Baby is gravid

the view from here

Yesterday I decided to test out our new storage location for my paint and sketchbooks by getting them out and painting the view across the street. Our living room window looks out over the parking lot next to a church (once an old synagogue) that makes amplified grumbling noises every Sunday morning. On the other side of the parking lot you can see the backs of two 3 story buildings and some old trees. This very Brooklyn view has little resemblance to anything from my childhood, but for some reason the faded blue of one of the buildings and the overhanging trees remind me of a specific short road with a blue Victorian house at the end of it that I would see when I walked to my piano lessons back home.

Updates and Thanksgiving

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your kind and helpful comments and emails about the last post. It's not that I thought y'all were the type to poop on a person about something like that, it's just...I worry. (But don't YOU worry, MFA Mama -- I promise I will still have more than enough angst when the Bean is here. Limitless supply, I tell you what.) Starhillgirl, I can't believe you'd even suggest cooking a placenta. You're just going to turn all the life-giving nutrients into toxic free-radicals that way, you know. SMH.

All this Actual Baby business is seeming suddenly very, very close. As of a week ago Monday -- 34 weeks on the nose, by my OB's count (which I've reconciled myself to, because these days I don't need time speeding up) -- I suddenly understand why people get tired of being pregnant. Though I am in basically good shape, all things considered, a lot of things do suddenly hurt and I have definitely entered the "waddling" stage. I've learned the hard way that my days of walking to and from the hippie coop are over, and I think I'd get much more comfortable rest if I could only figure out how to sleep sitting on the giant sitting ball (which I feel silly calling a birth ball, since we've had it for years and years as a desk chair). Poor Sugar is liable to be suffocated in our bed, as I have lately supplemented my beloved down body pillow with a throw pillow jammed against my back and have laid my father's old down jacket down in an attempt to get my hips to hush up for five or ten minutes at a time. Lucky for her, my snoring keeps her from sleeping deeply enough to succumb.

Despite her trials and tribulations, she has found energy to work a miracle in the second bedroom/office/music room/junk room/black hole: we now have a nursery! Like all good nurseries, it features a piano, several huge bookcases of non-children's books, a jankety metal cabinet with painting supplies (Mental Note: Remove prior to home study), and a filing cabinet. Filing promotes early literacy, fine motor coordination, and attention to detail. I can't believe Baby Einstein hasn't gotten in on this. We don't have a mattress for the crib -- your suggestions happily accepted -- but I'm sure babies do better just on the slats, right? Better ventilation and all that.



We've copied Shelli's excellent trofast changing table/storage juggernaut. Here's a closer view of the fabric covering the plywood top (which will ultimately have a changing pad or at least some strong fly paper):




The cats are very happy with their new room, especially the chaise.


Michaela can't believe it's taken us this long to get her a boppy.



Orson during the "little brother/sister" talk. "We're having a WHAT??"


Some very nice friends threw a little baby shower for us, during which no one played any humiliating or poop-themed games. I KNOW: sometimes it's like we're not even Americans at all. People gave us some very cute socks, nice books (I'm particularly partial to this one), and that all-important baby staple, a fleece viking hat with horns and yellow braids.

All this activity is very cheering and a good distraction from the "HOLY SHIT" moments that do beset a person. Not that the outside observer would notice much anxiety, I'm afraid, since I mostly sit around looking like this:

What We're Up To

I keep trying to write a quick post today and it keeps coming out dull as dishwater, so here are some pictures instead. With any luck, I will convince Sugar to scan the latest Bean ones and write you a better post soon. (Bean is fine, by the way. 47th percentile for weight, head down, heart still beating nicely. I, meanwhile, have gained exactly 0 pounds since my last appointment. Believe me, there has been some reorganization. Other than the kind of petty complaints that go without saying at this stage in the game -- acid reflux, some back pain -- everything is fine. BP remains low, and Sweet Sonographer checked my cervix for me even though she wasn't supposed to because all the stabbing down there in the last couple of weeks was making me nervous.)

(On the subject of health -- and this is one of those things that really deserves its own post or at least a place in a better-written one -- please stop by my pregnancy buddy tbean's place and remind her what an amazing job she's doing for the little turtles, because it's getting really hard.)

First, the quilt, which I peeled the cats off of for these pictures. We made this to save Sugar from gouging her eyes out, which is roughly what she threatens to do every time she sees the ones available at regular stores. Not to say that I like the teal/fuchsia/screaming lime combinations so much myself, but they seem to cause her extreme pain. This quilt isn't as fancy as the one we made last year, but it is meant to be tough enough to survive an onslaught of bodily fluids and regular batterings in the washing machine. Since I utterly failed in my plan to make the top at home and mail it to my parents' house (My mother has a nice sewing machine with a quilting foot), it ended up incorporating fabric from our house (mostly bits from other projects -- I like quilts that remind you of other garments, etc.) and also from both of our mothers' stashes.

Side A:





Side B, which was tons less work and, following the rule of these things, we naturally like better:




I made Sugar take a break from the IKEA festival (crib: done! ginormous wardrobes: done! thanks to the help and electric screwdriver of a certain uffish friend of ours who really should start blogging again. Read this one and see if you don't agree (NSFW) ) and take a picture of me in the fabulously 70s dress my mother wore most days of my childhood. I used to think it was ridiculous, but holy moly is that thing comfortable. The fact that she has lent it to me indicates a high level of excitement re: Operation Grandbaby, I tell you what.

Related: should I worry that my belly is glowing?


32 weeks, 5 days with the 70s Preservation Society

In Fact...

In fact, I do not feel very guilty about the fish oil. Partly, I'm not especially convinced it does so very much good for teh bebe (see here), and partly, I think it's of some import to my delicate psyche not to get too far down the road of "perfection" in this whole parenting thing. I put perfection in quotation marks because I don't believe there is such a thing in this arena; I think that the sooner and more often I remind myself of that, the better. I don't think that not taking vitamins is bad parenting. I think this is bad parenting.

As for slippery slopes, it turns out that the one I should have been keeping an eye out for was lurking in my kitchen the whole time. After a slow, v.e.r.y careful trip home from the coop on Thursday, carrying just slightly more weight than was wise, I stepped into the apartment, pleased with myself for not falling on the snowy/icy broken pavement. One step onto the kitchen tiles and I went down like the proverbial ton of bricks, if said ton had gained 30 pounds and weighed itself down with organic produce. The good part is that I landed on my knees, so no belly worries. The bad part is I landed on my knees. Except for the parts of my legs that hit my clogs first. Related: is there anything so annoying as being badly beaten up and having the bruises barely show? Or is that tipping my drama-queen hand a bit far?

What with the bashed up knees and accompanying jarred back, I have been less than no help this long weekend, as Sugar has begun Project Nest, aka, Project Babies Don't Sleep On Bookshelves. Great masses of furniture and boxes have been moved around the house or into our Fibber-McGee-esque storage locker. IKEA has been braved; flat rate delivery fees have been efficiently taken advantage of. Flotillas of boxes have arrived, heavy with flat-packed Swedish design, and, emptied of their cargo, have sailed away to the garbage room. Today, Sugar set up a new bookcase (just because babies don't sleep on them doesn't mean we don't have need of another; this will replace two shorter ones) and a chaise (Operation Maximum Sleep -- the chaise means an adult can sleep in our bed while another dozes by the crib). Still to come: crib, massive wardrobe for our bedroom to make up for some of the lost storage space, and our knock-off of Shelli's genius changing table hack.

The end result in the Bean's room -- which, things being how they are, will still have to include several non-Bean pieces of furniture -- should be something like this:


Because Every Baby Needs A Piano And A Filing Cabinet

Progress so far has been monitored by Inspector Orson, who has given preliminary approval to the chaise (shown here with side A of the play-quilt "we" (mostly Sugar) made over Christmas.



He does not, however, extend his approval to the camera's autofocus light.

Midwinter

You know it's the dark time of year when you find yourself eating breakfast by candlelight.



Those are kitchn's ricotta pancakes, by the way, and quite tasty they were, too.

Hope you are keeping the fires alight -- and dry, fellow New Yorkers.

Remember This Game

Hello from the calm before the cooking storm, chez Bionique. My mother is here, which has forced us to begin to make inroads in the junk filling the "spare" room (of course, no room can ever be truly spare in a New York apartment), at least to the extent that the aerobed can be jammed in there. Tomorrow, I will wear myself out cooking Thanksgiving dinner, as I love to do. I am still trying to decide which sweet potatoes to make: Sugar prefers them savory (being sufficiently sweet enough on her own, I reckon), but while I like them savory, I LOVE cold leftovers of sweet potato pudding, gobbled on its own or as a dense layer in the "Thanksgiving sandwich" I look forward to all year. (A Thanksgiving sandwich is turkey, sweet potato pudding, cranberry sauce, gravy, and any other leftovers you care to stick in there, all cold.)

Besides sweet potatoes of one or more kinds, we'll have turkey (we are not vegetarians, only lesbians), cornbread and pecan dressing, biscuit, maybe some mashed potatoes (lest we die of carb deficiency at table), a few pies, a non-wheat dessert (the surprisingly lovely almond cake from IKEA? candied pecans and baked apples?) and whatever other oddments occur to me in the next 24 hours. (Gravy, ice cream for the pies, and other such condiments are implied, of course; and cheese, bread, nuts, and pear paste to build the appetite. Can't be too careful.)

The Dane-stralian family will be bringing green beans, cranberry sauce, and their very scrumptious nearly-3-year-old. I've been a boorish hostess and made it clear that no orange nonsense is welcome in cranberry sauce at my house, thank ye. Another friend is bringing a mushroom dish that apparently cooks for nine hours. I reckon we won't be TOO hungry after.

Meanwhile, what are YOU making (or eating) for Thanksgiving?

I thought perhaps it might be nice to play our old Come And Eat game this weekend, with posts about what you eat at Thanksgiving dinner or what you eat instead or what you do with the leftovers -- or what have you, my dear, benighted, unAmerican friends. (I admit that those of you with antipodean addresses are likely too high on the coming of spring to need a big feast to cheer you on, but the rest of y'all in northern climes must be dreading the dark, too. Nothing like a few thousand calories shoveled down in a single sitting to take the sting out of the coming of winter and/or prepare you for hibernation.)

So. Come And Eat, would you? Sign up below with the address of your food post, any time this weekend. Please paste the address of a particular post, not just your whole blog, so folks know where to comment.

Baby's First Stoop Sale Saturday

In Which Bionic Is Reassured That Non-Pink/Blue Baby Clothes Do Exist.

And they're darn cute, too.

I'm posting this partly so Sugar can see them while she's visiting her parents for the weekend. She'll be home tomorrow, but should she really have to wait a whole day to see this?

Perfect Moments

Hey, y'all. Chez Bionique = still reeling. Happy, befuddled, occasionally panicking...never a dull moment, as they say.

Symptom watch includes mild (but not so mild that I wouldn't take an Advil under other circumstances) cramping, some fatigue, and -- I'm going to count this -- the biggest MFing cold sores I have had in easily 15 years. As in, where did the left side of my upper lip go? Yuck. Dr. Baby Factory says no taking anything, even L-Lysine. (Confession: I took some before I asked. I guess I'll not take any more. Probably.) Your miracle cures welcome.

I don't think I've ever managed to participate in Weeble's Perfect Moment Mondays, but Sunday had a couple of moments that bear recording, I think.

Here is Sugar, under the triumphal arch near our place:

Piano courtesy of Play Me, I'm Yours

My father is a pianist. He played Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Bach every night of my childhood. Some of my favorite baby pictures are with him at the keyboard, in a carrier on his back or pounding the keys beside him like a real hambone. He put neon green stickers on the ends of an octave's worth of keys to teach me their names; I don't remember ever not knowing. For reasons related to the crippling shyness that characterized my early childhood, I never took lessons, so while I can play a little, not much, really. (Let's not go any further down that road, lest the crying start.)

Even when we were first "dating" (misnomer for typically lesbian reasons), I was comforted to think that Sugar's ability to play represented a kind of redemption on that count, that there would, after all, be someone to play for our children.

Which brings me to this:

Yes, I surely did go out and by the pricey kind only when I already knew what it would say. What of it?

Quickie

Okay, I really do have half (read: three throat-clearing sentences) of a Come and Eat post written, only now it's time to leave the house for a day trip to the beach! (Read: Sugar is going to photograph someone's house, like she do, and I am going to drive to the nearby beach in our borrowed car and lie there.)

...which in turn means, via the Law of White Pants and its corollary related to bathing suits, that today looks very much like it's going to develop into CD1.

Thank you to my darling Clitty for the heart-warming, vag-affirming shout-out.

Come And Eat

My mother's favorite verse in the Bible is John 21:12. It's after the resurrection, and the disciples are fishing. A man on the shore calls out to them, hears that they are not catching much, and gives them some advice -- Try putting the nets on the other side of the boat. The nets fill up, the disciples realize the man is Jesus, and they begin to shout and carry on. Peter jumps into the water to swim to him. And Jesus says to them, "Come and eat breakfast."


Don't worry, my non-Bible-thumping ones. I'm not going to start sermonizing regularly. (For one thing, Sugar would have a fit. For another, I'm an Episcopalian, and we know our limits. Ours is not to preach but to polish old wood pews, to wring our hands over "tradition", and to try not to spill our martinis on the needlepoint pillows....) Take comfort: the Bible-thumpers are clucking their tongues over my lowercase "him" above -- I like Jesus better as a son of man than as a son of God, sometimes. I am an equal-opportunity offender.

Come to it, that verse might be my favorite, too. It gets to the heart of my beliefs about human connection: that the best way to show (and to build) our love for each other is to break bread. This idea is hardly unique to Christianity, I realize, nor to religion.

So, please: come and eat with me.


I'd like to invite you to last Sunday's dinner. It was a quiet affair, at home in our cluttered apartment. I'd rather cook and drink wine and talk to you than wipe down the backsplash; I hope you don't mind. I started cooking a little later than I meant to, so we'll all have to sit around and talk while the food finishes. Sugar made a pie, whose crust she almost wouldn't let me take pictures of, because the weather is damp and the dough was testy and she was afraid you'd disapprove. But I know you'll see that pie as more perfect because of the fingerprints left from her mending the dough. (And I assure you, it tastes just fine.) The pie is made of rhubarb -- which always makes me think of Sugar's grandmother, who grows stalks taller than she is -- and strawberries for the coming of summer and peaches from the freezer, a last-minute improvisation when the strawberries and rhubarb didn't fill the shell.







You'll meet my most long-standing friend, who sat on my mother's pregnant belly as a baby and started crying when I kicked her. She's still threatening to get me back for that, but I say it was fairly dealt: she SAT on me, after all. Our mothers were close during their pregnancies and her mother watched us both as babies, so we are built of some of the same food. (These days, I take some comfort in the knowledge that none of that would have happened if my mother had been able to get pregnant when she'd first wanted to. No Bug in my life? Impossible.) I can't believe that after being separated as young children, we've ended up living three blocks from each other, hundreds of miles from our various early homes. Womb Buddy's talking about moving away, and we're trying to talk her out of it but mostly trying to feed her well while she's here, make sure the bonds of shared food stay strong.


Israeli couscous with broccoli rabe -- I don't know how this is supposed to be cooked, but this is how I cook it.


And now, if you'd like, it's your turn. I've read some beautiful posts about food and eating together on your blogs recently (to say nothing of my ongoing delight in starhillgirl's requests to log my lunch) which inspired this attempted meme. Add your name and blog to the Mr. Linky list, and write a post about a meal this week. The ways food bonds us are multifarious, so your post can be pictures of a meal you made, a favorite or new recipe, a shared croissant with an old friend at a coffee shop. It can be wordy or just a picture.

I'll write one of these every week and invite you to do the same, like an edible version of Mel's (late, lamented) Show and Tell. Visit each other's posts, please, and write comments to let folks know you've come to the table. If you're writing about kids or babies -- and I hope you will, because I believe feeding children is about much, much more than just making sure they don't starve to death -- put a * after your name, in case ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) folks aren't in a good place for that. (Tip o' the cursor to Calliope's excellent suggestion at her Photo Friday project.)

(This is my first time using Mr. Linky, so maybe leave a comment, too, in case I didn't do it right.)

Weekend: A Picture Book

Hey there buckaroos and buckerettes. Hope you're having a nice weekend. We sure are. Here's what we've been up to (post-sitting-around-in-towels):

Saturday:

We started off at the community garden, composting, planting in the tree well, and generally, erm, soaking it all in. Not pictured: the squirrel Sugar found in one of the cisterns, soaking it all in for the last time.




The spirea is blooming. I like to call it bridal wreath.


And the columbines are starting.


From there, the train to Chinatown (Manhattan version), for lunch, art supplies, and textile madness.


We did not eat in this very picturesque place.


Instead, we had Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles, which sound dirty and taste amazing.


We bought drawing pens and an eraser shield at Pearl Paint, aka, EAR PAIN. Eraser shields kick ass.


And ate glittery sandwich cookies at Purl Soho's new-location party.


Loot! That's a lotus root, by the way. They're crunchy.


Presents! Purl gave us a gift bag. (We bought the thread.)

Home again, home again, lickety split. The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, where we saw flowers, bees, and the Family O.


More bumble bees around this bush than you can shake a stick at.


Sunday:

A rainy day at home with WWOZ's broadcast of Jazzfest and some crafty action.


Sugar made crepes!


And bread!


And turned Bionic's students' old papers into a dress pattern.


While Bionic sewed and embroidered and took pictures of her blue jeans, just for Calliope.


Wishing you a peaceful, happy Sunday.

Focus

Here is Baby, wearing only a towel, sitting on a footstool, obsessively reading the interwebs on her computer which, for some reason, is on the couch. It's Saturday morning chez Bionic.

Word-Light Wednesdays: On The Joys of Gardening, Even In April

Collard greens that winter-over.
Eating from our little plot even before the lettuce is ready.
The old collards will bolt soon and run to seed, and we will replant.

(See more here.)

The Cat Turns Around

In a typical turn of events, lovely Michaela did an about face half way through my drawing.

Baby and I have often talked about how weird it is that we share our lives with this completely other species. What do they think of us, anyway?

Sunday Dinner

I'm back from the conference, which was mainly a test of conversational endurance with my boss. This morning Baby and I went to buy a new scanner at B&H, my old one having died a premature death. Later we wandered around the botanic garden looking at blooming things. And then Baby cooked awesomely crunchy and salty/sweet faux chinese food. Here she is at the stove:



Dinner was delicious.

Michaela in the Morning

For the record, this cat was white when we went to bed last night.



Ah, Spring: when the aloes move to the outside windowsill, happy to have survived the winter's marauding.

Tacky or Hip?

It's time for Baby and I to come clean: we've been two-timing you all. We also write a craft blog that's been going for a few years, but we write under different names. I usually post instructions for how to make whatever craft object the post is about. I'm putting this post up on show and tell cause I thought you might want to see it. (I know, it's getting a bit meta around here, what with posts about posts about posts.)

Anyway, the most recent edition to our craft blog is instructionis for this lovely beaded item (made by me) which Baby thinks is ugly.



Last time I wore this thing out of the house she said, "I hope you don't get shot on the way to the party," (as in mistakenly shot by all those three-sheets-to-the-wind-north-woods-hunters we've got sitting up in the duck blinds of Crown Heights). Anyway, I think it's cool.



Here's a link to our crafty blog.

Make sure you go check out what the other kids are showing!

xoxo

Sugar

Baby Dust

Still not feeling very enthusiastic about this cycle. Meaning: I'd like to get pregnant. I'd really, really like that. (And don't get me started about the little voice in my head pointing out that this would be the cycle that would continue what my birthday-mate aunt calls the family tradition of first children born in late November/early December. Quite a number of us within only a few days, it's true.) But I feel like it doesn't matter if I'm hopeful or not -- my endometriomas are just too fucking big.

And we're out of stored sperm now, so we'll have to scrape up money again. (Thanks, body, for slowing things down enough that we JUST crossed the line into having to pay for a second six month's storage at the Baby Factory. Nice work.) And the sperm bank raised their prices. Yippee.

So, yeah. I'm not drinking or anything, but I wouldn't say I feel terribly PUPO, as it were. Nonetheless, I made a nice little baby dust* blingee for a board friend last night, and I thought y'all might like it, too. The pink background -- attentive readers will recognize the Sparkle Menace -- makes the dust itself a bit hard to see, but yes, it is meant to be emanating from the...hindquarters.








I've got a baby-dance one, too, but it still needs a little work. Something to look forward to.


*a phrase that makes me think of ashes. Nice, huh?

Show and Tell: More Stamps

Hey gang. Must say, I'm feeling a bit quiet these few days. But I hate to miss a Show and Tell.

Here are a couple of the dog stamps I've finished recently:



and



Next up: a three-legged dachshund.

Shameless self-promotion: I'd lurve to make you a stamp of your dog, cat, hyena, or Mexican jumping bean. Here's our Etsy shop, with stamps, nifty jewelry made by Sugar, and the occasional arty drawing of yours truly in stirrups....


Go see what the other, more talkative kids are showing over at Mel's.