I have a bunch of things to do in the next 48 hours, whichwould make for exceptionally BORING entries, so i thought I’d pose a few questions, and offer myself up for answers.

Q for the Mamas reading along:

What was the most surprising thing about the whole pregnancy/motherhood trip that you weren’t expecting? I mean, I expect to be sleep-deprived, and I expect to have sore nipples and raw girlyparts and be a little emotional, but what snuck up on you?  (I mean, I can expect  all that, but I know I won’t understand it until it happens….)

On that same line, what was the most exciting/happy/positive thing, and what was the most challenging thing?

And for answers:

Are there any questions you’ve wanted to ask? Ask them! Big or little, I’ll do my best to answer them.

My mom came last night (well, I picked her up)and we went to see the traveling production of "The Full Monty" at MCA.  Even though we were in the last row, balcony, seats, it was still a great show. It’s kind of hard to have a bad seat at MCA, because it’s so small, but you never know… anyway, it was great. I’m glad I used my student tickets on that show.

Today she went with me to my OB appointment.  She thought it was cool to hear the heartbeat on the doppler, which they didn’t do when she had us, and liked meeting my doctor as well.  It was weird, the doc was asking me if I’d felt movement (yes) and when she was doppler. . .ing, there were sounds of the widget wiggling around. I could feel the wiggling at the same time as the sound, and it was just WEIRD.  The doc could feel the wiggling from the outside, too. I can’t — when I press down, all I feel is my pulse, and then that distracts me. I imagine an OB has years of experience to be able to discern those little bumps.  I got my permission slip to do the prenatal fitness class at the Y, and they are scheduling my ultrasound for after January 1, at my request, due to the big insurance switcheroo, so that’s good.

After that, we did some shopping (bleh) and had lunch, and my dad picked her up at around 5. I’m working on a menu for the holiday weekend, and it is just nowhere near as cool as corntastico’s (mine’s like, "Ham, sweet potatoes, salad, and uhh, some kind of veggie and pie") and working on my shopping list for the holiday meals (namely Christmas brunch and dinner), and the annual breadbaking of 12/24, and the dessert for Inlaw Eve. I also had my plans to go to the cookie swap dashed by a final, dammit, so I’m going to make some quick and dirty fudge and drop it off with my regards, because I was pleased to be invited.  Thursday morning, I think I’m going to go back to my old school, the one where I taught, as it’s their last student half-day. I ran into the social studies teacher at Olive Garden, who gave me the scoop, and it might be nice to go in on a day like that and see my kids and coworkers and such, and then go to the uni after.

So! things I need to do:

1. FInalize menu
2. Make grocery list based on final menu
3. Grocery shop
4. Put away groceries (I hate that part)
5. Make fudge for Wednesday cookie swap that I can’t attend
6. 12/23 Bake cake for dessert
7. 12/24 Bake 6 loaves of bread
8. 12/24 Make pudding for dessert
9. 12/24 Put dessert together
10. 12/24 Inlaw Eve
11. 12/25 Brunch with Dave and parents
12. 12/25 Dinner with Dave and parents and MIL

And, oh yeah, write an assessment tomorrow before my final on Wednesday. Sigh. I just want to take a NAP!

We should really have people over more often. As it is, I can count on one hand the times we’ve had people here for Something. There was the housewarming/anniversary party in October 2004, my MIL joining us for dinner last Christmas night, and tonight we’re having Matt (Dave’s coworker) and his fiancee Sara over to eat pizza and watch Elf. Okay, so I guess I can count on one Simpsons-after-a-meatcutting-accident-hand. We aren’t very social. (I count my MIL and not my family, since my family is here all the time, and my MIL has only ever been here that once. My folks are informal guests; my MIL, formal.)

So, today has been spent cleaning, really cleaning not just decluttering, although there was a lot of that, too. I have chocolate chip cookies in the oven, and a citrus candle burning, and of course, an 8 foot balsam fir in my living room, so it smells mighty delicious in here.  I wrapped all of the gifts I have for people today, minus stocking gifts, and they are under the tree. My grandma’s gift arrived today, and is waiting to be deposited with our belated anniversary gift.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish more of the reorganization upstairs, at least enough to make the guest room guest-able again. I’m meeting my Dad halfway to pick up my Mom,who will be going with me to see ‘The Full Monty’ at MCA. She’ll stay the night, and then go to my appointment with me in the morning. She hasn’t heard the heartbeat yet, beyond the .WAV file I uploaded in the pregnancy journal, so she might find that neat.

Either way, the house is clean! YUM.

School is winding down. I don’t have any more classes, just a final next Wednesday. I finished my multimedia class, but still have two projects for the other two classes.  I’ll create my assessment over the weekend, or, well, Monday I guess, either way, the plan is to turn it in when I take my final.  My instructional design projoect — aiyiyi. That one is a winter break project, basically. My prof is cool with this (he’s also my boss); it’s just that I truly feel like the first half, at least, of the semester was swallowed up by a first trimester abyss. I really need to focus on the ID project after everything is done. I do best to just focus down on one thing and finish before starting another, which is why it feels good to have multimedia wrapped up. I wrap up assessment, and then I can do ID. It will all work out, even if I have to take an incomplete, it’s not a big deal. It WILL get done.

On top of the first tri abyss, this has been one of the most demanding semesters a student in my program can have. ID and assessment are reknowned as the ‘tough’ classes, and to have them concurrently has sucked. I’m the only one this year to do it, and other IT majors have cringed at the thought. SPring, though, will be cake in comparison, from what I’ve heard on the street.  Plus there’s that cool bonus of gettin’ me a baby at the end.

I’ll finish in the fall, practicum and a seminar, and be done. Done is good. Done is freakin’ GREAT.  Who knows what I’ll do for work, in the end. I was thinking today that I’m really passionate about education, but passionate about what I see as the bullshit that affects kids lives, and so passionate that I can’t fathom teaching again because of the massive amounts of crap that districts, admins, school boards, and teachers themselves create. I dont plan on teaching at all, but I hope I can still work on changing the way education IS, in some way.

And besides, a master’s degree in SOMETHING is better than nothing. I’ll always have my education, no matter what.

Dance, Dance, Revolution? Seriously? I am FASCINATED by the demographic the game gets in the union, I tell you, FASCINATED. And that’s all for today, because I almost forgot to post.

Today was my original due date. I wasn’t sad about it, because I’m pregnant again, and things are going well (knock wood), but it was a weird thing to contemplate.  I woke up with an inexplicable swollen lip — haven’t been punched or bitten recently, and it’s not a cold sore, just a giant swollen lip, so, weird — and had some tea and took a shower and shaved my legs and just sort of lounged around.

There was a knock on the door as I was drinking my tea, and it was DHL, with a box stuffed to the breaking point with books from an NYC friend who works for a major kids book publisher.  Such great books! Including, "Oh, David!" which Dave really got a kick out of, of course.  And some soft cloth books, and board books, and holiday books,and poetry books. Just — so great. It totally turned the day around from looking back, to looking forward. Yeah, I was imagining this day for several weeks in the spring as being my introduction to parenthood, and that damn tax deduction! (I’m still pissed about the tax thing. I’m far too practical.) But instead, I shipped a box to my sister, I went and adjusted a cursor size for one of my clients in the retirement home, I picked up giftcards and groceries, and did about a million puzzles on jigzone.com, and kept rifling through the big box o’ books that will be put on the shelves in the baby’s room soon. 

And now the day is almost over. Tomorrow, I have the appointment with the breast surgeon at around one, and of course, I hope it all works out to be okay.

We put up our christmas tree today.  Whylime wrote a great post about walking the line of celebrating christmas as a non-christian, which is something that I struggle with, too.

In my family, christmas has never been about the baby jesus, but about celebrating with family and friends in the middle of winter, when it can get pretty bleak, otherwise. We always had a tree, and stockings, and Santa, and reindeer that preferred whiskey to carrots, because it ‘kept them warm on their long journey.’ Made sense to me.  Celebrating christmas has always been one of the fondest memories of my childhood — the year we got sleds, and a note from Santa telling us to have fun and be careful, and the hours spent on them afterwards, a sawhorse at the bottom of the driveway warning cars off, and all the kids on the street taking advantage of our steep driveway with the big turn.  Or, the christmas that I got the doll that peed and got a rash, and for the doll, I got a carriage and a highchair, and my little sister gave the doll a permanent rash with red marker, and Danny B sat in the carriage and broke it at brunch.  I was so pissed. But I still remember that as a good time, too.  Or the year my sister got a Rainbow Brite doll, and was so happy she cried. It’s one of the best pictures in our house, my sister, all of 6 or 7, on her knees, clutching Rainbow Brite to her chest, head thrown back, mouth open, about to burst into tears at the happiness of Santa getting her letter.

We only spent the holiday away from our home twice — once as very young children, I was maybe 6? And Kate 3? in Texas with my grandparents, and once in western New York, an unexpected trip that was made in the middle of the night on the 23rd, arriving on the 24th, just in time for my mom to be with her mother as she passed away on the 27th.  We were there for almost 2 weeks, in the old farmhouse with no fireplace, and no christmas tree, our stockings hung on doorknobs and the ‘tree’ was a little 12inch white plastic with blue metallic balls centerpiece tree that sat on the coffee table.  It was almost 2 weeks of lake effect snow, as well, my dad driving my mom and her sisters at 15mph from State Line to the hospital in Erie, and then preparing for Nana’s funeral the night before, my older cousins finding me a poem to read while I watched Miss Piggy and Kermit help host Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve.

Other than that, it was always at the lake. And because we had no local family, my parents always hosted a big brunch on christmas morning, made up of our local ‘family,’ the people in our town who also had nowhere special to go.  Only twice, until last year, had my parents not held a brunch on christmas morning. It had started in 1972, when they were first married, and lived in a cabin that was only accessible by snowmobile, and it moved and grew over time. Now that we’re in our own house, though, they have enjoyed the quieter holiday.  The reason the brunch started in the first place is now the reason they’ve stopped — they have local family.

Today, when we picked out the tree, it took us 20 minutes, anyway.  Half a dozen other families or couples* came and went while we tried to decide on a balsam fir or frasier fir, and we ended up with a nice, narrow, balsam.  We moved the furniture and brought it in, adjusted it and strung the lights, and my parents called to take us to lunch.  After lunch, they came back here, and my mom and I trimmed out the rest of the tree, and Dave tied on the star. Now, the house smells like balsam (YUM) and the tree is beautiful, and I love it.  Through the whole process, all I could think was that, next year, there would be a baby here, who might be fascinated by the lights and ornaments and scents of the holidays. Or, you know, it might shriek in terror and the giant green monster that’s invaded the living room. Either way.

I imagine for us, we will do Santa and presents and stockings and such, and when the kid gets older and wonders why we don’t include church in any of it, we’ll explain, like my folks did with us.  I don’t plan to be an all-out-overboard with gifts type of parent (corntastico has a great format, with getting things in specific categories, which I will probably totally steal when the time comes), but there will be gifts.  And of course, Muppets.

I’ll post pics of the tree soon, it needs some shiny wrapped gifts underneath to make it look just right, and I haven’t gotten that far yet. Sure does smell delicious and look beautiful though, and yay! for sustainable forestry, local business/ag support, and the mulch it will be turned into by the city for the parks next spring. Just in case you wondered what my political leanings on real trees were. 🙂

*At the lot, we saw our old asshat neighbors — the ones that drove us insane with their fighting and drinking and smoking and loud music and OHMIGOD are we ever thankful this holiday season to be the hell out of that situation. We weren’t sure if it was them at first, and I suggested we ask her to shriek "OH GOD I FUCKIN’ HATE YOU" to check, but Dave thought that was a bad plan. What asshats. I can’t believe they’re still together, and neither of them is dead or in a body cast. SHUDDER.