Ho-hum

Not much going on here. I've kinda been caught up in a whirlwind of school finishing, my cousin visiting, and Nick leaving for L.A. for a few days. I never thought school would end. The last few days were torture. But my cousin was here during that time which made it bearable. She comes from a very musically talented family, so we were treated to live accordion & guitar often. It was great. I highly recommend cooking while someone plays accordion in the kitchen!

And Nick is out in LA visiting our best man for a long weekend. I bought him the ticket back when winter was neverending and I figured he needed to see the sun. Little did I know it would be chilly and raining for a solid month before he left so he would still need that trip in June. It's raining now. Of course it is. A friend of mine said he's going to build an ark soon. Nick and I are toying with the idea of going to Aruba in August so that we'll at least get five days of summer. I don't know... we have the money to do it, but it would pretty much use all of it. So we can either have savings, or do the irresponsible thing and go to Aruba. I'm on the fence. But all this rain is making me loco.

So I've been a single parent for a few days, and it's actually working out well. I've been putting a lot of effort into doing things with her, like going to the park, so I'm more tired than I would be if I stuck her in front of the TV (which, don't get me wrong, I'm still doing for an hour a day so I can catch up on Facebook and cook dinner). I'm not sleeping as well without Nick home. Two nights ago, I couldn't sleep even with a Tylenol PM. When I finally started to drift off around midnight, we got a huge thunderstorm that sounded like it was directly on top of our house. And it lasted for hours. It woke up Sascha (who has slept through smoke alarms) and gave me an excuse to bring her into my bed. The storm and her thrashing kept me awake until 3, but a few times she snuggled herself into me, and reached for my hand. I got 3.5 hrs of sleep that night but it was worth it.

Today we went to pick strawberries and I taught her how to take the stem off before she ate them, and she went to town. The strawberries babysat my kid while I picked. But I am wiped. After she goes to bed, I am just cooked, which blows because that's the perfect time to clean bathrooms or whatever. But every night I end up choosing the whatever. Tonight I have to make that be a shower, since I haven't showered in three days. I really want to get into bed with a glass of wine and "Mamma Mia" but it's already so late. (What. 9 IS late. Shut up.) (also, ignore the time at the bottom of this post-- I still can't fix that stupid thing.)

I'm too exhausted to write more so I'll finish with a story from the neighbor's birthday party we went to tonight. First of all, she got on this swing-- it's like a see-saw swing? this thing-- and figured out how to do it herself, so I could actually leave her alone, and go in the house to have some grown-up time, and she didn't scream. Which was a miracle. She played with the other kids, even through the rain. She came in as I was saying my goodbyes, and I picked her up. She was a little damp (it wasn't raining hard), but after a minute some water started streaming down my arm, coming from her. I was like "what the hell?" wondering if she was really that wet. Well, no, but her diaper was waterlogged, so she was peeing down her leg, down my arm, and onto my neighbor's kitchen floor. Everyone laughed but I was a little mortified. Fortunately the neighbor has a good sense of humor. She has to; my dad is her gynecologist.

Meh, false alarm

I haven't written in a while because my body was sending me weird signals, and I didn't want to speak too soon. My tits blew up like beach balls. Now, I'm not one to name body parts, I've always thought the practice was annoying, but I couldn't help but christen them Rock of Love Bus 1 & 2 (the link is in case you are reading from another country and don't have access to that particular slice of American culture). Because no matter how professionally I tried to dress, I still looked like a stripper. I might as well have had huge flashing arrows pointing right at my chest. And they HURT. Even though my period was well over a week away, I was like "hmmm...." and smells started to make me sick, and I got tired, and... I got a strong hunch that I was pregnant. I bought the test but refused to take it until my period was officially late. Well today it was officially early, naturally on a day when I wore a brand-new bright white skirt and my most delicate, lovely white lace underwear. No accidents, but still. Damn. I also had no protection on me so I had to do that awful 8th grade wadded-up toilet paper trick. (My apologies to any men who might be reading. You learn something new every day.)

Of course, I am focusing on the bright sides here: For the time being, my body still belongs to me. I can drink when I go visit my sister next month-- I can drink right now! I can still run. I just bought four pairs of shorts & skirts from Target that are ridiculously vanity sized (call me a sucker, it still strokes the ego). It's one more month that I get to feel good instead of feeling like crap. Sick, tired, bloated crap.

But.

I had been getting really excited about the prospect of a February baby. The timing with the school year would have been perfect-- I would have just been finishing up my sickest time when school started, and it would have been safe to tell everyone. The first few months after birth, when I was recovering and insane, I'd have been missing the very worst part of the school year (the stretch when there are no holidays for months and winter feels like it will last forever). I told Nick that I am disappointed but not devastated, the way you would be if you applied for a new job you wanted and didn't get it, but you still had your old job. Tonight I was watching Sascha jump on the bed, thinking about how hard we have tried to have another baby; how all last summer we paid extra close attention to my fertile days and still had no luck. I wonder if I'm actually infertile and she was just a one-time fluke. I would be okay with that if that's true. I guess I'd just like to know so that I can stop hoping and wondering and saving up my sick days like a squirrel collecting acorns for winter. I could get rid of the boxes of maternity and baby clothes in the basement. I could take days off to paint my toenails and watch daytime TV every once in a while.

But the idea that I was pregnant made me ridiculously happy.

So, it's onward and upward again in two weeks. Sigh... Sascha is in bed belting out "Hey Jude" at the top of her lungs. I'm going to go have a brownie and a biiiig glass of wine.

Guacamole is Depressing.

This afternoon I attended graduation at my school. It was just lovely, and got me all nostalgic and wistful (and stunned to think that mine was twenty years ago!).

Later, I was mixing up a batch of guacamole to go with dinner. It got me thinking about the small group of teachers I was talking to just before I left today. They're all about my age, and none of them have kids. Staring down into the bowl of green mush, I thought, guacamole is for people like them. People who can spontaneously go out for margaritas after work. It's "fun" food. It's socializing food. It represents the raucous Friday nights we used to spend with friends at El Torito in Sherman Oaks. It has no place on a table where a toddler refuses to eat and then throws a tantrum for an hour before a fed-up and exhausted Nick throws her into bed, screaming, without brushing her teeth.

Guacamole is depressing.

My problem with Dooce

My sister asked me why I have "mixed feelings" about Dooce. In case you've been living under a rock in a cave on Mars (or you don't have kids), Dooce is Heather Armstrong. She writes a blog (let's face it, it's THE blog) about motherhood. When she had her first baby 4-5 years ago, it knocked her on her ass so hard that she did time in a mental hospital. For that, I respect (and can relate to) her. She recently published a book about her experience and went on Oprah. Good for her. (Honestly, I am not being sarcastic there.) She is weeks away from having her second baby.

Here is the exact e-mail I sent my sister:

Hmmm. I don't know. I mean, I like her; I totally think we would be friends in real life. I'm just jealous. It's very low and base and immature, but I'm jealous because she's so freakin' skinny and so freakin' rich. And she's rich from doing exactly what I do too, except I have to work. I've made six dollars from my blog since last August. When I first started reading her blog [about a year after I had Sascha], I went back to the pregnancy posts and was (A) delighted to find that someone else felt exactly how I did, and (B) horrified that she had written almost word for word what I did, in several posts, and she is freaking loaded from those words. It's just depressing.

[a sidenote: I have put off writing this post because I intended to link her posts next to mine for a side-by-side comparison, I've just been too lazy to go through them.]

I have nothing against her personally, she's very cool and smart. And funny. I'm really REALLY interested in how she feels about the second baby considering her breakdown with the first, which (although I don't read her all the time) I haven't seen. A lot of her posts are hard to relate to because of her money-- look how we decorated, look what we bought, we took a family vacation, etc. It's turning into GOOP-- are you familiar with that website? It's Gwenyth Paltrow's site all about how fabulous her life is, basically. And I'm fully aware that my mixed feelings stem from jealousy, so I know this is a problem with me, not her.

When she has a second kid, she's not going to have to go back to work-- to teach, no less, not get to slump behind a cubicle-- when her kid is still waking up 3x a night. She won't have to recover from surgery. She will be able to order groceries online and have them delivered. She will snap back to her stick-figure body in about ten minutes. She can afford a professional doula to help, if she wanted to. She's not getting one that I'm aware of, I'm just saying that these are all things that would help me tremendously in the process of having a baby.

In short, she writes a blog about how motherhood is hard, and it's difficult to relate to her now because her money makes things much less hard. Again, not just the money, but having my body do what it did (betray me with the breastfeeding, blow up for three years) was really, really hard for me psychologically. Seeing that come easy to someone else, well, that's hard.

I know I'm verbally digging myself into an ugly, selfish hole that's making me sound like a horrible person, but meh-- I can tell you these things. [and now I've just told the rest of the world, heh.] When I think about my first 6-8 months with Sascha, I could make myself cry-- easily-- remembering how bad it was. Looking forward to that again, as much as I'd like a second child, is.... well, I'm in therapy for it. There are aspects that are unavoidable, like the c-section and the loss of sleep, but a lot of the other stuff would be much easier if I was bringing home $400K a year for doing something I'm already doing. You know? I could pay someone to help with the regular workings of life-- errand running, housecleaning, etc.-- while I focus on trying to heal, stay awake, and get my kid to breastfeed. And then focus on crying over my crap ability to do any of those things. Lather, rinse, repeat...

There you go. There it is. Sorry, Heather. I do like you, promise.

Under My Skin

Three things:

1. The murder of that doctor in Kansas, George Tiller. I can't stop reading about it (Salon.com has several fantastic columns), and I am thinking about it constantly. Recently, a friend of mine told me that she was pregnant several years ago. She found out the baby had some kind of horrible genetic disorder when she was 5 months along. She had to have it terminated because the baby wouldn't have made it to term. If it had, it would have lived a few days, tops. She was heartbroken. She wanted that child. And she still had to pass through a gauntlet of protesters calling her a baby killer on her way to do the deed.

I'm 37. I'm nervous about getting pregnant at my age. You generally don't find out something is really wrong until you're in your second trimester. And the more I read about this guy, how he worked in one of three offices in the country that perform late-term abortions, the more nervous I get-- to the point where I've wondered if it would be worth the risk. To read the things the right wing is saying about him... I just can't wrap my brain around it. He helped women who were desperate, who had no choice, like my friend. He was a father of four. My dad is a father of four, and an OBGYN like George Tiller. I can't stop thinking about this guy, how brave he was, and his poor family.

2. Sascha's still shutting me out. It's all about Daddy. I mean, fine, she's two, I get it, she's gonna do stuff like that. But man, it sucks. "No no! Mama go that way!" (i.e., "beat it, lady") is what I get when I try to intrude on their dinner or diaper changing or whatever. It sucks. That pushes me into the "pro" side for having another kid, because another one might actually like me. She's not supposed to be like this for another 11 years or so.

3. Today at work, this one teacher said to me, "Oooooh!! Abby! Number two?" I was truly confused by this, so I said "huh?" She said, "are you expecting?" I made some lame joke but I felt like I'd been slapped. I know I was wearing one of those flowy-type shirts (that I will probably never wear again, thank you) that isn't the most waist-flattering, but daaaamn. I just finished losing all that weight. I haven't been this thin (or as it turns out, "thin") in over three years. I feel great and really proud of myself, and now this woman makes me reevaluate and skip my wine tonight. I'm embarrassed to admit that later on I actually shed a few tears over it. Of course, Sascha had just accidentally driven her head directly into my nose, so the pain of that cracked the emotional dam.

So. Those are the three bugs up my ass right now.

I'm ovulating this week. I'm aware of it, but I'm not feeling terribly optimistic. I would tell you to blow on the dice for me, but somehow that sounds kind of dirty.