Flowers

A friend's mother died, after a long illness, this week. Tomorrow I'll be going to her funeral, because I want to be there to support my friends.

I hate funerals-- I've been to three of them as a grown up, and of those, at two I was a total basket case, even though at one of them I didn't even know the person. The first was a patient of my mom's who died of AIDS and I figured I would be fine at it-- but the emotions of everyone else just infected me and I cried as though it were my best friend gone. The second was a relative of Andrew's who I didn't even know but again, there I was, tears like you haven't seen. I did go a year or so ago to a funeral where it was actually more interesting than sad-- I didn't know the lady, she was in her late 90s and had suffered Alzheimer's for years, so it was a blessing for her to go. That one had one of those southern Baptist country preachers who can say Jesus and have it be at least four syllables. That was fascinating, really.

I really hope that the combo of pregnant hormones and funeral emotions doesn't knock me on my butt tomorrow. I think I'll be okay, but I sure hope I don't get too upset. It would seem weird to people, I think, since I didn't even know the lady. My friend whose mom she was will be busy, I'm sure, and I'll probably hardly see her, but she'll know I'm there, and that's what is important. I'm also going to be support for the friend's best friend, who has to go and whose husband can't make it. So I mean to think of them, rather than any sadness.

I bought flowers for the funeral yesterday. If you've never bought flowers for a funeral, you would be amazed, as I was, how expensive they are! The arrangement that we (it ended up being a group of five people) picked out was very cool, but even split five ways, it's still going to cost us each about 20 bucks. There were some really interesting arrangements, the sort you always see on TV & in movies-- but boy howdy do you pay for them!

I have to say I do not want that sort of thing one day at my own funeral. I don't even think I want an official funeral. I DO want something like an Irish Wake where everyone has food, and drinks, and stands around talking about MY LIFE rather than regretting my death. I want there to be laughter instead of tears. I'd rather my family spent the money they would spend on an elaborate funeral on something else. My body, by then, will be all that's left-- my soul will be elsewhere, and there's no reason to spend thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of dollars on an empty shell.

Use it for the party. Drink beer. Eat good food. And remember all the times I would have been there to do the same.

And I want my flowers IN LIFE.

Storytelling: A Ramble About My Head

Last night, at the local bar where we often hang out (it's part Jamaican restaurant too, with good Jerk Pork) Andrew & I got into a conversation with one of our friends about her daughter's school performance. This friend has some tough decisions to make, decisions that are similar in some ways to some choices my mom had to make when I was just about the little girl's age. In the process, we all threw in our opinions on child-rearing, the education system, discipline. Andrew & I have a little knowledge about some of the issues from having taken a bunch of education classes a few years ago in the process of thinking about him getting a Master's degree in educational administration and me looking to get certified to teach in Texas. Neither of us eventually went through with our teacher's plans (although I'll tell you we had big plans of opening our own charter school for a while). But we did read a lot about school law, and we learned a lot about the way schools work with the testing systems & failing kids & so-called "standards."

This friend of mine keeps wanting me to teach in elementary school. She keeps saying that I would be a great teacher (I always say I am a teacher already, but she thinks college is too late to help kids. I tell her it's not, but she doesn't believe me). I shudder to imagine teaching elementary school. There are plenty of kids I would be glad to teach, but for the most part, it is a thankless painful job with very little incentive for me to do it. I haven't spent all the time I've spent trying to get through the damn PhD to go back and do something I could have been doing years and years ago. I agree that we need better teachers (and that would begin by paying them better, but that's a totally different post). But I'm not cut out to be one of them; not at any level lower than high school. I would consider high school, by the way, but only in a progressive school where I did not have to argue with the sorts of people who are on school book committees who say "I've never read To Kill A Mockingbird but if it has those words in it, it ought to be banned." (which a local textbook committee person is supposed to have said.)

In the process of our discussion, Andrew and I told stories of our courtship-- some of which I've written here already, some of which I haven't. It was fun; he would tell part of the story, and then I'd chip in. Our friend listened with fascinated eyes. Then she told stories, and we moved along for a lot longer than I had intended to hang out. (They were having tequila shots; I had to make do with a bit of ice cream.)

Then this morning, with Andrew having a lately very rare day off, we got up, had breakfast, and watched Lean on Me-- that movie from the late 80s about principal Joe Clark's attempts to bring a school back from the edge of oblivion. I have to admit, in some ways stories like that are inspiring, but generally, the potential Joe Clark's of the world are far more often worn down by the system than not. Even the teacher who they told Dangerous Minds about eventually had to quit teaching.

If we, as a society, wanted better schools, we would get them. We can certainly get other things we want implemented, as our friend Robotnik laments about our society's great urge to TIVO everything. We can buy a TIVO and plenty of video games, but when we consider paying more for educators to have better salaries, or doing what it actually takes to get the kids in the schools working the way they should (and it would be tough, and dangerous, just as it was in the movie, by the way) we can't seem to get around to it. And I say "we" deliberately, because I definitely include myself in the problem.

I think that my method of teaching has been and always will be storytelling. I just need to figure out how to get my head wrapped around telling a different kind of story (the dissertation) and getting it done enough to get back in the classroom where I belong. That's how I can do even my own children the most good. It will happen. But Goddess, please, grant me the strength to do it soon!

Loves Me Some UPS deliveries!

I just got my cool assed nursing pillow from the UPS guy. He was here yesterday too, and as usual, ran off before I could get to the door. The pillow rocks the house! It's much bigger than I pictured it, but that's good cause I suspect these here babies are going to be biguns.

Hooray for modern gadgets!!

Dating The Big "L"

Ah crap. I wrote a very long post just now about my ridiculous love-life as a young woman, with the "evil ex." I frequently copy & save these posts to my clipboard as a safeguard against losing them, but for some reason, this one was not on my clipboard. And now, somehow, I deleted over half of it while reading for clarity & detail. The "Recover post" button blogger has now doesn't seem to help.

Crap sandwich! I'm totally not going to rewrite this post. Let me sum up.

Don't date people who lie to you constantly about any little thing. If he or she showers when they come to visit you, first thing they get to your house, they're probably cheating. I was a stupid, stupid girl who was impressed with bad young man behavior, even against my better judgment.

I am hugely lucky and hugely glad that I got over my young woman obsession with losers and every time I see a girl posting a blog about a loser guy like the evil ex, I want to take her by the hand and lead her to the nice guys she is ignoring.

Evil Ex totally didn't deserve such a thoughtful blog post anyway. Nyah!

**********

Part II: After at least two weeks of screwing off and getting no work done even when I tried, I am very happy about my progress yesterday on the EVIL DISSERTATION. More work will be done today, and it's quite possible if I get my ass in gear, there will be another possibly close to final draft of this chapter sent to my chair this week. :)

Now it's off to "Bertha's" for a chicken fried steak sandwich. You totally have to believe me when I tell you this is a sandwich to die for. It is incredible, and even if you aren't a fried food eater (which I am not) you would like this thing.

45 nosy questions

I haven't done a list meme in a while, and this one was fun. Take us out of "serious" mode for a day. :)

Snagged from Ophelia

1. Were you named after anyone? Nope. I always thought I might have been named "Kim" cause my dad's name is "Jim" and he wanted a rhyme, but I cannot confirm that... I never asked mom.
2. Do you wish on stars? Yes.
3. When did you last cry? Hmmm. Well, full-on upset emotional tears? I think when Andrew was gone to Guam and I was feeling lonely & sorry for myself. But that's been a while, and I cry all the time at movies & TV shows. Can't say when the last time that was.
5. What is your favorite lunch meat? Pastrami.
6. What is your birth date? November 8, 1969
7. What is your most embarrassing CD? I only own cool ones. :) I used to have a Yanni at the Acropolis CD. It was good background music. I don't know if I still have it; I threw away a bunch of stuff when I did the babies' nursery.
8. Do you have a journal? Yes.
9. What do you like best about yourself? I like lots of things about me. I rock.
10. Would you bungee jump? No. That stuff is bad for you!! My back is bad enough as it is.
11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? Not usually.
12. Do you think that you are strong? Physically or mentally? Well, I guess the answer is yes to both.
13. What is your favorite ice cream flavor? Whatever I'm currently craving or eating.
14. Red or pink? Red.
15. What is your least favorite thing about yourself? Laziness.
16. Last person you ate with? Andrew
17. What color pants and shoes are you wearing? Blue PJs, no shoes.
18. What are you listening to right now? CNN Headline news in the other room.
19. What was the last thing you ate? Oatmeal w/dried cranberries & cherries
20. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Dark Red
21. What is the weather like right now? Sunny, 64.7 degrees, wind at 5 mph, 49% humidity. (Weather bug!)
22. Last person you talked to on the phone? Andrew's Dad.
23. The first thing you notice about the opposite sex? Whether they are smiling or not.
24. Favorite drink? Alcoholic: a martini made of vanilla vodka & Frangelico w/ a cherry. Non-Alcoholic: GOOD Coffee
25. Favorite sport? Boxing
26. Hair color? "Dirty Penny" Red
27. Eye color? Brown w/ copper tones
28. Do you wear contacts? Yes, but not right now. Pregnancy has screwed up my eyes and contacts are really uncomfortable right now.
29. Favorite food? Pasta/Italian
30. Last new movie you watched? Eulogy-- very funny!
31. Favorite day of the year? Hallowe'en
32. Scary movies or happy endings? I like both depending on my mood. I don't like depressing or too ambiguous endings, though.
33. Summer or winter? In comparing these two, both. But Autumn is my favorite.
34. Hugs or kisses? Again, both please.
35. What is your favorite dessert? Key Lime Pie (made well, not too sweet.)
36. Last concert you saw? Hmmmm. This is a hard one... Um, oh yeah! Prince!!
37. What book are you reading? The Year Of Our War by Steph Swainston. Kind of an odd book, but good so far.
38. What's on your mouse pad? A "painting" of a dog & a cat, bought from Petsmart to donate to charities.
39. What did you watch last night on TV? TV sucked. For a while I watched basketball thanks to the playoffs (phfffft). I can't remember what else.
40. Favorite smells? Lavender, coffee, clean baby. My husband's skin.
41. Favorite sounds? the phone ringing when it's Andrew coming home.
42. Rolling Stones or Beatles? Depends on the song, but generally, Rolling Stones.
43. Furthest you've been from home? Paris, France, I think. Mile-wise, it's possible Alaska was further away... I'd have to do math and that's hard.
44. Do you have a special talent? Yes. (I suppose you want to know what it is.)
45. What is your ringtone? The theme from I Dream of Jeannie.

Massage, Pregnancy, and "Issues"

Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. 'Why must I lie beneath you?' she asked. 'I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.' Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, [read: rape her] Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him. from The Lilith Myth

Lilith has long been a symbol for women's rebellion-- and in some myths, she is a goddess, in some, a demon. She certainly troubles patriarchal religion's insistence on women being subordinate and accepting of that position.

Most pregnant women suffer from sciatica in some degree. This is when the baby & growing uterus put pressure on the sciatic nerve-- in the leg/hip area-- and this causes pain, numbness, tingling, etc. I've had some problem with it since very early in my pregnancy, even before there was much substantial "showing." Since you can't sleep flat on your back, and are supposed to "elevate" one hip slightly, and therefore sleeping on one side or another is basically what I have to do, the sciatica really does effect my ability to sleep comfortably, too. This makes me cranky, tired, less interested in things like exercise (because of said cranky-tiredness.)

When I talked to one of my doctors a while ago about the sciatica, (I see a variety-- sometimes I see the main guy, sometimes a resident), he said "well, there's not much you can do. If it got really bad, we'd send you to a physical therapist." After that visit, I got to thinking about massage therapy, and I went and had my first ever massage. You pay more for a prenatal massage-- at the place where I go, it's 15 dollars extra, making it a total of 65 bucks for an hour of massage (not including the tip). So that's pretty expensive-- a luxury item, right?

Well, I assumed, having never had a massage before, that it would be nice, but not really all that helpful with my sciatica. This is a pregnancy pain, and generally it seems the common refrain about it is "well, you're pregnant, you ought to expect discomfort, and live with it. Don't be a whiner."

I was mostly prepared to do this till I got to realize that actually, the massage really really helped me feel a lot better. And not just for a the short term day or so after. For at least two weeks after my massage, my sciatica does not bother me. I've had three massages now since February, and each time it has helped. Just before each one, I can feel my back muscles tensing up; I get many more Braxton-Hicks contractions, and I have more trouble with things like getting up from lying down, walking comfortably, etc. Massage helps all of these things, and I feel less constantly tired when I've had a massage.

So it stands to reason that prenatal massage is a pretty good idea. Why do women have to "suffer through it?" There are all kinds of therapies that one could get that could help with the general pains of pregnancy, and while I have no scientific data to back this up (not from not trying-- I looked this up in MEDLINE and couldn't get quick access to the two or three articles that looked promising on maybe telling me more), I still think that anything that makes pregnant mom feel better physically, without resorting to extreme measures (drugs, eating too much, etc) has got to be good for both mother and baby. The sheer drop in the amount of Braxton Hicks contractions is my biggest argument for this-- if I'm not sitting there getting all stressed and worried that my babies are coming early and this is the start of preterm labor, then there will be fewer calls to the doctor, fewer potential pointless visits to the doctor's office (which cost money, after all.) Less stress in general is definitely better for pregnant moms & babies.

So what's the point of this whole long rant? You would think that insurance might cover at least part of massage therapy. You would think that doctors would actually recommend it. No on both "you would thinks". My doctor did not mention that massage might help-- I made the leap myself from "possible physical therapy if it gets bad" to "while it's not so bad, maybe a massage will help." According to the one article that I did manage to read, people spend millions of dollars a year on "alternative therapies" and most of them are not covered by insurance. Well I get that. Insurance is not actually there to help us, really, and they don't want to spend more money. It's not cost effective to cover every little fad that comes up in medicine.

But if it's something non-invasive, something that really does help, don't you think there ought to be a push to use it? How many women do you know who can afford to get 65 dollars an hour prenatal massages? It's NOT going to be very many. This is the reason why I did some research-- it's not exactly cheap and we wouldn't mind getting some "help" paying for it.

And here is the other thing-- if you need "occupational therapy" insurance covers it. This would be something long term. Pain management because you had no choice, and your pain was long term and affected the daily quality of your life. But if you just get a massage for your short-term complaints, you're out of luck. People actually even seem to act like I'm some sort of nut case for even asking about it. As though I'm trying to pull some scam and am being unreasonable. I'm a persistent person, and I also have access to research methods that other people don't. I think this is an advocacy issue, and dammit, if I were in a healthcare related field, I would say this is a study dying to be performed. How much health benefit does the occasional prenatal massage have on babies & moms? Does it potentially decrease costs of "conventional" medicine, does it decrease office visits, decrease stress, possibly even decrease things like preterm delivery? All of those things really ought to be looked into. Why do I think it's not being done?

Because it's only something that women suffer from. And men still generally rule the roost when it comes to medical things. Yes, there are lots of women in medicine, but an awful lot of them are used to the status quo and might as well be men for all they pay attention to the differences between the sexes on certain medical things. It's all in your head is something that many women with gynecological pain complaints have gotten from both male & female doctors.

Most of the articles I found had to do with massage helping cut down on episiotomy, and some with easing depression during pregnancy, and some with pain management during labor. But very few studies have apparently been done on pain management for DURING pregnancy. It's very much "Eve, thou hast sinned and must suffer" in my humble opinion.

It really pisses me off. Not just for me, because I can justify going in every two weeks or so for a few months and paying the 65 bucks for several weeks of better sleep, less pain, less stress & worry. But women without the income my husband's war-monger job provide us? Ah, just quit yer whinin'. You're knocked up, what did you expect? It's the wages of sin, dear. It's what pregnant women have been suffering from forever.

Why? Why should women continue to face pain if there is a reasonable way of helping it? When insurance pays for f'ckin Viagra, even for non-medical reasons, then there's certainly some kind of f'ckin conspiracy here. Where are the feminist researchers in medicine? Damnit? If any medical students who are searching for a great advocacy project for their research ever read this, I tell you, somebody ought to study this. I wish I had the abilities; all I can do is survey what more scientific minds than mine have said. And unfortunately, an awful lot of those minds seem to be occupied elsewhere.

Eve, thou hast sinned. Great. So where the heck is Lilith? I need her input on this one.

Filler

In the search for enlightenment and self-knowledge, I give you

WEEKEND QUIZZES!

Clair Huxtable: You are Claire Huxtable from The Cosby Show. You have high expectations for your children, just like you have high expectations for yourself. You've probably got your own life and your own career, but nothing is more fun than spending time with your family. You may be a professional woman, but you enjoy getting silly with the kids sometimes.
You want good kids, but you also want them to be successful, smart individuals who can speak their minds as long as they do so respectfully. While you enjoy being the kind of mom that your kids can come to with a problem, you are not afraid to set them straight when they're acting badly. When it comes to discipline, you try treat your kids like adults, talking calmly and coolly. And that's ultimately why they're going to grow up with such unwavering respect for you as both a mother and a successful person.

Which TV Mom are you?




You're a girl power mommy! You love to be girly,
but you're no pushover. Your kids are learning
that gender differences don't have to mean
gender inequality. You've taken back pink, and
you don't care who knows it!

What kind of a freaky mother are you?



I also learned that I am an "encouraging mom," most like the mom in the recent Freaky Friday, and the mom in the Partridge Family on two quizzes that are not easily posted cause they're through a magazine rather than quizilla.

So I'm apparently going to be a cool, hip, encouraging, smart, girlpower mom.

Duh.

Gaia-Day: Big Fish, Little Fish

So today is the 35th anniversary of Earth day... Earth day is as old as I am. I was thinking about this because obviously, when you have kids, you want the world to stay at least as nice as it was when you were a kid. So what do I do to make sure of this? How do I contribute to the Earth being better or worse? I'm afraid that in some ways I'm just like most Americans and use more than I should. Although the "your environmental footprint" quiz here showed me as not using as much as most Americans by a good amount, I still use more than is sustainable. (Mostly because of my food consumption-- eating meat at most meals hogs up (ha ha) a lot of resources.)

But it's such a difficult proposition for most of us-- we think something we do (like, say, recycling) is helpful, but then you read that certain kinds of recycling are pretty much a waste (like glass recycling-- mostly it costs more to recycle glass than it does to produce new glass). And the "paper or plastic" thing-- pretty much a wash. Same with disposable vs. cloth diapers-- the energy output for cleaning/washing cloth comes up pretty high too. So what does someone with a conscience do?

So many things have changed in the last 35 years.

When I was a kid, you could play late into the night (although the rule was come home when the streetlights come on). You weren't really afraid of some psycho coming after you-- there were fears, yes, but they were largely unsubstantiated, like the boogeyman. Nowadays, people are so afraid of kooks coming and abducting their kids that I never ever see kids playing outside. And so most likely they are inside, using resources-- electricity, etc, while they play video games, eat cheetos, and don't socially interact. I remember riding my "big wheel" into the darkness, sweaty & tired from a day of playing chase with all the other kids in the complex. Everyday in the summer we were outside all day, our parents hardly knowing where we were. But we were safe then. I know I'm already worried enough about these issues that I'm considering a security system in our home... so again, more resources used.

And as for the environment, we weren't really aware of it back then. Recycling was unheard of for the most part, except in the classroom where around my second grade year (about 8?) we started discussing it. Many people actually still figured it wasn't such a bad idea to just toss something out of a moving car window. If you're old enough, you might remember the famous commercial with the Indian* crying because of all the pollution that there was on the sides of the road. According to the Straight Dope website, the commercial debuted on Earth Day, 1971.

For the better: I actually think that commercials like that had an impact-- I think that pollution on the sides of the road did go down substantially. But I'm not exactly sure if that was because people stopped throwing things out or because communities & states started paying people (or using community service) to clean up. The "Don't Mess With Texas" slogan is actually about litter, not Texans' attitude (although it has come to mean both over the years). I suspect it is the latter; I think people still throw a lot of crap out of their windows (hey, better than a messy car, right?) For the worse: But there are people who pick it up for them, and we probably spend a lot of money (as taxpayers) for that service. And it's an endless circle-- we pay our money, which we have to work to earn, and guess how most of us get to work? Driving a car which uses fossil fuels.

For the worse: Living in Texas, I am quite aware of how many people have moved to gas-guzzling big SUVs and trucks. If you drive a small high-mileage car (like mine, which gets something like 35 mpg) you're lost in a sea of giant vehicles. I think this trend is starting to change again a bit with gas prices so high-- people are tired of losing money every time they fill up their tank. But I still get a lot of people now saying "oh, now that you're going to have kids, you'll have to get a minivan/SUV cause you have so much stuff to lug around". Consumption, consumption. Stuff stuff. And I think, well, maybe. Cause it will be really hard to go shopping, with kids in two car seats, and have enough room for the junk you have to have to take babies out and still bring home the groceries. I think my car will still work for this, but maybe not.

I'm very interested in the Gaia hypothesis, which, according to Dr. Sean Chamberlin "proposes that our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Formulated by James Lovelock in the mid-1960s and published in a book in 1979." The idea that the Earth is a living organism fits so well with the Goddess religions, which we all know nowadays in its watered down form of "Mother Earth." Each system affects the others, which if you think of your own life, if you're sick with a headcold, it causes other parts of your body to have trouble too. Or perhaps you have a sprained ankle-- you compensate by walking on the other ankle, right? And then that ankle gets over used, or your neck gets sore from the imbalance, or your armpits really painful from the crutches... systems are sensitive to change, and the organism does seek equilibrium. But for a while, till your ankle heals or your headcold goes away, you're out of balance, and things get worse.

Are the diseases today which we find so difficult to combat reactions to overpopulation? It sounds callous, but is it true? We see it all the time in animals-- you get too many deer, for example, and they aren't sustainable on a certain bit of land, and they start dying off. Is this true for the planet? Are humans breeding themselves into disease and death? In the US and other industrialized countries, there is an obesity issue, because we have so much food, so many resources. According to some studies, this means that because of obesity related diseases, the median age of death/lifespan, which has been going steadily up for a long time, will drop sharply again in a few years. Is it going to get worse for us? (and by us, I mean humans). Probably. Has it gotten better? Some. More people are aware of their consumption, but by all means not enough.

So Earth-day has me thinking about my own "footprint" on this planet. I don't know exactly what to do about it, but there's got to be things we can all do that really actually DO something, that aren't basically busy-work to make us THINK we're doing something (which I'm convinced most local recycling programs are). I would love to see a place where we use fuel sources that actually improve the environment rather than deplete it. I'd love to see a world where more of us walk to the places we're going-- which is hard in the 'burbs, but maybe do-able if we try.

Are there things you have done, that you do, to try to reduce the negative impact your existence has on the planet? Or have you never really thought about it? After our baby shower a couple weeks ago, when we had a TON of garbage waiting by the curb, it was pretty clear we can generate an awful lot of waste. So what do we do about it? I'm certainly open to suggestions. I'd like it if when my kids are 35, they don't have to worry about it getting worse for their kids.

But I don't have a clue how I can actually do this. It seems like something that bigger fish than me have to attack. And how do we little fish get that to happen?

********
*(Interestingly, the actor who played the "Indian" was actually an Italian-American, and the tear was fake. The Ad Council website still claims Cody was an Indian and he even has a star on the walk of fame. Isn't that just what you'd figure?)

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage..... Sex AFTER the baby carriage

Sometimes, my Andrew will ask me if I ever thought about what it would be like one day to be married back before we met. He says on our first date (we went to the Olive Garden!) he looked at me chattering away about silliness and thought "what if this is the one?" I have to admit, I never really thought much about what life would be like one day when I was married. Part of this was that I didn't really expect to be married as young as I was-- I was only 23 when we married (he was 29). I figured, when I thought of it at all, that marriage was something far away in the future.

But that is one difference between Andrew & I-- he is a planner. He thinks hard about every significant purchase we make (I used to joke it took him 6 months to buy his TV set; how could I not be patient when he was deciding to marry me?) I am more of a "do it on faith" kind of gal. It's not that I don't think about the future, but I believe it will take care of itself as it goes. I don't mean that I won't take any steps to make things happen, but I don't fret about them before I do them. When it's time to do something, it will get done. But he's a planner, and that is wonderful. When we met, him a 27 year old military guy, he already had several thousand dollars put away in bonds for his future children's college fund. We used those a few years ago to buy our first rental property (which we still consider the college fund in action.) Most military guys will go out and use that bigger check to buy a fancy car, or a jet ski, or boat, or some big boy toy. No, Andrew drove a beat up rust-red pickup truck and put his money into practical places.

When we were dating, and I was a freshman in college, they had the Mel Gibson Hamlet for free showing on a big screen in the student union. I had really wanted to see the movie but hadn't had the money when it first came out, so I asked Andrew if he wanted to go, too. We got there, and the group of pals I hung out with in the cafeteria during the day were all there. We were about halfway into the movie when I realized Andrew was sick. He had a flu bug or something coming on, and was sitting very quietly trying to not let me realize he didn't feel well, prepared to sit out this movie I really wanted to see even though he felt terrible and couldn't understand half of what they were saying. I saw his pale, sweaty forehead and realized what was going on, and we left. His eyes when I said it was okay for us to go were so grateful and happy, and he took that as one early indicator that our relationship would be good-- I was willing to give up something I wanted for him, and he was willing to do the same. That's always a good indicator of a successful match-- if you will each give 150%, then no one ever feels screwed on the deal. (I eventually saw the movie on video anyway, with a well boyfriend, drinking pina coladas and lying on his couch at his condo which overlooked the bay and had a great sunset view.)

Nowadays we've been married almost 12 years and have been together 14 (give or take a bump or two in the middle of that first two years). When we were out with friends last night for the birthday of one member, and were ready to go home cause he was tired from a long day of work (eyelids drooping after a margarita, quieter than he usually is, sleepy boy at the end of the table) and I asked him to hold my little pregnancy "support donut cushion" while I "took a pit stop" before the drive home, smooching him as I handed the pillow to him, the folks at the table all said "awwwww". And at a recent other gathering of friends, as he sat behind me, hugging me and my big belly gently, chin resting on my shoulder, someone in the group said "how long have you guys been married?" with an incredulous look on their face. Apparently, we surprise people cause we still like each other in addition to the love married folks are supposed to have.

Yesterday on Oprah*, which I only watched for about 10 minutes while wrapping a birthday present, there was this lady arguing that it's important to put your spouse first, and love them romantically, while not letting all your love and attention go to your kids. She argued that you should love your children, but be IN LOVE with your spouse. That you should devote your ardent attention to him, and not focus on your children as the "suns" in your universe. Her essay is astounding, and exactly what I needed to read right now, because that is exactly how I feel. I also heard an interview on NPR not too long ago about this, about "Motherhood in the age of anxiety" which dealt with these exact same issues. I have a quote on my fridge that says

"the most important thing she'd learned over the years was that there was no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one."-- Jill Churchill. Amen sister.

Granted, as a Mesopotamian mother goddess, right now, I'm not really all that interested in having sex. And he's been a total doll about not pressuring and making me feel guilty about it. But I do miss sex. A whole lot. I plan to be interested in it as soon as I am healed, and babies are sleeping contentedly in the other room. We have always called it, when the cat demanded our attention and it was focused, instead, on each other, "Planning a trip to Disneyworld." One day, we will take them to Disney. But before that, yes, there will be an awful lot of planning, which I will take an active role in. I think it's sad that so many women think that to be a good mother, they have to ONLY be a good mother. They said on the show "you have to nurture and love your children." Why do they not see that you have to nurture and love your spouse too? That his feelings are not to be of secondary importance? That other things (watching TV, reading your book, chatting on the phone with your girlfriends or mother about things the kids did today, soccer practice and mommy & me and shopping and keeping the kitchen floor clean enough to eat off of) are the real secondary things?

She was met with a lot of hostility with the idea. She wasn't saying to NOT love your kids, but to devote your attention also to your spouse (on the show it was husband, but it needs to be both partners.) If you do for each other, and let the small stuff slide, there should be so much more energy & love for everyone (including the kids) to go around. And the best thing you can teach your kids is what a loving, forgiving, and GIVING relationship looks like. I never really understood that when I was young; perhaps this is one reason why I didn't really think about what marriage would be like; I didn't really have any role models in my family of divorced folks. It was sad to see what some of the women on that Oprah were saying about their relationship with their husbands (one woman said she watched TV while having sex-- she was "fulfilling his needs" which I call bullshit--if you're nothing more than a place for him to fulfill his needs while you are not engaged, he could do just as well with a jar of vaseline and some internet porn). And then these folks wonder why their husband finds a relationship elsewhere. So I plan to make sure to make time for my husband even when I have two screaming babies to worry about, and he will be there to help. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

So this morning, waking up slowly to a re-set alarm clock, with the cat on the rug mewing questioningly to see if we were getting up, Andrew spooning** me while I held onto my "must have pregnancy pillow" in front, the fan above us gently sending down cool blasts of air, grackles and squirrels busy in the trees in our back yard, knocking acorns onto the roof, I thought about what I would have visualized if I had thought of marriage. It wouldn't have been romance, and roses and candlelight dinners. It wouldn't even have been diamonds and special gifts, or trips to faraway places (even though those have been a part of our life too). It would have been, had I been smart enough to know, slow mornings, a husband who loves me so much he can't keep his hands off of me even when I weigh more than he does with a big watermelon belly. Someone who does the dishes while I cook dinner, who takes the trash out and does his own laundry and only scowls a little at the mess I leave in the office. Someone who gets me ice cream at night (but saves the Chubby Hubby for himself, which I don't mind). My ideal marriage? The one I have.

And I can plan for the future. In addition to my visions of adorable squirmy babies in onesies giggling in their cribs as I walk in, kissing little heads that smell of baby powder and sour milky sweat, I also see bad days when we're all exhausted, babies are sick, and we fall into bed with nothing but sleep on our minds. I know that will happen. But I also know that there will be plenty of time to see Hamlet later. And that 30 minutes spent holding the man I chose to spend the rest of my life with will be more restful than a 30 minute nap. If there's a choice between the two, or between loving him and cleaning the kitchen, then I say hire a damn maid or leave the mess. I know some people will say that I can't say for sure what will happen because I haven't been there yet. But I can promise you now that whatever it takes, there will be time for sex, after the baby carriages and burp bibs. Because it is in my children's best interest to see a loving caring marriage, so that they can someday have one themselves. And as much as I hate the phrase, I would be a bad mother NOT to love my "baby daddy."

I will make my heart big enough for all of them. And we will plan the hell out of lots of trips to Disneyworld.

************
*And I submit that this is one reason why Oprah totally rocks-- she talks about these things that especially women won't admit to, and hopefully makes them realize how screwed up their thinking is on stuff like this.

**And no, if you don't know what it is, spooning is not sex-- it's lying with your bodies together, nesting like two spoons. Dirty minds. :)

Super Belly-dance(?)

I have an opportunity tonight that I'm not sure I'll take... my bellydancing teacher is dancing at the old folks' home where she goes every month. She wants a bigger group this time cause in San Antonio, it's Fiesta time and everyone wants to have a big party. So she asked if I could come and, wearing something a little more modest than normally, play the zills (finger cymbals) and wiggle a little in the background while she and some other dancers dance. I said I would do it. I was hoping another of my friends would loan me this outfit she has that is a coverup, and I'd loan her anything out of my wardrobe she wanted to borrow.

I haven't really been bellydancing since my pregnancy cause it's really awkward & uncomfortable. I don't mind showing off the super-belly, but dancing--especially the kind which requires belly movement-- is not so fun with two babies wedged in the abdomen.

Now, another friend (S) has very tentatively planned another event which will definitely conflict with the bellydancing. The friend who 'might' (N) have also danced will most likely not do it if there's something else to do. It'll be too hard for her to change after work, then change back to civilian clothes to go another place. So now I don't know what I'm going to do.

Now I'm annoyed cause now I don't know exactly what I want to do. It's not like I am all gung ho about bellydancing in my current goddess-y state. Those old folks may not be able to handle it, and I'd be sorry to cause any conditions to worsen. :) But I did promise a while ago to do it, and I hate it when these kinds of conflicts between events & promises occur.

What to do what to do. It's making me a little growly.

Quiz Me Baby

I'm not surprised. I did grow up mostly in the South, but with a Yankee mom, and I try very hard to speak carefully. No one can ever guess where the hell I'm from based on my accent. When I came back from England after being there for two weeks, the guy at the hotel in NY insisted I was English, and not Texan. But when I was in London, I'd sound very Texan indeed after a couple of pints of cider (and while I'm at it, why doesn't anyone around these parts have decent cider??! and yes I drank it in pints and not pissy little half pints.... people actually stared at me for it!) Sigh. I never fit in anywhere. But that's a good thing. :)

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

30% Dixie

10% Yankee

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? via Lauren

Evolution of Desire

Your love is better than chocolate
Better than anything else that I’ve tried
Oh love is better than chocolate..... Sarah McLachlan "Ice Cream"

So, it's probably not hard to guess that when you're hugely pregnant, your desires range differently from the activity that got you here (knowwhatimean nudge nudge wink wink). Earlier in my pregnancy, I was having some really lustful dreams-- you may recall one about Brad Pitt I mentioned in a post (it was right after seeing Troy-- which is worth watching if only to see him almost naked, and really sculpted....even if it's not a fabulous movie in many other ways.)

So now my desires have, apparently, shifted a bit. This morning I had a very lustful dream-- about chocolate cake. The kind with the thickest, rich chocolate rind-like thing you could imagine. I wanted to say it was a ganache, but it's not really-- ganache is generally sort of thin. It was sort of like a really thick layer of the kind of chocolate you get on a dipped ice cream cone. I was peeling this layer of chocolate from the bottom of the cake in long, thick strips of gooey bliss.

Now I'm totally jonesing for some rich chocolate. It actually even trumps Brad, because I can eat all the chocolate I want and not get into trouble. :) Now I gotta figure out where to go to find such chocolate. That's the trouble with fantasies-- if it's not exactly what you wanted, you end up being disappointed.

But you can be sure that somewhere in my near future today, there will be a little chocolate gluttony. Hey! I can do it! Yesterday, my doctor said my weight gain was absolutely perfect. I am perfect. (That second was my natural interpretation of his words.) Now, though, I probably have cursed many of you to a search for yummy chocolate later today too. We should raise our chocolate snacks in a virtual toast... "To desire"!

Belly

and yes, you can touch my belly. It's fabulous, outrageously gorgeous, the best belly in the universe. I am a goddess. Not only does it not bother me, but I get a strange sort of jollies from it. (Not sexual-- ego lifting. I am superpreggo!! You all want to be me!!) The bigger it gets, the more I like it.*

But no. They probably will not kick for you. They are stubborn little boogers who only kick mommy till she has to lie down. And as soon as they sense foreign hands, they clam up and are "vewy vewy quiet."

Just in case you were wondering.

**********
*But please, realize that not all pregnant women are like this. Some are quite sensitive and do not want your hands all over them. Ask first. Unless of course you've read a disclaimer like mine, above.

Squatters

This might be news to you men out there-- but most women, when they encounter a public toilet seat, squat over the seat rather than sit down. They hover, so that their butts don't come into contact with the "germy" surface of the seat. It's something that was generally taught to them when they were little kids, and I think it's sort of like skiing-- if you don't learn to do it before you're 10, you might as well give it up. There's a trick to it of balancing your legs and holding yourself upright with your hands on the sides of the stall (which I'll get to in a moment.*) I myself could not describe this trick to you because I cannot do it. I am a sitter. I sit on public toilet seats-- have been doing it for 35 years (give or take the diaper time) and thus far have not encountered Ebola or anything life threatening (although there was that time in....) There have been many seats that I have not exactly wanted to spend a long time on, to perhaps bring home with me so that I could enjoy their fragrant beauty forever and ever. (This is one reason I do not like public "festivals" with their lovely port-o-potties). But I can't squat.

And, contrary to popular belief, it has not harmed me thus far. In fact, according to The Straight Dope website, there are many more things you ought to be worried about than sitting on a toilet seat.

But I was thinking about this the other day. Pregnant women spend an inordinate amount of time in public restrooms. Ask me where the bathrooms are, anyplace in the 3 mile radius (perhaps even extend it to five miles) and I can probably tell you.

The other day, I followed two women into the bathroom. We filed into our respective stalls, me in the third, and the two other ladies in one and two. Lady in stall 1 got down to her peeing business, just as soon as I did. You could hear the little chorus of pee striking the bowl. Lady in stall 2 took several minutes to line her seat with one of those paper liners, or perhaps toilet paper. I don't know, but she clearly did not start right away. I had my hands washed and was out of the bathroom before lady number 2 even started peeing, I think. BUT.

As she lined the toilet to make sure her pristine ass did not touch where someone else's bare ass had touched before, she hacked and coughed and wheezed. Clearly a smoker's cough.

Now let me explain why I found this amusing (probably not the right word-- ironic? sad? bizarre?). Not because I'm glad that this lady wasn't feeling great. But because, as a smoker, she participates in an activity (by choice, mind you. No matter what you say about addiction, at some point in your life you chose to light up those cigarettes for the first few times, prior to the addictive stage) in an activity that is virtually guaranteed to shorten her lifespan by 10-20%, cause heart disease, cancer, emphysema, asthma, early stroke, etc, etc. But, even though she participates in smoking, which has been proven to kill you in many ways if you do it long enough, she is afraid of touching her butt to a toilet seat. I don't know about you, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone dying from catching something on a toilet seat. (I am willing to admit there is a possibility that some clever researcher will find something. But you must admit that it's going to be a stretch. How many doctors do you see shaking their head over the body of someone who they've just "called" as dead saying "oh when will they learn not to sit on toilet seats?").

If you smoke, you might as well sit down on that toilet seat and relieve the pressure of that aching bladder faster. Don't bother spreading toilet paper all over the seat, don't bother with the squat. Just sit down. Enjoy the rest. Those of us who are not squatters will tell you that for the most part, the view from here is fine.

*****************

*and since most of the germs in a public restroom are NOT limited to the seat, ladies, consider that you're putting your hands or bracing your arms on the walls of the stall. I'm betting those walls get cleaned even less frequently than the seat. Think about it. When you flush, these germs you're so worried about go flying everywhere with the force of the flush. So those walls you're trusting to hold you up while you squat are germy, too. And you probably hardly ever wash your forearms as you leave the bathroom, do you? And probably very skilled people don't touch anything, hovering with very strong quads over the seat. But I tell you, it is an un-necessary exertion. Just pee for goddess' sake!! Those of us waiting in line wish you'd hurry the hell up!!

Weekend Gap

We're going to Shreveport this afternoon for Andrew's Reserve duties (and if you're asking-- didn't you do that two weeks ago? Yes. He sometimes goes more than once a month). This will be most likely the last trip I'll make up there till after the babies are born, since 1. it'll probably not be all that comfortable for 7.5 hours in a car 2. I don't want to risk labor in a place other than home. Next month he will go up there for a week at a time, once in early May and once in late May, first of June, to finish up some training he needs. Then I will stay here, at home. And after that, well, there will be other little guys to consider who will most likely not take well to driving and staying there yet.

SO. The point of this post is to say that I don't think I'll try hard to get to the coffee shop this weekend to post entries. I need to spend some quality time editing the heck out of the draft of my dissertation chapter my chair just sent back with comments, and I tend to do that better if I don't have the Internet available. I'm going to sit in my hotel room and work work work. I hate telling you all in advance that I'm not posting cause then my visit stats drop way low and make me feel all inadequate, but this is only common courtesy to warn you that it'll be till Monday at least till there's something new from me. One of these days soon maybe I'll get a guest blogger, for when I go into the hospital to have the babies. Perhaps someone who knows me and will be able to tell you updates about them.... but that's just a spark of an idea.

Anyways. Now I need to go jam a whole day's worth of procrastination into five hours, including a quick trip to Target to get one of those pregnancy "back support" cushions.

Another thing to do soon is to post more preggie pix of me. You would think that I was pretty big back about a month ago when I posted last. Sometimes, I wake up in the morning and I seem substantially larger than I was when I went to sleep. I think they're doing steroids in there or something. :) Perhaps they want to prepare for a career in pro-baseball one day. They certainly seem to have the moves-- I get batted and kicked about 100 times a day (maybe soccer is more the thing for them.)

Have a great weekend, and see you Monday!!

Wit, Students, Texts

The hospital where I will have my babies, and where I go to receive care now, is a teaching hospital. Because I am considered "high risk" with the twins, I usually see a main guy staff doctor, who is the chief of the OB department (and thus, more experienced-- not learning as he goes). So that's pretty cool. But for other things, like when I went to the doctor the other day for my "complaint," I see whichever student/resident is on duty. On Tuesday night, it was a young man wearing an "Aggie Ring."

Aggies are the students of Texas A&M, and many of the more "gung ho" students get these rings-- they are distinctive, and a bit of a club membership sort of thing. Texas A&M, if you didn't already know, is also where I am getting my PhD, and where I taught back in 1998-late 1999. I taught freshman comp and intro to literature, which got me first year students and "almost graduating" students, at various times. I probably taught about 100 or so kids in that time period, many of whom have now had time (if motivated) to finish their degrees, and even some of their advanced degree work. So, this young doctor who took care of me the other night, I realized as he was standing there, could very well have literally been my student back when I was teaching there (he wasn't-- but he could have been). It was an odd realization. Made me go "hmmm." What would I do, how would I feel, if I did recognize a student in a situation like that? Once, shopping at the outlet mall, one of my former students slipped some of my purchase into the bag without ringing it up, which I did not realize till after I had left. I didn't know what to do-- go back in and pay for the product and get the student (who meant well, but had a skewed concept of "well") in trouble, or essentially participate in his theft from the company? A real moral dilemma. So what happens when you encounter former students in other capacities?

If you've never seen the movie Wit, starring Emma Thompson as a college professor who gets cancer & is worked on in part by one of her former students, it's worth seeing.* It is a bit of a tear jerker, but it is really well done. Much of the time is spent with Thompson carrying on a dialogue with the camera (us) about how she feels in this situation. She loses her hair, and is in the hospital a lot, partly because she is participating in a cancer study. There's one scene in particular that I was strongly reminded of yesterday while at the hospital to figure out whether my "complaint" was enough to warrant minor surgery (it wasn't).

The doctors got me in to the surgery department really quickly. I was very cordially treated; it was a nice switch from the way you're sometimes treated at other overwhelmed and understaffed medical places (like, say, the pharmacy, or the lab where they draw blood.) Then I met with a student doctor, her boss, and that boss' boss-- the guy in charge. The guy in charge was a nice big bear of a man who took to patting me reassuringly with his large hands while talking. He said "so you're having a real pain in the butt". Ha ha. I'm sure he uses that one almost every day. They took me in to examine me to see the extent of the damage. The main doctor teaching, then three or so other student doctors watching.

The student doctors went out of their way to introduce themselves to me. I, at this time, am lying there mostly naked with one of those fun little hospital gowns that open in the back, on a paper-covered exam table that's a teeny bit too narrow for comfort, with two rolled up towels under my head for pillows. The room is a little too small, really, for all the people that are "observing" so they have to jostle around, but they're all behind me so I only hear them moving around. The doctor in charge explains to me what he's going to do (always important when you're poking people in places they're not accustomed to being poked.)

Now, I actually am very hard to embarrass. I also am, always, a teacher, so having realized the night before that these young doctors could very well be students who I had taught (as far as age goes) I'm sort of laughing to myself about this scene in Wit where the young doctors all go on teaching rounds with the professor (played by Christopher Loyd from Back to the Future fame-- he's still a bit squirrely looking to me). They cluster around her bed throwing out smart-sounding details of her condition, and they miss one very important detail. She lies there quite knowing what detail they're missing. After they leave, she muses about how she, the teacher, is now the "text" being "taught." She says "It's easy for me; all I have to do is lie here and look cancerous."

As the doctor-in-charge was teaching them about what my particular complaint consisted of, they needed to feel for themselves. Not a problem as far as I'm concerned; I'm way past caring. Just make me feel better and whatever. So the first student poked about a bit (causing me to think that really, women doctors are much better suited to this particular specialty-- two words-- smaller fingers). Then as she was feeling the "sort of like a marble, there to the upper left" hemorrhoid, the other student said "what does it feel like?" so of course, the doctor asked me if I minded if she felt, too. No, not at all. Have at it. Is there anyone else you'd like to bring in to try?

I lay there thinking about Emma Thompson's wry realization of becoming the text instead of the teacher. How out of control you are yet how vitally important to the learning process. I actually felt like laughing, hearing in my head as I was being examined Thompson's proper enunciation of the phrase "lie there and look cancerous/hemorrhoidial" (thankfully the second, in my case). I'm sure they would not have, could they have seen my face, quite understood my attempts to hide a smile as they were poking me.

Then, lesson learned, the group trouped away to cluster around a bank of computers. After I got dressed and wandered down the hall I saw them in another room. Perhaps the lesson of me had continued, perhaps they had moved on to something new. I just had to go make my appointment for the follow up visit and head home, to heal without any more intervention from the doctor or his eager young students.

At the same time, though, it is really important for the main lesson of the film Wit to not be lost. While we are, as patients, also sometimes texts, we are finally still human beings, with human emotions and needs. We lie alone in a strange, sterile place, not knowing what comes next, often completely out of control of our own lives while there. At the mercy of other people, for whom this is a job. They might care about us, but we are still their job-- and they need to know that we aren't exactly texts. If I make an offhand comment about a poem by Emily Dickinson being one way or the other, perhaps saying it's not one of her best, the poem doesn't get hurt by my comment. It doesn't matter if a student pokes about in a stanza while another student pokes the stanza in a different way. We are not going to hurt the poem. But the human being-- well, obviously, can be hurt. Can be forgotten about. Can be left alone and scared in a white room with a door closed. Waiting. If I could really teach those students something, that would be the lesson I would want to give.

******
*It's currently in fairly regular rotation on HBO, so if you haven't seen it, and you have HBO, you can probably catch it. But have a box of tissues at the end if you, like me, are a movie-cryer. A large box.

Jump Start

Since some time in February when I first learned the babies' sex, I've also been following this cute cartoon in which the cartoon mom is pregnant with twins. They're boy/girl twins, and sometimes you see "inside" the womb to have the twins talk. Today, for example, is a twin day. It's really funny how many of these little cartoons have been similar to events that have gone on for us. Sometimes I wonder if there's some sort of "bug" in the house-- how the heck else could he get some of these things so "right"? I have two of them on my fridge-- one of them from when the twins were wiggling, and when the dad tried to feel the mom's tummy, they held very still, with big, scared-looking eyes, and the word balloon read "is he gone yet?" The other has the little girl twin sarcastically telling the boy "I'll try to help you as much as humanely possible." I can totally see Maia & Sean having little conversations like that. And I fully expect Maia to be a bit of a know-it-all-- if she's anything like her mommy, that is. :)

The little girl twin in the cartoon is kind of a smarty-pants, while the boy is a bit of an exhibitionist, (as you'll see if you go there today) and a little more silly. I've saved the majority of the twin-in-womb cartoons and plan to print them out and put them in the babies' scrapbook one of these days. If you go to the link, you can see the last thirty days worth for free- not all of them are twin days, but the cartoon itself is entertaining too.

Anyway. This still doesn't count as the inspirational, poetic or literary post I'm going to try to write today. But I have been meaning to mention Jump Start here, and just read my morning fix. And so. :) Soon, off to the docs for my "non-perfect pregnancy" issues.

Errands, Etc.

Whenever Andrew is off work during the day, my blogging tends to get all disrupted. We ran "important errands" today together. One of these included a trip to the doctor to check into one of my common pregnancy complaints (which I won't detail, other than to say it's a real pain in the ass.) :) I have to go back to the doctor tomorrow to perhaps take care of that. Clearly, this was made worse by my recent forays into the lovely world of laxatives... I don't understand how anorexics can take those things.

Anyway. Another post of way TMI. I'll think of something poetic and inspiring to write for you tomorrow to relieve you of all this personal info. :) I promise.

Ugh

Warning: Potentially Too Much Information post. If you don't like to talk about "bodily things" go read another, nicer post. Like this one. (I did write this as discretely as I can, but don't get mad at me if you read on and get a little queasy in sympathy).

Have you ever read Stephen King's The Stand? In it, there's this superflu bug that gets released, and most of the population of the planet is killed. In the book, they call it "Captain Tripps" because of the seriously awful "trips" to the bathroom you have to make before finally dying.

When I read The Stand, I, like most people I know, got a little head cold. Power of suggestion and all. But now I can truly empathize ever so much more with the real dangers of the novel's superflu.

Yesterday, feeling bloated & crampy & uncomfortable, I took a single tiny pill that had been prescribed to me by my doctor for just such an event. I haven't needed it till now, although it is a common enough problem for pregnant women ("No Tripps" syndrome). However, the cure is far far worse than the problem was. Next time I'll just eat some fruit and drink a decaf latte!

I feel horrible awful terrible sick blah ugh yuck now. I've never felt as sick, I would have to say. And added to the sickness is the extra annoyance that it's sort of my own fault. Why, oh why, doctor, did you prescribe those little golden pills without more warning? I assumed "gentle and safe for pregnant women". NO. Not gentle. Not at all. And for Goddess' sake, how long does something like that stay in your system? What an awful way to die that is in King's story; he has such an "on the nose" imagination. It never really hit me before how bad dying of a superflu like that would be. By the end, they must have been so willing to just lie down and stop. But then, I guess that's probably the way most of these apocalyptic books are-- the disease being so bad that it's a relief, really.

But since Andrew is working, and there's no one else to baby me, I really feel pouty and cranky and (as before) sick. There's no good food to eat that doesn't require going out to the store (other than some lame ass cans of soup I'm sick of.) And no one to say "awwww poor baby" and put a cold washcloth on my head. I slept later than I have been sleeping, and I want to go back to sleep again, but it's daylight, and that makes it harder to do, you know. So I figured I'd make a bid for sympathy, even though it's a little bit of a gross subject matter & I usually try to not be quite so "confessional" on the blog. Even the nurse I called to check to see if there was any time limit where I should be concerned didn't sound too sympathetic to me, though. She said "next time use some Milk of Magnesia". Well great. That's great advice NOW.

Wherever you are today, whatever you're doing, I'll bet you're going to have a better day than I am. If that makes you feel any better about your Monday, then perhaps I feel a teeny bit better. (Nah. I don't really. I want my normal self back, please!)

Weekend Update

Sorry about no posts for a few days... it's been crazy here. Yesterday was the big baby shower, which was held at my house (even though other people did the party stuff, it was still busy for us, too). I'm kind of tired today, and my feet are swelling. Ick! So not a big post, just one to let you know there's no emergencies or anything.

But I do have the greatest bunch of friends & family ever! My nursery is now brimming with adorable onesies & sleepers & stuff. Very sweet of everyone, and very appreciated. I even had a couple of friends come over and clean my house up for me for free-- I had been going to hire a maid for a day to do the after party essentials, but they insisted on doing it for me. You should see how clean my friend's mom got my bathroom (which is hard for me cause we have very hard water & it's hard to get all that lime off the walls....) Wow! But now, for a nap, and to wait for Andrew, who has to work this weekend. Maybe something fun to do, maybe just a quiet day at home alone with the hubby & cat & two babies kicking.

Matchstick Men

We just got a phone call, and I am totally not making this up, from some guy trying to pull the con (basically) that they have in the movie Matchstick Men. He called TWICE, after Andrew had hung up the phone the first time, and left a voicemail. He said we had already had a product purchased for us and all we had to do (you know what's coming) is give them our credit card number and they'd just charge us the shipping. RIIIIIIGGGGGHT. Andrew talked to them, told them not to even think about sending the miracle product (with a ridiculous name to match it and make it sound special). I told him he should have said "this is a joke, right? Did you watch Matchstick Men last night and think this would be a good idea or something?"

I have to say that I am totally a tattletale too. These kinds of bastards rip old people and the gullible off for lots of money. I've reported them to the cops already. Cause I've got their number.

Those Baby Pix....

I promised. They are sooo cute if you know how to read them.


In this one, Maia is looking straight at the camera. Right in the middle of the picture, you can see her nose, and her lips sort of pouty & supermodel pursed underneath. Her little cheeks are poofy, like a chipmunk. I think she's a little nonplussed. Damn paparazzi!!


In this one, you have the two babies with their heads together. They are facing each other, and it almost looks like Sean is giving Maia a kiss on the forehead. You can see, if you look, Maia's little neckbones, so you can tell she is turned sideways and her head is sort of angled down. Isn't that the cutest thing? The doctor who was doing the sonogram was beside herself. :)

Warning: Hormones Ahead

Look. You've all heard it before a million and a half times, even if you haven't personally experienced it. But let me repeat it, like those little warning labels on hair dryers that say not to use said dryer while showering. Or sleeping.

Pregnant women are a mass of raging hormones.

Something that might have made us frown a little in "normal" times will now send us streaking to the bathroom with tears running down our faces and those little panicky gasps for control. Something that might have been even FUNNY back when we could fit into our size 10 skinny jeans will make us want to rip your head off. And we might just do it.

So if you push our buttons ANYWAY, I say you deserve the fallout, and the anvil on your head.

And also, if you are around as an innocent bystander when it happens, it's probably better to just let it be, not try to be too comforting. Cause if you're very nice to us while we are in this highly excitable state (like neon gas) you might, by being kind, make it worse.

(All related to an unfortunate mis-printed document for my father-in-law, and an old man who ought to know better. But I am over it now, except having to wait for him to come by and pick up the corrected document.)

Changes Along the Amazon

This morning I needed to look up a book I will buy from amazon.com before too long. When I was looking at the site, it appears they're changing the template/layout for books (maybe other stuff too eventually--looking at the baby items, they still have the same layout they had yesterday). It looks very different today than before. It's a little disconcerting, actually. I think it looks nice; I like that there are much bigger cover pictures. But I guess after close to 10 years of using amazon, the template hasn't changed that radically, and you get used to something looking a certain way.

Now this seems like a foolish post, on the surface. Who the hell cares about whether a bookstore website changes its template? I am not all spooled up about this; it's not that big of a deal, but it does reflect on something about human nature, and myself a little bit.

Change.

Do you adapt to change quickly, easily? I usually do. I taught myself HTML, webpage design, graphic design. I pretty much taught myself technical writing, so that I can teach it pretty darn well. I mostly taught myself things like Powerpoint-- which, although some people want to claim is obsolete and not good for presentations in a real business setting, is pretty darn cool to most people, not easily done by most people, and very widely used in academia for presentations & stuff. There are more things I taught myself-- and this is just an example of how I adapt to change pretty easily. I certainly learn things a lot quicker than a whole lot of people I have tried to teach. This isn't to toot my own horn-- but to realize that apparently, there is a limit to my adaptability.

Somehow, looking at the new amazon template, I get this sense of wrongness. See how the part that used to be in the center of the screen, with columns down along the left and right side, is now butted up against your left side of the screen instead? If you go to another page you can see how it used to look. See the "Search" box? The long columns of "recently viewed" and "rate this item" stuff? Those are missing from the new look, at least for now.

Part of me is yelling: It shouldn't be different; it should be the old template I'm used to. There are things missing, for Christ's sake. It doesn't look right! Is this getting old? Is it a designer's viewpoint? I think it's the second-- something about this new template seems unfinished and incomplete, like perhaps it's a beta model and they're still working on it. But you know they have the ability to hold something until it's reached a certain level of perfection before launching it. So somewhere, someone thinks it's ready to go. And I'm just not sure.

It's something most people will undoubtedly not notice. But I think it will confuse a lot of the folks who don't adapt to change very well. Where are my "browse" sections columns? Why is this picture so big? Where do I click to buy it?

Change bad? Change good? Don't care about change; let's get with the cool literature and quirky stories? Maybe later, after I finish obsessing about something that I have no compelling reason to need to care about. That, my friends, is procrastination.

Baby Info

Oh, and just in case you were wondering... I went to the doctor today and had a sonogram for the babies' size and stuff. We didn't get to do a videotape since they apparently don't do that at our hospital, but I did get some pix. I can post a few of them later, after I have time to scan them and fiddle with them.

But the babies were "sized" and Sean is 2 lbs 10 oz and Maia is 2 lbs 5 oz. According to gestational size charts, they are right at normal, and actually a little bit big for twin sizes. (Especially Sean!) It says on the twin charts that at my stage (27 weeks) they should be about 2 lbs 2 oz. So there! Singleton babies are supposed to be about 2 1/2 lbs about now. (What's a half pound-- that's 8 oz, right?) So Maia is just a little under the singleton baby size and Sean is actually a little bit bigger. Figures. :) They certainly wiggle and squirm a lot and I can definitely feel them in there!

They were very cute on the sono. They have always seemed to want to keep their heads together. Maia is now considered breech cause her feet angle down towards the cervix, and her head is lined up with Sean's. In one of my sonogram pictures, it looks kind of like they're leaning their foreheads together. Very sweet. The doctor said in one shot that it looked almost like she was kissing him on the forehead. Isn't that too damned adorable?!

Rrrrrrrrrrrrr-- She Be A Woman, Matey

Robotnik asked if I would do a post about International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and on doing a teeny bit of research, I saw that there is, indeed a day of that glorious nature. But it's not till September 19, so a post on it today would be a bit premature.

But in the midst of that search, I saw a cool "action figure" of Anne Bonney, legendary female pirate and therefore instant feminist icon. So I thought to myself "Self.... write something on women pirates" and then there was a long dialog with said self about how I really should do something more productive, of which the procrastinate-y self won out (as usual.) So putting my skills as an English major to use, I came up with the following post.

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Anne Bonny & Mary Reed
Apparently, it was not as unusual during the 18th century as we might think for women to cross-dress and go to sea, as Ann Bonney and Mary Reed, her co-pirate at arms, did. I remember in what I thought was a great movie, Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp (as a cross between Pepe le Pew & Keith Richards), there is a scene where the black woman pirate (Zoe Saldana) is at first somewhat shunned as a member of the crew, but eventually wins over the ship and proves to be one of the best pirates on board. Then there was the movie with Gina Davis (Cutthroat Island) a few years ago-- which I never actually saw, but remember meaning to see (mental note to rent that movie). Female pirates are interesting-- they cross this line between the ultra masculine, ultra seedy, dirty, cursing scoundrel and the so-called "feminine ideal" of the pure woman dressed in clean floral prints and fanning herself with exertion. But perhaps that "ideal" is something of a later time period-- according to some critics, it really only came about in the 19th century. The idea of the fainting flower of a woman is a much later invention than we might admit.

According to Marcus Rediker,

Women had long gone to sea, and in many capacities--as passengers, servants, wives, prostitutes, laundresses, cooks, and occasionally as sailors, serving aboard naval, merchant, whaling, privateering, and pirate vessels. They also made their way into armies. An anonymous writer insisted in 1762 that there were so many women in the British army that they deserved their own separate battalions, not unlike the women warriors who fought for the African kingdom of Dahomey during the same period.*

Both Bonny and Reed were born illegitimate, and both raised as boys in order to allow for more freedom and to possibly escape from the poverty that would face them in the other more common kinds of lives they could choose. They were both "discovered" to be women pirates when, after having been arrested as part of "Calico Jack Rackam's" pirate crew, the two pleaded "pleaded their Bellies, being Quick with Child, and pray'd that Execution might be staid."

Dorothy Thomas, one of the witnesses against Bonny, said in court that the women: "wore Mens Jackets, and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads, and that each of them had a Machet[e] and Pistol in their Hands." (So the above action figure is a pretty accurate rendition of that image). They also "cursed and swore at the Men" and "were both very profligate, cursing, and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any Thing on board."

As a little girl, I was very attracted to the idea of a pirate. The reality, I'm sure, was grubby, dangerous and uncomfortable. But the heroic myth persists: going anywhere you wanted, of obeying a law unto oneself, of sailing to exotic places when most stayed in a small village most of their lives. Being free to fight, and curse, and dress in comfortable clothes, and make a fortune on your own merits, just like the man at your side. When you're a little girl being told that you are not allowed to do something "because you're a girl" or that the standards are different, and you're a stubborn girl who doesn't feel any different, and if different, feels superior to the little boys she could wrassle to the floor and whup-- well, there's pirates. And if there are pirates, there are other things, too, that girls could do as well as some men.

All of this is just to say "Pirates are Cool." And female pirates are even cooler because they defied even more rules. It might not be a big deal for a boy to "try his fortune" at sea, but for a girl, there were so many more dangers that a woman who made herself a success was truly admirable. There are 42,700 hits for Anne Bonny on google. There are musicals, plays, books, movies, murder-mystery events devoted to her. While Reed apparently died in jail (perhaps of tyhpus) Bonney seems to have "disappeared." Perhaps she went back to her life as a woman and raised her child in "normal" society.

Andrew has a dream of perhaps one day owning a boat large enough to live on for extended periods of time. Sailing around the Med, stopping in to shore to perhaps teach a semester at some overseas university (me) while he trails around dragging our kids to museums and stuff. There is a definite appeal to that idea. I can picture it, and it does not sound like it would suck (most of the time.) So perhaps one day, you'll see us pull up with this flag flying, and the voice of Maia or Sean yelling out "prepare to be boarded, ye' scalawags".

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*Source: Rediker, Marcus. "When Women Pirates Sailed the Seas." Wilson Quarterly;17:4 (1993)102-111.

Tricksy Hungry Hobbitses

I'm officially a Hobbit. I already have had this morning:

Breakfast
Second Breakfast
and Elevensies.

If these babies come out with hairy feet, I'm denying that I ever wrote this post.

Barefoot, Pregnant, & Using Power Lawn Tools

We really needed our lawn mowed today. Andrew, fortunately, was off early and didn't have to be to work till noonish. So he went out and mowed, before the neighborhood association folks sent us a "we breaka your legs" letter. In the spirit of helping, I went out and used the leaf blower to get all the oak leaves that were liberally littering our driveway & sidewalk. In Texas, the live oak trees shed leaves twice a year-- fall & spring. So it was a mess.

My feet have officially swollen, and pretty much none of my shoes are comfortable anymore. Now I know why the stereotype of barefoot & pregnant persists. You just can't stand the pinching anymore! I had shoes on when the lawnwork started, but kicked them off after a while. So visualize me with the leaf blower, in a pair of Andrew's jogging shorts and a really old t-shirt from his days in AOCS (it says "Batt II" on one side and "AOCS 4" on the other in ugly yellow letters)*. Hugely pregnant, of course. I'm sure it was amusing. My neighbor, who we hardly ever see because they own a restaurant and work what must be 20 hour days almost every day, saw me and smiled and gestured towards her belly-- saying, basically (in a nice way) "Look at you; you're pregnant!". She looked all trim and elegant in a long black dress. Sigh.

But at least the lawn fascists won't get us for a few days.

*In fact, this is the t-shirt I came home in after our first "sleepover" date (knowwhatimean nudge nudge wink wink). I had worn something a little less comfortable, and he let me sleep in his big t-shirt. Boy clothes, as I've said before, are special. But he was a little uncomfortable back then (almost 14 years ago!!) bringing me home to my mom at 6 am wearing his clothes. Heh heh. I was such a brazen hussy. :) But don't tell the kids. As far as they know, our first 6 months were completely chaperoned, studying Bible verses and drinking cocoa.

D'OH-Light Savings!!!

Yesterday, as I'm sure you all know, pretty much all the news programs were filled to the brim with news about the Pope's variously worsening condition. Anecdotes about his life, etc. So when Andrew got home from work, we went to a party for one of his military buddies. They call it a "wetting down"-- it's basically a tradition where, when you get a promotion, you spend the amount of your first upgraded paycheck on a party. This guy did a Louisiana tradition-- a crawfish boil. Well, pregnant me did not get near enough food out of those little mudbugs to satisfy me and the twins. So we went to get "meat"-- steaks! Yum! And we didn't watch the news at all--we watched silly movies (including the ever so stupid "Road Trip") so we totally missed that today was Daylight Savings Time.

Andrew needed to be at work at 7. We got up at 6. He showered, I made breakfast. We were sitting down to enjoy said breakfast and the lady on the Weather Channel cheerfully said "I hope you remembered to set your clocks back!!" DOH!!!!

So Andrew was 30-ish minutes late.

I don't think I've ever screwed up Daylight Savings before. There have been times when I forgot about it, but never on days when it actually mattered.

So now I feel about an hour behind all day. Not that it matters that much cause I'm mostly just hanging out waiting for Andrew to be done, and we'll head back home later. On the road again!! This may be the last big road trip till the babies are here and ready to roll. I'm checking with the doc this week; you're not really supposed to go out of 1 hour from the hospital when you're past a certain phase of pregnancy.

Daylight savings. Piffle. I've saved enough daylight lately.

p.s. you guys got very naughty on me yesterday with those phrases! Whew!! I'm going to get some weirdos from google searches over the next couple of weeks thanks to those comments! :)

You Want Pickles With That?

No, this isn't a post about cravings. (Besides, most of my cravings are for sweet things.) Yesterday, I walked up behind Andrew as he was talking to a fellow aviator type about some training options he has in July. He said "The wife is due to pickle about that time...." that's when I interrupted him. Pickle?! This is a term I had not been privvy to.

Apparently, in military circles, "to pickle" means to drop one's payload-- bombs, whatever. So I will be double-pickling around late June early July. It's an odd term. Especially when you consider the mythological preference of pregnant women for eating pickles with everything (which, frankly, I have not encountered at all.) So now, in the evolution of things I have called my babies we have "The Alien/s" and "The bananas (and/or plantains)" and now, The Pickles. :)

Terms like that: pickle, 86* (to eliminate), gouge (gossip, info), the "re-rack" (to have a nap after getting out of bed early) and other military-inspired terms (I can't think of them all right now) are so fun. My mom was a Navy gal back in the day, and she used to always say "If it doesn't work, get a bigger hammer." Which was apparently a military phrase. I like it; it suits the way I usually "fix" things.

Waitress terms I think are pretty cool are: "in the weeds" (way too busy and having a hard time catching up); "they stiffed me" (left no tip). Sometimes they're localized terms. At one restaurant I worked, which had been a buffet style place before, we had a big long table full of people come in once and ask didn't we used to have "sweet (swaait) tea (tay-- rhymes with say)" (in the hick-i-est southern accent you can). At that place, "swait tay" was a euphemism for a table of people who were going to run you ragged and not tip.

A friend I used to hang out with used to call people who were a bit nuts "crack heads" and say "are you on crack?" So now that's a general term I like to use for nutty people.

Are there any terms like this that you use, which you picked up somewhere along the way? That you'd have to explain to someone else and they'd likely look at you like you had lost your mind? Not just general slang that everyone would know, but "insider slang"?

On that note, I need to get back to work... I'm workin' on the Buffy chapter today, having sent off my chapter 3 to my committee chair the other day.

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*Although some people claim "86" is an accounting term. I wasn't able to find anything on this on the Internet.