clearbluecup

So, I'm just back from a two-day shopping trip in Dublin, and my clothes crisis is hereby declared solved! I did come back with a couple of cupcake-y things, including a stretchy blue sundress that is big and billowy, but it was so comfortable and cute. And I'm sure come July and August I'll be thankful to have clothing that doesn't have anything resembling a waistline. It was a great shopping trip. I did feel a little guilty heading up to the till with an armful of clothes, but what fun to come out of a shop with a bag full of great new things.

I also went to another antenatal appointment today, where I was herded through long queues and rows of plastic chairs in order to be poked and prodded and weighed and measured by the midwives. The only noteworthy thing that happened was hearing the baby's heartbeat on the doppler. I started to tear up, which I almost did at the ultrasound as well. I think I've got my emotions and intellect wrapped around the existence of this new life, and then I get ambushed by this wave of butterflies and tears every now and then.

In non-baby related news, Tom and I went to see Knots last night, which is a dance/theatre show written by psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Interweaved through the dancing were words written by Laing that spoke of the knots and impasses we find ourselves tied up by in relationships. More than once I recognized myself. I think you'd have to be superhuman to NOT recognize yourself in these statements, all written in a logical form that shows the words reflected in themselves. Many of these statements were repeated over and over by the dancers until they lost all meaning and simply became like a mantra, an obsession that is clung to when nothing else makes sense. One of my favourites, due to it's simplicity and insidiousness, is this one:

I don稚 feel good

therefore I am bad

therefore no one loves me.

I feel good

therefore I am good

therefore everyone loves me.

I am good

You do not love me

therefore you are bad. So I do not love you.

I am good

You love me

therefore you are good. So I love you.

I am bad

You love me

therefore you are bad.

today's tantalizing craving: skor blizzard from dairy queen. It's just not gonna happen but that doesn't stop the drooling!

the starting gate (week 6):

a hint of difference? (week 8):

just imagining the bump (week 11):

candy? what candy? (week 12):

the infamous brown trousers (week 13):

get me some maternity jeans already... (week 14):

hello bump! (week 16):

it seems that I have inadvertently killed the comment function on my page by trying to make it more spam-proof. Hopefully it won't be too long before I get comments back up and running!! sorry about that folks...

Edit: I fixed it! Just a bit of googling and GM Installation for Dummies required.

writing is just thinking of one word after another and recording them onto some kind of medium, right? such a simple concept, and yet so complex.

I am feeling placid. I am feeling placid today. I felt placid yesterday, but only after I got home. Am I confusing placid with fatigue? I was feeling so pleased with my placidity a few days ago that I started to doubt it, fearing it would prove to be temporary, and then I had a very un-placid evening. But overall, I am placid.

I suppose it all comes back down to the fact that my brain is doused with large amounts of hormones, many of which are designed to make me feel like doing two things: 1. eating 2. sleeping. I am obeying my hormones, and end up most nights wrapped in a duvet on the couch, ben & jerry's in hand and sex and the city on the laptop. yes, I am enjoying it while it lasts.

while I sleep, the large amount of hormones in my brain also seem to have the effect of creating really detailed, complex dreams. The other day I found myself dreaming about pastries, looking down into a showcase overflowing with beautiful, flowing croissant curlicues with chocolate and icing sugar decorating the top. there were so many to choose from! it was like heaven. and then I rolled over and realized that it was morning and my stomach was rumbling. Last night I dreamed of an art-installation toilet, with singing dancing light fixtures and modernist vents in the walls that would dry and condition your hands. it was like heaven. and then I rolled over and realized that it was 3am and I was bursting to pee. My dreams are definitely trying to tell me something, but it's usually not too hard to figure out what.

I am somewhat afraid that my brain is actually shrinking from the effects of all these hormones, and that I will come out of this experience much duller and slower than i was before. But if I get to keep the placidity and dodge out of the path of post-partum depression, it would be worth it. If not, well, I don't know what. The placidity is like a giant pool of peaceful molasses preventing me from thinking of anything remotely close to retribution. evolution is pretty darn clever...

3.14

Wistules

As in, "The wistules took me back to the days when we would cook coffee over the campstove, and drink it in the fresh morning mountain air."

It's the perfect word for olfactory memory - I imagine particles of wistfulness wafting into one's brain. Credit for this one goes to Tom, who came up with it this morning over pancakes.

I was standing in an enormous old ballroom with Tom and his dad, and as I looked around I noticed that the wallpaper was starting to peel off the walls. All around the edges, at the corners and baseboards, great sheets of paper were lifting off and curling up as if they'd been starched. This peeling wallpaper bothered me, and so I went in search of someone in the house who could tell me how to fix it. I found a wise old aristocrat who advised me to take a package of tinned meat (spam?) to Tom's dad and I would be able to fix the room then. I returned with the package, and gave it to Tom's dad, who was now dressed appropriately for a holiday in India or something, with white walking shorts and sunglasses. Next thing I knew I was smoothing down lovely new coloured wallpaper, and the room looked like it was ready for the next few years. I had the feeling that this ritual had to be performed on a regular basis, and the aristocrat just waited around for the next person to arrive and take this task upon themselves.

This dream seems to be representing my nesting instinct, which normally appears as a small voice that says, "wouldn't it be nice to have an extra bedroom to decorate as a nursery?" or as a compulsion to paint shelves, rearrange furniture, sort baby clothes and pull up the manky linoleum in the bathroom. I've been resisting these urges, partly because we still haven't got firm plans for where we will be post-phd, and partly because we don't have a lot of extra money to buy piles of baby furniture and decorate a nursery. But the anxiety still comes and goes from time to time. I know something will work out, tom will find a job and we will have somewhere to live, but I get impatient and want to know NOW what that something is going to be. I'd like to either begin the difficult process of uprooting and packing early, or put my roots down a little deeper here and get settled in and as stable as possible before we pass into family-dom.

What I don't understand in the dream is the offering of tinned meat. Why do I need to give the gift of spam before I can re-wallpaper the room? Tom's dad doesn't even like meat - in real life he's a vegetarian, and would most certainly never be caught dead wearing white walking shorts and sunglasses.

Usually I try to write something coherent, where I have a theme for each post and I try to tell an anecdote or something that illustrates that theme.

However, I regret to inform you all that pregnancy-brain has set in and I cannot coherently compose a coherent blog post about my personal experience to save my life. see, there. I incoherently repeated myself. I hope my former brain comes back hand-in-hand with my former body.

so, sit back and enjoy a rambling list of things that are going on in michelle's head right now:

- I've been scheduled to do my driving test on April 27th. I feel semi-competent, but really need to work on parking, reversing around corners and uphill starts.

- I am eating all day, every day. I am an eating and sleeping machine. I also seem to have lost so much of my energy that I can barely drag my butt at a leisurely walking pace around the route that I used to RUN a couple of times a week.

- I am going to see the ballet on April 6th - a Russian Ballet school's performance of swan lake. I feel very posh saying that I am going to the ballet, and I am really looking forward to it.

- I woke up this morning at 7am, starving and freaked out by my freaky dreams. They are just getting more and more weird and detailed, although I feel like 99.9999% of the details are forgotten even before I wake up. See preggo-brain above. Anyway, this morning I could only remember one dream in which a strange man wanted to send a hedgehog down an enormous flight of stairs in a small shopping basket. He set the frightened hedgehog into the basket, and then put the hedgehog's luggage beside him, and was about to start wheeling him over to the top of the stairs. I was so scared for the hedgehog, because it seemed like he was already hanging on to the wire basket rather precariously, and the holes were big enough for him to fall through on the bumpy ride down the stairs. Later this morning I remembered a story told to me by a girl who fell down the stairs when she was 7 1/2 months pregnant, because she fainted while carrying a big drum of restaurant cooking oil. Yeah, scary.

- the hedgehog has started to do perceptible gymnastics and karate kicks in the evenings when I sit down to relax on the couch. Which is totally cool and one of the best parts of the Pregnant Experience so far. I started looking forward to it, and then couldn't feel any movement for what felt like a really long time. Just when I had been starting to relax into this thing I get hit with the worry again! I have a sneaking suspicion that this will be a recurring theme.

- i saw a pair of gorgeous dolce & gabanna sunglasses while out shopping with the girls yesterday, and came home thinking about how I could possibly justify buying designer sunglasses. "They make me look like a model!!" didn't seem to carry that much weight with my superego anymore. Today I decided that I'd rather have a rocking chair. Goodbye, carefree Michelle! See you in 25 years!!

How I can waste so much time.

This week has been grey and cloudy, someone in the house is withdrawing from nicotine (again) and I just CAN'T get in gear to get anything done. All the things that normally get me kick-started - a long walk, yoga, working on writing assignments, going to the gym - none of these are working this week. I have stalled.

hello, world? I'd like more sunshine, please.