Why Tom's Not Invited To Lamaze

Tomorrow is my first obstetrician appointment. If I remember from 10 years ago, I will sit in a waiting room for forty-five minutes and then spend 10 minutes in a room with a desk talking to a nursing student named Tiffany about what to expect and how to take my vitamins. Oddly enough, I would prefer an introductory pelvic exam from the doctor I'm going to be charged for seeing anyway.

It occurred to me today that when this child goes off to college Tom and I will be, respectively, 58 and 50. Midlife crisis time. Tom will want to leave me for an eighteen year old woman. This means that I could conceivably walk into the doctor's office tomorrow and sit down next to my husband's future mother-in-law. If Tom, like more and more men before him, decides to leave his ageing wife for a woman the age of his own child, there is a women somewhere right now pregnant with my replacement. I will never be able to look at other women in the diaper aisle the same way again.

Oh look, I'm carrying his baby and I'm already hating my gestational replacement. Are there no limits to the depth of my insecurity?

A Really Crappy Weight Loss Plan

Ahhh, the nausea is gone. Almost three months along, my first ob appointment in less than a week, and I can finally eat without puking. Sadly, though, I can't eat.

I had forgotten this little pregnancy joy, or at least the severity of it. I have no appetite. None. Like, you know when you're not hungry and you look at food, how nothing looks good? Well I can be all shaky and have low blood sugar and stuff, and I know I need to eat, but nothing looks good. And then if I eat more than a few bites I get queasy. Not nauseous, but just really really turned off from eating any more. I'm supposed to gain a pound a month, and I can't even eat as much as I was eating on my diet! Prepare for more doctor lectures. How can I lose my entire appetite? Is it hormonal? Is it pressure against my stomach from a tipped and swelling uterus? Is it a manifestation of a deep-seated fear of weight gain? And if it's the last one, why didn't it help with the dieting three months ago?

The Ex Files

Imagine Britney Spears just keeps doing stupid shit, just making the same mistakes over and over again. Imagine it's crotch-shots and bad driving and head shaving for the next five years. Muffin tops and car accidents and rehab and hospital stays and non-stop visitation hearings. And then imagine that she calls you, and asks for help. She doesn't know why people don't like her, what's she doing wrong? But she says she doesn't drink too much, and it's no one's business what she wears or how she drives, and people just don't understand her, and she gets defensive. And imagine that every time she calls you she is drunk and you are busy.

That's why I don't talk to my latest ex-boyfriend. And yes, I am aware that that makes me a bitch.

There But For The Grace Of God Go I

You know that guy who tries too hard to be a badass? He tries to grow a goatee but ends up with only a few dozen scraggly hairs on his chin, and then lets them grow too long like he's starring in a all white-boy punk kung fu movie. He wears his hat pulled low like a gangster but he'd pee his pants if someone got out of the car to bitch at him in traffic. He wears baggy pants and struts like he's all that, but he has to constantly hitch up his pants while he walks and he wears boxer-briefs, or just briefs, instead of boxers. In short, he's a loser and that's all he'll ever be and he doesn't impress anyone and he just doesn't get it.

That's my ex. One of them anyway. But he's the one who, after not seeing his daughter in two years, sent me a text message in the middle of the night reading "Tag your it". That's right, he misspelled you're.

Every time I read about some punk kids breaking into a store and getting locked in, or a would-be robber getting beat up by an old lady, I think of him. Not that he's a criminal, just that he's that pathetic. He changed his brakes one time and forgot to go back around the lug nuts after the first pass of every other one and his front tires rolled off the car as he pulled away from a traffic light two blocks from his house. His battery died once with the power windows down and he locked the car to keep anyone from stealing his stereo.

In my defense, I had low standards and self-image problems when I got pregnant. But since I'm an all-around fantabulous gal, I wonder why it is that us hot brainy types sometimes end up with losers. I mean, why do we settle? Thank god I outgrew it. Why do the biggest losers, in jail or on probation for the stupidest things, have the hottest girlfriends? The thirty year old pizza boys, the garage band dreamers living in Mom's basement ten years after graduation, the single guys who go to the food pantry. How do they get women at all, let alone decent women? It must be pheromones.



And yes, I am hot. There's no picture on this page so you can't disprove it. And no leaving comments with links to pictures. I have to approve your comments and those won't make it.

Toes, already.

Okay I hate the pregnancy counters. Apparently I am two to three weeks farther along than I thought, because my pregnancy started before I got pregnant. What, you think that makes no sense? Well let me explain it to you.

Since most people don't have the luxury of being able to narrow the date of conception down to a couple days like I do (since Tom's only home a few days a month) it seems that the medical community has decided to date pregnancy from the beginning of a woman's last period. So even though I've only been pregnant since Thanksgiving (about 7 weeks), I am somehow ten weeks along. Also, by this screwed up logic, I have been four weeks pregnant at the beginning of every period since puberty, since it is now medically accepted that a woman can be two weeks into her pregnancy before the egg is fertilized. See? I was two weeks pregnant when I got pregnant!

So now instead of being only seven weeks pregnant, as in "Oh my god I'm almost two months along," I'm almost into my second trimester already. Suddenly the chapters I've been reading and the animated development calendars I've been googling are all wrong. And my due date: off by a week. Odd that it's only a week, but what the hell!

I do not need this, not when I'm this moody. Suddenly I have toes in my uterus, toes that were two weeks away from forming yesterday.

Jesus is the shiznit

The local evangelical uberchurch in town, which thinks it's more important than it is and has a freaking billboard out front on which it puts pithy little messages, apparently loves da gangsta speak. The sign now says:

New Year's Resolution: Increase prayer, Speak sofly, Know Jesus

I can't help it. I don't like the church and its focus on conversion rather than actually being a good person, so I mock its spelling errors. Every time I drive by I am compelled to speak urban street slang. "Yo yo yo! I be down wit da brotherman Jesus cuz I be speakin SO FLY!" "Dat be whack, homeboy! Da man upstairs be havin MY back cuz I speak so fly. Word."

Spellcheck is going to love this post. And I am going to go to Hell.

Caucus Schmaucus

I have voted in three presidential elections in my life, which is to say that I've voted in every one I was old enough to vote in. I have only helped elect the president once, because in the other two he was alternatively nominated by the Supreme Court, and elected by the evangelical theocrat populace. But oh well, why harp on it? It's not like he's gotten us caught up in a quicksand war in the Middle East or ruined our credibility with the rest of the world or anything. Oh wait....

Anyway, each election I vote in, and even the one before them which I sort of did vote in if you count a junior high mock election, I learn a little more about the process. I have learned a lot more about politics since marrying a Republican, though. (Interfaith marriages really test your faith.) But caucuses are, I'm sorry, a concept I just can't wrap my mind around. I understand primaries. You go to the polling place, declare your party-line preference, and then go vote on either a Republican or Democratic ballot and walk out with a little "I Voted" sticker. Primaries make sense to me. But caucuses are weird, like some 18th century holdover from before the concept of voting privacy became popular. I actually wonder if maybe the little voting booths in Iowa don't even have curtains. The idea of standing around for hours being forced to listen to speeches, and then raising your hand and being counted that way seems, seems, well it seems like the absolute perfect way to ensure low turn-out. Who wants to get packed into a room to listen to a last minute attempt to sway your vote? Isn't there actually a law that says people can't try to sway your vote within so many feet of a voting booth? But then again, a caucus doesn't have voting booths, and I may be thinking of an Illinois law.

I wonder why states with caucuses don't switch to primaries. Admittedly, I don't understand the caucus system so I don't know anything about it except that it has notoriously low turnout and that yesterday's caucus gave Obama what I personally hope is a great edge over the competition. But still. In a little over a year I am supposed to move to the Omaha, Nebraska area, which lies on the Iowa border. I now have one more factor to consider when deciding which side of the border to buy a house on. On the other hand, I would sit through a caucus if I had to, but I don't think Tom would. Maybe living in Iowa could save the country from one more Republican vote.