Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Warning for the Gentlemen: Pregnant Lady Stuff In Which I Mention Vomit and Urine. Like That Would Stop You Pervs.

Well when it rains...

I can't seem to catch a break. In spite of living in a hermetically sealed cocoon for the past three months due to the fact that if I move or think about moving I vomit outrageously, I've managed to catch a cold. I do not enjoy being sick (not that anyone does) but being sick when I'm pregnant makes me extremely anxious. I do not like to take medication when I'm pregnant, and I'm forced to if I get a headache because if it turns into a migraine, I will end up in the hospital on their medication. Bear with me. I'm miserable.

On the plus side (kind of), I went to the midwives for a monthly check up and they called me back after they checked my urine sample and said I needed to come in for an IV because I was extremely dehydrated. I knew I wasn't quite up to speed, but I was in denial since I was still actually able to pee (albeit in only trace amounts). Last time I'd stopped entirely.

But that brings me to the plus side which is the midwives. I don't think I mentioned it, but I'm going to a birthing center instead of a hospital. With my first two, I didn't have time for an epidural or medication, so honestly, what's the point? If I'm going au natural anyway, I might as well be able give birth on all fours in a swing if I take a mind to. They're very tolerant. And so kind and sympathetic. When you are just perfectly miserable and even blinking makes you sick, it helps to have someone who simply understands and does whatever they can to make you comfortable. When I went for the IV, they put me on a comfy couch, got me three blankets, a fluffy pillow, and a bunch of magazines along with snacks and juice, and they just stayed and talked with me. It was almost fun. We tossed around ideas as to what was causing my incessant nausea, and I made them laugh, which is always nice. The midwife that day said she wanted to be the one to deliver my baby which I took as a compliment.

At the birthing center, they have 8 or 9 midwives and you try to see every one of them before you give birth. If you establish a special rapport with any of them, you can request them for the birth. Other than that, it's whoever is on call. With how fast I deliver, I know better than to pick favorites. But so far it's even. Every midwife I've seen has been an angel.

So things are chugging along. I'm 4 months in. I've probably lost some 20 lbs, but I had it to spare (and then some). I'll probably lose a bit more, but that will only be a silver lining at the very end. A new baby plus hotness. Pretty cool.

I'll update again when I know what the baby is. I'd love to be all secretive and surprisey but that ain't happening. I have too big a mouth.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Big News

So finally something to blog about.

I'm pregnant.

And almost on purpose this time.  Jethro and I had been talking about trying for a boy for years. Recently, the talk became a little more proactive, and God said, "That's it! They said yes!" And boom. Here we are. Expecting a sweet little baby sometime in June.

We won't know if Jethro will have a son and heir until February, but as he said on his facebook status, "May the third child be a masculine child." We are going to hope that translates into a boy and not a lesbian.

So that's the good stuff. Now the bad stuff. I'm sick as a freaking dog. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but I handle pregnancy about as well as an Occupy Wall Street protester handles baths. Among other unpleasantries, I am nauseous constantly and I throw up so hard and often that I worry about detaching my retinas (hypochondriac that I am). I've always wanted more children, but I just didn't have the strength to be pregnant, especially after Gwen and Em being so close together. And I was young then.

But after a 10 year hiatus, I've worked up the nerve to have another go. And it's just as bad as I feared, so this will have to be the last even though I wanted 4. I just can't do it.

But it will be worth it. I don't even have to just tell myself that. I know it. Gwen and Em are proof. They are so helpful and sweet and excited, I could cry. I'm a horrid bitch from the belching depths of hell when I'm sick, and they have been so patient and good. They must have really, really wanted another sibling.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Catching Up

Well yes, it's been awhile. Not too much in the way of news, except that the swinger couple broke up in dramatic fashion, which was fairly predictable. She was a diabetic who would have weird, blood sugar related outbursts flinging wild accusations of physical and sexual misconduct and vile profanity. The swinger gentleman decided that the opportunity to stick his dick in a cage containing the volatile creature was probably not worth the potential of having it bitten off. In jail.

Other than that, things are going well. That's good for me, but obviously terrible for the blogging.

But as Jethro says, "I've got a beautiful wife, adorable children, a great house, a great career, my dream car, and Gears of War 3 is coming out next week. Can't ask for more than that."

And should I be content? Yes. I should. But as usual, I'm not. I'm trying to take credit for my kids who are quite lovely, but they were pretty much just born like that so I want a career of some kind to take credit for and make a little scratch at. Yes, I help Jethro at the clinic, and yes, I do graphic design on the side, but I really would like to make either of them just slightly more lucrative. What's that you say? The economy is shit? All the more reason to suck it up and do something. I am ambitious for both of us, but I don't know how to take the first step in really launching either of us. It's annoying. But enough of that. This is boring.

So what else is new? Oh yeah. Jethro bought a car. A blue 2008 Audi A5. We can't afford it, but we did it anyway because he was driving a beater and it didn't make him look successful. Or competent. Or sane. So we will continue our diet of beans and gruel cooked on an increasingly hostile stove for a little while longer. Not that we're that poor. We just have a lot of debt that we would like to pay off sooner rather than later.

In other, not so pleasant news, both of Jethro's parents have suffered strokes. His mom had one over a year ago and refused to get diagnosed for over 6 months. Now she is continuing to refuse to go to physical therapy, so she is getting weaker and weaker and there is nothing we can do with her unrelenting stubbornness. It sucks. Jethro's father is almost as bad, but fortunately his stroke, while not as serious, had more obvious side effects so he went to the hospital and got treatment. Unfortunately, while there, they discovered his platelets are low and his white cell count is high, so they are trying to figure out what unknown condition he has on top of having had a stroke. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that he is a reluctant participant in his own healthcare.

Jethro, confronted with the genetic red flags of stroke, has begun a rigorous exercise regimen and I offer him thoughtful and well-timed encouragement from the couch while drinking a nice red wine with cocoa undertones and eating Dryers French Silk ice cream. I'm nice like that.

Now for anyone who has read me for a long time, this is going to blow your mind. My eldest is 12 years old. She was 4 when I started this horror show.  She is everything a 12 year old should be. Insecure, awkward, sassy, and beautiful. So much of a child still, thank God, but darting towards a womanhood she greatly anticipates and utterly fears. Boys are complete mysteries to her, but she knows she kind of likes them. Her heart is kind. Dogs and babies love and obey her with complete devotion. She geeks out on anime, but loves playing basketball. I look at her all the time and still can't quite believe that this spunky, delicate little creature is mine to love with all my heart.

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Love Wins The Day

A military friend I've flirted, argued with, and defended for years in the comments section of Blonde Sagacity, lost a friend of his who had served two tours in Iraq to suicide a few weeks ago.  I can't adequately describe how good his writing is on the subject, so I'm just going to link it.


This is real life. It's not a screenplay. It's not politics. This is the ugliness we all fight to keep at bay.  It's why we stay up until 3 am playing video games. It's why we inject poison into our faces.  It's why we email pictures of our junk to 21 year olds.  Sometimes we're stupid. Sometimes the ugliness wins. But we fight on. We mourn the ones who make it real and we fight desperately on.

When Charles died, I thought the ugliness had won again. It had snatched the best of us.  Someone brave and strong and joyful and good.  I felt the same way after my father died.  But I was weak then and young and stupid. Too much responsibility and no skills for it.  Circumstance after circumstance seemed to set me back more and more until finally I met a nice guy named Jethro and made a couple of babies.

When Charles died, I found myself pounding the stairs in anticipation of that great and terrible pain that was sure to follow.  I ran out the door and into the street because I knew what that pain was and how much it was going to hurt. I tried to cry and get it out of the way before that searing, tearing agony reached my lungs. Dry sobs that felt like the desert. The ugliness.

Then I found Jethro. Again. I stopped and the pain came.  But gently this time. We held each other. We still loved each other.  We went to see our friends.  The barrier our love created for the two of us expanded. We still loved our friends. They still loved us. We beat back the ugliness.  We beat it away from each other. We beat it away from our memories of Charles.  We held onto each other and wouldn't let the ugliness in.

I remember once when we were freshmen in college.  It was the end of our first year and we were all gathered in Charles' dorm room to drink the horrible wine made by the chemistry majors for one of their projects. 20 people in a little bitty dorm room is not going to go unnoticed by the powers that be and we were interrupted in pretty short order by the glorified hall monitors.  We'd had a small practice drill at Charles' urging and we collectively managed to hide the bottles on our persons so that they could not be found.  The glorified hall monitors searched every place they were allowed to and found a small bottle of Everclear and 2 cans of beer in the tiny little dorm fridge.  Everyone stayed completely mute and let Charles do the talking, since it was his room.  After they left with their sad little confiscations, we were exuberant.  Giddy, even.  We still had the goods.  Charles looked admiringly at the group of us and complimented everyone on their presence of mind and coolness under pressure.  I like to think he would have felt the same way if he could have seen all of us at the funeral and other events that have taken place since.  Not that we were cool, exactly, but we stuck together.  We wouldn't let the ugliness take our wine, and we wouldn't let the ugliness take our love.

And this was the great difference.  When my father died, I had no one except histrionic relatives, younger sisters who believed our father would come back to life, and a mother who had just had her world destroyed.  The ugliness had easy targets.

But love is the bayonet and we all became stronger.

Things are better now in my family simply because we love each other and it's amazing. I never thought it would be good again, but it is. It was a struggle, but we all kept bayonetting and now things are beautiful. Imperfect as always, but beautiful. 

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Swinger Weekend

I have had an interesting weekend.  A friend of mine from Houston came to visit with his girlfriend.  They are swingers.

It seems we had a miscommunication somewhere.  When I say I'm open minded, that means I'm not going to judge you too harshly to your face about anything short of child-molestation.  That doesn't mean I want to make out with your girlfriend or watch you feel her up or see a picture of her clitoral piercing, much less a live view.

And when we discuss your swinging lifestyle and I say "The only way I would do that is if I paid someone," that literally means I WOULD ONLY DO THAT IF I PAID SOMEONE.  That does NOT mean I am toying with the idea of having fun sexy times with people I actually know.  When discussing the idea with Jethro (and I do this only to string him along the rocky trail of holy matrimony), it is always with the understanding that I am not interested in some broke, schizophrenic college student with daddy issues.  I want a professional who will do whatever I say, in a place so far away that I would never have to make small talk with them while having flashbacks to their sex noises if they cough in a funny way.

Yeah, I know I can talk, but that is all it is.  I am ALL TALK.  No action.  Never have been, never will be.  Most people understand this and humor me as long as I amuse them.

Now I'm not really mad at my friend.  They're new at it, and it's very very exciting to them. I wasn't interested, but if I had been, I really would have needed some warning.  Because my bedroom was nowhere near orgy-ready.  And I was on my period - something I did not plan on announcing.

But I am loathe to make people uncomfortable in my own home, so I found myself politely commenting on the photographs of the clitoral piercing, the cage in which girlfriend was stripping awkwardly with the friend's penis thrust encouragingly through the bars...

I smiled and yawned when girlfriend asked me to come lay down by her so she could play with my hair, which was actually tempting because I love to have my hair played with.  Fuck, I have no balls.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Some Movies

I tried to watch an old movie on Netflix called "Those Redheads from Seattle."

My family has a thing for old movies, probably because we only had a VCR growing up (no tv) and our mom would rent old, silly movies so as not to warp our morals.  Fat lot of good.  But in spite of us now practicing all manner of heathenry, she did manage to instill in us a love for old, cheesy films and their accompanying soundtracks.

The description was mildly intriguing:

Determined to reunite her scattered family, Mrs. Edmonds moves her daughters north to the Yukon to be with their father.  But the man's been murdered, and now the penniless women must make ends meet while finding the killer.

It sounded a little noir-ish with the twist of a mainly female cast.  But it's a damn musical.  And it's horrid.  They are going to find their father's killer and do a very modest can-can, exclaiming all the while about how daring they are to let anyone catch a glimpse of their bulky pantalettes.  I haven't finished the movie, and I doubt I will, but I have no doubt the killer will be drawn in some way to those bulky pantalettes.  They always are, you know.

Which brings me to another movie I watched earlier today.  It was a very stupid French film called "Emmanuelle."  I'd never heard of it, but I feel certain it is well known among connoisseurs of early 70s erotica.

Not being a connoisseur of early 70s or any other kind of erotica, I'm not sure what I was thinking.  I thought it would be stylish, I guess. But it wasn't. It was about a wealthy, hedonistic band of white people upholding the dignity of their respective countries by screwing around Thailand; and Emmanuelle, the nice French girl they wanted to corrupt for their own gratification.  For a film which contained a sex act in nearly every scene, including a young girl masturbating to a picture of Paul Newman, and a flexible Asian chick lighting a cigarette with another cigarette from the part of her anatomy you'd expect her to light it with if you were in Thailand, it was boring as hell.

The last quarter of the movie had Emmanuelle, at the insistence of the hedonists, being escorted around Bangkok by a patriarchal old pervert attempting to rid her of her inhibitions and convince her to accept the tenants of eroticism by making her smoke opium, having her forcibly taken by natives in the opium den, offering her as the prize to the winner of a very lame Thai boxing match (which the winner, remarkably free of bruises or cuts, gleefully accepted on all fours in front of the entire gathered assembly), and then giving her a new dress.  All the while, the pervert remained clothed in a dark, somber suit, and lectured constantly as to what she should be thinking.  It was like being raped to a sermon.

I guess it was supposed to do something for you, or at least make you uncomfortably sure that you'd be heaped with scorn by the sexual sophisticates for thinking Emmanuelle looked kind of silly with her skirt over her head for most of the film.  Mostly what I took away is that hedonists are just as humorless about sex as puritans.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Oh For The Love Of...

I visited the eye doctor yesterday and got the spankiest new pair of eyeglasses.


I also found out I have something called Pigment Dispersion Syndrome, which is where the pigment in the colored part of your eye flakes off into the fluid which can clog in the drainage ducts of your eye which increases pressure and can lead to glaucoma.

Now of course, the second I get the news, my hypochondria kicks into hyperdrive and I'm convinced I have blind spots and I feel like my eyeballs are about to pop out of my head.

And even more pathetically, I'm worried slightly less about the glaucoma and possible blindness than I am about having a milky eye.  I don't want a milky eye.  I may not win the blue ribbon at the county fair, but I'm a little vain about not having a milky eye.  

I just don't know how I'd handle being introduced to people and having them not look at my milky eye.  I'd probably do something awkward like say, "Hi, my name is Zelda. I have a milky eye, and I'm totally fine if you want to stare at it.  Or not.  I'm cool.  Just because I have a milky eye doesn't mean I'm not cool.  Fucker.  You try living with a milky eye and see how you like it."

But it might be totally worth it if I get to look at Jethro seductively through a colored contact and ask "with or without?"  That poor man.  I'll have him up to his eyeballs in midgets and glue (and chocolate for me) yet.

And to top it all off, doing anything that jiggles your eyeballs around can cause more pigment to dislodge, so I was told that I am not supposed to exercise.  I have been waiting all my life to hear those words, but of course they come just after I find an absolutely flipping fantastic sports bra 



and began draggin' my wagin around the block so I can do a Warrior Dash in November. It really is almost epically bad timing.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Ok so the new blog was short-lived.  It gave no more incentive than the old one, so back to the devil I know.

It seems Chris Noth has some stern, meaty thighs.  NSFW in case the adjectives weren't enough of a clue.

So how is everyone else doing?  Anyone out there?

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Fresh Start

I think I need a new start.  I'll still post here, but I must have something completely narcissistic to write quickly.  Like facebook.  But not.

Things I Won't Say On Facebook