Monthly Archives: November 2011

Won’t stop ’til I get enough

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I was born in 1982, a year that was especially auspicious for me because of its ripe placement at the beginning of the 80s. In 1982, the Decade of Excess was solidly coming into itself as gaudy, strange, and smart. It had firmly decided that its bridesmaids would sport day glow, it was OK for makeup to wear you, and British pop had earned an extension to its 60s heyday. How could I have heard “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” as a baby and not felt like this life was going to be a good one?

I think growing up, my compatriots and I all felt as though we had been lucky to have been born when we were. If I consider this objectively, it’s a little absurd to read being born at a time when television offerings included “Charles in Charge,” “Gummi Bears,” and “The Snorks” as making you lucky, but we would take what we could get. The soundtrack that was playing in the background as we watched these shows – as well as the permeating smell of our mom’s fresh perm as she spun a salad in the kitchen – was really what made those years glisten with optimism, whether we knew it then or not.

And we were right. All our suspicions that we were totally awesome were confirmed by VH1 in 2002. The glory of our decade couldn’t be contained in a single hour. No! A mini-series was the only platform suitable for such a cavalcade of nostalgic self-love. When “I Love the 80s” premiered in America, I promptly readjusted my perception of VH1 as the music station of my parents (the impression I had gotten from my upbringing) and appreciated it because it appreciated me. We had lived through something special through those years, and thank God VH1 was there to remind me of it. TV to the rescue, once again!

What are some of the things I remember most?

Reading Rainbow. Come to find out that LeVar Burton was known for things other than scouring New York City for kids who would likely later become NPR interns and coordinators of nonprofits. Maybe I’m not thoroughly 80s because I wasn’t aware at the time of his fame as an actor, but I still revere him as the bringer of all good books. And those books were good! Waaay before the Arthur cartoon (which I admit to really liking), Arthur’s plight with his glasses was featured on Reading Rainbow.  LeVar was an amazing dancer, too. I dare you not to want to work in a diner after this:

I remember Dolly Parton. The first cassette tape I ever owned was Dolly’s Greatest Hits. This lady was – and still is – amazing. She had a variety show in the 80s that was apparently cancelled pretty quickly because I haven’t found much on it surfing the interwebs, but I certainly remember its existence and crying HARD when I was notified of its cancellation. Dolly is the entertainer of entertainers. I’ll give Michael Jackson his due for being ridiculously incremental to his industry, but Dolly reigns supreme, evermore.

Via Wikipedia

I remember Book-It, Pizza Hut’s answer to the problem of illiteracy and gross vegetable consumption of American youth. Filling up your Book-It button with stars would earn you a personal pan pizza from the restaurant. Later on, you could also receive a bag of Cheetos Paws for your excellent scholarly conquests. Yeah, yeah, I think this program was introduced in the early 90s, but let me have my moment of nostalgia here. Those nights when our family would embark to Pizza Hut to redeem our Book-It stars were the closest we’d get to knowing the romance suggested by red cups and low Tiffany lighting for a long time.
I liken those Pizza Hut meals – from back before the restaurant had defiled itself by offering delivery and drive through – to dates with my family. Our parents took us out on a night on the town to a sit-down restaurant where we’d sit in beautifully gnarled pizza parlor chairs and voluntarily put our napkins in our laps. Upon ordering, our parents would proudly announce to the server that we were Book-It kids whose literary aptitude had earned them this meal. They’d smile the same way I now smile about my clever husband and express that sentimental thankfulness most evident when smelling pizza and knowing that there are no dishes for you to wash tonight.

For tonight you can just relish your child’s ability to read and receive junk food in exchange for it.

Courtesy imremembering.com

Get Me Out

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Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth

Over the long weekend, I read Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth. Randi Hutter Epstein describes some of the lowlights of maternity and childbirth in the Western world from medieval times to the present. As with topics in medical history, these lowlights also tend to be highlights at the same time because progress – albeit slow, sexist, racist, and almost always partially misguided – is progress, right? Eh, maybe. She details such topics as the use of forceps during delivery from the 1600s to the 1800s, the burgeoning of “lying in” hospitals in America, and the topic I found most intriguing, how a doctor in the American south used “volunteer” slave patients to perfect the operation to correct vesicovaginal fistulas, tears in the vaginal wall.

It’s a great read if you’re like me and enjoy a nice historical trounce through medical topics in culture. It reminded me of a book I read a long time ago, When Germs Travel, where Howard Markel describes the effects of several epidemics that terrorized America from 1900 onward.

There’s nothing like reading about healthcare in the past – even if that past is pretty recent – to make you appreciate the fact that you’re living now. Yeah, B and I are paying a ridiculous amount of money to get our baby out, and yeah, I do occasionally feel like I’m just a woman in the room rather than The Rockstar Haver of the Baby when I go to the doctor. However, I have no doubt that Bebe and I will literally survive delivery, which is a relatively recent sentiment among expectant mothers. Hundreds of years ago, you could not confidently hang your hat on your survival.

Women have been giving birth since Day One, and since then, people (not just the preggos among us) have moralized pregnancy and done as best they could to see that Day Two could be a reality for humanity. They recognized it as the imperative event that it is and used pertinent information they had at hand to usher babies into the world. By today’s standards, “pertinent” often meant “condescending to women” or “disregarding of common sense”, but hindsight is…well, you know. Depending on when and where you were living, the mothers of these babies may have been considered a help or a hindrance to the whole process. Only about four hundred years ago, a woman was burned at the stake for requesting pain relief when she delivered her twins. Nowadays, you may very well receive a thorough tongue-lashing if you question the choices a woman makes when it comes to her pregnancy and delivery. How far we’ve come!

The book describes pregnancy and delivery in such a way that makes you recognize that it’s all about trends. Trends in midwifery, trends in allowing male doctors into the birthing room, trends in introducing pain relief into delivery, trends in fixing the problem of infertility. With historical hindsight*, it’s easy to identify the many errant notions that reside in those trends. Nowadays, most of us probably wouldn’t feel too comfortable being knocked into an amnesic state with narcotic drugs and delivering our babies, but that’s exactly what many upper crust American and European women were doing at the turn of the century when they opted for dammerschlaf. “Twilight sleep” was a birthing option that many feminists of the time chose because it made them have no recollection of the toils and pain of childbirth after it had occurred. To be sure, they still felt the pain and had to be restrained and blindfolded during delivery, and their babies also suffered seriously impaired breathing.

But hey, they didn’t remember the pain, and according to doctors, twilight babies “never turned blue”. What better way to exert your feminine identity than to insist on drugs that would remove the curse of Eve and not turn your baby blue?

Seeing pregnancy and delivery through the lens of culture trends has left me a bit conflicted. I know. Me? Conflicted? Why, that’s never happened before!

I want to be culturally autonomous when I make decisions concerning my family. I want to base my decisions on their needs, not what everyone else is doing. But I’m not an island, so I’d be pretty silly to think that that this desire of mine is made in a vacuum; I mean, the fact that I know that my voice is pertinent and not merely supplementary to my husband’s marks me as a woman of my time.

Not that I’m complaining, though. I haven’t made any hard and fast decisions yet about how exactly I want to deliver, but I must say that despite the monetary cost of pregnancy, I’m so glad that I live when I live and (sometimes) where I live. At least I can make those choices. At least the variety of options available to me is vast and generally safe.

Now, on to the future!

*As if we’re doing everything perfectly now.

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Epstein, Randi Hutter. Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. New York: Norton, 2o10.

Markel, Howard. When Germs Travel: Six major epidemics that have invaded America since 1900 and the fears they have unleashed. Random House, 2004.

Gingivitis Friday

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Today we awoke to find that we were out of mouthwash, a staple in our home. Possibly because we spent some time in Korea where almost everyone brushes after every single meal, B and I are anal about our teeth (OK, note to self, “anal about your teeth” should not be a thing. Ewww.)

Because we use so much of it, I usually buy the generic brand; frugality is cool, man. This means that I buy it at Target or Walmart nine times out of ten. Normally, we have some backup containers under the sink, along with about ten extra tubes of toothpaste, fifteen extra toothbrushes, several thousand extra yards of floss, and a couple of those tongue scrapers and a dentist-office spritz (for good measure.) But with the baby coming, I have lost focus during my Target visits and neglected to stock up on mouthwash lately. Obsessed with Baby’s First Christmas, I have been straying from the grooming aisles and perusing decorative holiday oven mitts instead.

Followers of this blog, you haven’t missed anything: the baby has not yet been born. I’m just preparing for Christmas 2012. I want Bebe to know the love of the holidays that can only be conveyed in a set of hand towels with smiling gingerbread men on them. Such love is more poignant when Mommy purchases them before Baby’s arrival.

But our teeth suffer. Brushing twice is not enough; we must gargle. I could just go to the store today and pick up some mouthwash, right?

WRONG. For today is Black Friday, that day that divides our country into two warring camps. On one side are the staunch capitalists who take advantage of their tryptophan-induced comas of mid afternoon to rise again late in the evening and stand in line to save ten dollars. There’s a possibility that they’ll trample a Walmart security guard; such is the stuff that holiday traditions are made of. On the other side are the self-described holiday purists, doubtless all drivers of Priuses and subscribers to NPR. Their war cry is that Christmas consumerism has encroached the perimeters of Thanksgiving so much in recent years that soon our national morale will be completely compromised by the lack of Thanksgiving observance. Everything the founding fathers worked towards will be for naught if we don’t eat a giant poultry-based meal with our extended families a month before Christmas, when we will eat a giant poultry-based meal with our extended families.

Black Friday: you love it or you hate it, and people will likely judge you based on your opinion of the day. I know I’m going to unfriend everyone on my Facebook who announced sentiments counter to my own on this extremely pertinent issue. If you can’t blindly judge people based on their consuming habits, then on what valid grounds can you judge them?

I am personally going to sacrifice my teeth to the hoards today and avoid the stores. Perhaps this is because I woke to an email from my aunt wishing us a happy Thanksgiving weekend and then conveying her hope that we weren’t at the local shopping mall early this morning, where gunmen let loose on the premises. No one was harmed, but really? This seems a little excessive, even for the extremely bored people in our town.

I simply don’t want to get involved in the fray (the crowds OR that band). My sarcasm-cloaked ambivalence towards shopping, big box stores, and sentimentality is evidenced in this very post.

Ergo, I will stay home and concoct gargles with baking soda. Frugality triumphs once again.

Tips on Compiling a Baby Registry

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When your un-disembodied hands aren't enough: The Zaky Pillow

One of the many things I’m experiencing now that I’m halfway through my pregnancy is that of creating the registry for little Bebe. Yes, there are few joys during pregnancy that approach that of shopping around for things that you have absolutely no idea if you will end up needing or the baby will like. It’s also amusing to wonder if your family and friends will ignore the list you toiled over and instead purchase items for your little one that have no basis in reality, such as the Zaky hands pillow.

Making a registry can be overwhelming, but fear not! I have compiled a few tips to assist other parents-to-be out there in choosing the right things to add to their registries.
1. Pick a side in the disposable/reusable diaper debate. And do it NOW. If you’re going to flake out compromise and go with both, write up a treatise on why you feel the need to divide your allegiance between these two warring camps, as enthusiasts will demand a thoughtful explanation. Force share your thoughts with everyone but especially undecided pregnant women who can still be won over. Knowledge is power. Similarly,

2. Spend lots of time with opinionated moms. Frequently stress to them that you don’t know what you’re doing at all when it comes to making purchases for your little passenger; by doing so, you will give them the go-ahead to inundate you with information that they likely omitted as a courtesy to you when they initially sent you a nineteen page email weighing the merits of several brands of spit-cloths. All moms are experts. Do not toss aside any of the critical information they bestow on you. Remember, you don’t know anything.

3. Research every single new item that has emerged from the baby market in the past several years. The more difficult it is to identify the item at first glance, the better. Your baby will thank you for being aware that there is a stroller that doubles as a cookbook holder/ hobby horse/ lap desk/ fondue set; even if you do not purchase it, the child will appreciate that you spent an entire afternoon researching said stroller when you could have chosen any other worthwhile activity, such as eating or bathing.

4. If this is your first child, decide now if you’re planning on having other children. When embarking on the task of decorating a nursery, the expectant parent is faced with the question of whether the room should be gender specific or gender neutral. If you opt for making the room gender specific, you will never be able to use any of this stuff again if your next child is another sex. Imagine the identity crisis that would ensue if you reused a white crib on (gasp!) a boy or dressed your baby girl in (o, the horror!) a blue onesie! So decide now. You likely took far too long to decide to have the current baby anyway. Tick-tock.

5. Adjust your attitude. Had a lot of fun making your wedding registry, now didya? Yeah, it was fun to hop through Macy’s with that little scanner, caution to the wind, wasn’t it? Well, guess what? You’re pregnant now and you have to start acting like a grownup. You want XYZ crib for Baby? Well, XYZ crib could possibly mean the demise of your little one. That’s right; all baby products have the potential to scar your baby for life. You had better be good and sure that XYZ crib is safe or you could very well be buying your child the equivalent of a machete.

Happy registering! Remember, no pressure!

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Congrats to jmlindy for being Freshly Pressed! I love her blog Snide Reply, and you should too! Check out the post Gratitude, Schmatitude that is garnering her some well-earned attention.

Getting It Down

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I’ve been working on this weblog since August, and it’s quickly overtaken my Garmin navigation system as the latest thing I don’t know how I lived without before I got it. It’s become something that I make time for several days a week and really enjoy laboring over. As luck would have it, during this time of my life I’m at a place where I can focus on doing something for myself like write a blog and not feel guilty that I’m neglecting other more “pressing” matters. That’s the amazing thing about pregnancy for me: it’s truly allowed me to relax and be more authentically Emily because an authentic Emily will make for a better-adjusted Mom.

As everything will have changed this time next year with the arrival of Bebe, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the structure of my life now, and more specifically, the routine I have in maintaining this heaven-sent blog which has come to mean a lot to me. Hopefully in a year – when my life is monopolized by scenarios I don’t even know exist yet – I’ll be able to look back here and take some advice from myself about what was working for me, writerly-wise, and get inspired to continue on within my new situation if I’m having difficulty doing so.

Dear Self,

Here’s what you were doing to hammer out this blog in November 2011 when you were twenty weeks pregnant.

Cheers,

Emily

Getting Ideas 

Even though I actually sit down to write on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I’m always thinking about something to say. I mean, constantly. I try to take everything seriously as fodder for me to chew. Even though I am now writing primarily about pregnancy, it’s not the only thing I’m thinking about. Even though I haven’t yet written about current events such as the OWS movement, the Republican nomination race, the recession, education in America, and so many other things I’m intrigued with, my thoughts are always there and a lot of times my tone towards these issues fleshes itself out in my writing about pregnancy. For example, if I seem really frustrated while writing about some pregnancy absurdity, I’m probably also irked by something I heard about in the news. Likewise, if I feel inspired by a book I’m reading or an art movement that I’m learning about, it’s probably going to feed into what I say on my blog on a certain day, albeit in an oblique way.

For me, it’s all about allowing stimuli to inform what I’m saying, even if I don’t express it blatantly. It’s all about opening myself up to inspiration and applying it to my current situation.

Writing

I generally post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; those are also the days that I write. I have a routine that works for me. I get up and eat breakfast while I read weblogs that I follow. I do some morning chores, get dressed, and sit down to write by 11:30 AM at the latest. And I write straight through my entry in one sitting; I try not to edit too much at this stage because when I was in school studying English and writing a lot, I regularly hit walls when I tried to write and edit concurrently. (More on that later.) I blog on WordPress, and I write my entries directly into the website rather than in a separate document; this just works better for me, although I do eventually save my entries in separate Word documents.

I try to keep an open mind when I write. Again, the whole authenticity thing comes up; I strive to be myself, but I also censor myself to a certain degree initially. If I personally feel uncomfortable saying something, I examine it rather than just avoid it completely. I make sure that I’m not intentionally omitting something because it may turn people off. If, after close examination, I still don’t feel comfortable saying something and it’s because of my own feelings, I leave it out but don’t forget about it. It’s very volatility suggests that it’s rife for further exploration in another post. I come to grips with how I’m going to address it in a way that makes me satisfied, and it turns up in another post.

Editing

After I finish a post, I usually read through it once or twice, checking for grammatical errors and  wordiness. When I was in school, I used to get major strikes from my profs for my inclination towards wordiness; you know you’ve got a problem when you write a paper on Derridian deconstruction and the number one criticism you get is that you sound too much like Derrida yourself. So I make an effort here to keep my writing straightforward and to avoid convolution.

And after those one or two readthroughs, I press “Publish”. I don’t sit on my posts overnight or anything like that. I get the post up almost directly after I write it. The bulk of my editing comes post-publication. Why?

I studied English in college and graduate school, so the majority of my work was in writing papers. I got massively weighed down in drafting and editing. Judging by my grades, my work was good, but I dreaded each and every assignment because I knew that all my hard work would eventually culminate in an endless round of self-inflicted editing drudgery. I was unsure of myself and my capabilities, so I examined everything and unfortunately cut a lot of things that were already great as-is.

I’m in retaliatory mode now. I publish straight away. No turning back. However, on the days I publish, I go back and read the post through several more times on the blog itself and make slight changes throughout the day. Pressing “Publish” is kind of like yanking off the proverbial Band-Aid. This system of editing works for me a lot better. It’s emblematic for the confidence I’m developing.

Now, what works for you?

Introducing: Dung Chim

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Being a little kid is the absolute best (and sometimes, worst) thing possible. Yeah, you don’t have a lot of control over your life, but that frees you up to unabashedly explore all the weirdness you’re surrounded by without being self-conscious about it.

You can watch your Barbie video four times in a row, loving it ever more upon each viewing, and then demand it be shown again right then, oblivious that all the adults around you are losing their minds preparing taxes or doing laundry.

You can go in your backyard and pull up monkey grass and other strange roots, mix it with a little water, serve it up in a Frisbee to your brother and call it Mongolian beef. Who cares if that one fungus you added was potentially poisonous? You’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. Or, more likely, your parents will.

That stuffed Humpty Dumpty toy you were given? Hmmmm, it looks like it would be a perfect fit for the commode. Let’s just test this and see if our predictions are correct.

Being a kid is awesome and bizarre wherever you go, and it can be even better to see Kiddie Culture at work in a whole other country. In America, cootie shots are standard-issued upon entrance into the second grade and MASH is the go-to game when you get a bit older and desire to see whether you’ll be living in a shack with the smelly kid from your class yet somehow affording a Ferrari, or jet-setting with your crush du jour and returning home to your Tercel. When we arrived in Korea, we quickly began to see how a major facet of their kiddie culture is centered around the butt.

Yes, the butt. Now, growing up in the US, I can remember a huge amount of humor being gleaned from the posterior, but in Korea it is taken to a level beyond what we have here. The comedy of the rear end permeates almost all stratum of the World of Child, and it is wholly acceptable and deemed cute and childish. A Barney-esque television show starring an orange character with a lettuce leaf on his head produces what can only be called “magic farts” that sparkle and introduce new elements in the show. In the Korean version of Crayon Shinchan, the trouble-making main character Jongu regularly drops his pants and moons unfortunate gazers.

Kids were always doodling in-between classes at our school, and no matter what the subject of their art, there was a butt and/or a coil of poo integrated into the design. Apparently, the proprietor of a convenience store we frequented felt so much pride in the artwork of his child that he felt the need to hang this piece of work up prominently on the wall of his store:

Poo galore. And there are no boundaries! When my friend Paul ordered a tiramisu at a cafe, this is what he received:

With sugary flies to complete the deliciousness. Follow Paul on Twitter: @adayinkorea

But the king of all butt jokes in Korea is the dreaded dung chim. Literally translated “dung needle”, the dung chim is performed by holding one’s index fingers together, coming up behind the unsuspecting receiver, and stabbing the receiver in his bottom.

Here’s what makes the dung chim the prank of all pranks: although it can be performed on one’s peer, its target is almost always a male adult. So if you’re a male teacher, that pretty much means that, yeah, at some point or another, a student is going to stab you in the rear, laugh, and think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. All the while, you are going to be thinking one if not all of three things:

1. Ohmagad what just happened?

2. What universe am I inhabiting in which small children poke me in my rear and don’t run right away and instead hang around for my reaction?

3. Am I going to get deported for this?

Something magical is going on under there.

As a foreigner, you’re going to be even more shocked when you notify your Korean co-teacher of said incident, hoping to get some advice on how to deal with the miscreant; nine times out of ten, your co-teacher will laugh and see no problem in the assault. Eventually, you’ll realize that getting dung chim’d is a rite of passage for almost all male (and sometimes female) kindergarten and elementary school teachers in Korea and the trauma will begin to subside. You finally have your own war story to tell when out with fellow teachers and the conversation inevitably turns to this strange habit.

And yeah, for a second, you will feel jealous of these over-worked, under-played, adorable little kids. Why? Because they get to grow up in a culture where stabbing their teachers/dads/uncles/authority figures in the bottom is somehow acceptable and chalked up to innocent impishness. You realize that it would’ve been pretty sweet to have had dung chim in your arsenal of trickery as a youngster yourself.

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I want to take a moment and congratulate Miss Demure Restraint on being Freshly Pressed! She has been a supporter of my blog from almost the beginning and has always left kind and constructive comments that I value a lot. Her blog always makes me laugh and think (a nice little pair!) If you haven’t already, check out her post that got her some attention. Congrats, Miss D!

Little Kicks

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Is it even worth it to describe to someone who’s never experienced (and doesn’t care to experience) the emotional weight of what it feels like to have a baby move around inside them, what it feels like? (I dare you to diagram that sentence!) Going on and on about it to non-breeders kind of makes me feel like I’m describing a long, hilarious-only-to-me unsexy dream in which the listener is not featured and therefore does not care to hear me clumsily struggle to find the words that describe the indescribable. I’m no Joseph Campbell, and I’m not going to succeed in blowing your mind to the level of supreme mindblowingness that I would hope no matter how hard I try.

Plus, I don’t want to become That Woman who insists on putting her pregnancy and motherhood out as a smorgasbord that no one outside of really hungry people with similar tastes wants to dig into. We all know that there’s nothing worse than being made to eat when you’re not hungry at all. Or listening to a pregnant lady babble about how “amazing” it is when your only point of reference is that at one point, you yourself were in utero.

Let’s just say it’s pretty much The Best and leave it at that.

More importantly, what does it physically feel like?

First of all, I would like to get rid of this term “flutters.” Flutters? Really? Say it several times aloud to yourself and you’ll get my meaning. This word is laced with smarminess, corniness, and lame-osity concurrently, which is difficult to achieve. I think we can do better, considering the glory of what we’re trying to describe. I’m not offering up an alternative, as my descriptive powers are severely limited (see “lame-osity” and “mindblowingness”), but all you wordsmiths out there need to get on this one, stat.

I can’t really liken the feeling to that of being inhabited by an alien, either, although I can understand how others may describe it that way. Throughout the first trimester and up until quite recently, I thought about Bebe A LOT as my little alien, my little growth. But as I get to know my gal and get used to pregnancy in general, the less foreign it seems and the fewer italics I will use when describing my inability to grapple with the reality that I’m growing a baby. I think we can heave a collective sigh of relief that my abuse of italics will soon be coming to a close.

So far, I’ve been able to detect Bebe’s movement since last Thursday, so it’s been pretty subtle up to now. She feels a lot like minnows or some kind of live bait moving around in there. The feeling is cute, endearing, lovely. My little fish.

Sometimes she pushes on my lower left, sometimes on my lower right, and quite often directly on my bladder, as if it’s a large inflatable exercise ball and she’s just doing calisthenics. Again, really endearing. (Just to clarify, I’m not being snarky here when I say that it’s endearing; if you’re pregnant and refuse to get used to having to pee all the time, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for you. Just pee and deal.)

About thirty minutes after I eat is when she is most active. She flips around and does a little uncoordinated dance.

“She’s on the move,” I’ll say to B.

He’ll grin this gigantic smile, say, “Really?!” and sigh, and we’ll both sit back and reflect on how gorgeous this whole experience is, bad dancing and all.

So a woman walks into the ultrasound room…

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Wow, now this is a big post. I mean, the reveal of the sex of our baby! I kind of wish it were 1999 so I could have some great spinning GIFs scattered around this post to heighten the excitement.

As it is 2011, I suppose I’ll have to rely on my words, though, which is a shame. That Ally McBeal dancing baby would do really well here.

So I drank half a gallon of orange juice last Thursday and drove with B to the doc’s. There was a couple who went into the ultrasound  room before us, and they emerged beaming and notifying everyone within earshot that their baby was determined to be a girl. I think, “Great, well if they for sure know what their baby is going to be, what are the odds we will too? Probably scant.” Ah yes, always looking on the bright side.

We were ushered into the ultrasound room. It was painted dark blue and had stars and other space objects painted in glow-in-the-dark yellow. I guess this was to maximize the chances that any juvenile hangers-on would feel at ease, which I’ve already pointed out was a massive concern of the practice. But it was pleasant, and the nurse was bubbly and kind, too.

B told me later on that he was quite nervous about the ultrasound, but I never would’ve known it. The ultrasound nurse asked us if we wanted to know the sex if she could determine it, and he quickly answered up, “YES” and followed up with vigorous whiplash inducing nodding. She started the examination and I felt pretty chill, just assuming that Bebe wouldn’t cooperate and flip over to show us what (s)he was. The orange juice hadn’t done much good, and Bebe was clearly at rest, so much that the nurse was having to work a bit to even get a good glimpse of the things that were important, like the development of Bebe’s organs.

But then the nurse gave a little tap on my stomach and Bebe squished around a bit. Enough for the nurse to say,

“Well, it’s smooth. Very smooth. I’m thinking it’s a girl or an extremely stubby little boy.” (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I asked her to give me a percentage of how sure she was that it was a girl, but she said that she wouldn’t do that because she’s been incorrect before. However, she did commit to it on the photo:

Since Bebe was clearly sleepy, the nurse couldn’t get her in a position where she could assess her developing cerebellum. I’m going back for another sonogram later this week so she can assess that AND hopefully make us know 100% (instead of 90%) that Bebe is a girl.

I have so, so, so many thoughts on this. Is it corny for me to say that B and I both know she’s a girl, right now? Because, we do*. Knowing a baby’s sex is an elective thing these days and I have no doubt that we’d love her the same if we didn’t find out until she was born, but I feel so close to her now that I know this little bit about her.

She is perfect.

Thursday night, I finally felt her swimming around. Pushing and moving. Coupled with the revelation of her sex, the sensation of her moving has made the last few days the most inexpressibly wonderful of my pregnancy. I’m still trying to get the words in order before I tackle what it’s like to feel a little one swimming around.

I’m on a baby high.

*I’ll feel kind of silly come Friday if I have to report that Bebe has developed a blatant masculinity, but oh well.

Yay for Awards!

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This morning I woke up, ate some Cream of Wheat with cocoa powder mixed in, and turned on the compy.

And what did I find?

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Oopsie23 from Broken Condoms had bestowed the Liebster Award on my little corner of the Internets! Thank you, my bloggy friend! She is also an expectant mom who runs a nice site making light of all the ridiculousness that is pregnancy. She keeps it real, which we like. A LOT.

The Liebster Award is intended for blogs with fewer than 200 followers. “The purpose is to help give awesome blogs a bit of a nudge in the way of followers and fans.”

I get five choices for blogs I love. I know; only five? There are so many I love a lot. I may just have to introduce a blogrole sidebar to The Waiting. I have tried to whittle it down:

1. Krug the Thinker: If you’ve ever perused my About page, you’ve seen Cameron, my besfrinn (albeit it’s from when she was 17). She launched her lifestyle blog around the same time that I did and it pretty much runs circles around mine.

2. Cristen’s Corner : Cristen’s blog is fresh, witty, and awesome and I enjoy it so much every time I head over there.

3. Wet Casements : My pick for expat life in Korea. The posts are bite-sized and always make me think/laugh/reminisce.

4. Duke’s House : I am currently living vicariously though Brit. She’s expecting, traveling the world, and running an awesome blog that I love dropping in on.

5. Not Another Mother : Ashley is a really new mom who wrote awesomely about her pregnancy and now writes beautifully about her new little baby girl.

Now, if you want to keep the ball rolling and accept the award:

1. Copy and paste the award on your blog.
2. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.
3. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
4. Hope that our followers will spread the love to other bloggers.

Thanks again! I have SO MUCH to tell you about what’s been going on at my homestead, so stay tuned and I’ll get a preggo post up later today!