Attract Mode

I just spent 30 minutes trying to tune my violin, crappy piece of instrumentry that it is. Is instrumentry a word? Anyhow, Robin listened the entire time.

I did finally succeed.

I should go assign lots of tags using Wordpress’s new tagging system.

Yesterday was Kevin and my’s second wedding anniversary! I totally forgot! Kevin went off for a work dinner and then came home and passed out and I still didn’t remember. Today, he pounced me and told me he’d forgotten. I said, “Oops!” I’m so glad we built a year mnemonic into the date, so I could figure out how LONG we’d been married.

Later, Raymond said, “Your first anniversary was Dog, right? No? Am I wrong? Was it Pirates?” Very amused.

I have been industriously doing some kind of chore everyday– mostly the repetitive kind, but the ones that make the house more pleasant for everybody. What I haven’t been doing is writing. Shame on me!

Also: as much as I dream about babies, I dream about dogs. I’m not surprised, really; I see them more than I see any other living thing these days.

I turned on the air conditioner today, but while I’m enjoying it, I’m also wondering how much it’s impacting our electric bill. So I’ll probably find some way to do without most days and save the big expenses for later in summer-and-pregnancy. I’m definitely starting to worry about our finances– not so much the initial baby outlay as the month-to-month costs.

Last night, I felt Zod kick from the outside. It didn’t feel like a sharp thump vibrated through skin, which is what I imagined it’d feel like. It felt like my flesh tenting upwards from within.

I wrote a Persephone myth yesterday.

My tummy keeps getting in my way, despite being only barely visible as a pregnant belly. It’s hard to reach things I used to be able reach while sitting, and standing up is harder.

Also, almost daily, there is thumping from Zod. This is an improvement over bubbles. It feels like painless muscle twitches. Kevin talks to my belly regularly. Usually, what he says is, “Wake up, baby! I want to hassle you!”

I feel yucky, headachy and nauseous. I really wish I had more appetite on a regular basis. The RNP assured me that not gaining weight is fine for a woman of my size, and I’m not really worried about the baby that much, but I have to think that not getting enough to eat is contributing to how I feel most days.

Anyhow, today I am apparently twenty weeks pregnant. It’s still too cold for our garden to grow most days; the tomato plants are outside but untransplanted and kind of static, and the pumpkin and squash are still inside but growing slowly unless I provide extra heat. I’m still not feeling Zod move on a regular basis– the best I usually get is a kind of super-awareness of my belly and I think that comes more from shifting positions.

We went for a long walk Sunday evening and took a wrong turn. It was a beautiful evening and I really didn’t mind it, until we had to climb some hills to retrace our steps. That made my abdomen give some funny twinges, and Kevin told me, Raymond and the dogs to stay put and then he struck out on his own and returned with the car. It inspired some interesting thoughts inside about guilt and responsibility but the end result was mostly overwhelmed by how cool Kevin is. And it was a great walk until the end.

I finished the Sabriel books and reread Going Postal and Bridge of Birds. An old friend of Kevin’s is in town this week and I think we’re supposed to see him tonight. I hope I feel better.

I’m all worn out from a grocery shopping trip! I haven’t had a very productive week; I’ve done some dishes, some laundry, showered, and now, shopped. I’ve read a lot– reread some Discworld and the Chrestomanci Quartet and read Sabriel by Garth Nix finally. I started Lirael last night but I decided to put off any more reading until this evening.

The last prenatal appointment was also my monthly deadline for writing. I got a little over 1/10th of the way to the amount Kevin requested. At least that means it would be almost impossible to do WORSE this month.  But you can see by my progressbar that I’m having a lazy start again.

To be honest, I’ve spent way too much time refreshing the blogs of various people I know, especially (but not exclusively) the people with babies. Why aren’t you people telling me more about your babies? I’ve got one, growing inside me right now!

When I was a kid, I somehow developed the idea that an unborn baby was hooked into its mother’s nervous system: that it would see and feel what the mom saw and felt. Legacies of that idea still follow me; I have to remind myself that if I want the baby to have any chance of hearing me, I have to say words out loud. The baby mostly lives in a little cave inside of me, connected to me mainly via circulatory stuff. Well, a soft cave. Okay, a sack.

I’m busy making egg and flower-shaped cupcakes for a decorating party tomorrow. I slept all day, quite by accident. I slept on the couch last night.

When I just sat down to take a break, I could feel, um, my uterus, I guess.  At the bendy point. It was disturbing. Then I ended up looking at pregnancy photos on the web and now I’m a little more freaked out. “Oh my God is that going to happen to ME?” Some pictures were less terrifying than others. But… man. I’m going ‘uh-oh’ now. What the heck have I gotten myself into?

In the beginning, I was careful to not let myself get too attached to an embryo. It was important to me to not be too attached. Not all seeds sprout, after all. And I’d rather live in uncertainty than fear.

I have this anxiety problem, see. When it flares up, I can’t help but pair positive and negative emotions. Wild happiness is always tainted by the dread that it’s too good to be true. Deep love is twinned with a horrific and inescapable fear of loss. I don’t mean passively; I mean anytime I feel a good and strong emotion, I immediately start getting the butterflies of a dramatic anxiety attack. So I encouraged the uncertainty of early pregnancy to blockade the progress of a greater and more debilitating fear. It made sense to me. If I’d gotten attached to anything, it would have only been the idea of being pregnant, of being a mom in eight months. I didn’t want to get attached to that.

But that couldn’t go on forever. Some seeds sprout.

Or rather, it could go on forever, if I kept pushing the ideas away. It’s something I’m very good at. The core emotional center of me is well shielded from big impacts (though the little ones can leach through–song-sized sentimentality). A baby’s a pretty big impact, and an absolute magnet for anxiety. But letting an avoidant fear of a crippling fear control me would be as much of a tragedy as anything more biological.

I’ve talked about this with Kevin. And I’m getting closer accepting a baby person in my life. I can see the looming iceberg* of the most crippling fear I’ve ever felt on the horizon. But today, feeling little whooshes inside, I will not let it sink me. ‘Cause suddenly I really know that a baby person is cooler than fear is frightening.

*The iceberg of fear is an illusion. It’s not there if we can’t see it. Most of the time, disaster is a submarine, not an iceberg. I’ve been telling myself that for eight years or so, and I don’t know that it’s worked much when push comes to shove, but I didn’t have medication then.

Dogs make me think of kids, because, well, they’re more trouble than cats.

All right, Hannah alone never reminded me much of children, but now I have two dogs, one quite young, and I’m pregnant. The speculations are inevitable.

Now, I know that dogs and kids aren’t that similar except in the most basic of ways: they eat, play, poop, destroy things and when they’re young they have poor bladder and bowel control. I mean, you can lock a dog in a small room when you leave the house, and nobody cares. I hear you can’t do that with children.

But nonetheless, I can’t help but notice how I behave and wonder if it will translate to children. If I want it to translate to children. The two dogs remind me of siblings so much. They fight, they play, the younger boy pesters the older girl, just to be a pest. They miss each other when parted and she hates to be with him, both at the same time. He wants everything she has. And so on and so forth.  And I wonder, do I want to treat siblings the way I treat them?

I mean, Hannah is the Good Dog. She’s not always the good dog, but she’s well-behaved and has an engaging personality. Dante is the Naughty Dog. He gets into trouble and his personality is very simple. And these things influence how I talk to them. For example, we were outside in the suddenly-lovely weather, and when it came time to come in, Dante raced ahead and romped in the grass. I let him in and then went to see what was taking Hannah so long. She was taking a long, roundabout route to the back door, across the porch, avoiding all the places that had been sloshing with mud up until yesterday. I smiled. “Clever Hannah, you don’t like getting your feet dirty. Ready for your cookie? Inside– Dante, what do you have in your mouth?”

Because they’re dogs, I don’t think what I’m saying matters very much. But I think with kids, especially siblings, it can. It seems like it could create problems if I went straight from praising one child (even indirectly) to being horrified by another. It seems like if I visibly expect the child-equivalent of Dante to misbehave constantly, he’ll try to meet my expectations. Especially if he’s competing with another child for attention.

Anyhow, just stuff to think about if I do have multiple kids someday.

I felt fine this weekend. Well, as fine as usual. I unpacked some long-lingering boxes and collected a whole bunch of recycling, which Kevin and Raymond took outside. Then I helped Kevin clean out his ‘office’ (mostly as a cheerleader) and Raymond wash his couch cover (mostly in the form of ‘we should do this!’)

I’m very happy with the clean office, since it will eventually be turned into the spare bedroom when the spare bedroom becomes inhabited. This is an important step.

Safety tip! When sucking down fluids from a bend-neck straw while nearly prone, keep the straw in your mouth after you stop sucking. This prevents lemonade from dribbling all over your face.

Still not done with IF thingie, IFers. Sorry. Not forgotten about. Something to do with insecure PHP variables supposedly.

Just planted the everbearing strawberries. They arrived a few days ago, a bit early, and I wanted to get them into dirt and water.

That Carouselchain story is still basically not done. It started out well, went along for a while, and once I started having real trouble with it the writing took a turn for the worse. Now all that’s left is a climax of sorts and I even know what it is but I’m plagued by doubts that it’s lame. I think I should write it anyhow so I can put it in the ‘to be edited’ pile rather than the ‘to be finished’ pile but it’s so easy to find distractions.

While I suddenly seem to have lots of ideas for stuff that is totally experimental or a tried-and-true nonsale (like poetry), Kevin has been gently nudging me on the road of novels. I think I can start up TFN 2 again. I hope. What I think and what turns out to be true have so little in common these days, with regards to my writing.

It continues overcast here. Dante likes to chew on the peat pots I got for my seedlings, sometimes with seedlings inside. I need to get him more officially sanctioned chewbones.

In the name of writing, I’ve been exploring national tourism sites, building a list of ‘well-known features/attractions of a country’.

Cooking, sleeping, very bad housekeeping, American Idol, Disgaea 2, shouting at dogs, visiting seedlings, reading books on decorative painting, thinking about writing, scribbling bad poetry. Running errands. Coughing up breakfast and a lung. That about sums things up. Expect a pregnancy-themed post Monday afternoon, if my doctor actually manages to keep our appointment.

I’m so damn embarrassed by this– by what a gentle person would call writer’s block. So damn ashamed.