fozzy wocka baby update

so, how's the baby?

how should i know, can i see in there?? no. but as far as i know things are aok. at my doctor's appointment last week its heartbeat was rockin along while she prescribed me more antibiotics for the BV (which if you don't know what it is and you aren't a lady, i'm warning you, you probably don't want to know, ew).

this is week 18, four and a half months. 154 days to go or something. the internet says its as big as a bell pepper or a baked potato, which i bought at the grocery last night. this week it can officially hear stuff from the outside. and next week we (hopefully, cross your fingers that he/she cooperates better than it did at the ultrascreen) get to find out the sex!! wheee! and if it has a sex then it can have a name which i am definitely looking forward to.

and ps, i am totally against telling anyone what names we are thinking of because A.) I don't care what you think B.) I don't want to hear your opinion C.) If you tell me all about how you don't like it or suggest other names, it will only make me mad because we've already decided. for more on this controversy, read here.

it doesn't feel like my belly is any bigger, but jon has convinced me that it grows in spurts or something. in the next two weeks it is supposed to be super-growing time so we'll see. i think i have felt it move most every day since the one time of ultimate moving, but it hasn't really been like that again. it's all, poke, poke, bump, not KICK KICK PUNCH. lame, baby. lame. other than that things are uneventful. i feel fine, sometimes my back hurts if i have too much activity in one day. i had planned to keep exercising all the way through with walking and whatnot but the back pain has limited me more than i had planned. and sometimes, like last night, i have trouble sleeping and dream really weird dreams about this guy (yes, Tag from friends) being my cousin and taking me on a motorcycle ride through the country to drop off an envelope at the hospital.

in other news

we took our darling fur-babies to the vet last week to get their various illnesses checked out. bang has an upper respiratory infection but (thankfully) not pneumonia. you know how they find that out? chest x-ray, cha-ching! and nico is also on his standard round of antibiotics and steroids for his ear infection situation. and guess who else is on antibiotics? me! so jon, feeling left out yet? don't you need to catch some kind of weird infection so you can take antibiotics with the team?

bangerang

this is really exactly what having a bulldog is like.

portraits of a pregnant lady watching tv with her dogs

unexplained disappearance

you may have wondered where the hell i went for 5 days. or, not. but either way here i am back again. jon and i took some days off work and went to pittsburgh to visit his sister and her hubs and their dogs for a mini vacation post-birthday. oh yeah, and it was my birthday back there last wednesday. that too.

pittsburgh was fun though i don't know why the cold weather police had to come and rain on my vacation parade the entire time. our dogs were assholes, as usual. bang apparently has some kind of cold/cough/disease because she started sneeze and coughing and choking (i was typing really fast there and typed, cocking... heh) and a lot of yellow snot now flies out of her face every few minutes. it's charming. and nico insisted on either A.) crying all night long OR B.) sleeping in bed with us. both options = very little sleep for me. ugh, i could have punched him right in his dog mouth, but i didn't. so we ate foods, and hung out prego-meets-prego, and jon and dan put up baseboards in their house, and we generally just relaxed.

birthday was pretty uneventful. jon and i had a mediterranean fiesta. we got 20 billion kinds of lebanese foods and then ate them and watched horrible movies and ghost hunters and ate cake. that is all. also, my driver's licence expired and i showed up at the wrong ohio bmv branch 5 minutes after the right one closed. so now i can't legally drive. and i'm 25.

oh! exciting. i did feel the baby move. at target. and not just move he/she was practicing karate in there and going to town like crazy for like 10 minutes. hearing people describe it as "popcorn" or "butterflies" or whatever other gay metaphor they use is not accurate at all. you know what feeling your baby move inside you feels like? a crazy alien moving inside you. imagine that. and since then? nothing. zip. our baby is a jerk and is torturing me for fun. i asked jon what if those had been its final throws of death and that's why it never moves again- which he did not find funny at all. i don't think i was trying to be funny, i was channeling prego-crazy. i have a lot of anxiety.

annnndd..... what else? here i am back at the office. didn't you miss me?? everyone around here could tell i was back from vacation when the receptionist paged someone and i accidentally yelled out, "WHO THE FUCK IS REBECCA BROWN?" whoops.

dilemma

i had to go pick up dog food the other night because nico has been eating bang's puppy food for a few days now and it was about time i actually went to the store. i love the pet supplies plus store we go to because they have all the super premium dog foods that other places just don't carry. really the only down side of going there is that the "staff" (if you can call them that) consists of 16 year old high schoolers. and i give them props for actually having a job, you go kids! don't be lazy! but the store's policy is supposed to be that they help you carry all this dog food around.

well this has never happened since the beginning. in fact i always took a certain amount of pleasure in stomping to the very back shelf of the store, picking up our 40 lb bag (or 2 bags, recently) of dog food and carrying them up to the checkout myself. no, i don't need help carrying this to my car 5 feet out the door considering i already carried it 50 feet to the register. but thanks, really.

but now i'm not supposed to carry heavy things and i've been experiencing some pretty horrendous back pain. so when i went in to get the dog food i had a dilemma- do i make them go carry it, and how? i don't look pregnant so it's not a very useful excuse at this point. jon says yes, just stand at the counter and make them go fetch all the things i need. but this time, i just went and carried it myself. it's just too awkward. maybe next time. now i'm going to go eat my third nutri grain bar in a row because i am all woozy and have the shakes for some reason and i might pass out. ta!

beating a dead horse

first thing i read when i came into work this morning: Pope says condoms not the answer in fight against AIDS.

"You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms," the pope told reporters aboard the Alitalia plane headed to Yaounde, Cameroon. "On the contrary, it increases the problem."

really? really? do i even have to tell you how not true this is? new pope is mad scary.

in great anticipation

for my birthday on wednesday i have declared to jon that we will watch all my favorite movies, which he hates because they are all genuinely awful. this picture is what i imagine it would look like if you put 300, deathrace, doomsday, eastern promises, and taken into a bag, shook it around, and dumped it out on a table:

100% pure awesomeness.

i've found the lord, and lo, but he is good.

jon and i stayed up late (well, later than i have been staying up which is really pretty lame) to catch the jon stewart vs. jim cramer interview on the daily show last night. if you weren't aware jim cramer, who hosts a show on cnbc called mad money, was invited on to the daily show and skeezed out at the last minute. jon stewart then ranted and raved about cnbc and cramer on the daily show all week and it started some kind of crazy media hype feud, a la mccain standing up letterman. now seriously, jon stewart is a comedian. on the comedy network. do you really need to get all up in arms if he makes fun of you? no. chill out guy.

as a pinnacle to this stupid feud cramer went on the show last night and jon stewart spent his entire show on the interview, trouncing cramer for being an unethical ass. and cramer, for his part, rolled over like a complete bitch and took it. all these finance gurus are coming out and saying, "dude, this financial crisis is years in the making and we so should have seen we were fucked a long time ago." meanwhile cramer, on his show, is condoning shady trading practices and saying, "WHOA OMG how did this crazy mess happen?! it's a perfect storm of finance not at all caused by our unethical practices that we condone on our show! ZOMG" that's pretty much the crux of jon stewart's argument; cramer and cnbc reported unethical crap when they should have seen this coming and taken steps to help people instead of... not.

let me just say that jon stewart is god. my god- The God. he is self-aware that he is just a guy on a comedy show, but he's just so fucking well informed and well spoken. he's insanely, insanely smart. and while a lot of tv personalities have a written script, what has always impressed me most about jon stewart is his ability to have a real, unscripted, intelligent political discussion. no one wrote this stuff for him, that is just him talking. plus, he's dreamy and stuff. (including this dream i had that he was in)

here's the interview, if you care. and below that is my favorite jon stewart moment ever, when he went on crossfire and totally tore them up.

don't fuck with god, ok? he will strike you down.

a little testy.

over the weekend we stopped by ikea to pick up some frames for these prints (here and here) that we got for the baby's room. now i love going to ikea, but the people there really get on my nerves. ohio people just can't handle all that swedish craftiness- somehow it brings out all their greatest redneck qualities. like when we went into one of the long narrow display kitchens to check out the dishwasher and this huge annoying woman comes in there also and just stands, staring, at the sink. and i'm like, standing and maneuvering towards the only exit but it's totally blocked. come on lady, take the hint, i'm waiting and waiting here for you to let me out. i'm pretty sure i ended up just running into her until she moved. and that's what our ikea is like. a few savvy designery people buying loads of stuff and hundreds of yokels wandering around saying, "dayum ma, look a what them fancy foreigners make! whatchu think that's fur? crazy. i aint buyin none that." (shuffle, shuffle, shuffle)

so while ikea is a design haven, by the time this pregnant lady made it to the checkout line i was through. through. we only had like 3 things so we hopped into the self checkout line. and of course we picked the slowest side because that's how the world works. when we got up to the machine this annoying old ikea lady walks over and is all, "I can help you over here!!" and then proceeds to pick up the self-checkout scanner and try to scan all our items which jon is juggling in his arms. i couldn't handle it. it was the final straw. i'm pretty sure i actually said, out loud, "it's self checkout for a reason. get away." and then the freaky lady stepped back and watched me get in my purse, find my credit card, scan the card, and sign. i'm assuming she was going to "help" me if i ran into problems with using my own credit card. jon thinks maybe i overreacted a little bit. NO JON. NO I DID NOT.

dream of the day

last night i dreamed that we had just moved into our house so we were having a party. somehow this party involved my friends shooting water balloons into our neighbor's windows from the roof. it was a good time because apparently if you shoot balloons into people's open windows they aren't mad, they think it's nice. it turns out that dooce* lives next door, inside chris's house. so after my friends shoot giant green water balloons into the dooce family home we all share a laugh and they come over to hang out. which really meant come over and watch bang run into stuff. that part of the dream could totally be real life. i mean, she runs into stuff all the time and it is totally hilarious. apparently this was so funny to the preggo-dooce that we were invited over later to be friends.

so jon and i went over to the dooce household, which was the top floor of chris's house. and it was all like a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms, and their living room was tiki-luau-bamboo themed. and dooce told me she didn't like it. and she was concerned that leta was at a friend's house and it was after 9pm. but not concerned enough to do anything. then her husband showed us leta's room, where the floor was covered with rens, and he said that sometimes in the morning the rens all pile together and it looks like a monster and he would show us. so we went back to their other living room (this one themed like a 70's record lounge) and then he took us around through a secret door that also goes to leta's room, and then the rens looked like a lumpy rens monster. and we were friends, but it was that awkward kind of friends where you like each other but you don' know each other very well yet, and we sat around and drank gin and tonics and watched tv in the low-couched 70's living room.

and our houses were on a hill, and it was a tall hill, and there was a taxi cab, but i can't remember...

*i am going to continue to refer to her as dooce, because i think it is creepy when people call other people they don't really know on the internet by first name. it makes it sound all stalker-ish. i already had a dream about them, let's make this as un-creepy as possible here, ok?

bump watch

#1... 8 weeks. #2... 15 weeks. grow, baby, grow! he/she is the size of an apple this week.

ps- i love brownies.

they're here!!!!

my flip flops have arrived!!!! ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! they are a replacement for a pair i bought when we went to alaska and then i was so sad to finally have to throw away last year. and when i took them out of the package, they are exactly the same as my old ones. YESSSS! ... can you feel my joy through the screen? i hope so.

and you can bet 100% that i'm wearing them right now. busting out the flip flops in the spring is a big event for me because while i love wearing high heels, wearing shoes is not really my thing. and wearing socks? forget about it. other than at the gym i can probably count the number of times a year i wear socks on one hand. i don't like to have hot, trapped feet. i've been known to wear flip flops out into the snow before (though after i got uggs, which don't require socks, i actually wear those in the winter instead.)

here's to you friday nice weather flip flop time.

and just to make up for Benny Lava...

on a more serious note, i read a really interesting article on slate about a guy who chronicled reading every word of the bible in his new book. at the risk of polarizing people, i'm going to discuss it here. though if you survived this and are still hanging around, it's probably going to be cool with you.

last year i enjoyed reading A Year of Living Biblically, by A. J. Jacobs. Jacobs spent the year learning about and trying to adhere to every minute ridiculous letter of the law in the bible, and even though i'm not religious, it was fascinating (if not slightly shallow). now i'm interested in this guy, David Plotz, who dedicated his book to reading every word of the bible. now just to be clear i've read the entire bible, just not recently. it's been a few years and i don't really remember much that matters.

slate interviewed him and i thought he had a few really interesting thoughts, including that all high schoolers should be required to read the bible- NOT as religious text, but as part of a literature class. we require students to read the classic writers (Shakespeare or the Constitution or Mark Twain) because they influence us today and plotz makes some great points about how even a non-religious person's life is influenced every day by the writings and sayings that have originated in the bible and we aren't even aware of it. it might be better than reading beowulf for a 5th time. i'm just sayin.

but, what was even more interesting to me was the conclusion he came to:

You notice that I haven't said anything about belief. I began (reading) the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.

and just in case this wasn't serious or polarizing enough, in boston this week Gill v. Office of Personnel Management was filed. the gist of the case is that gay couples, legally recognized as married in massachusetts, are not recognized as married by the federal government. the state recognizes their union but they can't file join tax returns, receive social security benefits. etc etc. everyone has been so focused on california's proposition 8 that it's kind of been put on the back burner that these people are already legally married. many of them for years. what obligation does the federal government have to recognize these individual state laws? people who voted for ron paul (barf) wanted each state to make it's own laws about these controversial type of subjects. and they've gotten their wish so far. but now how does that pan out in the larger scheme of things? is a marriage recognized by the state but not recognized by the feds really as good and equal as mine?

Benny Lava

i know these video posts kind of seem like a cop-out, and i had a serious and dramatic topic all lined up to write about today, and then this happened....

miss pudge

this last weekend sucked. hard.

moving on, i'm at the really weird point now where some days i look maaaaaybe pregnant and other days i look mostly normal. not quite showing, not fitting into my pants anymore. thursday and friday last week i looked like a cute little pregnant balloon but since then things seem to have gone back to normal. you'd think that a huge plate of delicious biscuits and gravy would pop things out but apparently not. i'm definitely most looking forward to the showing part.

the only particularly interesting development over the weekend was on saturday in the shower. when i looked down... my stomach was clearly jutting out more to the left than the right. come on little guy, stay in the middle! it's freaky looking when you jam all over to one side. i swear it wasn't just my imagination either.

oh yeah, and i almost died. we were putting up these IKEA lamps in the baby room (which look awesome) and when i went to put in the lightbulbs they were the wrong size. we bought them at IKEA where they were displayed directly next to the lamps in a huge display of BUY THESE LAMPS. well it exploded, because thanks IKEA, but those aren't the right ones. we're probably lucky i didn't get electrocuted because then we would have had to go to the hospital. but here i am, live and well with only a weird burn on my index finger.

is the winter ever going to end?? ever? 15° this morning? is that necessary? i might start boycotting going out of the house at all if this doesn't end soon. plus i bought flip flops online this morning and they will arrive in 5-7 days. i will be wearing them in 5-7 days. so hurry up warmerish weather. or else.