Painting

We had a very productive Saturday as we got all the painting done in the new nursery.  Painting is definitely work, but I have to admit to enjoying it a bit, at least as much as you can enjoy anything that isn't an actual leisure activity.  We did 3 walls in the light pink color and 1 wall in the red paint.  This was the first time I've used Benjamin Moore paint and I was so pleased with it.  The red wall only took 2 coats to get really nice coverage (except for a 3rd coat on a little of the brush work), which I couldn't believe.  This is the 3rd red wall or room I've painted and I always had to do 3 or 4 coats with the paint from Lowe's or Home Depot.  Benjamin Moore may have just made a loyal customer.

These pictures are, of course, of Grace painting sometime last week.  I regret to admit that we were not so adorable while doing our share of the painting in our home.  Grace was off at my parents for the day, a large part of why we were able to finish the whole project, down to clean-up, by 4pm.  It's amazing how much more productive one can be without a toddler running around!  I know-- what an amazing revelation!  We so appreciated my parents spending the day with Grace.  One wonderful thing about moving back to Texas is being close to my parents again.  They live about 45 minutes away so we don't have overlapping social circles or see them on weeknights or whatever, but I so appreciate having them accessible and close.  I'm not someone who gets homesick or sad when living far away from family but still, being near is wonderful.

After the painting and picking up Grace, I went with my mom to hear my dad play at a CD recording their church had.  My dad was playing guitar and mandolin there a mere 24 hours after returning from a trip to Ireland, just a week after playing at an open mic night at a coffee house over in their side of the Metroplex.  Live music, international travel, recording sessions-- yeah, it turns out that my dad has a way more happening life than me.  And their church is way more rock & roll than the church Rob and I go to here.  Seriously, one time I left a Sunday morning service there with tinnitus like I'd been at a club or something.  I'm open to pretty much anything as far as musical styles at church so it was generally lots of fun.  What I'm not open to is the deep mistrust of science within conservative evangelical circles getting reinforced from the pulpit.  Grrrrrrr...  There was a little speaking and one of the leaders made a brief condescending comment about the Large Hadron Collider. I don't want to overemphasize it, because it was just a few seconds in a whole evening that was largely great, but oh, how things like that madden me...  It's attitudes like this that make books like this and this necessary ("The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind"-- HA!) and give the world outside Christian circles, especially the educated world, good reason to dismiss us as backward and ignorant.  And more importantly, it is not what Christians are called to; it's a perversion of what Christian faith should be.  This particular brand of hogwash makes me appreciate the church we were part of in New Haven; it is certainly not a perfect place but as it sometimes seemed like half the people making up the church had PhDs or were on their way to having them, nobody would have pulled that there.  I find myself disappointed and distracted by such things.

Nursery Design Fun

I am just at the beginning of my 3rd trimester, depending on how exactly you prefer to do the math.  This means there is a BABY COMING, dear reader, and we have got to get ourselves ready.  Somehow this translates in my head to decorating a bedroom, although as I've stated before I realize there is some logical fallacy there, given our parenting choices and habits.  Oh well, better to decorate and organize this room now than after we have a new tiny tyrannical human with us, right?  Anyway, the cute fabrics are from IKEA and were super affordable.  I'm going to do curtains (combining both fabrics) for the two windows and a dust ruffle (just the hippos) for the crib.  We don't use a bumper (dangerous) and I have enough crib sheets, so that's about it for textiles.  I couldn't decide between pink and red, so at the suggestion of my mom (good idea, Mom!) we're using both.  (I am secretly very pleased with this because with just one wall in this room painted red, I think I can still get away with painting the dining room red in the future.  I chortle with crimson-addicted glee!)

OK, I shall cease with the excessive parentheses now.

I was really excited this week to get our Tiffany Ard art in the mail.  And we've decided on a name:

Yes, even though Grace has the purple room right now.  There will be plenty of time for doing things color-coordinated with her name in the years to come.  Rob and I are painting this Saturday while my parents spend the day playing with Grace; I know that Rob agreeing to do this with me is a real expression of his love for me given his marked dislike for painting tasks.  I'm going to try to get all the prep done today so we can really just get in there and paint tomorrow.

In other baby preparation efforts, I recently opened up all the boxes of Grace's outgrown clothes and organized them.  It temporarily soothed the organizing, nesting compulsions flowing through me to fill the drawers of the baby's new dresser with little tiny clothes organized by size and type of garment.

And seriously, these are some TINY CLOTHES.  It is hard to believe that Grace was so small a mere two-and-a-half years ago, and harder still to believe that a new tiny person is coming.  Really newborn babies are so seldom seen in public (for good reason, what with their immature immune systems) that it seems just laughably impossible for a human being to be so tiny.  For scale, here is a shot with my hand in it:

Not Right in the Head

Lately I've been dealing with some of the more disorienting symptoms of pregnancy; in other words, I am losing my mind.  The hormonal fog has invaded my brain and turned what was once a nicely organized set of synapses into mush.  This happened to me with Grace as well; I was still a postdoc working in astronomy research then and I did such nonsensical things to code and databases and observing queues.  This time around, I have tried to go to an OB appointment one week before it was actually scheduled, I have left important ingredients out of recipes (you know, ingredients that figure prominently in the name of the dish), and a few days ago when Grace asked me for her crayons, I opened the refrigerator to get them for her.  Yesterday, I totally spaced out on my weekly women's group at church and just didn't go.  Even though it is on my calendar and everything.  It is disorienting to be this way because it feels so out of character for me.  If I try to describe it, I would say that it feels like I cannot focus and hold my brain where it needs to be, that my brain is slack and plodding.  It is bewildering to experience this, because even beyond my self-identification as a bookish smartypants type, my tendency to be detail-oriented, sensible, and organized is pretty core to my understanding of who I am.  Who the heck am I now?

Also bewildering is the hormonal shift in my emotional balance.  I have been, how shall we say... a bit on the crazy side.  It is disconcerting to firmly grasp that under normal circumstances whatever has just happened would not normally bother me that much and at the same time to be seething with anger or bawling.  Whatever is going on physiologically is enough to make my feelings careen into uncharted disorder but not enough to make me unaware of how deranged I am.  It's difficult to know how precisely to think about such a state of affairs.  Because of my spiritual beliefs I believe that we as human beings are more than just the sum of the biochemical firings of our gray matter, so it's a metacognitive challenge to deal with the state of my physical body having such an obvious effect on the state of my emotions/soul/spirit/what-have-you.

 

And I'm starting to have trouble sleeping, which is no doubt contributing to my mental and emotional issues.  This too is really common; hormones running amok and getting up to pee multiple times and growing larger and unwieldy all conspire to place a good night's sleep out of reach for many pregnant women.  The pregnancy books seem to largely imply that the sleep issue is all in my head (worry about impending motherhood, etc), which makes me want to go all River Tam on them.  I mean, yes, there is some stress in my life right now (feeling out of place here in Dallas, soon I will be mothering TWO tiny individuals) but honestly I think the sleep issues are exacerbating such stress, not the other way around.  I'm experimenting with exercising more and cutting out daytime naps in the hopes that I will sleep better at night.  So far, I can tell you that I am much more sleepy come 8pm but the jury is still out on whether I will end up being more rested.

So to sum up, pregnancy kind of sucks.  And at the end of it, there's labor, which is also not so great.  Babies, on the other hand-- babies are really fantastic.  I love babies, and toddlers, and children, and all that, and I love being a mother.  This has been the most interesting, fulfilling, challenging thing I've ever spent my energy and time and intellect doing.  I know that we are really fortunate to have gotten pregnant twice without trouble or heartache or medical intervention, and I do count it as a huge blessing in our life.  Being pregnant again does make me think more deeply about growing our family in the future, though.  Rob and I have always been really open to adoption.  Before we started trying to conceive, we talked about what we would do if we had trouble.  We definitely had unity on this; we were willing to try something like Clomid but weren't willing to try something like IVF.  We would adopt.  I know that I would have mourned missing out on the life experience of pregnancy but neither one of us really cares that much about having a genetic link to our children.  Heck, we don't care if we have the same skin color as our children.  I know that the process of adopting a child is long and challenging and painful, as our friends James and Kim can currently attest to, so I don't mean to imply that we would adopt a child because it's easier.  Rather, why would we have a third biological child when we're concerned about the problem of already-existing children without families and the environment and I don't have any desire to be pregnant again?  I think my biological drive to procreate has been sated at this point and I can consider these other issues.  So since this is most likely my last pregnancy (although hopefully not our last child), I will attempt to live in the moment and appreciate the beautiful things about being pregnant, to look beyond the physical difficulties and remember that there is a tiny new human being growing inside of me, a teensy passenger who I will be lucky enough to count as a member of my family and to kiss and hold and know from the first moments of her life.

Missile Defense

In the early morning, Grace is a mommy-seeking missile.  Her normal time for rousing is around 6am, give or take thirty minutes or so.  We hear her moan and complain incoherently in her room for a few beats, then we hear her tiny toddler feet slap-slap-slap down the hardwood floor of the hall toward our room as she half-asleep wails, "Mommymommymommymommymommy..."  She climbs into our bed and my arms, curling up so that the curve of her tiny spine nestles against my ever-rounder belly, and the largely unintelligible grumbling quiets into peace as she falls back into a deeper sleep.  My eyes barely open through the whole process but I feel her warm, perfect toddler skin and smell her sweet hair fresh from her bath the night before and hear the breath slowly whooshing in and out of her diminutive lungs.  She sleeps for another hour or so, and although I am so OVER all-night cosleeping at this stage of pregnancy, it seems a flawlessly restful, somnolent hour.  When she finally awakens, she asks me, "Are we awake?"  When I answer in the affirmative, she contradicts me in a sing-song treble, "No, not yet!" and snuggles in for a few more moments of her fleeting toddlerhood.

Skirting the Issue

I've been thinking about clothes again.  More specifically, I've been thinking about how much more I like skirts than pants.  There are, of course, many reasons why they are superior.   I don't know if it's just a quirk of my posture or what, but I really do think they are more comfortable than pants. (By pants, I mean "real" pants.  I love a stretchy pair of yoga/sweat pants and mourn their unsuitability for most functions in even my SAHM life.)  And don't even get me started on jeans; I think jeans have to be the most uncomfortable items of clothing in a woman's closet.  I remember watching an episode of the U.S. version of What Not to Wear where the victim claimed that jeans were uncomfortable and that the entire world must be operating under a mass delusion to make them the casual uniform of choice.  It was refreshing to hear someone whose experience with jeans is so similar to my own.  Of course, such a feeling led this particular person to live her life in pajama pants and stained T-shirts, which isn't the path I'd prefer.  Fortunately, I have another option: skirts!  Cooler in warm weather than even shorts, easier to get to fit, and just straight-up more comfortable.  I do prefer to wear pants on the coldest days because I am undecided on whether wearing tights under a skirt is a comfy option-- are they basically yoga pants (my clothing nirvana) with feet, or a torturous item of clothing likely to sag down and constrict?  I still vacillate on that dilemma.  Fortunately, I now live in a climate where it is prime skirt-wearing weather for all but a few weeks a year.

My fondness for dresses and skirts is based on aesthetics and comfort and is not at all ideological.  I feel like I have to make that clear because of my years of being homeschooled and living in a cultural milieu where it sometimes was.  Homeschooling families are an interesting and diverse bunch, but there always seems to be a strong representation from the extreme far-right crowd with their women and girls wearing ankle-length old-fashioned dresses and hair grown philosophically long.  I must admit that several times a year something will remind me of the whole "modest clothing" scene and I end up googling and reading blogs and whatnot for a day.  It's the worst kind of voyeurism; I mentally snigger but these clothes, just a few tiny steps away from Quaker plain dress or traditional Mennonite garb, engross me.  It must appeal to me at some level or it wouldn't absorb me on occasion.  I must be modest-clothing-curious.

Actually, I can explain the appeal to some extent.  I love clothes and I think it is so interesting how we use them to identify ourselves to others and send a message about who we are.  That message can range from "I want to fit in" to "I am not part of the crowd" to "My baby spits up a lot and my life doesn't have room for a lot of time for myself these days".  I feel an affinity for people who dress outside the cultural norm; clothes do tell the people around us something about ourselves so why not go with it?  And wouldn't the world be more fun if there were more people dressed like they're going to a steampunk convention or Burning Man?  My own sartorial desires lean toward a sexy-librarian/1950s vintage look, sort of like the (rather annoying) Kenley on the current season of Project Runway or the oft-referenced-by-me Erin at A Dress A Day.  Who knows?  Perhaps someday soon I shall go full-on eccentric.