Like a kid on Christmas Eve...

So you know how the night before something exciting, like your first day at a new job, or say, a trip to visit your sister in France you don't feel like sleeping and you say it's like you're a kid on Christmas Eve? Yeah, I just had that thought. And then I remembered that it is in fact Christmas Eve.

I haven't really been feeling very festive this year. We didn't do any decorating, since leaving three cats alone in our house with a Christmas tree seemed like a poor choice. I'm not exchanging a ton of gifts with people this year, either, and what I'm getting will be for the most part purchased in Paris, so I haven't really done that either. Combine that with the stress of working in retail during the holiday season, and well, you wouldn't be feeling so jolly either.

It's Christmas Eve and I'm sitting in bed waiting for my nail polish to dry before I go to bed. Kyle is out getting a beer with a friend. We had mac and cheese for dinner. It's very unChristmas-y. And tomorrow we are taking the bus to the airport. Wahoo. We don't actually make it into Paris until the 26th, but the family is holding off on the festivities until we get there. So that is nice.

My dad's favorite cousin and his wife are also joining us for a few days in Paris, and I'm really excited to tell them about my pregnancy. When they saw my sister in November (right when I found out), they were asking her if I was going to do the baby thing soon, so they'll be excited. And it's pretty amazing to be able to tell the in person, since the last time we saw each other was at my wedding.

I'm itching to announce it. Now that we've made it this far, there's no point in spoiling the surprise before we get that ultrasound done in January when we get back, but I'm ready to be out. I feel lately like everything in my life relates back to this, and I'm finding it difficult just to carry on normal conversations with people for fear of letting something slip. And the whole growing belly thing is clearly going to become an issue soon. (I went through all my dresses trying to find something appropriate for going out in Paris and nothing fit!) But we'll be able to be out with family this week in Paris, and then we only have a few days after we get back before we can tell everyone. Ready ready ready.

A little bit of everything.

Oh man, I have been a bad blogger. I am sorry. Unfortunately now that I've let it go so long without posting anything, it's hard to even know where to start. Lots has happened recently, and I think a bog post full of bullet points is the only way to get through it with any sort of coherence.

Please accept this as a substitute for a belly picture.

• I had my first midwife appointment this week on Thursday. It was a little crazy because the birth center had two births that day so I ended up seeing one of the assisting student midwives, and the end of my appointment was very please-let-yourself-out-I-have-to-go-catch-a-baby, but honestly I'm glad that laboring women get priority, because obviously that will be nice when I'm in need of a baby-catcher. We went through my medical history, etc., and the just of the appointment was pretty much, "wow, you are ridiculously healthy and well informed." I knew that already, of course, but it's nice to hear. Basically everything I already knew; I am at an increased risk for post-partum depression, but other than that, everything is groovy. We talked about what they reccomend for that, and she let me know which local doulas and childbirth classes are dreadlocked hairy-armpitted hippies, not because I care, but because I know such things would put Kyle off, and I need him to be comfortable too. And then I peed in a cup and they took some blood and everything is peachy keen, as far as I know. They've referred me to a local hospital's fetal/maternal medicine unit to do my combined screening, and we're hoping that we can get in before we go to France. It will be our first chance to hear the heartbeat, etc., so I am super looking forward to that, and also getting assurances that everything is going well. So far, the only confirmation I have that I am even pregnant, is my home test pee-stick, and while my symptoms regularly remind me that something's in there, it would be nice to be able to see what's going on. Soon.
•  We hit eight weeks on Wednesday! It seems like a lot. I took pictures, of course, but Kyle somehow mangled our camera cord, and my laptop doesn't read HD cards, so they are trapped forever there, or at least until we get a new cable. However, if you want to know what I look like you can look at any of the pictures from the last four weeks, because I look exactly EXACTLY the same. I know this is a blessing, especially since I'm not "out" yet, but honestly, I'm excited for stuff to start moving around. Or at least for bigger boobs. Something, please. Anyway, blog posts are much better with pictures, so instead of my non-belly, there is an adorable kitten for you at the top of this post, care of google image search.
• Speaking, of being "out," or not, as the case may be, I've been thinking more about how and when to tell the general public about all of this. For the most part, I don't really care who knows, I just don't want to actually have to announce it. I'm a fairly introverted girl, and I don't like making myself the center of attention. I had a hard time telling people I was engaged when Kyle and I were getting married, too. It just seems very difficult, to me, to find a way to bring up, completely out of context this random (though, yes, exciting) news, and like, change the subject to being ALL. ABOUT. ME. It makes me feel horrible and awkward, especially because there are quite a few people who would be upset if they were not to get a personal phone call, which makes it all the worse for me. I'd like to tell as many people as possible via mass email or facebook announcement, so that I just don't have to deal with it. And I'm sorry, as much as I like talking about it, I'm afraid that by the ninth set of aunts and uncles (and we'd not even be all the way through Kyle's side yet!) I'll just be so over answering the same questions that I'll be feigning excitement and it just won't be good. Fortunately, though, my mother-in-law decided that an email would be appropriate for most of Kyle's family,  so we'll only have to make a few calls when the time comes.
• I'm especially anxious about everyone at work finding out. For the most part it will be fine, and I know everyone will be happy and excited for me. My friends that I worked with at my old location all know how much I wanted this so they'll think it's awesome, and there are so many mothers working at my new location that they'll be totally cool, too, so that's not the problem. Just there is one guy in particular that I am worried about. He is technically my boss, which makes things more complicated, although boss-lady won't let things get too shitty because she is awesome. He is a pain in the ass to work with as it is for a myriad of reasons (he doesn't really respect women, we have very different ways of looking at things, communication styles, etc., he thinks that to be respected he has to be an asshole), and I know that as soon as he finds out I am pregnant he'll be super nice to me, but in a very paternalistic, no let me lift that for you kind of way and I really don't want that. I know when to ask for help and when I am pushing myself too hard, and I want to be able to make those decisions for myself, so I can't help but worry about that whole dynamic.
• My plan right now for telling people is to announce just before we leave for France, so at least the news will have a week to sink in before I have to deal with everyone. I'm real magnanimous, I know. At least by that point we'll most likely have fetus pictures, that will make the news more fun. However, if anything looks funky in our ultrasound, I'm probably holding off, because we're pretty sure we are terminating if anything is really wrong, and I don't think that would go over well with Kyle's catholic family. Or with anyone, really. So. But we're not really high risk for anything so I'm trying not to worry about it. One of Kyle's cousins does have Downs Syndrome, though. I don't know.
• My regular yoga class is getting super uncomfortable. I really started to feel it this week. Next class is restorative poses, which I definitely don't want to miss, and then the following week is the annual, teacher takes us all out for Indian food not class, which obviously I can handle, but I'm probably not going back after Christmas. Sad. I did drop into a prenatal class this past Monday, though, and I really liked it. It was the only one I could find offered at a reasonable time (i.e. not 1pm on a Tuesday... really?) but actually managed to be pretty awesome. The instructor and owner of the center is one of the local premier prenatal teacher trainers, I guess, so that is pretty good. I was the least pregnant woman there, by at least eight weeks, but it was good and all the women were super nice, which was cool, since I know like 3 people who are or have in the last five years been pregnant in real life, so. So. Glad I found that.

Okay, so that's as much as I am going to cram into this post, because it's clearly way too much information and now my brain feels like mush from trying to sort all that out (or possibly because I am pregnant and my brain feels like mush most of the time), and I need to go to bed, because the more sleep I get the less likely I seem to be to spend my entire morning barfing. So, goodnight.

Two Things

First, Kitty Update. The Bird Cat came out of surgery just fine, and it ended up costing us slightly less than the low end of the vet's original estimate, so that is good. She's kind of irritated with her cone, but other then that is fine, if a little sleepy. We spent all of last evening napping and cuddling on the couch. I think I needed it as much as her, as work this week has been excessively stressful--a coworker quit and walked out in the middle of her shift yesterday.



Two, the privacy thing again. Now you know more about my cats than you do about me and my husband. I think about this an awful lot. If I get pregnant, or even if I just get a haircut, I want to post pictures! And I want to discuss baby names. And OMG, it is really hard for me to keep typing"husband" instead of his actual name.

So hi, I would like to introduce myself. I am Astrid. (See, the A. I know, very clever.)

And this is Husband. His name is Kyle.

Anyway, nice to meet you.

Fur Babies

Today I wanted to write a nice lively post about Husband's and mine trip to Mount Rainier yesterday, but shit has gone down, and plans have changed.

Husband and I have cats. Lots and lots of cats. Well, three, but when they are long haired and shed everywhere and you live in a teeny house it feels like a lot. We love them. LOVE them.

We also really suck at naming our pets. We gave them these fantastic names, and then.... never used them. So they each have two names, the "official" one, and the commonly used nickname.

When Husband first moved to Seattle we adopted two kittens, sisters.

This is Sal:

 

I named her Sal because it means salt, and there is nothing that Husband loves more than salt. Except for maybe napping. But really, salt. He puts salt on everything, without even tasting it first. Including things like cheeseburgers and pizza. Gross. Hit brother got him a salt lick for Christmas once. Anyway, when she was little she made chirping noises all the time, and they sounded vaguely bird-like, so she was henceforth "The Bird Cat". Very creative, I know. The bird kitty apparently has a death wish. When we were living in our very first apartment she jumped and/or fell off our second story balcony. A couple years later she ate a bunch of thread and had to have several thousand dollars of surgery and other veterinary hoopla. I guess she is not very smart. She loves me most of all and sleeps on my feet every night. Sometimes she likes to chew on my head and it kind of hurts but it is too adorable to do anything about.

This is her sister, Echo:

 

I named her after Echo from Ovid's Metamorphoses, because that's what I was reading in my Latin class at the time. And I like the myth of Echo and Narcissus a lot. Because I'm kind of weird. Anyway, she is kind of deformed and all of the bones in her tail are crunched up together in a little ball so instead of a majestic cat tail she has a little bunny poof. So naturally, we call her The Bunny Cat. (See this very creative theme...) The Bunny is madly in love with her daddy and pretty much wishes I (and the other cats) didn't exist. When Husband and I briefly broke up she stayed alone with him and I think she longs for those days. She seems, though, to have accepted that I am here to stay, so she doesn't yowl at me any time I walk into the room anymore.

Less than a year after we adopted The Bird Cat and The Bunny, they started getting really big and not so cute and kitten-y anymore, so, to bring even more cuteness into our home, we adopted yet another cat:

 

This is Lancelot. He is adorable. Clearly, however, we couldn't just use his god forsaken name and call him Lancelot, so he became known as The Kitten. I know, you didn't think it could get less creative, but it did. It's even worse, because he is so clearly not a kitten anymore, but we can't bring ourselves to call him anything else. He is friendly and loves everyone and I think he might be slightly asthmatic because he sometimes wheezes when he purrs and snores when he is napping. He loves his adopted sisters, who mostly just tolerate him, and sometimes tries to give them baths.

Last night The Bird Cat was bleeding and had a huge wound behind her ear. Looked like she had gotten into a fight. I washed her off as best I could and put some Neosporin on it and kept a close eye on things to make sure it wasn't getting infected. But when I came home from work today it was bleeding again and she had been scratching at it and I got another look at the injury and it looked a lot worse on closer inspection than it had the night before. Off too the vet, hoping they might just give her some stitches and a cone and maybe some antibiotics and we'd be out a hundred bucks or so.

Turns out she has a nasty abscess. They had to anesthetize her and put a drain in it and keep her overnight tonight. And charge us a lot of money, of course. We get to pick her up in the morning. Or rather, Husband gets to pick her up because I have to go to work. The vet called and told us that her surgery went well, but I am still feeling very sad, and I am going to miss her sleeping on my feet tonight.

It is always The Bird Kitty that gets into trouble. Maybe she should have a new nickname: The Million-Dollar Cat.

A brief history of my reproductive life

The 1980s:  Somewhere around age 3 or 4 I told my mother that I was going to have 100 babies; 50 boys and 50 girls, obviously. She talked me down to ten, five of each sex.

First Grade: One day we were supposed to come to school dressed up as what we wanted to be when we grew up. There were lots of artists and baseball players. I think I was a ballerina. I remember scoffing at the girl who dressed up as a mommy, because lol at her for having no further career aspirations.

Middle & High School: I was pretty sure I was going to have kids someday, because that is what people do. However, any daydreaming I did about my future was completely absent of offspring. Sometimes I was a lawyer driving a fancy car; or I was an anthropologist in Italy, digging up the rest of the ruins of Pompeii.

June 2003: Lose virginity. Immediately get on the pill. Have a lot of bad teenage sex.

May 2004: Fall in love with husband on the internet from a million miles away. Briefly I am horrified when I assume that he is probably childfree. Cry. He assures me that this is not the case.

August 19, 2004: Husband came to visit me for the first time. He is perfect. And my mother likes him.

December 2004: Husband comes to visit me for the second time. This is the third weekend we've ever spent together. He tells me he thinks he is going to marry me. I swoon. I imagine how beautiful and amazing our (1/4 Japanese) babies will be.

2005: I think about having babies with Husband a lot. I am paranoid that I will subconsciously sabotage my birth control. Look into more effective options.

January 2006: Husband moves to Seattle to be with me. We move in together. Things are less amazing than I imagined they would be.

February 2006: Have IUD inserted. Husband and I agree that we will start making babies when it is scheduled to be removed in 2011. I want to be married for a few years before I have babies, so I hope to get married by the summer of 2007. Start bugging husband about marriage. We adopt kittens. Husband is adorable when he cuddles and baby talks to them. I imagine how even more adorable he will be as a father. Daydream a lot about our babies.

August 2007: Husband and I are still not married. Not even engaged. Husband has changed a lot in moving to Seattle, and is not sure anymore that he wants to get married any time soon. We fight a lot. After several months of thing clearly not working we break up. I move out. We split up the cats.

September 2007: I move into a studio by myself. I've completely stopped thinking about babies, except for occasionally wondering how I am going to have them before I am 40 if I don't even have a boyfriend, much less a husband yet. But there is no longing, no burning desire, no constant brain takeover anymore.

December 2007: Husband I reconnect; he misses me. We go on a date, but I want to be sure he's serious. We plan to officially get back together when he comes home from spending the holidays with his family in Ohio.

January 2008: I pick husband up at the airport and bring him back to my place for lunch. I ask him how soon we can get married. He agrees to "now." I confirm that we can still have babies on the original scheduled we had agreed to when he first moved here. We are engaged! Everything is rainbows and unicorns.

July 24, 2008:

January 2009: I decide that I will spend 2010 "getting ready" to get pregnant. This will include taking out my nipple ring to let that ish heal before I have to breastfeed, getting my IUD removed, and cutting my caffeine consumption. I start buying baby books. BFF gets on the baby-train with me and we talk about it ALL. THE. TIME.

August 2009: Start asking husband "Can we have a baby?" pretty much every other day. At least. Ask him all the time what he thinks of various possible baby names. He thinks I am crazy.

January 1, 2010:  Take nipple ring out, right on schedule. I am sad, but not that sad.

Early 2010: Suddenly realize that baby-making time isn't in the distant future anymore. Commence internal freak-out. Bug husband about babies a lot less. Avoid making an appointment for my IUD removal. Change subject every time BFF brings it up, which is all the time. She thinks I am being weird.

April 2010: Come to terms with the whole baby-happening-soon thing. Now that I'm okay with it, I don't want to have to wait any longer. WANT BABY NOW. Try and convince husband to move up baby-makin' date. Only manage a month.

May 2010: Apparently everyone I know is having a baby. BFF just found out she is pregnant, too. Husband thinks I am just jealous, but I am not. I am happy for them, but I am so so so sad that I am not in their company. I can't think of anything other than having a baby. It's in my head all. the. time. Make appointment to (finally) get IUD removed.

...


So I got it out today. Welcome back to fertility for the first time since age seventeen! But the biggest victory came a couple days ago. After a couple really tearful (on my part) conversations about how badly I want to have a baby, and how I can't think about anything else, and how I am so tired of waiting, and how the seven months until December seems like eternity, husband agreed to change The Plan.

So instead of condoms or whatever-the-fuck we were going to use at birth control now that my lovely uterine friend is gone we are going to just let nature take it's course. Because, as I mentioned to husband, we probably won't get pregnant anyway, considering how rarely we manage to actually have sex. And if nothing happens by, say, October, I guess we'll actually start trying.

Basically I am dying of happiness. Rainbows and unicorns, people! I'm trying really hard not to bombard husband with baby talk because he is being so accommodating, but it's all I want to talk about, because hi! I am fertile again! I could ovulate at any moment! BAAAAAAABIEEEES!!! Yeah.

All I really want is a syrphid fly.

Oh, and that pesky reproduction thing.

So I realized just now as I started to write that blogging about insect catching could possibly be even more boring than blogging about wanting babies. However, that will not stop me in either of those pursuits. At least not for now.

The weather has blossomed into magical summertime in Seattle lately, and if you haven't been to Seattle when it is perfect, let me explain what I mean by perfect. The sky is legit blue. If there are clouds around they are big and happy and puffy and look like a really excellent place to take a nap. It isn't too hot. It's never too hot. Maybe one day a year, on average, but really, it is perfect skirt and a tank top, leave your jacket at home, but don't worry too much about turning into a sticky sweaty mess weather. There is usually a slight breeze. Everything is green and happy and alive. Because there are trees everywhere. Because this is Seattle. And we like trees.

But anyway. Perfection.

Yesterday I got home from work at nearly 9 am, after working a horrible ten and a half hours overnight, my third overnight shift in a row. (P.S. I am not cut out for graveyards.) My store is in the middle of a six month or so remodel of doom, and we moved in to "phase two" this past week, which meant basically moving everything that ever existed somewhere else. Fun. (Really!) But also completely exhausting. So I blasted old-school Backstreet Boys all the way home so that I wouldn't pass out in the middle of traffic. And as I said, I returned home, ready to die, at eight-something-or-other to husband just waking up, claiming that he felt sick and emailing his boss to explain his absence. And then husband went back to bed with me, bless his wimpy little heart.

When we woke five hours later it was perfect out, so I showered and threw on a skirt and we picked up lunch to eat at the beach. Amazing.

Today has been slightly less amazing, though. The weather is still perfect, of course, but I had to return again to work, and my brain is still not completely functional from the earlier part of this week. Most of my day involved lifting heavy boxes and moving them from one place to another, sweating and grunting in front of hot construction worker. My job is very glamorous, I tell you. But luckily for me I work my stupid butt off this week so I had to leave after half the day to avoid overtime. Bought dresses for sister's graduation and for BFF's wedding. And lots of things with floral print, because flowers are my one true love right now.

My lovely little kitten (or at least he was a kitten two and a half years ago) greeted me outside and I sat in the backyard with him. And then... a syrphid fly! Can I just tell you how much I love syrphid flies? Love! They may be my favorite insects ever. They tend to be bee and wasp mimics, meaning they look like bees and wasps, or more accurately, like cartoon drawings of bees and wasps.

But really they are not bees, they are flies. And as such they have no stingers. They do all the lovely things bees do like have stripes and buzz around the garden and pollinate flowers without any of the "bad" bee characteristics, like stinging babies and living in giant colonies in your barn. And they hover. They are amazing and magical little helicopters.

Also what makes syrphid flies more awesome than practically anything else is that they have a "spurious vein" in their wings, which is one way to identify them. It's just a fake non vein little crease thing, which is not very exciting, but it's called a spurious vein! Amazing!

I wish I had a spurious anything. But alas, I am not as cool as a syrphid fly. I try to catch the syrphid fly, because it is amazing, and because I don't have one in my new collection because I just started it in a month. But, as I mentioned before, syrphid flies are amazing and therefor faster and smarter than me, which means there is no hope for me catching one without a malaise trap or at least a net. Not a complete waste, though, because I am strange and find great pleasure in chasing insects around my yard with my cats.

The afternoon has taken a turn for the worse, though, as I am image searching bugs on Google and eating a giant bag of Rolos.