Sweetness.

Pearls of Wisdom

Last night, the Professor and I were making our way into the grocery store, in order to purchase ice cream and chocolate chip cookies (totally my request this time, by the way), when I asked him to ease up on pace we were walking.

“I’m getting pretty slow these days,” I reminded him.

"No, no," he said.  "It's all about your attitude.  Instead of thinking of yourself as an extremely slow human, you should consider that you are really fast for a sloth."

Are you a Tucks girl? Or is Preparation H more your style?

I don’t think there’s anything more upsetting than the post-partum session of childbirth class.  The instructor passed around a pillowcase full of “post-partum goodies,” and we each pulled one out while she explained why it was there and what it was for.  It was kind of like Santa Claus showed up with a sack full of treats for hemorrhoid-ridden, incontinent, fat, sad ladies who wear cheesecloth for underwear. 

I have decided to stay pregnant forever.

While waiting for the doctor.

While waiting for the doctor to come in a do a tummy check ("Yes! Your stomach! It is still there!"), I glanced over at a pile of magazines (which, of course, I didn't touch, because they will give me the swine flu, and then--because I am a pregnant lady--I will promptly up and die).  People was on top, and it was the issue memorializing Patrick Swayze.

My train of thought in that moment went thusly: Patrick Swayze. Dirty Dancing. Nobody puts Baby in a corner.  Wait.  Our crib is in the corner. Our baby will sleep in that crib.  Ack.  We've put baby in the corner.

Perhaps all this will be followed by a lucrative career for the Professor on one of the "Law and Order" franchises.

One can only hope.

Half man, half horse, that's me.

So.  Did you know that a remake of "V" is on ABC these days?  I'm not liking the coinciding of this with my little Sagittarian's impending birth.  It's too close to my nightmare for comfort.

Speaking of signs of the Zodiac, I am over the moon to be having a Sagittarius baby.  As a Sag myself, I am confident that this is the best, most awesome, incredible, delightful, and charming sign to be born under.  While crowing about this over the weekend, I got some serious glares from my Capricorn sister, best friend, and husband.  Seriously.  Those goats are grumpy.

The little archer is proving herself to be willful already.  Every time I try to count her movements, she is still.  Which, of course, leads to me looking at the Professor and asking, "Do you think I've killed the baby?  By eating too many Nutter Butters?" and then putting on sackcloth and ashes and rending my garments and swearing never to touch another delicious peanut buttery cookie ever again. (Oh what will we do with the Tagalongs that the Brownie across the street just delivered?)  He rolls his eyes and goes back to watching the World Series.  (Um, Phillies?  You can start hitting the ball when you come up to bat.  Any time now.  Ryan Howard, I'm looking at you.)  And then, sure enough, an hour or two later, she'll shift and move as if to say, "Gotcha!  I do things on my own schedule.  And you eat too many Nutter Butters!"  

And I do.  They are, however, delicious.

Fully inhabiting this stereotype.

I’ve finally hit that awesome point of pregnancy wherein I have begun to waddle.  Personally, I prefer to think of it as wobbling, as in all actuality, I toodle around like a giant Weeble Wobble, listing magnificently side-to-side, yet not falling down.

So it was last night when I found myself waddling/wobbling around the grocery store trying to gather together the ingredients to make brownie sundaes for the Professor, who is the world’s biggest chocoholic.  (We like to mix up the gender roles here – he eats the chocolates, and I do the prenatal bench pressing.)

As I waddled up to the checkout, arms laden with brownies, ice cream, maraschino cherries, and whipped cream, the cashier looked up, smiled, and said, “Having a craving?”

And as I tried to explain that no, really, it’s all for my husband, she smiled wider and said,  “Oh, I see. Your husband.”   She might as well have thrown in a little “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” while she was at it.

As I left the store, I fought the impulse to turn back, grab some pickles and head back to her checkout line.  Might as well live the dream in technicolor.

First, I'll need some felt.

In another life, I was training to be a Professional Scholar.  Only I was not very good at it.  Instead of shutting myself in the archive and diligently researching the relationship between reading and performance in novels and plays, I shut myself in my carrel and played a whole heck of a lot of solitaire.

I had some discipline issues.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, my deep, abiding passion for Literature Noone Really Reads Anymore (Unless a Teacher Makes Them) burns brightly.  Case in point: I’m reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans for fun right now.  And I like it.  In fact, I’ve already come up with the topic of an imaginary seminar paper that I’m going to write on the darn book when I finish it.

I'm just missing the life of the mind a little more these days, and wondering if an infant would be at all entertained by some eighteenth-century British drama performed via finger puppets.  I think it could work.

Gym Scene

Possibly inspired by the fact that I’ve been watching a few too many re-runs of “The Biggest Loser” lately, and possibly because of the fact that I was a bit bored, and possibly because I’m confusing labor and delivery with an endurance fitness event, I decided that it would be a good idea to go to the gym last week. 

Now, I’ve been walking and swimming and going to pregnant-lady-exercise class, and pregnant-lady yoga and whatnot, but I thought that I’d mix it up a little in week 31 (because isn’t that what the third trimester is for?) and lift some weights.  Because there’s nothing more inspiring to a dedicated gym rat than a hugely pregnant lady bench-pressing 20 pounds.  And then getting stuck on the bench because she has lost all abdominal function and cannot sit up or manage to right herself without flopping about like a walrus hauling itself up the beach.

So, off I waddled to the weight room.  I needn’t have worried about my propensity to flop about or my delightfully protruding belly button, however, as the denizens of the weight room—all of them male (of course), none of them pregnant (again, I’d say, “of course,” but thanks to Oprah, I’m not really sure what to say)—were completely and totally engrossed in examining each other’s abs and making comparisons.  (I did have a fleeting thought of going over, lifting my shirt and showing my belly too, but I tactfully refrained.  I didn’t want to inspire jealousy.)  And then, they all started showing off their patented ab-firming moves, from crunches to other types of crunches to yet an even third type of crunch.  It was all very fascinating as I lay there on my back wishing I had one single ab muscle, capable of pulling me upright or, perhaps, that I could strike a deal with the person living inside my general ab area whereby she would be responsible for hoisting me up from inside. 

Anyway, as I was rolling myself off the bench all graceful and lady-like, I discovered that the conversation had taken a new turn.  Done with sharing the secrets of a successful six-pack, they commenced revealing their ages.  The range was from 68-75.

I tried very, very hard to pretend that my presence did not inspire their final subject of conversation: vasectomies and the age at which they are best gotten.

So much to say.

I don't know where to begin.  So I'll start in the middle. 

My belly button, according to my father looks like the Eye of Sauron and according to my mother it looks like it should get checked out.  It's purple.  Which, by the way, when you Google that, just leads you to oodles of posts on purple belly button rings.  Not helpful.

I never watch teevee.  Ever.  Well, except for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. (Religiously! We're such old people, the professor and I.) And I can get pretty rabid about Nova, too.  Okay, so I watch some (deeply nerdy) teevee.  Well, the other morning I watched the Today Show for five minutes while eating breakfast and in those five minutes I watched Padma Lakshmi make a recipe that I have made three times since then.  It is delicious.  Painfully so.  And it makes for an easy lunch. 

After sharing said recipe with my mother I discovered that she often refers to chickpeas as chi-chi beans.  Which, in my opinion, gives the humble garbanzo a nice Latin flair.  Like it might jump out of your salad and start talking like Charo.

This fall marks the first time in 28 years that I have not gone "back to school."  It's weird to think that much of my life was spent in education.  I'm not sad; in fact, eating breakfast on the back porch in my bare feet in shlubby clothes while contemplating the havoc I was planning to wreak on our abode throughout the coming months (everything is going to find its place, and I mean everything) was really nice.  But at the same time, I got kind of nostalgic for the excitement and anticipation for back to school - it's such a cool sort of new energy.  So different from the hilarious drag of exhaustion that propels everyone, teachers and students through the end of the year.

The end.

Insecticide and Votes for Women

I killed the cricket.  I went downstairs to do some laundry and was stepping back to move the wet clothes to the drier, when, CRUNCH.  My first thought: I killed our luck.  My second thought: I am so glad I wear slippers in the basement.  My howl of sadness brought the professor tumbling down the stairs, and upon his arrival he declared me the most heartless cricket murderer East of the Mississippi. 

It is this kind of support that will get me through labor, I imagine.

Fortunately, there was another cricket sitting and staring at me.  Unsquashed.  My first thought: Sweet, more luck.  The Professor's first thought: Probably the other cricket's mother, saddened by the sight of her only beloved child's untimely death.

Perhaps it is time to consider a doula.

In other news, I called our insurance company to ask about hospital stays and financial responsibility and the having of babies.  The customer service representative was very patient with my ignorance of this whole process.  She also, as it turns out, is an amateur activist women's historian (my diagnosis, not hers).  After informing me that, according to our plan, having a baby is slightly cheaper than buying a Roomba (yippee!), she told me all about maternity leave and the Western Electric lawsuit and all the changes in the law in the seventies that enabled women to take time off of work without being punished for it.  She told me to go look all this information up.  I was impressed.  Although slightly saddened that she kept celebrating the fact that maternity leave is guaranteed, "just like any other disability!"  You win some, you lose some.

It's sort of like that moment in "Mary Poppins" when Mrs. Banks returns from her suffragette meeting only to completely ignore the fact that her governess has something to say. 

Our newest resident.

We've got a cricket in the basement, and I am thrilled.  I'm counting on the luck he's bringing us.  I have visions of a lovely pagoda and mulberry leaves for our visitor, but, in all actuality, he'll have to settle for not being stepped on or accidentally put into the washing machine.