Monthly Archives: February 2010

Not the excitement I was looking for.

Maybe I should stop complaining that my life is boring. My life is not boring. My life is stable, safe, and awesome. Let’s go back to that. So uhm, I got to spend 5 hours in the ER today. Around 1:45pm I started experiencing mild lower abdominal cramps. They were intermittent and not too severe. Around 2:00 they started getting a little worse and it started getting hard to stand up completely straight. I started calling folks like my midwife, Noah, a friend who is also a midwife. The only person who answered was Noah. (I was at a friend’s house.) I told Noah I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do about it but I was concerned. Once I started getting fairly fierce lower back ache I burst into tears and announced it was time for the ER.

I sat in the waiting room for hours before finally getting seen at all. I spent a lot of time in the waiting room hunched over crying from pain. My midwife arrived after not too terribly long and we snuck off to the bathroom so that she could listen to the baby with the doppler. She said she didn’t know what was going on with me, but the baby sounded fine. My blood pressure instantly dropped. I stopped crying every time the fierce pain came and instead started breathing through what I was pretty certain was contractions.

For those following at home: I am 14 weeks pregnant. There is no way my baby could survive outside of me at this point.

Eventually I got in to see a doctor. (Amusingly this doctor is well known in the dance community. She immediately offered to get a different doctor if I felt uncomfortable with her giving me a pelvic exam. I muttered that given how many of her friends have already seen my crotch, one more person was no big deal. She tactfully ignored me. :D) She was friendly and professional. She didn’t feel anything problematic so I was back out to the waiting room so that I could wait and wait and wait for an ultrasound. It took another hour or so. The ultrasound technician was WAY chatty compared to my previous experiences telling me all kinds of interpretations of what he was finding. I’m pretty sure he was actually breaking rules but oh man am I not going to report him. The baby looked great. The baby is measuring a couple of days ahead of my dates but that’s not a big deal. The heartbeat was lovely. Development is universally on target or a couple days ahead. This is awesome. But I had a whole lot of confirmation that I was having very fierce contractions. My cervix was long and thick (that’s a good thing). I am no where near having a baby any time soon.

I had to wait a while longer to see a different doctor (shift change) so that I could get final results. No UTI. No obvious anything other than me having severe contractions. Uhm, I guess those just happen. Take Tylenol for the pain.

Then we were released. My midwife said that if I am not opposed, half a glass of wine should probably take care of quieting my uterus. I am currently sipping an awesome vintage.

You know, given how stressful my pregnancies are I really really really really don’t need to go through this a third time.

Weight

It’s ok to talk about weight while pregnant, right? It’s not somehow verboten? Just checking.

So a friend whom I like and respect has told me that the best thing to do while pregnant is to look at your weight, cut that in half, then drink that many ounces a day in liquid (mostly water, of course). Thing is… I’m trying like mad to do this and I’m dropping weight. I feel hungry but unable to eat because my stomach capacity is maxed out. I’m shaky and kind of weak on the days I manage to get to 11 cups of liquid. (I should be drinking 12+ according to that theory.) But if I drink only as much as my body feels inclined to take in I’m drinking 6-8 cups of liquid a day and I can eat. I feel much better physically. I don’t shake.

I think that the ideal of tons of water might just be an ideal for me. I’m beginning to think that is really a bad idea for my health and my pregnancy for me to focus that hard on water.

(For the record my midwife’s general philosophy is: don’t get dehydrated.)

I’m thinking about this because I’ve been trying really hard to get in my liquid today. I am up to 7ish cups of liquid. And I’m shaking like a leaf. I feel like shit. I can barely move around. And I feel like I am starving but my stomach is full. I think I’m done with this.

Well isn’t that fucking ducky.

Today I opened up facebook to see my sister post:
Mommy is coming today!!! Gawd I miss my Mom!! Can’t wait to see what her acerbic witt comes up with this time. She blows into town and starts giving all the kids crap if they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do. Which means I don’t have to be the only bad guy (that they actually listen to) for the next week. …They love Grammie – she’s as whacked as we are… =P

I…

I’m tempted to throw together a bag and get out of town. I have no fucking idea where I would go but it would be awfully convenient to say when she calls (cause she will) “Oh… I’m out of town. Sorry.”

Kidlet rambling

I don’t talk about Shanna much anymore. 🙂 I should do that. Today Shanna dragged her Mega Bloks out and built a foot tall tower. She’s never done that before. I really should have taken a picture but I’m lame and I didn’t. Normally she maxes out on attaching about three blocks together before knocking them over. This kind of sudden leap always makes my brain hurt. It seems like she pretty regularly can’t do something, can’t do it, can’t do it, Oh no big deal I can do that. It’s really amazing. I think kids are so awesome. (I don’t think my kid is a special snowflake I just have limited exposure to seeing this kind of development in other kids. 🙂

I thank God just about every day that her speech is so developed. I am growing to understand toddler tantrums more and more. She has such strong feelings and desires that if she couldn’t express them I can see her screaming and hitting. I made a list recently and off the top of my head I came up with more than 250 food words she knows. And boy howdy does she exercise them. 😛 It’s really nice that she can very specifically say what she wants because then neither of us get frustrated. I’m kind of terrified of next kid being less verbal and equally strong willed. I think that Shanna feels mellow to me because she is very good at asking for what she wants and I’m pretty happy to give it to her 9/10. I only say no when I have a good reason to. I’ve never really understood the principle of telling kids ‘no’ just as a matter of course.

Toddlerhood is far more challenging than babyhood. We struggle to find the balance. If I am well rested and feeling patient we do ok. If I’m tired… oof. I have cracked two teeth gritting my jaw when she gets frustrating. Oops. Well that coping mechanism needs work. By and large our days are still very joyful. It’s hard that if you stop doing something (like playing on the computer) to go stop her from doing something (like running water in the bathroom) she RUNS back to mess with the computer. Every so often we get into loops where I am chasing her back and forth from thing to thing and that’s not my favorite. I somehow doubt that the toddler years are going to be my favorite stage. 🙂

She has (mostly) stopped eating her books, which is really awesome. At this point she only occasionally will put an already well gnawed book in her mouth. Oy. She loves reading so much. I read to her for probably at least an hour a day and Noah also does a lot of reading. No signs of her being able to ‘read’ and that’s so completely ok. I recently introduced the alphabet song out of desperation when I couldn’t think of any other song to entertain her with and she loves it. She doesn’t know much of the alphabet and that is ok with me. 🙂

I feel like an EC failure because she is still in diapers. I put way too much pressure on myself. She potties more often than she goes in a diaper most days but sometimes she just has no interest in using the potty and pushing it seems kind of silly. So the march of laundry continues on. I have used disposables a few times in the past year because of traveling and man do I prefer cloth. The smell of disposables makes me gag. I don’t know why it seems so overwhelming to me. I am sort of hoping for at least a couple of weeks of break between kids but if it doesn’t happen that will be ok too. 🙂

This pregnancy is So Much Easier. I have been really exhausted all through the first trimester but that is abating a lot in the last week. I need to start getting out of the house more and doing some exercise. I have no interest in being completely out of shape when TBD arrives. That was a pain when Shanna was born. And this time I’ll have a toddler to chase too! Very exciting. I am having a bit of trouble with controlling my temper. I am not resorting to hitting and I’m not yelling much at all, but I’m not as patient as I can be. This is a big enough thing to me that I think this is the deciding factor for me on two kids versus three. It’s not ok for me to be this frustrated as a matter of course with my kids. Just not reasonable. And if I am struggling this hard with one child it would be orders of magnitude harder with two children. So it looks like we are done. I have mixed feelings about that because I feel like in my heart I really want more children. But there are wants and then there is the ability to meet the needs of your children and I’m really not all that selfish of a person. Having children at all is a selfish act and I can only push it so far. 🙂 It’ll be great. It’s cheaper to travel with two kids instead of three. 😛

I spend a lot of time looking at Shanna wondering how something so amazing came out of me. She is so joyous and giving and upbeat. I wonder if I ever had that lightness of spirit. When I have dark days wondering if I ‘deserve’ to have children because I am a horrible person I look at her and think that whether or not I deserve to have children, the world deserves to have someone like her in it. She really is wonderful.

Weekend Report!

We went out on a hot date on Friday! Whoo hoo! We went to the swinger party at Edges. I discovered that I am really not in a position to be doing any play with other people. I had this visceral, physical, instinctive feeling of NOT THE DADDY when a playmate touched me even slightly. I just couldn’t handle that. So I only played with Noah and I had a great time. I was quite thrilled to be the initiator of a bunch of other people getting lots of play though. 🙂 That was really fun for me in the space I was at.

The only problem with such events is they keep us up very late at night and Shanna is not interested in sleeping in. 🙂 We spent Saturday very zombielike not getting much of anything accomplished and it felt wonderful. We have both been needing some together-slacker time. We also had hot sex again for the third time in a week. I am pretty sure last week involved more sex than the whole rest of this pregnancy combined. I’m feeling physically much better. 🙂 Yay for second trimesters.

On Sunday I went up to Mo’s Tea Party in San Francisco. This was not a kid-friendly event so Noah and Shanna got to have a date at the Discovery Museum. 🙂 I had a really great time. I got to catch up with folks I like and meet a bunch of new-to-me people. I stepped pretty far outside my normal comfort zone and it was a really good thing. It was a thoroughly excellent event all around. 🙂 Then I went over to Wicked Grounds for some real food (I had not had much real solid food all day that wasn’t sugary and by 5pm that’s a problem) and had an awesome sandwich. 😀 I also got to enjoy fun, festive, sassy conversation with a fair sized crowd of wonderful people. I think all of whom are on lj. 😀 Thanks everyone! I felt very included and loved. It is nice to remember that when I get out of my house there are still lots of really neato people who are happy to talk to me. 🙂 Whoo hoo! One of the people said she would be thrilled to take bart down to come visit with me and Shanna and someone else said, “I’m sorry I never visit… but at least I never promise I will!” Both comments were awesome in very different ways. 😀

Cycles.

I notice that when I feel bad about something and I don’t act on it because I feel confused/anxious/uncertain about how to handle it I tend to get very fussy and anxious overall and it bleeds over into way more of my life than it should. I tend to hold on to things for a long time in that state building it up into my head until I am so frustrated by it that the smallest hint of an infraction in that direction feels like THAT’S IT!!! I’M DONE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Often this doesn’t go all that well. When I completely over react like that I feel terrible and guilty and like if I were just a better person I wouldn’t blow up like that. But the situation doesn’t really get resolved and it continues on and the cycle continues.

But if I manage to say my piece in a way that is maybe not perfectly polite but not a complete and total overreaction directed at one person I feel way better about myself. And I will have an easier time enforcing that boundary for a long time afterward. I’m always super happy when I manage to do this.

And just because this is the kind of thing I almost never say–I’ve been doing pretty well lately. I’m having lots of emotional cycles but I’ve not been depressed in quite a while. Frustration seems to be ever present while pregnant though. 🙂

Not.The.Problem.

I’m not currently feeling massively pissy about this topic so this is probably a good time to write this post. Let me state emphatically, for the record, that being a stay at home mom is not the problem no matter which problem it is that you (general you) think I should fix. Let me explain why.

When I was teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week. I was chronically underslept. I was rather unhealthy because I had no time to exercise and we ate out constantly because when in the hell was I going to cook? My house was a disaster and keeping up with laundry was a nightmare. I was lonely (doesn’t anyone remember my angsty whiny posts from that time period?!) because I never got to see my friends and students don’t count as personal time. I loved my job, please don’t get me wrong. It was wonderful. It was deeply fulfilling for me on a personal and spiritual level. But it had a very high cost to my health, social life, and sleep schedule. Granted, I quit after only three years of teaching and everyone says it gets easier. But when they say it gets easier they mean it goes down to 50-60 hours of work per week. Grading papers takes a lot of time. In addition to the mandatory 35 hours/week of your contract time of which most of that is teaching/passing periods/breaks during which you have to deal with students you have very little time for prep work or grading. It pretty much entirely has to happen outside your contracted hours. And that’s not including commute time.

So, for those of you who believe I would suddenly have more ‘personal balance’ if I had a job–exactly when in the day do you think that would happen? When on top of an already stressful job I had to also take care of getting two children ready in the morning and try to add their needs on top of grading in the evening? What, you think I would have more time for myself on the weekends when I was trying to frantically do laundry, clean house, and pay attention to the kids who missed me all week? That’s fucking mental.

And between daycare costs and the increased amount of eating out and commuting costs and needing a better wardrobe for work and buying my own school supplies… I think our noticeable income would go up by about $400/month. Well that sounds like a bloody stupid ass trade to me.

Why being a stay at home mom is a good decision for me personally:
-I get plenty of sleep. Without sleep I am not a pleasant person for anyone to deal with. I went through the whole first year of Shanna’s life very well rested despite the fact that she woke up to nurse a lot at night because I could go to bed whenever I wanted and sleep in as much as I wanted. There were no constraints on my time.
-I have a better diet than I have ever had in my life. (Ok, pregnancy is kind of making this one harder but it will come back.) I eat a wider variety of vegetables than I even knew existed I shit you not. I had never heard of many of the vegetables I’ve eaten this year. And I am mostly eating a local, seasonal, organic, humanely raised diet. I feel really good about that both from a personal health point of view and from the point of view of my impact on the planet. That is just awesome.
-I really believe in Attachment Parenting and it is pretty fucking difficult to do if you are away from your kid 55+ hours/week. I believe strongly in nursing on demand and child led weaning and I am a shitty pumper. I honestly would not be able to keep up pumping at work for years so that my supply stayed present. I know this about myself.
-I believe very strongly in homeschooling. I have done the research. I have worked in education. I have 5,000 reasons that I will not ever put my kids in public school and private school isn’t much better. Kind of hard to do with two working parents.
-I get a lot of downtime to do shit I want to do. I do house remodeling projects (which while stressful also make me very happy) and read and get more exercise than I have gotten in years. I have had a blast baking. I love learning how to cook more interesting foods. I really love my weird hippie quirks and they are rather time consuming.
-I see friends during the day quite a bit and I still get to devote tons of time to my family. I really enjoy spending time with Noah. He’s my best friend. He’s funny and fun and interesting to me. I really appreciate that our time as a family together involves very little stress about cooking and cleaning. (Ok, pregnancy and the first six months of a kids life are more stressful but that would be 5,000% worse with a job.)
-I like the challenge to meet our financial goals within restraints. That is totally how my mind works. I feel very good about the many ways in which I am frugal. It’s like a game. I don’t do this in the ways that other people often do–I’m not trying to find name brand purses for cheap or anything like that. I’m trying to pay off our mortgage as quick as humanly possible while still having a really high quality of life. Given that we were able to decide to go to The French Laundry and up and go in less than a week means that I am succeeding really flippin well.

Every life choice carries with it challenges. I whine more about the hard things than I post about the things that make me happy. This is true of a great many people who journal online–it doesn’t mean awesome stuff isn’t going on offstage. If you (generic you) have an ounce of respect for me, my ability to make reasoned choices, and the best interests of my family you will never again tell me to get a job because it will cure what ails me. You are just fucking wrong and I’m getting really fucking sick of that stupid lecture.

noticing dates

I try to avoid knowing what day of the month it is around specific parts of the year. It’s just better to not notice. I had to write a check today. Today is Tommy’s birthday. He would be 33. In June it will be 12 years since he died. I didn’t have a good relationship with him by any stretch of the imagination but it is still really hard to think of him. I wonder if I will ever stop feeling responsibility? I wonder if we would have been able to have a relationship as adults. Would I have developed compassion and patience for him? Most of his issues were quite literally not his fault. He had a severe brain injury. I’ll never know.

Identity

I noticed something today that I consider interesting. When I glance around at the profiles of mothers I know in various social networking sites almost all of the mothers with young children have pictures of themselves with their children as their primary picture and sometimes their partner/husband is in the picture. It is very rare for a father to have a picture of himself and his child as his primary picture. Once parents have teenagers it is fairly uncommon to have pictures of the kids in a primary profile picture at all. In fact, for most fathers of young children you have to spend some time hunting to find mention of their kids/pictures of them. And once you find pictures you notice that the father has 1-5 pictures of his kids (out of dozens or hundreds of photos) whereas the mother in the same relationship has the kid(s) in almost all pictures up.

I hear a lot about how women give up too much of their identity to their children. I wonder if this attitude comes about because men don’t give up enough of their identity to having children and in our society the default ‘personhood’ is being a man and women are wrong for where and how they deviate from that norm. If you think about it, that is very much how (at least American) society works. Women are shafted in the work place because they need maternity leave/sick leave to care for children/time off during the day to take care of appointments for children. This is all left to the sole providence of women in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there are some exceptions but they are exceedingly rare. I believe that companies get away with their nasty anti-woman policies because the default is that everyone should behave like a man therefore women are bad/wrong for when they need something different.

Back to my original point about parents. I’ve been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot. Women are told not to give themselves up to being a mother. I hear it. I’m told to go out and have a separate identity. The thing is, there are only so many hours in the day. Having a toddler is a shitload of work and I really don’t see how I could do much more than I am doing lately and still be as present as I am with my daughter. I’m not willing to put my daughter in daycare for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is I’d have to get a job to pay for it and then I would be gone all the time working and I would have even less time for myself than I get now. 😛 My job was brutal on me for having a separate identity anyway.

My point being that I think that it is crap that women are told they should be less invested in their identity as a parent when men are not told they should be more invested in their identity as a parent. Yes, there needs to be a balance but I don’t think men are doing better than women they are just fucking up in the opposite direction. There has to be some meeting in the middle and I’m not exactly sure where it is.

Update sorta thing

Shanna seems to be back to normal today. Whoo hoo! She was probably awake for a grand total of 5 hours yesterday and during those brief awake periods we shoved her full of chicken broth and water and juice and she has come out the other side unscathed. *phew* I had some icki symptoms later in the day yesterday and I seem to be back to (my) normal today as well. I’m glad that bug was quick. 🙂

{milestones} ewwwwwww

Whereas Shanna has technically vomited before that was a direct chain reaction of too much junky food+ too much sugar + chugging way too much juice really fast = stomach says no. That was on Halloween. Generally speaking she wasn’t sick that day.

Now she is sick. She’s been miserable for the better part of a week with fever off and on, a really nasty runny nose, general malaise (from what I can tell), and occasional cough. Last night she went to sleep super early (really around 6:30 on Noah’s chest in the living room) and she was transferred to bed for the night around 8. Around 9 she woke up and vomited all over herself and the bed. 🙁 There was a rather alarming quantity of chunk. She had to go straight into the shower because her head/hair was so full of slime. 🙁 Noah cleaned up her person and I stripped the bed. She has been sleeping in her own bed lately but we pulled her into our bed for the night. She slept like the dead. She woke up fussy and whiny and hungry around 6 am (a pretty normal wake up time) so I made her some chicken noodle soup and mostly just let her sip broth. She nursed on one side and passed out hard. She is showing no signs of stirring.

This has been her worst illness to date. My poor baby. 🙁

ETA: and… now she has really nasty diarrhea. I wish I knew more about watching for signs of dehydration in small ones. 🙁

30th birthday musing

In this filter there are currently: Mo, Alex, and Sarah(yes!) (all of whom I functionally think of as single), Mark/Laura, and Brittney/Joe (two married couples who at this point do not have children), and Ali/Mark and Deborah/Anthony (both couples have two kids and I think they don’t plan on more).

So this filter is relatively small. I’m giving you guys this run down so you have some idea of who I am talking to about this topic. 🙂 It is also worth pointing out that even though I like all the people in this group and I would want to spend a fair bit of time with you, I need my ‘family time’ and I need a lot of it. So we would not be locked at the hip by any measure.

I would like to go on a Disney Cruise and to Walt Disney World for my 30th birthday. That’s a bit out, not till September 2011 but pre-planning is required for a couple of reasons. We just bought into the Disney Vacation Club because given my vacation habits it’ll be paid for in like five years. 🙂 If I have some idea of who might be interested it changes a bunch of my potential strategies and it gives people a chance to start saving money.

Here are some of my nitty gritty details that I’m pondering:

I can rent a 2 bedroom cottage (174 pts) or a 3 bedroom cottage (281 pts) at WDW for six days. A 2 bedroom can sleep up to 8 people and a 3 bedroom can sleep up to 12. (Children under 3 are ‘free’.)

A 3 night cruise is possible (90 pts for us 67 for someone else) or a 4 night cruise (98/77) or a 7 night cruise (157/127). [Uhhh… I’ll have a maximum of 695 points to work with.]

If 8 or fewer people are interested and sharing rooms isn’t a problem technically speaking Noah and I could pay for two state rooms and the cottage with our points. It would wipe us out for while but it would be the most wonderful birthday trip I can imagine. In exchange for that I would request that folks contribute some reasonable amount that would at least cover the rest of the trip for us (airfare, food, park tickets, some souvenirs) because dude…I’m saving you many many thousands of dollars.

Alternatively some different combination of people could say, “I will join you at WDW but not the cruise” or vice versa. Or some people could say, “I would feel more comfortable paying for myself but I can only afford a 3 day cruise and 4 days at the park.” There are many different options available. It is also possible (and pretty common) for people to stay at multiple resorts during their stay in WDW. If my family goes before anyone else we can stay in a small studio and move to a larger accommodation when others want to join up and save a bunch of points. WDW has a whole process set up for moving your stuff. It’s pretty cool. 🙂

I am partially starting this negotiation so early because I am excited about the possibility and partially because I have to make my reservations about a year in advance and this way people have plenty of dithering time before I have to commit officially.

So…. yeah! I’m going to have decades of joy out of speculating about trips. I apologize in advance to the people who talk to me on IM and who may already be sick of this. 😀

Nice day

In an attempt to remind myself of the people who love me I called one of my friends last night and asked him if he wanted to grab dinner since I was giving Noah the night off. 🙂 It was lots of fun. It was really nice to reflect on how much our relationship has grown and changed in the last ten years. He is pretty awesome about listening without trying to ‘fix’ at this point despite the fact that it takes conscious out loud reminders (he does this for himself) don’t fix! Don’t fix! It’s pretty cute. 🙂 He said something to me that I appreciated a lot. I told him I was pregnant (he is kind of out of the loop) and that I had been last time I saw him at Dickens but I didn’t know yet. He said, “That explains the level of emotional you were displaying then” and I quipped, “As opposed to just being generally crazy?” and he said, “Despite your desire to self-identify that way you really aren’t crazy.” I kind of stopped. That was interesting for me. Let’s just say that if he thought I was crazy he would say so. He’s really not one to uhm pull punches. So it was kind of startling.

What am I getting out of describing myself that way? Something to ponder.

Not to mention that I spent the earlier part of the day with a girlfriend. She asked to come over and that felt nice. It was nice to catch up with her because we haven’t done that in months. 🙂

And I was right to cancel the massage. There was no way in h-e-double hockey sticks Shanna would have tolerated me lying on the table. She’s starting to feel better physically today but now I’m getting a cough too. I’m glad I didn’t send this bug home to Ms. I Have To Take The Boards On Tuesday. 🙂

Two things

As much as it does get annoying to be trapped under Shanna while she naps I love that she is still my baby. She is a huge, precociously talking toddler… but she’s still my baby. *love*

And! We are going to Disneyland in December and I am so excited I can’t stand it. I know that the trip is ten months away, but I haven’t been to Disneyland in years! As I’m sitting on the couch trying not to feel icki I’m really enjoying thinking about all the planning stuff I want to think about for the trip. Planning trips, even ones I never actually go on, is really exciting and fun for me. I love thinking about every possible detail and arrangement of plans. Shanna will be two and a half and I think that is just about the perfect age for maximum enjoyment of the magic. Of course, this means I need to show her a few Disney movies between now and then so she gets it. 🙂 I’m really tempted to avoid the Disney Princess movies and stick with the books for those stories. That way I can slightly edit the ‘helpless female’ schtick. But movies like Pinnochio, Dumbo, The Aristocats etc. are awesome and she’ll love them.

I’ve been bugging people on IM about this trip all day. I’m really enjoying poking around the website and making plans. 😀

Ha. What a life summary.

With yet more thanks to facebook I found a fella I was good friends with in high school. He was one of the guys I cheerfully beat the crap out of nearly daily and he has the distinction of being the first person whose ribs I cracked. (He told me I couldn’t beat him wrestling. I did.) Catching up on 12 years of missed contact was pretty funny. He and I both dropped out of high school, though I ended up with a diploma anyway. He has been traveling the world and seeing awesome places. He doesn’t have a college education and really doesn’t care. He is currently in the Middle East and has been for a couple of years. It sounds very exciting to me.

He was shocked when I told him about the bdsm stuff–which, as Jenny pointed out, shouldn’t be shocking at all compared to the current domesticity. 😛 He told me that he admired that I worked in service to the community as a teacher. I wasn’t sure if he was mocking me given the choice of language. He said the thing he is most envious of is that I’ve had way more sex than him over the years. 🙂

Summarizing my life over the last 12 years quickly does sound way way more interesting than it feels to me at the moment. Perspective is funny.

Pity party, table of one

Today my (awesome, fabulous) midwife was asking me questions about my community and what kind of support I have. It was quite disheartening to realize that for my first pregnancy I was completely confident in my community, my chosen family, and my friends that they would be there for me. I’m not anymore. If something bad happened and I had to stay in the hospital for a while with the new baby I would have to do it alone because Noah would have to stay with Shanna. I don’t think we have other options. I have people in my life who love me, but they are all people who have too much on their plates to begin with and they really, legitimately don’t have time for me.

I’ve tried so hard to make new friends in the mommy world and it’s just completely failed. When people just stop returning my calls that is kind of a hint. I feel like I have become too mundane for the freaks to give a shit about me anymore and the more mundane people seem to find me kind of disgusting.

I am so lonely.

Slave labor

Shanna has been very enthusiastically trying to help ‘clean’ the kitchen lately using our broom/dustpan. The problem is that the adult broom is big enough to whack her in the head and she cries constantly and she loses/hides my dustpan which royally pisses me off. So yesterday she got her own broom and dustpan. She’s so excited! She is moving around the kitchen telling us, “Shanna is helpful girl! Shanna cleaning!” Now we just need to work on her technique so that she actually does some cleaning instead of just moving things back and forth on the floor. 🙂

Cause I feel like it

You know the rules by now.

1. I’m feeling incredibly conflicted towards you right now. The push pull is driving me batty.
2. I have decided that in the interests of not looking pathetic and clingy anymore I am going to let you do the contacting for at least one or two go rounds. We’ll find out if we are actually friends.
3. If many many people all read the same thing and reach the same conclusion it is highly unlikely we all read it wrong. Maybe you should work on your communication skills.
4. I really wish you would shut the fuck up. I don’t want to be on the same side of any argument as you.
5. I wish I could do better.
6. I really wish you would stop saying, “I totally want to hang out” and then never call me back. Just admit you don’t want to be friends. I’m a big girl; I’ll deal.
7. I keep thinking about you. You called once. I called back. …. Silence. I wonder if I’ll ever get over you.
8. I wish I didn’t notice your behavior.
9. I’m trying, really. I’ll try harder. You deserve better.
10. As bad as it makes me feel to admit it–I kind of wish that you would just die. Then you couldn’t hurt me anymore and I wouldn’t have to deal with feeling terrible for trying to prevent you from hurting me.

Not accurate!!!

I just finished watching Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It is not accurate in ways that bug me. I know it was a gigantic book and they were going to have to cut things, but I don’t like the random things they added. No I’m not going to get into details cause I don’t want to be yelled at again for spoilers. It was a pretty movie, I’ll give them that.

I needed that.

I’ve been feeling very fussy about a few social interactions lately. I’ve in fact been writing humongous long rants in response to them (they take a while–I think I’m up to page six on one of them and Shanna is a big distraction) and I think I’m just going to let it go. I got a message today that reminded me of the humanity on the other side of the behavior that bothered me and I need to let go of my internalized grudge. Now the work will be for me to not feel bad about the stuff I never got around to saying publicly. 😀