poker? i hardly know her!

tried acupuncture this afternoon as a way to kickstart real labor. have a follow-up appointment on saturday if i'm still pregnant then.

i've never tried acupuncture before. really wasn't bad.

deck us all....

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

- Walt Kelly.

the baby is a tease

i am really getting sick of the daily 'here's some contractions for ya, now i'm done' pattern. by this point i'll probably ignore them when the real thing happens. "yeah right baby, you're not playing me for a fool any longer!"

i'm mildly annoyed because i'm coming down with a cold. some family was in the midwifery waiting room while we waiting more than half an hour for my appointment (the practice was having a particularly chaotic day), and among the four kids was a boy about a year younger than boo. boo starts playing with the boy, after which the father tells me that boy has a cold. i pull boo to the other side of the room. father allows boy to play with all doorknobs in the place. i ask the receptionist for a sanitizing wipe the second the family leaves. i'm sorry, but if your kid has a cold and you have another parent around, don't stay in the freaking waiting room full of pregnant women!

another moment of 'ewww' - for some reason, i couldn't find the breast pump i used last time. i know i kept it. but i bought a manual one just in case i need one again. i researched them on amazon and saw that lovely 'new and used starting at....' pricing. used??? eewwwww...... eeked me out more than the concept of used bluetooth headsets for cellphones. ewwww. ewwww!

dorota's easy quiche recipe

made this tonight with asparagus and swiss. yum!

-1 frozen deep-dish pie crust
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup milk
- 1 Tablespoon flour
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/8 teaspoon pepper
- "a dash" of ground nutmeg
- about 1 1/2 cups grated cheese (Swiss, cheddar, whatever...) *note: too much cheese can make it runny!
- either fried onion (or green onion)
- a bunch (a cup or so?) of cubed ham, or cooked turkey, chicken, whatever... spinach, mushrooms? whatever sounds good.

bake pie crust. Mix up eggs, then mix that up with all the other stuff, and pour into hot crust. Bake at 350 for 35-45 or so minutes, stick a knife into the center and if it comes out clean it's done.

--let it sit for some time to cool, otherwise it'll be runny if you try to serve it right away.



this was really easy, as described. i think earlier quiche failures stemmed from an intimidating recipe in a old version of the moosewood cookbook, and a bizarre real simple magazine version that used eggbeaters and a bottle of blue cheese salad dressing. i also tend to add too much cheese to just about anything, and probably tried putting in too much veggies as well.

nothing yet

just a bunch o' contractions, like last night.... not at the magic 10-minutes-apart, usually 20, but not super-consistent.

had a midwifery appointment this afternoon, they've checked and not much is actually going on. but they kinda hinted that this on-again, off-again contraction thing tends to happen a couple of days before the real thing....

pattycake, pattycake, bakerman

realized something yesterday:

boo enjoys cooking quite a bit, particularly soup and cookies. while he'll chow down on a couple of bowls of soup for lunch or dinner after we make it, he doesn't eat so many cookies. currently the kitchen is overflowing with gingerbread and chocolate chip, but he'll still ask for an oreo instead.

miracle on lombard st

boo and i came home after school yesterday to find that the drug house two doors down has been boarded up.

turns out that the nonprofit land trust that owns the land under the house was able to evict the homeowner (who would have been in foreclosure on her mortgage anyway) on the grounds that illegal activities at the property violated her agreement with the trust. i talked to the exec director of the trust, who was apologetic that the process took so long - they had been working with their legal team for five months to make this happen.

well, it was faster than multiple calls to the police.

the activities in the house were worse than we had suspected. based on a conversation with a neighborhood (but alas, not my neighborhood) cop, we thought it was pot - all the activity was at night, nobody around during the day, people seemed to be carrying baggies. lo and behold, it was crack and prostitution.

last night was the first night in many, many months with no driveup traffic on our street. even the amount of driveby traffic seemed to be less. "honey, look at the nothing!" i exclaimed to my husband.

the land trust will buy the house back from the mortgage company, renovate it, and resell it over the summer.

it's a huge, huge relief to us, and we are incredibly grateful to the portland community land trust for doing this. best holiday present we could have received.

no news = no news

for the billions of you who read this,

nothing's going on. no baby yet. a bunch of 'holy heck it's a contraction' but nothing in a pattern yet. i'm running around like a headless chicken getting last-minute stuff done, trying not to panic as the new house stuff seems to be getting delayed, and as usual trying to figure out how to be in 3 places at once.

so i'm takin' half a unisom, and hoping for some sleep.

i'm too sexy for PWC

a former coworker emailed me to say that the filter on the county's internet connection has blocked my blog for sex acts.

i feel so..... dirrrrty.

less hysterical, but still in pain

i knew i was miserable and nuts yesterday, so i put off making a decision on this until i could try to sleep and see if i felt better this morning. i'm not in quite as excruciating pain as yesterday, but still in enough pain that i made the call and have stopped working from now until sometime this spring....

i love my job, i love what i do, and there's a part of me that truly has a hard time letting go of it. but i can't walk without wincing! it's time to give up and stay off my feet as much as possible.

stupid, stupid, stupid

just got back from midwives appointment.

no, they won't change my due date, despite what the ultrasound that THEY ORDERED BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT I WAS TOO LARGE FOR THEIR DUE DATE said. ("late ultrasounds are notoriously inaccurate." good, because i will not pay for it when the bill comes.) gee, maybe i could consult with their doctor next week and talk about scheduling a c-section. however, since they're not changing my due date, and they won't want to do a c-sec until i'm 39 weeks, which they think is a month from now. as opposed to 2 weeks from now.

oh, and the pain which keeps me from sleeping? take tylenol! and ambien??

panic

thankfully i'm headed to a midwives' appointment this morning.

i've had insomnia throughout the pregnancy, but last night was something else. (it's 5:30 am and should still be 'tonight', actually.) i'm really miserably uncomfortable, and the heating pad and tylenol have done nothing. i usually haven't been in pain to the point that i can't sleep, and i certainly haven't been in pain to the point of tears until now. i know the hormones are going bezerk right now - my skin's breaking out again, i can feel that i'm getting ready to lactate again - but i'm not going to be able to get through much more of this. supposedly, this isn't labor yet. we had 'childbirth refresher class' over the weekend, where my main concern was being able to recognize labor since i didn't go through it at all last time.

i worked sunday and although i'm scheduled for several more shifts between now and the 17th - which i though was a safe end-date for working, when i was due mid-jan - i think i'm going to have to bail.

a not-so-small part of me is hoping that they either tell me i'm dilating and this will be over very soon, or for some reason they feel they should schedule a delivery well before the end of the month. as it is, i'm worried about keeping myself together this morning while getting boo ready for school and getting him to class. i could handle it if i didn't have to talk to anyone, but running the phalanx of kindergarten moms asking me how i am doing is a little more than i can deal with right now. that balls into the horrible feeling of disappointment i have about how that's gone, socially - it's a tense and divided group, essentially split between those who put up with Disastified Mom's crap and those who seek to avoid it - and I think that if we weren't all tiptoeing around the toxic one, some better friendships might have been made. As it stands now, however, I don't feel like I can call on anyone for help in that group, ang g-d knows nobody's offered any. Maybe if anyone had said, hey, what are your plans for boo when you're in the hospital delivering, can I help with that, I'd feel a hell of a lot better. Or at least able to tolerate a half-dozen half-hearted 'how are you feeling' queries every freaking morning.

6 am now. maybe i can feign some sleep for an hour.

bunch o' stuff

1) baby is now, according to ultrasound, due dec 28.

2) restauranteurs, please do me a favor. stop using soup veggie mix. it's freaking obvious when there's square carrots, corn, peas and (bleagh) lima beans what's really in the 'primavera' or the 'navratan korma' or any of the other crappy incarnations i've seen this stuff used in. it's an insult to the intelligence of anyone who's ever been in a grocery store.

3) i got a service award at work for walking. or as the patron put it on the nomination form, "for sarah (big belly - pregnant) - she walked me around the library". i'm not sure what to make of this. um, it's my job.

4) chocolate comes from the cocoa plant. therefore, i'm hereby classifying it as a fruit/vegetable serving.

5) all things are good to go with the new house. yippee!

6) i can't fit into any of my shoes anymore, so i got a couple of pairs of not-too-slipperish-looking slippers. one looks like black shearling boots, and the other looks like black flats. why the heck didn't i think to do this all the time?? beats shoes. and i love shoes.

7) boo quote. after explaining that a sign stating 'no minors' meant that nobody under 21 years old could sit at the bar, he pipes up with 'i think you have to be 100 years old to sit there.' 'oh,' i said, 'so am i old enough?' 'no, mommy, you're nowhere near one hundred years old. you're only halfway there.' thanks, kiddo!!

mystery

gee, as soon as it was the day to leave my hometown after our week-long thanksgiving trip, that horrible pressure disappeared....

it struck boodad and i as funny that when we lived in manassas, going to rhode island was enjoyable enough to consider moving to the providence region (if only there were sufficient tech jobs). however, now that we're in portland, rhode island once again feels like the sleepy little hamlet that i ached to get out of as a teen.

there was also plenty of passive-agressive stuff to deal with, like my mother's insistence on giving me turn-by-turn driving directions when tooling around my old neighborhood. and my parents' out-of-control packratism. i truly, truly fear what will happen when, hopefully many years from now, i am called upon to clear out their house. my mom can't seem to grasp the concept of throwing anything out, or ceasing to accumulate multiples of things that aren't even in use. case in point, her 'sewing room'. it does indeed contain a sewing machine and a serger, as well as a cabinet full of fabrics that she bought while i was in grade school. however, nobody can get to these items, because there are bags and bags of paperwork, old newspaper articles, magazines and god-knows-what filling the floorspace. i have cleared out that room two times on previous visits, so i don't know how it reaccumulates all this gunk. in their bathroom, they have added an additional shelf for the multitudes of lavender and lily of the valley scented powders, bubble baths and body lotions that she's amassed - very few of which have ever been opened. my dad's office and the basement, both of which were bedrooms of mine at various points, are similarly deserving of enter-at-your-own-risk warning signs. i was hoping to dig into an old box of photos during this trip, but couldn't manouver in the basement at all.

we stayed in a hotel and rented a car, and it was worth every penny.

on a completely different note: someone has come up with a scent called in the library. eau de kickstool et dewey!

get. it. out.

magically, the day after the last midwives' appointment, i started feeling very uncomfortable. lots of pressure and it feels like something/someone is heading down. it hurts, but it's not contractions. of course, this started the day i flew out of town for thanksgiving. i'm in new england right now, and not returning to portland until tomorrow night. the ultrasound is the next day. so a little part of me is hoping that i get told 'we can't let you go on much further, this baby comes out next week' or something like that. not another whole month.

carrying too much

last night i dreamed that i was in school again, and i was trying to carry my stuff and a friend's stuff and i just couldn't do it.

today i got told at my midwifery appointment that the baby seems a bit big for the projected due date, and i need an ultrasound to figure out the size and position. this may adjust the due date up, but i don't know by how much.

also, today a very spur-of-the-moment bid we made on a house was accepted. i saw this house when i was getting out of my hair appointment saturday, and was curious enough to look it up. we toured it with our agents later in the afternoon and put a bid on it that evening. the sellers want to close dec 15. we're planning to stay in our current house and move s-l-o-w-l-y and then put this house on the market in april or may. but yeah, a lot to do with a new baby. so we have a little more paperwork to do tonight, and may run out there again to look at phone jacks and electric plugs and things - the inspection will be done while we're gone, and this is a new house that is just being finished - we want to ask for plugs and jacks exactly where we want them.

oh yeah, and i have to pack, too. and i have a parent-teacher conference in 45 minutes. and i'd like to nap. me, carry too much?

i give up on the rawk

only i could go to a $10 show and have it cost me almost $90.

breakdown:

made arrangements to go to show with friend. since the venue's website doesn't list box office hours, and i don't want to ping back and forth between various sides of town all afternoon, i decide to buy the tickets in advance online. so, two tickets plus service charge = $27. total rip, i know, i just get anxious that we'd get there and have it sold out.

friend calls in late afternoon; her girlfriend is quite ill due to bad seafood reaction. no biggie.

call another friend, who happens to be going to the show with housemates. great, he offers to buy the second ticket off me. except his housemates have a no-opening-band-because-we're-too-cool thing, and the band i'm there to see is the second of three playing and i don't want to stay for the headliner because i'm working tomorrow. arranged that he would call when they get to the venue, although this is now becoming if they go to the venue. of course, no call.

get out of show, which was good but eh.... it's my 5th time seeing them. they're getting crisper in their playing and i kinda like it messier. (as i said to the drummer last time, 'what the hell is wrong? i can hear what you're saying after your set, that's not supposed to happen.') get back to car. and yes, i will admit that i saw the 'no parking, loading zone' where i was, but it was at a theatre whose parking lot was completely empty - so i figured no loading was going to be done. i also figured being very close when very pregnant was worth risking a ticket - maybe a $25 fine? turns out that the theatre doing no loading at the time doesn't matter to the police - there's a $60 parking ticket on my windshield. (ps. could you at least use those funds towards answering your 'drug house hotline' at nonabsurd hours? like when i call at 9 pm on a saturday because my next-to-next door neighbors are dealing, and find out you're not taking calls until 6:30 am on monday, and 911 won't dispatch because the money exchanges are happening inside the house?) at least i warned the guy who almost took my space when i left that he'd likely get a ticket too if he stayed.

oh, and add the $2 diet coke. $89 for a ten dollar show. i give up.

screwed priorities weekend

so this weekend there's a few things that i "should" be doing:

- i should be going to orycon to hear guest of honor cory doctorow speak tomorrow. also, i should have gone to see him speak at PSU thursday, but had no sitter and i'm guessing having a 5-yr-old sit through a talk on copyright issues is asking for disaster.

- i should hit the gem fair and restock on some beads.

- i'm working on sunday so these activities would have to happen saturday.

however, life gets in the way:

- i missed a hair appointment on thursday morning because it was a little more important to talk with a contractor about my sometimes-wet basement. i had to reschedule for saturday, noon, which means i won't be able to get from southeast to downtown by the time of cory's reading. (also, i noticed he's not on the booksigning/autograph schedule at all. hmpfh.)

- i'm trying not to spend oodles of money right before our trip back home for thanksgiving, and bead shows tend to be 'spendy for me. i'm also not so critically short on anything that would make it worth walking into a giant convention room of temptation.

so, saturday is haircut day, and at night i'm rawking out to dirty on purpose at the doug fir. wheee! beatrice, get yer earplugs on.

yeah, baby!

i have figured out when the baby will be born.

my ultrasounds say jan 4, my midwives say jan 14. but thanks to a jaunt into town today, i realized the magic date will be jan 8.

why?

because on that date this man will be in portland:


and so i'm imagining that this will be done by 7:30 pm, in time for Mr. Manilow to make his 8 PM Rose Garden show, having already performed the valiant deed of belting out LOOKS LIKE WE MADE IT!!! as Beatrice's head pops out.

how 'bout it, Barry?

storybook dream

during last night's dream i was at work at the library, but not in the usual way things happen there. i had to photocopy the reference desk schedule, but someone started it ahead of me and had screwed up by making it on the wrong size of paper and making way too many copies. and then we were all in a meeting, but we were sitting on the floor and i kept being bothered by the antics of a couple of coworkers who were tumbling around. (shades of boo's kindergarten?) everyone was dressed in black polo shirts and sweatpants, and the content of the meeting was banal. in my annoyance and boredom i grabbed a book of fairy tales and was surprised to find that i could pluck the delicate, fluffy clothing out of it, and put it on. i started wearing layered tutu-ish pink skirts and embroidered jackets straight from the book. there were little notes in the book from my english grandmother encouraging me to find these things, as well as some large cut-glass bottles of perfumes and a pair of shoes that looked like lampworked glass bottles. "have you done something sparkly?", my grandmother had written on top of one of the pages.

who knew, i'm cinderella.