroom.
3. I started thrashing like a dying carp all night long.

Consequently, I began a one-woman brainstorm. How could we accommodate all this bed? I tried selling our original mattress, but haven't had any takers yet, and mattress #2 was impeding any sense of functionality in the second room (which is where we are keeping the baby gear; it serves as a glorified closet) by taking up every single square inch of floor space, rendering baby clothes, our filing cabinets, and my clothes closet completely inaccessible.

I hatched a plan to move our dressers into the perimeter of the closet-room and bring mattress #2 into the bed-room, resulting in a room comprised exclusively of bed. Tonight, with three men over 200 lbs. in the house to do my bidding, the dream became a reality. You can pencil roll across the entire bed-room. Check it out, and while you're at it, notice the birthday headpiece:
He is demonstrating the pencil roll. I wish I could have gotten a picture that captured the extent to which the room is a giant bed, but it was a cell phone picture.

I don't know how I got so lucky to have people in my life who indulge my desires for them to wear silly things on their heads and create fortresses of bedding while I sit around and make lousy cakes out of root vegetables, but that seems to be my lot. I'm one lucky duck.

Who needs a crib when you can have a bed-room?

My preferred medium

Something about pregnancy makes me think in haiku. Perhaps it is that seventeen syllables is the full extent of my attention span. Here are a few I conceived during lunch.

Without melted cheese
I could not survive nine months
Sorry bovine friends

I am enormous
More than I thought possible
Like a Volkswagen

Stretch-marked abdomen
Five weeks til you resemble
Crumpled newspaper

I am still alive.

Five weeks to go!

Dilemma

I have a problem on my hands that seems without solution.

In the first year of my graduate program, I was feeling uncharacteristically ambitious and, wooed by the prospect of working under the tutelage of a woman who is hands-down the most appealing academic (and possibly the most appealing human being) I have ever met, I decided that I would ask her to be my advisor in writing an optional Master's thesis.

Optional is the only word in that very long sentence that matters.

It translates to: I am an idiot.

So I took my shiny little self to meet with her, convinced her to take me on, and registered for her course on Qualitative Research Methods. The week before the course began I was stricken with a cough (perhaps you recall the rumple syrup?) that never ended. It made it impossible for me to complete the primary requirement of the rigorous class: writing the Research Precis. I told the teacher, my hero, about my plight and she seemed unfazed. Every year, she assured me, someone couldn't finish for whatever reason. I could simply take an incomplete and finish it sometime before I graduated. The 'I' grade would be replaced with whatever grade I received, with no penalty for having taken a sabbatical.

So I took that incomplete. I shoved the precis to the back of my mind. None of my Masters level cohorts were involved in research, so I just never had much occasion to think about it.

But I need the grade to graduate. In May.

I am, as you know, due to deliver a baby in less than seven weeks. This is great. What is not great is that it means that I should really get this grade taken care of before then. Which means I have to write a big thing.

Which, as it turns out, I hate doing.

I have spent some significant time this week trying to write the introduction, and every time I start I get Jello-brain even worse than my usual pregnant mental functioning. I start to fall asleep. I feel depressed. I just want it to go away.

I would almost go so far as to say that I can't write it, but I realize that this is probably just hormones talking.

I suggested to Ryan that I just ask my advisor what it would take to simply pass the class, and he looked horrified. Apparently he thinks that this would be a breach of integrity, which I am willing to consider, and also to accept at this point. My next idea was to pay someone to write it for me, or to hang out and write it with me, but then I remembered I don't have any money. I just want it to go away.

I will never try something ambitious again.

Anyone want a baby?

Sweatpants

Who decided that sweatpants are inappropriate office attire? I have no other pants that are not actively painful. I may have to choose between wearing sweatpants to work from mid-February until mid-March and quitting work a month ahead of schedule.

I had no idea the amount of time I could spend fantasizing about sweatpants. Weekends are sweatpants heaven.

In other news, I have a pan of brownies in the oven featuring prunes and black beans. Sorry, kid. Your mom is that mom.

Jiggity Jig

Home again!

Ryan and I spent the first two weeks of our vacation in the Bay Area visiting his family, listening to the rain, and enjoying the freedom to breathe without fear. I decided that it would be nice to live in a place where it is possible to be outside for a significant amount of time each day without threat of bodily harm. Whether this wish will always be a fantasy remains to be seen.

Our Christmas was lovely, and we received many generous, thoughtful, and wonderful gifts. One gift, marked "To: Ryan and Amy" was an iPad, upon which I have not lain one finger since its receipt. Ryan, who maintains even still his hate of Apple products and programs, is losing face fast as it becomes increasingly impossible to pry from his eager little hands. I figure, he can have it. I would just use it to look up brownie recipes anyway, and that's the last thing anyone needs.

In the end, all's fair in Christmas gifting. Ryan may have received a Very Fancy Electronic, but I received a Very Useful Toileting Alternative. Evidently, human elimination ought to be done from a deep squatting posture and, in the interest of my intestinal wellness, Ryan's brother-in-law, at the behest of his clever wife, built for us a contraption called a squat platform, nearly identical to what you see pictured below. As soon as I can squat without fear (honestly, I'm even finding standing still a little hazardous these days), I will let you know how it works.

Or perhaps not, now that I think about it.

After driving back from California, we flew to Maryland to see my side of the family. I don't know whose pelvis I thought I was working with when I scheduled 24 hours of car travel and ten plus hours on a plane, but I've never been known for my prudence or good judgment. The trip was worth the discomfort, edema, and risk of embolism, however. I was the lucky recipient of a cast iron skillet and baby shower gifts including soft, blue things for Dweezil and a recliner for me. And pleather maternity pants.

Sometimes I like to reward those of you who keep reading when I'm feeling boring and long-winded with tidbits like this.

It's true! My grandmother, mother, sister, and I went to Unique Thrift, a Value Village subsidiary and our most beloved destination, to search out clothing for my expanding bod. This was the source of many additional soft blue things (baby bodies are far easier to dress than the bodies that produce them, I'm learning), and several maternity items, one of which is a pair of pleather pants with a stretchy panel over the belly.

Trying on clothes at Unique Thrift is an acrobatic event in any condition, but trying on pants with no dressing room at seven months gestation nearly gave me a coronary. Still, I felt I had no option. This was clearly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I had to at least see if they fit.

My eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, who goes by Mutie, took one look at me in those pants and proclaimed "Amy! They're darling!" I couldn't believe the funniness of my life as she continued, "Really, they look very nice! Especially from the back--" At which point I had to interrupt her. A woman in my condition can only take so much commentary on her derriere.

The end of the story is that Mutie couldn't bear the thought of my leaving that store without those pants and so she forked out the four dollars and bought them herself. She then proceeded to harass me for the next two days about how I ought to wear them to the lovely, classy baby shower my mother's friends had organized for me. How do you tell your grandmother that, no matter how minimizing of one's hindquarters, pleather pants simply don't feel like baby shower wear?

I mean, look at her. You wouldn't want to mess with her, admit it.
I wore regular clothes to the shower. Don't worry about Mutie, she'll get over it, she's tough. In fact, she shared a little poem with us the morning we left for the airport:

The harder you fall
The higher you bounce
Come up with a smiling face
It's nothing against you to be knocked down
But to lie there,
That's the disgrace

Pretty much sums her up right there.

The day after the shower was my mother's birthday, so I forced her to wear a birthday hat and we all ate pancakes.

It was a lovely holiday, so lovely that it provided me with ample material for the five posts I penned in my head but never quite got to the presses. Oh, well. At least I have some pants to wear if I go to a motorcycle rally before April.