"Smushed?" update

I’m sorry to have to make fun of my own mother…well, not that sorry. But she has been forewarned, and she really does have it coming. She has been giving me something of a hard time about what I eat and expose myself to as a pregnant woman, which is fine, though I’m sure she will admit she can be a bit of a “nudge” (nooj? Not sure how to render that Yiddish word in English).

But she really topped herself a few days ago when she left me a message in which she read aloud from a novel called The Barbarians Are Coming. It was a passage about a medical student who discovers that cadavers that have been placed on their stomachs become undesirable specimens because of the way the fluids pool in the organs and “engorge.” She read on and on, into my answering machine, about corpses with engorged organs; I had no idea, for the longest time, what the H*LL she was talking about. Actually, I thought she had finally completely lost her mind. Then, at the end of the reading, Mother Dearest said: "Sar, this passage [from a novel, about face-down cadavers] proves that you should not be lying on your stomach." (Not that I wasn’t already worried about that, as anyone knows who read “Smushed?”). I said, "Mom, you do realize that I'm going to have to write a blog post about this insanity. I'm sorry, but you leave me no choice."

I love you, Mom (aka M.B., the Matzo Ball)

P.S. Mom, feel free to correct any elements of this anecdote that I may have gotten wrong, especially as I have not actually read this novel that is so chock full of sage advice for the pregnant :-)

A Pregnant Woman's Canine Culinary Adventures

Sunday, Feb. 26: Ate a doggie treat today. Or, partially.

But let's back up a moment. First I had a lovely lunch at Saul's Jewish Deli in Berkeley with my friends Katherine and Tom, and I also ate a delicious chocolate croissant that Katherine made, and I followed all THAT up with some cheese, bread, and tomatoes at Katherine and Tom's house. So I wasn't exactly starving at the time I popped a doggie treat in my mouth.

Precisely what happened was this: at the door of the house, as Mark and I were leaving, Tom handed us each a little yellowish pellet, which turned out later to be called "Meaties" and to be intended for the dog, Maggie. This was quite obvious, as I think he'd even said something to us a few minutes earlier about giving Maggie a treat before we left. Now, it is true that when he handed them to us, he said, “One for you, and one for you,” which could be construed as a straight-forward offering of a treat. But it is also true that Mark didn’t immediately pop the pellet into his mouth; he looked down at it first and determined that it didn’t look meant for humans. I, on the other hand, ate it on the spot.

I am pretty sure I would have gone on eating it and pretending to be politely delighted by the flavors and texture if I hadn't seen looks of alarm and disgust cross everyone's faces. I managed to spit it out pretty quickly, although a kind of bodily, sensory memory of it lingered in my imagination for hours afterward.

Tom, Katherine, if you are reading this, did I leave out any crucial details in the narrative, or was this a good version?

Smushed?

I just found out from my doctor that it has not been such a good idea for me to be lying on my stomach, as far as the baby's well-being goes. So now I am really worried that I squashed her. I think Kaiser should give all the pregnant women Dopplers to take home so that they can do their own heartbeat tests whenever they get worried. Instead, I am going to have to wait till sometime in March to find out if I squashed her. Anyone reading this who may have an investment in her coming out un-smushed, please be forewarned.

Now I'm just getting carried away...

While I'm on the subject...

...here is a man breathing fire (one of the Gene Simmonses from one of many incarnations of Destroyer). Don't try this at home!

P.S. One of these men was rated "Joe Normal" by the "Nerd, Dork, Geek test." I'll let *you* ruminate on the ensuing implications for the term "normalcy" :-)

Thank you, Deb!

The test Deb told me about just helped me a lot. I am a nerd. Apparently, I am *not* a geek, the category in which I did most poorly. I think I really am a nerd, too, because it bothers me that the person who wrote this description hyphenated the phrase "No-longer" and put two colons in the final sentence. Here's where you can take the test, if you are interested (if you are not, you are definitely not nerdy, geeky, OR dorky):
http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=9935030990046738815

Sarah's rating:

Pure Nerd

69 % Nerd, 17% Geek, 21% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/ interactions.You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd. The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 76% on nerdiness

You scored higher than 11% on geekosity

You scored higher than 28% on dork points

Dad's line to me today

"Sarah, I'm doing you a favor by telling you this: no one, other than family, is going to want to look at those ultrasound photos."

What I know about my daughter so far

Shy like her mother (covers her face modestly with one hand while being probed at by the ultrasound)

Wiggles and kicks and squirms (may have restless leg syndrome like her mother)

Very photogenic (according to my doctor, who would never say something like that just to please me and certainly doesn’t tell ALL the mothers the very same thing :-)

Good spinal cord, clearly visible on the screen (despite Mom's critical, intrusive suggestions that she won't HAVE a spinal cord due to my failure to swallow prenatal vitamins--an instant recipe for throwing up)

Long legs—seems to be gearing up to be a long-distance runner
Small butt
Disproportionately large head
Ten fingers, ten toes

My Ultrasound

"It" is officially "she" (with 95% certainty) :-)

So much for my maternal instinct that it was a boy!

The Boobening

After returning to running today, one thing is abundantly clear: I am going to need a new sports bra.

(I'm sorry, but I really wanted to create a post called The Boobening.)

A Sighting of the Heir Apparent

Mark and Mom and I saw the baby today. I was relieved, because I was not fully convinced I was pregnant or that there was anyone in there. Today, I am convinced! We went for a routine exam, and the doctor listened to the heartbeat (this time I could hear it more clearly); she wasn’t going to do a sonogram unless, for some reason, she couldn’t hear the heartbeat. But I asked her for a special favor, to do the sonogram if the machine was available (there is only one sonogram machine for the whole floor, so if it had been occupied, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the sonogram). Now this was NOT the high-tech, fancy, sophisticated ultrasound that we are getting next week—that’s my “Big Ultrasound,” done by specialists in the ultrasound department. This machine is older and more rudimentary, the doctor said—not capable of showing the same kind of clear detail and nuance that the “big ultrasound” will show us.

In fact, I thought the image would be very blurry and unclear, the way the 7-week sonogram was. So I was kind of blown away by how much we saw. Last time I couldn’t make anything out (guess the baby was too small and undeveloped at that point), but this time we saw its face with all its features, its arms and legs, hands and feet. We saw it moving—it was moving quite a bit. Squirming around, I’d have to say, adjusting and re-adjusting and trying to get comfortable, it looked like. The doctor tried to zoom in on its butt and look between its legs, to take a guess at the sex. After a quick look she saw no obvious boy parts, so she speculated a 60% chance we are having a girl (though we will know more definitely next week at the Big Ultrasound). So, it’s alive (and very active, apparently), showing no sign of boy parts at this point. I thought it had a Roman profile, but its nose must be, like, a millimeter long.

Blog Problem

I am having a problem with this blog; I wrote to the support email address but I haven't heard anything from them yet, and I'm wondering if anyone else has had a similar problem and can advise me? The problem is that some of the comments people write are not appearing on the blog...or, they appear and immediately disappear. On one post, I wrote a reply to a comment I saw, and when the blog came back up, my reply was now appearing, but the comment I was replying to was gone. On another post, someone wrote in and her comments appeared, but the previous comment was now gone. I can't figure out why, since there weren't a ton of comments on this post--just four. (Well, actually, there had been six yesterday, but when I looked at it today, two were randomly gone and there were now four.) I asked the people whether they had deleted their own comments, but this was not the case. So....???? Has this happened to anyone else, and does anyone know why, or what to do?

Meditations on Vomiting

All my life, I have hated vomiting and would do anything to avoid that terrible, vulnerable moment. It was better to suffer hours of nausea, resisting the barf, than to face the inevitable and succumb. Since pregnancy, though, I have been forced to confront my fear of the vomit and to realize some of its aesthetic qualities. From experience thus far, I have identified two distinct kinds of pregnancy barf: a) the long, slow, suffering nausea that results in the final succumbing, and b) the instantaneous projectile barf. The first kind of barf is more like the type people experience under ordinary circumstances, I think, and so the second is of more interest to me. In this other kind of barfing, there is almost no warning. You are not feeling nauseated beforehand—you feel fine, in fact. Then, something triggers your gag reflex (in my case, it has often been my attempt to take my prenatal vitamin), and suddenly—with no struggle and no warning whatsoever—you vomit. There is no time to get to the bathroom, so you have to hope you have a bag nearby that can serve as a barfbag. For a long time I kept several bags next to my place on the couch at all times.

Unlike with normal barfing, another quality of the pregnancy barf as I have experienced it is that you don’t feel better afterward. Directly after, you feel better, but it only lasts about fifteen minutes, and then the queasiness returns, worse than before. It is the most awful, hollow, cloying feeling in the pit of your stomach. Not fun, people. NOT FUN. There may be other kinds of pregnancy or non-pregnancy barfs that I have not identified, of course, and I'd welcome hearing about them.

Please direct protests about the grossness of this post to Albert:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=20745138&postID=113815715149366210

Etiquette with Professors

Yesterday in the Writing Center, I helped an Asian ESL student with an assignment I thought was kind of interesting, though maybe it’s going to seem weird of me. It was for an Intro to Grad School class specifically designed to help ESL students with practical skills, and the aim of the assignment was to learn email etiquette through a variety of different scenarios. So, for instance, one was to write an email to the hypothetical “Professor Lyman” inquiring about a low grade. The student had written, “Lyman: I got a low grade. But I do not think it is relevant to my paper at this time. I will meet with you in class.”

Obviously, there were clear things to work on, such as how to address the professor respectfully and frame the request to talk about grades less abrasively. That’s what I liked about working on the assignment. It was kind of interesting to try to explain, as I figured it out on the spot, what degrees of asskissingness were required for each scenario. It seemed useful, too, so I felt like I was truly helping the student. In the scenario in which the student asks for a letter of recommendation, for instance, it would be better not to have written, as the student had, “Lyman: I am applying for jobs. A letter of recommendation is required. I hope that you can write it as soon as possible.” I could explain how it is necessary to frame such a request by expressing gratitude and an understanding of how busy the professor’s life is. (And, of course, it should seem as though the professor has an option to decline!)

But I was surprised by some of the scenarios the teacher had come up with for the students to write about. In addition to complaining about a low grade, they were supposed to ask Professor Lyman for help writing a paper for another class and ask to be excused from class on the grounds that they had a DMV appointment. I can’t think of many professors who would accept either scenario, regardless of how politely it was written.

More pics I took of the brave tree

A favorite San Francisco tree

...bravely defying the ocean winds!