email to a friend before tonight’s party August 30, 2008

I only have 2 bottles of throw-away wine – thought I had more! So if you have a box or jug you want to kill, please bring it over. I can use some better stuff if need be – just makes the Sangria better, arguably, but if you have some cheapo stuff you want to dump, please bring it. (classy party huh?) For fruit I got a pineapple, Valencia oranges (because it’s sangria), strawberries, one nectarine and a cantaloupe. I have Tito’s, dark rum, and brandy here at the house FYI. Also have OJ concentrate if you need OJ.

I have now ended up making (because I am genetically unable to leave well enough along):

tabouli
deviled eggs (better than Easter, I swear – those were awful)
baba ganouj
grape salad (kind of like waldorf)
… and I have two packs of pita bread.
and I got some kalamata olives and a block of feta cheese which I will cut up for snacking.

Oh, and chocolate raspberry truffle cake from CM.

I think that’s it.

Nope, also stuffed grape leaves (from a can – I’m not idiot enough to try to make that myself)

It occurs to me that I am celebrating the completion of my Mexican tile backsplash with a Mediterranean feast and brisket. Am I always this discordant, or is it the pregnancy, I wonder?

See you soon! Can’t wait!

PS – Barney’s here, but he’s leaving tonight evidently so if we want to stay up late we can. Fair warning, Tom has five hour energy drink.

A

yes we can August 29, 2008

We completed the majority of the kitchen grout while watching and listening to the last night of the Democratic convention on KLRU. It was an odd juxtaposition, listening to a political equivalent of a revival meeting while feverishly working on the house at the same time – the psychic effect of the political exhortations made us work even harder, it seemed, despite the fact that we weren’t engaging in anything even vaguely relating to policy or The Future Of America.

I wore a couple of small holes in my right index finger from smoothing the sanded grout before I wised up and put some gloves on – typical me. We got mostly all of it done and Tom finished the rest this afternoon after he got out of work.

Here is the finished product:

Grouted sink and windowsill

grouted kitchen

Tom, feeling cherubic

And thus. You will not have to look at pictures of my kitchen for a while, I hope. We’re done except for some tile in the laundry closet and the wall base. Hallelujah! No wonder Tom feels like an angel.

Our house guests canceled because of the threat of a hurricane in Houston, where they live, but my father-in-law will most likely come up to visit this weekend. Then we may head down to La Grange on Sunday to visit Tom’s mother’s side of the family.  And Monday is my birthday!  Hurray!

One thing I realized in the zen state of frantic grouting was that Barack Obama was 40 when his first child was born.  That is a significant fact in our family because Tom turns 40 this year – in two weeks, basically – and it consternates him that he might be too old to be starting a family.  Not that he’s regretting our procreative exercise, but he worries about how old he’ll be when Amelia is learning to drive and going to college and things.  But he’s the hugest Obama fan ever, and I think it made him feel better that he and Barack came to this whole parenting thing at the same time in their lives.

So a message of hope rang in our household on the personal as well as the political fronts this Labor Day weekend.  Good times!

Verklempt August 28, 2008

I have been reading books about labor with a lot of verve lately, including Ida May’s book, and have been thinking about my upcoming labor off and on because of all my reading. Haven’t been feeling scared necessarily, despite the fact that I keep getting almost double-edged compliments about how brave I am to have a home birth. On the contrary, I’ve been allowing myself to daydream about my ideal labor experience, in hopes that I could manifest that for myself as well as I’ve done with all this rain…

And yet, when my midwife asked me about some of my self-confessed labor daydreams, I became suddenly and surprisingly incapacitated by tears. Granted, this is a super-hormonal time for me, with intense rushes of emotion one minute and weird drunken energy the next. But I’m getting choked up again, just thinking about how I was getting choked up.

What gives?

Long days August 27, 2008

Yawn. I’ve been playing and working awfully hard these days.

Monday night my friend Becky and I had a sort of a last gasp – before my third trimester starts – at the Saxon Pub. We infrequently spend Monday evenings at the Saxon to see Matt the Electrician and Bob Schneider play… you stay up way too late on a school night and have to get there ridiculously early to get a table, but it’s always a good show. I have a great fondness for Matt and admiration for Bob, and I think Becky thinks Matt is funny and cute and Bob is sexy as all hell. I agree with her opinion but with less fervor.

Matt’s band played a great set and he played a song that he had written that morning about the name Milo. If I understood it right, a pal of his had had his second child that morning and named him Oscar, a name Matt really likes. He wrote the song because he was so happy that his friend didn’t name the baby Milo, because he thought it was a terrible name… but then he felt bad and wrote a song about all those cool, likeable Milos that don’t exist as an apology to the name. He didn’t want to apologize to the actual people named Milo, because “Well, fuck them.” Though I’ve never met anyone named Milo, I can relate to the impetus to the song, it was a good song, and also Matt’s hilarious.

Bob’s set was unusually chill, for him, with a lot of slower songs and a accordionist/trumpeteer and cellist sitting in. Rehearsing for Labor of Love? Who knows, but the music was awesome even if the volume was so high that I heard distortion on the vocals and ended up plugging my ears with tissue halfway through the night. Yes, I realize that I’m signing my death warrant re: old age by admitting that, but damn! I was glad I’m only 6ish months along so the uterus is nice and thick and Amelia wasn’t running the risk of gestational deafness… though I admit worrying about being wrong about that.

Then last night, we got Busy.  Built up the window sill and the bar shelf so we’d be ready to tile, and then we tiled the bar wall.  We started at about 6:30 and didn’t finish until about 11:30, and I had about 3 hormone rushes before we were done, between worrying about the mural looking OK and listening to Hillary’s speech.

BUT, it’s done.  Check it:

BEFORE

AFTER

Tonight, light tiling of the windowsill and shelf.  Tomorrow, we grout as if our lives depended on it.  Friday, we clean.  Saturday – House Guests!

When the kid shows up can I start getting some sleep?

a good tired August 24, 2008

We’ve been Getting A Lot Done at the house, and not before time too!

Though we had planned to visit Tom’s father in Cuero this weekend, the rainstorms in his area made us reschedule the visit for early September. We saw a silly movie at the Alamo on Friday night to out-wait the rain that arrived just in time for the Friday after-work commute, and then got up early on Saturday to tile the kitchen backsplash.

We’ve been sitting on this project since March, as you might remember from my post when we installed the backerboard a couple of weeks ago. But yesterday and today we unearthed the boxes of tile and stuck them all to the walls like studly mason-type people.

I was quite worried about doing this backsplash, as what I remember from tiling the kitchen floor in March was that it was the hardest thing I’d done in years. For those of you considering tiling, let me hint you something: 16 inch tiles are much harder to install than 4 inch tiles! Who knew?

Though I had some trouble reaching the corners (I’m sure Amelia was trying to figure out who decided to introduce corners to the womb), I like to think that I was my old handy self this weekend. I’ll admit I was utterly exhausted afterwards, but then so was Tom. And it was over 24 linear feet of backsplash. And they’re hand-made tiles from Mexico, so they’re not what you might call square. Yeah, we kick the proverbial ass.

Care to bask in the glory of my tiley, tiley kitchen?

Over the rest of the week, we’ll tile that shelf up there and the window sill over the sink. Then we’ll tile the 50″ x 51″ wall on the other side of the bar (with the shelf on top) with a Senor Sun-Face mural. Then we’ll grout all of it.

All of this will happen before next weekend’s houseguests arrive on Saturday. No big whoop, right?

(If you’re wondering about that Tile Guy I was rejoicing about, that’s someone who will install tile in our living room and hallway for us. After we finish the kitchen, the next do-or-die is finishing the nursery, and then the replacing the living room carpet with ceramic tile. My midwife commented today that we were early – usually preggo couples start kicking into nesting overdrive at 32 weeks. But we have so much to do, I think we’re right on time.)

recipe for stress relief August 21, 2008

This was baked especially for me - says so on the box!

Pregnancy Hint #28: Do not, while you are pregnant and struggling with issues around your mother that you never bothered to address until you yourself suddenly became a mother, get yourself into a situation in which you become the manager of an older female employee WHO REMINDS YOU EERILY OF YOUR MOTHER.

If this misadventure happens to you, take deep grounding breaths, stay in the present, appreciate the opportunity to develop some new communication skills, and liberally apply pizza & red wine as necessary.

Finally! August 20, 2008

I found a tile guy.

Who will save us lots of money on tile and installation.

Fucking-A.

Bubble Bubble August 19, 2008

So you’re not supposed to have a birth plan, according to the home birth-crunchy granola books. Mostly it’s so you won’t come to the labor with expectations that will then be disappointed, tensing you up and making you fight the flow of the birthing work.

(I say this as if I really know my shit, which I don’t. I’m extrapolating like a champion.)

However, while reading these books my mind naturally turns to thoughts of what I want my labor to be like. Not in a rigid first-this-then-this-then-that kind of a way, but in an I-sure-would-like-it-if-this kind of way. I’m having increasing success in manifesting good things for myself these days (witness this week’s glorious rain – yeah, that was me – just had to wait until after the wedding), so I figure why not try manifesting a super labor experience?

In my non-rigid imaginings, there is a large tub of warm water that buoys me when the contractions get intense. There is some tasty food to snack on, not sure what it is yet, but Indian’s sounding tasty. The house is clean, and there are funny movies and friends cracking jokes. There’s no hurry.

My most genius imagining, the biggest brainstorm I’ve had in weeks, is the champagne. I’ve always held that it’s impossible to be unhappy when you’re drinking champagne, and so why not apply this to the potentially stressful situation of childbirth?

I’m planning on buying about three Very Decent bottles – no, I’m not planning on drinking them all for the labor, but we need to have extra to celebrate with afterwards! I think probably a nice Franciacorta and two Frenchies. Something toasty and classy, with richness and snap. I’ll pop the first bottle when I think the contractions are for real, and sip a glass every other hour or so – not to get drunk, but to celebrate my daughter’s birthday, and maintain that bubbly high.

I do plan to clear this with my midwife, don’t you fear. But I honestly can’t imagine she’ll deny me completely. Especially if I offer to share!

Oubliettes are out August 18, 2008

Do you have one of those rooms in your house where everything that you don’t have a good place for ends up? The extra computer parts, the exercise equipment that you don’t use, the paperwork you need to file, the gift bags you re-purpose, the guitars that neither of you play? Add to that, in our case, Tom’s brewing equipment, all the books I’ve carried with me through 10 years of Mexico and the islands, a neon sign we want to repair and an old hookah.

Wait, Tom sold the hookah.

Well, in our case, that room is the office, which also holds a great wood desk that is only slightly smaller than a twin bed, as well as a credenza full of random things. And the tile for our backsplash. And the futon mattress we’ll be putting in the teardrop trailer that Tom’s building.

This is the room we’ve decided to make the nursery. Why choose the room with the most crap in it, one might wonder. Well, mostly because that’s also the room with 3 interior walls and only one window – which means it’s got good climate control and can be made dark for napping kiddos.

What to do with all the Stored Crap, though? Honestly, I don’t know. At this point, we’re just chipping away at it. We’ve put a desk in the guest room – not the big one; that one we’re going to sell, as well as the credenza. We picked up a couple of bookshelves at Ikea and all the books are out now, and we can move the filing cabinet and the computer into the guest room.

After that, it gets pretty ugly.

We have no real climate-controlled storage space in our 1400 SF house. We don’t even have a garage. There’s the attic and… nope, just the attic. And in Texas, you only attic-store items that can withstand 3 months of 120 degree heat.

I like to think of myself as living a fairly simple life, but one of the things that being thrifty means, to me, is holding onto things in case they’ll come in useful a month or thirty from now. Thus, I have a lot of That Might Be Useful Someday Crap, and That’s Perfectly Good And Worth Good Money Stuff. And don’t even try to convince me to get rid of the I’ll Take Up That Hobby Again Someday For Sure Shit.

Do you know a secret way to balance thriftiness and a simple living/low storage lifestyle? If you tell me I’ll promise to sew you something in return, when I take up sewing again. Or make you some cool magnets, sometime this decade.

tell them to cut you August 17, 2008

The wedding of our dear friends yesterday was unutterably perfect, to the point that many of us felt a renewed sense of faith in the goodness of the world. The reception was relaxed and fun, and the after party was cozy with a healthy touch of debauchery. Everyone got a little drunk, with the exception of myself and a grandma or two.

Seeing a few friends & acquaintances for the first time in my pregnancy brought up all the usual questions and congratulations. Fathers talked about their wives’ experiences and mothers talked about their labors and pregnancies.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when you talk about planning a home birth, it seems to bring up insecurities for other mothers who did not birth at home. I get a lot of “wow, you’re hard core” and “oh, I couldn’t have done that.” Reminds me a little of when I was an English teacher and would get a lot of people confessing to me how much they hated the subject.

Most notably in discussions of my forthcoming labor experience, however, was a conversation with a woman who had never given birth but seemed to have the inside scoop via her two sisters. This in-the-know lady took it upon herself, sloshing rose out of her glass as she gestured, to explain me how important it was for me to have an episiotomy.

“Tell them to cut you, so you won’t tear,” she urged me, over and over. “If they don’t cut you, you’ll tear. Tell them to cut you. It’s only a few stitches and it’ll help your sex life after.”

I was feeling quixotic, so I tried to explain to her that episiotomies are not necessarily de rigeur, depending on circumstances. That the birth canal is built for birthing, and that in many cases women do not rip their coochies when giving births. She was having none of it. Finally the conversation ended, and I drove home peacefully with my sweetie and my super-elastic vag.

For the record, I’m not Rocky. Don’t cut me, Mick!