Produce

Small Watermelon. (T-Minus 4 days)

So yeah. It’s been a long time. I thought that I would like the blogging thing more than I do, I guess. I have really enjoyed being pregnant, however, until about 11pm Sunday night when I went from feeling pregnant to feeling REALLY pregnant and kind of grumpy about it.

I’m anxious about labor and delivery, but not as anxious about that as I am about actually having this little lady in our house. It’s been 8 years since I had even a baby animal to take care of…and so we shall see how this all goes. I’m going to try to update this more - with photos and with other items of interest, and hopefully I’ll actually have the wherewithal to share it with some friends and family as well.

Sonogram. Big Bang.

Technology is amazing. Little feet….giant alien eye sockets….hiccups. 4cm long. Heart rate of 154bpm. Although it is proof of the little miracle of human reproduction, it is also one of those things that highlights the anticlimactic nature of this whole thing. It speaks to the juxtaposition of intimacy and public life; of apocalypse and normalcy. No more unusual than pooping - although it is a miracle.

Obviously making a baby is quite intimate….but then it becomes so public. Absurd questions and inappropriate touching by strangers. And, although our world feels so completely rocked by this little cricket inside of me, it’s something that happens all the time, every day to women all over the world.

It’s been difficult to get my head around - a big part of me not wanting people to notice or fuss, but at the same time - being completely unable to think of anything else to talk about. I am walking the fine line between being pregnant and glowing and being a naggy uppity braggard touting the amazing wonders of the most basic function of the human body.

Just saying “I worked out for over an hour today” takes on an air of snark as if to say “HAH! Even though I’m knocked up, I still managed to drag my ass to the gym unlike some other more lazy individuals…Bless their hearts.”

Fig.

So I have to admit that I’m having trouble writing this blog. It’s just that pregnancy, while being a “miracle” and all of that, is BORING. I’ve tried to write a couple of entries since I posted the last one - trying to be funny, amusing, irreverent (you know, all of those things that blogs are supposed to be) - but it’s just boring.

My old clothes still fit.

I feel just fine. (Thank you for asking.)

I’m all good, really I am. (Except for when people say things like “Soon you’re gonna have to get one of those milkers for your tits,” which makes me wonder if you get special treatment if you’re pregnant when you are booked into the county jail for assault.)

Maybe it is all supposed to be more dramatic…and maybe I’m supposed to be more gracious and patient with the questions….but I just don’t see it going down like that, frankly.

Grape.

So some days there is more funny about being pregnant than others. Yesterday was pretty funny as we attended our first “Welcoming Baby” class. Part of this class included Jason and the other “baby daddys” in the class having to wear the Empathy Belly - a strap-on boobs-and-belly apparatus that is filled with water and two 7-pound shot puts made of lead. It was pretty awesome. It made their hips hurt and made them seem vaguely grumpy….or maybe that was the realistically-weighted baby dolls that were swaddled and burped. Who knows.

All I know is that I feel like I just completed the workout of my life - muscles aching, boobs hurting, but at least I’m not barfing. Hopefully I have safely made it out of the woods on that one.

I will say that Jason’s admission on Saturday night that he weighed 10 pounds at birth freaked me out a little….but I’ll wait until after our first appointment with the midwife on Friday morning to get TOO freaked out.

Alice in Utero

One of my best friends in the entire world is expecting her first baby in a matter of days. In the meantime, one of my other best friends managed to corral a group of 10 women who are scattered all over the world into sending fabric to her, which she is sewing into a quilt for little Alice as a gift from all of us. I found this website and shipped my fabric contribution to my sewing friend - and I think that it is a fabulous site. Great fabric, great website…it makes me want to be more domesticated.

http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome

A note about my level of domestication: I don’t sew. I would like to sew (managed to get score an A- in middle school Home Ec), but I am terrible at math, and so I either screw up the project completely through inaccurate calculations or I break the sewing machine. I have recently had a wild hair to get in there and try again (mostly due to the awesome stuff on this site), but so far it’s just been an exercise in voyeurism. Hell….I don’t even know how to use my own washing machine.

Kidney Bean.

So I’ve now had no fewer than 5 people insist that they would like to be able to hear, read, see, witness, etc. every last bit of my pregnancy experience…even though I have insisted that they don’t really want this as badly as they think that they do. So here I am. Blog #1. 8 weeks pregnant.

I anticipate that, due to the near-toxic levels of estrogen coursing through my body, the colors, title, tone, frequency of posting, etc. will all vary greatly. I sincerely hope that I do not become one of those women who cannot fathom speaking of anything other than producing children, feeding children, playing with children, and cleaning children. Therefore, it is my intention to frequently share non-pregnancy-related snippets as well. I am not sure, other than maybe a few people, who will read this, but I write slowly with a pen and I have too much knitting ahead of me in the next couple of months to spend any time with super sore hands, so here we go.

Blog on, blogger.