Ooooh, shiny.

Notice the new beautifulness that is my blog? Yeah. It's pretty sweet. This is what I get for sitting through four years of The Husband's graphic design projects in college... I am easily bored and end up redesigning things on a whim. It's helping me keep my mind off the fact that The Bean is due one week from today. Scary, huh? Technically he could come at any point from here on out. The doctor said he'd be surprised if I made it to my next appointment on Tuesday, and my mother is convinced that I'm going into labor tomorrow (Friday). Uh, we'll see.

The Husband has been kicking butt and taking names with the job search stuff over the last few days; hopefully we'll start hearing back from companies soon. I've been on maternity leave from the restaurant since the first of the year, and I'm really paranoid that they won't let me take more than the federally mandated six weeks, which means that I will only have a couple weeks after the baby's born to actually re-adjust before going back to work. Sigh.

Right now, though, I'm going to enjoy the brownies I made... although I probably should actually eat dinner first. Problem is, nothing is defrosted, so I have no idea what I'm going to make. After that, I have a PBS documentary to watch called "the Human Spark" that I Tivo-ed last night. What's the best part? My favorite person in the world is hosting it. Brownies +Hawkeye= a good, good night.

Doh.

So, I had this ridiculously long post written about absolutely nothing in particular. It was all about how I have become both incredibly ADD and incredibly OCD throughout my entire pregnancy. I started it, got really obsessive about it, and then lost interest in the whole post when I decided I was hungry. Here's the very short version:

• I am obsessed with Alan Alda. I even married a man that looks a little like him.
• I am in full-on nesting mode. I have reorganized the kitchen, my walk-in closet, my room, and all of my bookshelves in the last week and a half since going on maternity leave.
• I am also obsessive about really strange things. For example, my pantry is now organized in a very specific manner, and God help whoever puts the flour next to the canned tomatoes. (Baking goods are not canned goods and the two should have nothing to do with each other!)
• I am quite possibly the only person in the world who has her books organized by genre, and her history books sub-organized both chronologically and geographically. Seriously, it's like freaking Borders on my bookshelves.
• Our poor son has no chance of not turning out to be a complete nerd. I really should start a "send Charlie to psychotherapy fund" now.

Imagine each one of those points having two or three paragraphs. Yeah. A little much.

In other news, I am officially on maternity leave, and have been since New Year's. We had a bit of a false alarm on NYE, and I decided I was just not doing the whole "being on my feet dealing with crabby hungry people in a restaurant eight hours a day" thing anymore while carrying around the kid. So instead I pace around the house, check Facebook seventeen times an hour, and do baby laundry four times a week. I have seriously considered starting a Twitter account out of pure boredom. It's that or watch six episodes of The Simpsons a day. (Maybe I'll tweet while watching The Simpsons? Eat my shorts.)

The Bean is due 9 days from now ( as my doctor said, "But who's counting?" He smirked at me this morning when he said that. Not cool, dude), but honestly I could go at any point, apparently. I'm 50% effaced, but not dilated at all, which sucks. So, until I actually pop, I'm keeping myself busy by helping The Husband job hunt, baking an insane amount of brownies, and watching cartoons I never got to see when I was a kid.

By the time Charlie comes out, I'm going to have the mentality of a 12 year old boy. (Let's not talk about how this isn't really much of a stretch...)

Weekend Update

I'm really too tired to even think about being funny right now. The Bean is having a growth spurt, I think, and for the last few days has been sucking all of the energy out of me. Pair that with the fact that in the last week, we went from 85 degree weather to 55 degree weather-- literally, it happened in a time span of two days-- and I had a serious case of the fall blahs.

However, lots of positive stuff has been happening. We went in for my 24-week checkup on Wednesday, and everything is right on track. Good weight gain, good measurements, no complications so far, knock on wood. So that day we also went and did our baby registries for the shower, which my mother is very generously throwing for us/ me/ Charlie Bean on the 28th of October.

(Dude. that's totally this month. Thanksgiving is next month. Christmas is the month after that. And then, a month after that, Charlie will be born. Insane.)

Speaking of registries, that was one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life. Registering for the wedding was fun; that was all just gadgets and toys and upgrades and stuff that we didn't really need, but was fun to have. Registering for a baby... well, one, it makes it even more real. But also, you realize how much stuff this little person needs.

"Well, we definitely want to register for a breast pump."
"But then we need accessories for the pump."
"And bottles! ...Ohmygosh there are literally seventeen different brands of bottles."
"and we need more than one size of nipple....hehheh, nipple." (That was me... I have the mind of a 12 year old boy lately).

Ten minutes later:

"Where the heck are the diaper pails?!?"
"uh, do we need a high chair?"
"DIAPERS! Must. get. LOTS. of. diapers."

Notice how I totally thought about the diaper pail before the diapers? Yeah. Pregnancy brain.



On a completely unrelated note, there is only one thing that is EVER appropriate to say to a pregnant woman when you are talking to her about the physical manifestations of her pregnancy: "you look great/ beautiful/ wonderful/ SODAMNGOOD!"

Not:

• "Oh, you're hardly showing at all!" I'm 6 months pregnant. Don't freak me out about my baby not growing, please.
• "Oh, you're really big for six months!" Oh, you're really chubby for someone eating lasagna. Shut up. ( I had guests say both of the above things to me tonight... two consecutive tables that I was serving. Do I make comments on your food choices or your obnoxious tipping habits? Well...not to your face. And DON'T TOUCH MY BELLY!)
• "Are you sure you should be eating that?" That's between me, my doctor, and the parasite in my abdomen who is telling me that I must ABSOLUTELY have chocolate chips and garlic bread, along with a nice strip steak.
• "When I was pregnant, I never got sick!" Aren't you the lucky duck. Excuse me, I have to go impersonate Linda Blair.

OK, so maybe I'm a little... assertive.... tonight. Blame it on the hormones. (Every time I say "blame it on the...." now, my brain goes, "Blame it on the vodka, blame it on the henny, blame it on the blue tap got you feeling dizzy, blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol, blame it on the ah-ah ah-ah ah-al-co-hol..." Damn you, Jamie Foxx!)

Of course, all of this (except the part about Jamie Foxx) was said much better by the wonderfully hilarious Assertagirl over at Aiming Low. If you haven't checked out Aiming Low, you need to. It's a fantastic group of hysterical (in more ways than one) female bloggers. It is my crack.

21 weeks later, I'm finally starting to look pregnant.

Charlie is growing faster than I can keep up with him. This is actually a very exciting thing, because I'm finally starting to look pregnant. Still, nobody at work actually believes it, so here's photographic evidence that I do, in fact, have a baby and not one too many hamburgers in my stomach. Although, if I did, I might just post a picture up like this anyways to try to convince you that I'm not just chubby.

Note the classic "hands on top and bottom of the belly, pensively looking at the ground" shot. It's even in black and white with sepia tone layered on top. That's right. I'm artsy.



I made the mistake the other night of having a glass of chocolate milk before going to bed the other night. Dude. I totally had a PB and J with it too. And baby carrots. That's right, not only am I artsy, I'm five. And I'm totally craving chicken nuggets and goldfish crackers now.

Er. Anyways. Point being. (cough *preggoADDmoment* cough)

Charlie had his first sugar rush... and kept me up all night. First of many, right? I know. All you moms out there are cackling. I know it.

This morning, I had to be up ridiculously early to go to a mandatory licensing class for work on serving alcohol. Here's what I learned:

• Don't serve booze to drunk people.
• Don't serve booze to teenagers.
• There's no technical law, per se, against serving booze to preggos. You would think... but of course if you refuse service to someone because you think they're pregnant, and they turn out to be... simply Rubenesque... they could potentially sue you for discrimination. Then again, if you knowingly serve booze to a pregnant woman, they can turn around and sue you for causing damage to their child. So... have fun with that one, Washington State.

The point of all this is, it was ridiculously early to be dealing with this kind of silliness, even if it is state-mandated. So I decided to take my one serving of caffeine per day as a cup of coffee, with about seventeen glasses of water. Charlie was doing back-flips the entire class. If nothing else, it kept me from falling asleep. And now he's kicking again, hard. Repeatedly. In the same place. Dude, kid.


Oh! ha. Yes. I got a job. This is news. Blogs= places to put news. Duh. Apparently there is a restaurant out there crazy enough to hire a pregnant chick to wait tables. Score. I was rather flattered, though-- I was one of seven out of 200 people to apply that actually got hired. So I've spent the last week in ridiculously intense classrooms learning about food, Italian wine, and how to write my name upside down in crayon on butcher paper. I still have to do two more follows with other servers and then take a humongous oral test in order to get "certified", but hopefully that'll be by the end of this next week. All in all, things are starting to look up...now to find a job for The Husband.

Sleeping? Who actually sleeps these days?

Certainly not me or The Boy, although I'm pretty sure he's at least getting some amusement out of it. A perfect storm of ingredients has combined in a whirling maelstrom over my bedroom to make an Adam Sandler-worthy slapstick routine storm of epic proportions, with, apparently, highly comical results. This all culminated last night with me flailing over the dog, the hubby, the shoe rack and, almost, a fully loaded bookcase at 3 AM. In the dark. While really, really needing to pee.

Fact #1: I can't sleep on my back or stomach, apparently, during this whole preggo thing. So we rearranged the room so that my side of the bed was against a wall. Great for side-sleeping, really-- it gives me something to lean against and prop me up. Unfortunately, this also puts me on the inside of the bed. Ever had to pee while sitting in the window seat of a plane? OK, so I might only have one person to crawl over, but he kicks. The best I can say is that he probably doesn't mean to, since he's at least half asleep. So I usually try to clamber to the foot of the bed and dismount that way. All that gymnastics training from when I was seven is finally kicking back in. We are going to have to change this system very soon, for reasons which will presently be made clear.

Fact # 2: I am pregnant. If you've never had the misfortune of either being pregnant or sleeping with a pregnant person, here's a fact for you. We pee all the time. All the freaking time. Meaning, I might get up four times a night.

Fact# 3: Our dog is needy as heck. Right now, the rest of the family is on vacation, so she refuses to leave our sides. She drags her baby blanket into our room, and usually sleeps on it, but will occasionally sneak up onto the bed when The Boy and I have fallen asleep. The other night I woke up to her actually laying smack in between us, head half on my pillow and half on his. Most nights, though, she's content with sneaking up and laying on the foot of the bed.

Fact #4: Our room is very crowded right now. Basically, we're trying to compress a one-bedroom apartment into... one bedroom. Granted, it's a decently sized room, with a walk in closet and an attached bedroom, but we have lots of stuff. So our shoe rack is at the foot of the bed, and then there's about two feet of space, and then one of our four bookshelves is against the wall facing it. There's enough room to walk....barely.

Can you see where this is heading?


Suffice it to say... at about three AM last night, the kid started dancing on my bladder, so I pulled myself into a half-crawling position.. and into a minefield. I managed to step on the dog's tail, trip onto the shoe-rack while aiming for the floor, and barely catch myself on the bookshelf, which has a rather alarming top-heavy wobble.

Did I mention that my ligaments are loose, so sometimes when I stand up, my hip pops and it takes me a minute to get my balance? Yeah, both hips decided this would make a perfect time to try to get me to waddle like a duck.

I have never been more grateful for the...extra padding... I carry around on my backside. There might have been some cursing involved. I certainly startled both the dog and The Boy out of a sound sleep. The former started barking her head off, and the latter, after flipping on the light and making sure I wasn't bleeding or concussed and hadn't fallen on the bean, started laughing his head off. Apparently, he finds something about his wife sitting on the floor, blinking against the super-bright energy efficient halogen light-bulb with a four inch heel that had tried to impale her in one hand funny. Jerk.

(At this point The Boy would like you to know that he is, indeed, a wonderful, loving, caring sensitive husband who regularly loads and unloads the dishwasher and promptly gets anything smelly out of range of his very sensitive wife, and kisses the preggo belly and talks to it. Sigh. Fine. He's right. He also made the bookshelf less top heavy so it wouldn't fall on me. Sigh.)

I still had to pee.

If I keep eating like this, it'll be a butterbean.

Mmmm. Butter. Maybe I'll make popcorn when I'm done posting.

What a hell of an introduction. What else can you expect from a crazy preggo lady, though? I have to admit, I've always felt like blogging was a bit self-indulgent (not as bad as twitter, though... don't even get me started on twitter. No love for the tweeting), but I am currently unemployed, four months pregnant, and I'm pretty sure my poor husband is either going to me or himself over the head with a frying pan soon in order to put us both out of our misery, so a dip into the blogging pool might be a healthy alternative to blunt force injuries. There's only so much bitching the poor man can listen to.

So... boy+ girl= bean.

Boy= my wonderful husband Michael. Graphic designer by education, IT miracle-worker by occupation. Although he grew up on rural Long Island, we met in college in Florida. After we found out we were expecting (2 weeks after our honeymoon the test came back positive), he unselfishly decided that we needed to be closer to my family, so we moved to Seattle to actually live with my parents for a while as we looked for jobs, houses, etc. Its like the white Cosby show around here. If you have a business in Seattle, you should hire him. Now.

Girl= me. Sarah. Went to school to be a high school history teacher, because I have a machoistic streak a mile wide. Now, five months after graduation, I am living with my parents again short term (oh, God, I hope short term... I love them, but being married and living in your high school bedroom is weird),have no job yet, and I have no idea what I want to do with my life... other than take care of the Bean.

Bean= the parasitic thing that will be gradually taking over more and more of my womb in the next five months. We don't even have ultrasound pictures yet. Part of the whole unemployment thing is no insurance, so Medicaid is naturally taking forever to go through. Almost there, though, and then I will be doctoring it up as much as possible. I know everyone says some variation of this, but it's bordering on asinine how much I love this three-inch long thing that's taking over my body. The only thing it's ever done for me is give me an aversion to anything fried or sweet, which, pre-pregnancy, were my two main food groups. And still, I have fallen head over heels in babylove. It's affected The Boy too. He kisses my stomach and talks to the Bean and gives me hugs when I feel fat. He made me cry in the car today:

Boy (apropos of absolutely nothing) "you're so pretty..."
Girl: "Thank you.. I'm glad you think so."
Boy: "You don't think so?"
Girl: "...I'm having a pregnancy day."
Boy: "Well, you look beautiful now, and you're going to look beautiful when you're eight months pregnant and waddling. Because you're taking care of the Bean.
Girl: ".........."
Boy: "Ohshit. are you crying? WHY ARE YOU CRYING?!?"
Girl: " ...sniff....that was so sweet....sniff"
Boy: *palmface*

Yeah. I cry a lot. For all of you who haven't ever been pregnant, try combining the worst hangover of your life with the worst PMS of your life, and then stir in the knowlege that in a few months, you're going to spend a day or two pushing a screaming, writhing, bloody creature that you'll be responsible for during the next 18 years out a hole that's usually too small to comfortably fit anything other than a tampon or your husband's youknowwhatimtalkingabout. You would cry a lot too.