I know it’s not October yet, but I’ve already updated the Illustration and Desktop of the Month (see sidebar for links), cause next week we are on vacation (woo-hoo!) and I doubt I will be doing any posting.
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
We got our first baby gift over the weekend. Thank you, Lori Howell!
And I am starting to show. We have a definite bump going on.
Well, I am quite the little kid today. I had my annual eye exam this morning. After dutifully marking on my chart that I was pregnant, I learned that this year I wouldn’t have to have the pupil-enlarging drops. (No absorby meds while you are in, as my eye doc actually said, “the family way.”) I thought this meant I got a free pass on testing my eye pressure. No! Instead, we got to kick it old skool and blow concentrated puffs of air into my eyes.
I tried to beg off and plead couldn’t we just skip it? Ah, no. I feel so terribly lame when I freak out at doctor’s offices, and yet I cannot seem to help it. They must think I am crazy, because I appear perfectly calm as I explain that I have irrational fears about some things. What they can’t see is inside, where my heartbeat is rapidly changing and my blood pressure is either skyrocketing or plummeting and I am 2 minutes away from just passing out. I’m awesome.
After the puff monster was done, I picked out new frames. The ones I liked best from the front happened to have butterflies and rhinestones on the side. Hey, everybody, I’m seven!
My grandparents came downtown for lunch and asked if I would go with them. They picked me up at 10:40am. That’s okay, cause old people eating time and pregnant peeps eating time are about the same.
I forgot to order my mashed potatoes without gravy and before I could stop her, my grandmother left the table to go hunt down our waitress and tell her. Cause in her eyes I’m incapable of (a) handling it myself or (b) dealing with gravy.
So, yeah, little kid day.
Today’s random phone call questions from loved ones:
From Jaimie
“Those Japanese girls with the pink hair and crazy clothes? What are they called?”
“Harajuku girls, I think.”
From Kris
“That doll with the tape in his back? What was he called?”
“You mean Teddy Ruxpin?”
Random occurences of reflexology:
Last week, Andy Powell brought me a magazine about the Smoky Mountains to look at (Kris and I are headed up there next week) and there was an article about reflexology and an accompanying graphic designating which part of the feet connects to what.
The very next day, to update the weekly Top Five graphic, I was doing a Google search on “Tim McGraw Faith Hill soul2soul tour” and what image returns but the reflexology chart? Bizarre. 
Lastly, a cool link about a pregnant belly from FA
This week, I packed up the remaining hermit crab and sent him to the Moxie with Kris with the instructions to find him a new home. Yesterday, one of Glean’s customers came in and asked “is that a hermit crab? My daughter’s been begging for one of those.” Lady, it’s your (no, our) lucky day. Kris says the crab changed shells three times while she was there. Show off.
Wednesday morning, Kris and I were walking and when we got to the “scary Turrentine,” I noticed a scrawny little kitten that looks like Frodo. I was just going to point him out, but Kris knelt to pet the little guy. He was uber friendly, probably because he was starving and realized we looked like a good mark.
“If he follows us home, I’ll feed him,” I said. Because cats do not do that: follow you blocks back to your house. Except that, of course, he did.
As we sat and watched him scarf down the food, we were like “well, looks like we have another cat.” Cause if you feed a hungry cat, it stays around. I made a joke “or we just wait until the Woods come home and then they have five cats.”
See, Kris had told me that they weren’t coming back until today. But they got home Wednesday afternoon before we got off work. And when Chris Wood sees a scrawny, hungry kitty… well, you know how it goes.
But guys, I swear I was kidding! I didn’t mean to curse you into a fifth cat.
Except, come to think of it, I’m the one that fed Lucy, too. Can this be one of my superpowers? I feed hungry cats and the Woods end up taking them in?
Sophia Monroe Norris was indeed born yesterday. Kris and I tried to find a pic of her online, because St. Vincent’s does this web nursery feature. (Granted, you probably need to be like a whole day old first.) But you have to have the kid’s code number or something. Here are the babies I found instead:
Disco Baby
Mickey Rooney Baby
Strawberry Shortcake Baby
Babe Ruth Baby
See 105 other babies in the web nursery here.
Kris’ cell phone rang this morning shortly before 7am. He tried to take the call quietly in case I was still asleep, but since I wasn’t, as soon as he hung up, I shouted “who calls you before seven in the morning?”
It was Brad, saying Cindy was having the baby today.
“Is she being induced? Is she already at the hospital? Is she dilated?” I asked.
Kris did not know, because guys don’t ask the same questions a woman would.
I hope little Sophia is born today, cause then she’d share my mom’s birthday.
So today was our second prenatal visit. First up, the weigh in. The nurse clucks at me. “You’ve gained six pounds.” I’m thinking “and that’s bad?”
I’m ushered to a room. Another nurse comes in. She puts some goop on my abdomen and begins to hunt for the heartbeat. For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t be able to find it. But before a wave of panic could hit, there was this crazy fast whoosha-whoosha-woosha noise.
She looked at me expectantly. I think maybe I was supposed to tear up. Instead, I said “that’s so weeeeird.” Kris agreed.
Third nurse comes in, asks how I’m feeling, tells me I don’t have AIDS or syphilis and that my blood type is A positive. Then she frowns as she consults my chart. “Six pounds?” They only want me to gain 10 pounds by my 20th week and I’m at 13 weeks tomorrow. Um, sorry?
And finally, it’s the doc. Do we have any questions? No? Well, keep an eye on that weight gain.
As we left, I told Kris that it is a true mark of my being a teacher’s pet back in school that I was more upset to have gained too much weight than excited that we heard the heartbeat.
And I thought our ultrasound would be scheduled for next month, but no, they said they’d schedule it next time. “So I won’t find out if I’m having a girl or a boy until November?!?” The nurse said she’d cut me a deal and have the ultrasound done two weeks after our next appointment instead of four.
Over the weekend, I had one more vote girl (Mishaela) and one vote boy (Mama Juanita).
About a year after Kris and I bought the duplexes, we began to long for the simplicity of one house. There was a house down the street that went on the market in spring 2005 that we would have loved to make a move on. Financially, that was impossible at the time.
Earlier this year, we looked into buying a building on Broad Street so we could put a salon downstairs and a loft upstairs. Financially, it would have been barely feasible, but a really bad idea.
We talked about a loft for several months and Kris decided that if we couldn’t afford to hire out the major labor (and we couldn’t), then he didn’t want to do it. I agreed.
Then we went and got pregnant and I’m really glad we didn’t pursue the loft.
But sometime in the last two weeks (I, of course, am blaming the hormones), my thoughts have begun to drift back to hankering for a house. A specific house that we visited a couple months ago. The fallacy is that we won’t own just one home; we’ll own four.
I can think of many reasons that it’s not a wise move: it would require liquidating the small amount of savings we’ve acquired, it’s not really any bigger than where we are now, we’d have to get our side of the ‘plex ready for tenants and then find said tenants… and we probably wouldn’t stay there very many years.
On the other hand, when we walked through the house, we felt peace.
I would miss the duplexes, but I can’t seem to forget this other little place. I am not sure how to proceed.
You may ask yourself, “when did this turn into pregnancy blog?” Around the time that the hormones took complete control over my body, like Vikings. (You know the old saying, right? “Vikings don’t take vacation. They take everything.”)
If it’s not the hormones making me have to alter my entire eating system, it’s hormones making me grumpy or tired or unable to concentrate. It’s a hormonal free for all where Catoe 2.0 dictates how I eat, when I sleep, where I go, and what I wear.
I (naively) didn’t expect to lose ownership of my own body so soon. I am merely the host organism, making a comfortable environment for the 2-inch alien in my abdomen. Just wait until that thing is big enough to pilot the ship.
As real as the fatigue, mood swings and hate/need relationship to food are, the “living being gestating in the womb” is equally unreal. I imagine this could change on Monday, cause that’s our second prenatal appointment and I think we’ll get to hear the heartbeat.
We’re already pretty attached to the idea that we’re having a baby… sometime next spring. The idea that there is a baby this very minute, it just happens to be kinda small… yeah, not so much. I can’t feel it move. I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. I just feel crappy and gross all the time.
A few times, usually in the middle of the night, when I’m sleepy and my defenses are down, I am overcome with a wave of panic. What have I done, there’s something growing inside me, I’m not ready to be swept away by this current. In my waking hours, when my rational brain gets to weigh in, I scoff at panic girl: deal with it. This is something that we wanted to happen, and billions of people have done this before.
When I start to worry about the myriad of things that can happen between now and birth and then after… I have to remind myself that as soon as life begins, it is already ending. If it lasts 8 weeks, 8 months, 8 years, 8 decades… I have no say in that. And anything that happens in between? Can only be faced as it happens.
Right now, I’m facing it with a sleeve of stale saltines.
