Incidents of pregnancy weirdness

A) Starting to have "baby brain" - incidents of just stunning absent-mindedness or forgetfulness. Two great examples:

• We have to use an ID badge to get in and out of any building at work, so not having it is pretty damn inconvenient - hard to get to your office in the morning, hard to get into and out of the cafeteria for lunch, etc. This week on Monday I couldn't find mine and spent the next four days struggling through without it. This morning? Found it in the pocket of my coat. Which I'd been wearing. All week.
  
• As grand poobah of the org I run, I have the one key to the supply room in which our extra equipment is stored. One of my reports earlier in the week told me he'd lost the key which I'd loaned him last week, and becuase I didn't remember any differently, I accepted this as fact. We spent the next several days badgering the admin about ordering us a new key. Until yesterday, when he and I were in my office, and he noticed a gold key on my desk, buried under some stuff. Could that be the storage key? Let's go see.
  
  Sure 'nuff. Apparently he gave it back to me, and we both forgot about it.

I think I may be going insane.

B) Today, I threw up in the car on the way to work (luckily I was not driving - my poor husband), and then came to work and immediately ate:

• A large danish
• An entire egg-and-bacon-on-english-muffin sandwich
• A diet coke

And I'm still hungry.

C) I seem to be losing the ability to dress myself well. Yesterday I spent all day being quietly mortified about my "fashion don't" outfit. Here's a tip - don't wear the biggest brightest print shirt ever with your fancy sequin-y bollywood shoes, folks, just don't. And don't top it off with your most matronly white cardigan and a pair of maternity jeans that just won't stay up unless you're really going for that look that shouts that each of your three or four multiple personalities picked out a separate piece of your outfit. Today I'm not sure I did a whole lot better, good intentions aside. I used to be good at this dressing myself with some amount of style thing, but it seems to be a bit beyond me at the moment.

Pregnancy is crazy.

Awake, asleep, awake, asleep

This movement thing is a lot of fun - I can tell now when the baby is awake and asleep, most of the time, and I'm starting to see some patterns to it. This little girl loves her breakfast, let me tell you.

Each night, there's a random party of macarena dancing going on in my uterus before I fall asleep, followed by utter stillness when I drag my groggy butt out of bed at 6:30 a.m. -- until breakfast arrives, that is. Just a few swallows of cereal, and it's the hallelujah chorus time! Breakfast! Yay! Oh frabjous day, callough, callay! Breakfast has arrived again! There is both chortling and joy going on down there.

I think she's actually doing the Snoopy "suppertime" dance in there. And she's going to be born already addicted to the taste of Life cereal with bananas. Oh well.

Bad Comcast, Bad

Internet, I have not abandoned you despite a lack of posting. Alas, the problem is that we've had pretty much no Internet access at home for the last four days. This, as you may well imagine, is reducing Brett and I to a state of primitiveness we have not experienced since approximately 1990. Yesterday we were reduced to sitting around reading books for long periods of time, and to watching television without the option of dashing off to a computer to look up just what other films such-and-such an obscure character actress had been in. We have no way to settle our arguments, book airline tickets at the drop of a hat, or read up on celebrity gossip.

Good lord, how did we LIVE before the Internet?

Tonight we have it working in Brett's office only, after powercycling various pieces of equipment two separate times and chanting obscure incantations to the lords of Comcast. If that hadn't worked, we might have sacrificed one of the cats to the forces of darkness.

Movement!

The baby has finally begun to move in a way I can feel, and just in time - as week 21 approached with no discernable movement, I was honestly beginning to worry that perhaps my cough medicine weeks had hurt the kid in some way. But starting Saturday, I've been feeling movement pretty regularly - at first just when I was laying down or holding very still, but today, she started fluttering around right in the middle of a meeting with my boss.

It feels - hrm. It feels like someone is popping popcorn inside my abdomen. Pop! Pop! Pop! Very cool. Every now and then it kind of tickles; it's a little startling. But mostly, I find it vastly reassuring.

Go baby!

Phoenix's logical fallacy

Phoenix is having some problems with logical fallacy, specifically inductive argument. This morning, for example, I watched him go through this process of thought, with predictable results:

Premise 1: I pee in a large plastic box with no lid.
Premise 2: Here is a large plastic box with no lid, in Brett’s office.
Conclusion: I’m welcome to pee here as well.

This led to a rather unpleasant discussion between Brett and I about a) whose cat he really is, b) whether he should have to clean it up and c) whether there was malice involved.

From my perspective, there was no malice at all. I was in the room on the computer and watched him (stupidly) as he settled into the box, thinking that he was just sitting down for a nap until the tail started shaking and I realized what was really going on. There was no “look me in the eye and pee on my belongings” kind of mischief* here. He was literally confused. Smelled like a litterbox. Looked like a litterbox. Must BE a litterbox.

*And believe me, I've seen the malice and mischief side of this. Phoenix used to make a sport of urinating on the belongings of boyfriends of mine he didn't care for. Looking back, I can't blame him. He was right.

What made this morning especially confusing is that Phoenix’s litterbox in the basement is, to put it mildly, unusual. Phoenix, the most meticulous of cats in every other way, is hopeless when it comes to bathroom hygiene. Normal litterboxes don’t work well for him - he’s too large. I’ve seen him carefully position himself completely inside the box, as he’s supposed to, raise his tail, and pee right over the outside edge, missing the litter completely. (See diagram 1.) He just doesn't fit. But he means well.


Diagram 1: The mechanics of Phoenix's litter box mistake

To try to solve this, we recently bought him a supersized litterbox with walls about a foot high and a lot of extra space inside. This has helped; the river of pee we sometimes find on the utility room floor is less frequent now. But if you take a look at the box he uses, it really is about the size and shape of your average storage container. I can see how it would be easy to confuse the two on a cold morning, especially when you’re a 13-year-old cat who hasta go and the basement is a LONG way away.

Back to this morning - of course I scooped him out quickly, shouting “No! No no no!” Phoenix was wounded, and then pissed off. He’s very particular about his bathroom habits. He does not like to be looked at while he’s on the box, and he pays back the favor by not making eye contact with us when we’re in the bathroom - even though he insists on being in the room with us and will complain vociferously if he’s shut out for some reason. But when you’re actually on the throne attending to business, Phoenix is the soul of discretion, busying himself investigating the shower or rubbing his cheeks on the pedestal sink. How could I interrupt him so rudely today when he was just doing what he was supposed to do? Have I not learned anything from nearly 14 years of training?

I took him down to the basement and tried to show him - we only pee in this plastic box, not any others - but he wasn’t having it. He was far too wounded to listen to anything I might have to say.

Ruminations

The last four weeks have marked the beginning of the period in which the baby (can't seem to call her the Niblet anymore) can hear. During this time, supposedly, she's starting to hear and be able to recognize her mother's voice.

My fear, given the many weeks of flu, with its inherent lethargy and television-watching frenzy, followed by more weeks of laryngitis (no talking) and constant coughing is that the baby now thinks her mother is:

• Oprah Winfrey
• The morning host on NPR - she probably hears his voice more than mine
• A barking seal who follows her around coughing all the time

Boy will she be surprised when she's born and finds out it's just me. :)

Halfway mark

Today (or thereabouts) marks the exact halfway point of this pregnancy - we've hit twenty weeks! Very exciting. I remember sitting around at the very beginning thinking about how far away twenty weeks was, and how it was going to be forever before I'd be that far along.

I just wish I was showing a little more. I seem to be on the small side for pregnant ladies; I know I should be grateful for that but I'm at the point where I'm really looking forward to having a real pregnant belly, or to being pregnant-looking enough that someone will ask me if I'm having a baby, or actually wearing some of the maternity shirts I bought. (Only one of them really fits.) And I want to feel the baby move! Since my post weeks and weeks ago where I thought I'd felt something, I haven't felt a thing. Should be happening any day now, but so far she's either holding still or punching in the wrong direction for it to make contact.

Ask me how I feel about wanting a big belly in three months and I'll probably be thinking I was crazy to not enjoy being small while I still was.

Commuting with Satan

My unborn child and I drove home behind Satan tonight -- or at least that's what the license plate on the car in front of me said. It was, I decided on reflection, the kind of car I thought Satan might drive - a black BMW, quite expensive and sleek, with black tinted windows at what must be the darkest hue allowed by law. A quiet, powerful car.

I found myself fascinated with this vehicle, keeping it deliberately in sight the whole time I was on 520. Why would someone get a Satan license plate? I guess the obvious answer is that you're a Satanist. I kept trying to figure out other reasons. Trying to piss off a conservative family member? Just think it's funny? Like the attention? (But then why the dark windows?)

What struck me even further was that I could not make out a head inside the car. I was right behind it and from time to time enough light would pass through the front windshield that I could make out some details of the car's interior - the passenger seat headrest, the driver's headrest, no head. Um - who exactly was driving this thing?

Of course, this meant that I had to find some way to pass the car on the left. Which I did. First I saw a hand - hrm, hand of satan? Finally I was able to make out the driver - a woman, which surprised me, and a nice-looking one at that. A few questions came to mind about her:

• If you're Satan, shouldn't you be illegally using the carpool lane or something?
• If you're Satan, should you really be going the speed limit?
• If you're Satan, couldn't you clear up the inexplicable traffic backup that shouldn't be there at 3:15 on a Friday? Or are you causing the backup? My compliments, evil lady.

I think I was under some kind of compulsion, because I gave serious thought to following this lady home to see where on earth she lived or to catch a glimpse of what she looked like. However, right after we merged onto I-5 North, she took off like (pardon me, I just have to say this) a bat out of hell and I lost sight of her within minutes.

Next time I looked up, there was another vanity plate in front of me. CUBSFAN, it said.

Probably more my speed.

March, gone

I should be blogging, but it's hard to come up with anything to talk about when you haven't been out of the house in five or six days.

But I'm improving! Yesterday I felt well enough to actually read a book - whipped throughAugustus by Allan Massie in about 24 hours. (Why am I endlessly fascinated with books about the same subject? This must be the fourth or fifth Augustus book I've read.) It was also the first day since Monday that I've felt relatively good enough to a) notice how boring being sick was, b) get restless, and c) go outside for a few minutes. That, of course, brought on another fever and a need to nap. But still, this is progress.

Brett is still struggling, nearly two weeks into his own bout of the flu. Neither of us has had the strength to clean the house (egads, what a mess) or do much of anything. Both of our birthdays went by in this blur of travel and sickness and more sickness. What a sucky month March has turned out to be. In a couple weeks, when we're both recovered, I owe Brett a birthday cake.

Anyways, here's to April!