Catching up

First of all, congratulations to the Spohr family on their beautiful new daughter Annabel. I know there must be bittersweet moments, but they deserve every moment of their joy.

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I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. I get home from work most evenings and it pretty much sounds like this in my brain:

“DINNER! Oh, look, bills. What’s for dinner? OMG I need to change into stretchy pants and fuzzy socks right now, and then COOK DINNER. Perhaps laundry? AFTER DINNER. Oh, I want to check e-mail and blogs but that is going to have to wait until AFTER I EAT DINNER. I want a glass of wine, dammit. WITH MY DINNER.”

So you can see that you’re not going to get much in the way of thoughtful journal entries between 6:30 p.m. and bedtime. This entry is actually being started on my lunch hour, and as I am currently well-fed (tossed salad, orange, and a hummus/cucumber/red pepper sandwich on whole wheat bread), you may get a few compound sentences out of me.

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I got an effusive thank you e-mail for mentioning someone's book on this blog. Um, I never mentioned that particular book. Sorry. Thanks for the note.

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I'm 17 weeks pregnant today. So, you ask, how goes it?

• I still want sushi. All the time. And veggie sushi just doesn’t cut it. I swear, I’m going to be two days postpartum and I’m going to call the local sushi place like a junkie calling her dealer: “SPICY TUNA ROLL! NOW! I DON’T CARE WHAT IT COSTS YOU TO DELIVER TO MY HOUSE, I’LL PAY CASH! GET IT HERE NOW! WITH EXTRA GINGER!”
• Still no nausea. Thank you, whatever deity is watching over me.
• I really would like a drink. But not nearly as much as I want sushi.
• The first-trimester exhaustion is still hanging around, though it’s certainly not as debilitating as many people I’ve known. I’m lucky to last past Jon Ste*wart’s opening monologue these days; my new strategy is to be in bed, 100% ready for sleep, when it starts. Then I’m generally OK because I knock off immediately when he gets to the first commercial. Yeah, I know there’s a rerun, and I know I could get a Ti*vo or something. Whatever. Priorities.
  
• I’m still in my regular pants/skirts, but that’s probably going to change this week. The belly is no longer easily explained away—it’s not big, but it’s no longer the kind of belly you get when you’ve gained a few pounds from all those holiday cookies.. It’s… a small preggo belly. I’ve only gained about four pounds total, but every one of them is in my middle.

The last point above pretty much means that my nearly-incognito-at-work status is about to end. People know now, but only those I’ve told. Yeah, that’s about to go away.

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I continue to be amazed at the love and generosity and support I’m getting from all quarters. I had lunch with a friend on Saturday, who brought with her a bag of maternity clothes. These were not my friend’s, but belonged to a friend of hers-- who I’ve never even met. This coming Saturday I pick up more clothes and assorted other stuff (sadly, not a bassinet as originally hoped for—still am looking for a loaner for that, since I refuse to buy something that’s only used for a few weeks) from a friend of a friend. I’ve at least met this person, but only a few times, and only briefly—but she’s pretty much offering everything to me that I want to take, without me even asking.

For both these women, their only request is that I pay it forward, and pass them on. Absolutely. Again, it’s amazing.

(Maternity clothes: ridiculously expensive, and you wear them for ten minutes. I am AOK with the hand-me-downs, thanks. I’ve bought a few things like yoga pants and some dresses on sale, and I’m sure I’ll need to supplement donations, particularly with pants for work and solid color t-shirts which are my staple since I’m a scarf-wearing chick. But seriously—renew, reuse, recyle.)

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Placeholders for future posts, since lunch is long over and I need to earn my keep:

- Genetic testing (long-promised)

- The weird feelings about starting to be visibly pregnant as a single mom—I hesitate to use the word shame, but…

- How much I love my midwife, plus bonus musings on whether to hire a doula despite the fact that it’s not covered by insurance (short answer: yes)

- Freaking out about day care (availability, not the concept) long before I can do a damn thing about it

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Last but not least: it’s a girl. :)

This is powerful, important, and needs to be watched.

All of it.

Domesticity

I'm basically posting this because I'm avoiding going to the gym.

I believe in full disclosure.

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I have a friend's birthday party tonight, and she's requested a potluck Thanksgiving dinner. No presents, just dinner. I offered to make the stuffing. (Well, it will be dressing, since I'm not cooking it in the turkey.)

Stuffing, in my family, is a Very Big Deal. My mother's stuffing is legendary. I've seen people practically stop breathing when they taste it. When I had a roommate, if I didn't bring her back leftovers after the Thanksgiving holiday, it was the ultimate insult.

In fact, my mother's stuffing is so good that she won't let anyone else make it. That includes me. So, while I've watched her make stuffing for my entire life, I've never actually been allowed to make it. (I'm allowed to do all the chopping, though. Nice.)

You don't really learn to cook anything, I think, until you have to make it myself. So today, for the first time, I made dressing. It's sitting in a nice blue casserole dish, waiting to bake for 45 minutes or so before I go to the party (and it can finish off when I get there). Having tasted the mix, I can say two things:

1. It is not my mother's dressing.
2. It does not suck, regardless of #1.

I already know a couple of things I'll do differently next time, so the experiment was a success.

And I made stuffing. I feel like a real grown-up now, somehow.

Also, random thought for the day: I was back from my errands before 11 a.m. Note to self: the grocery store really is that much less crowded if you get your butt out of bed earlier. Worth it!

I got the fever

I so look forward to weekends. This one was planned to the gills. Saturday: gym in the morning, Art Institute with friends in the afternoon, use evening to prep for dinner guests on Sunday, so I could spend time with dinner guests rather than cooking from scratch. Sunday: sing, gym, guests for dinner.

Revised plan: wake up at 3 a.m. Saturday morning with a brutal sore throat and a fever. Spend Saturday on the couch, alternately sleeping, messing around on the intarwebs, trying to drink lots of fluids, and reading. Cancel Sunday dinner guests.

Boo!

I'm currently unmedicated (and all I can take is acetaminophen anyway, darn it) and have only a minimal temp, so I'm hoping a good night's sleep tonight will knock the rest of the sick out. SO ANNOYING.

I also must admit I'm annoyed because I was really looking forward to having leftover chicken enchiladas and possibly leftover guacamole in the house. (Although the odds of guacamole being left over are never very good.) Company is such a good excuse to cook stuff I wouldn't normally make.

If I feel OK tomorrow, though, I'll probably modify the side dish recipe I was going to use (a black bean dish) into a rice and beans dish that I can use for various meals throughout the week.

But that's not as good as guacamole. Grr.

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I've been telling more people about the pregnancy, now that I'm nearly 15 weeks and have cleared the genetic testing hurdle. (More on that in another post.) I told one of my two bosses on Friday, and he was just as great about it as I expected. Shocked as hell (and remember, I don't give a bunch of context; how this came about isn't something I offer up), but very positive and supportive. He gave me a big hug and he's about the least huggy person I know, so I was really touched.

I tell my other boss this week. I'm more worried about her. I don't know her; she came about through our recent acquisition. I don't trust her one bit, though she seems to like me and has said very positive things about me. She also fought to keep me, and keep me at a decent (albeit reduced) salary.

But I still don't trust her. I question myself on many things, but I do know when to listen to my gut. And my gut says she'd sell me out in a heartbeat.

One of my goals post-baby is to find another job, but I obviously need to take good care of this one for right now. I'll need to be careful, and I will. I've already started thinking about plans for covering my leave, and I have also been thinking about plans for managing my workload once I'm back from leave. A ways to go, yes, but it doesn't hurt to start planning now.