Thursday, October 25, 2007

I've Been Tagged

Egypt4 has tagged me for a meme:

Job’s I’ve held:
1) Restaurant hostess
2) Cocktail waitress
3) Mechanical Engineer
4) As an accountant (for the now defunct Arthur Andersen) doing Family Wealth Planning for wealthy folks - a really fun job. Lawyers are an absolute hoot to work with.

Places I’ve lived:
1) Atlanta
2) Buffalo, NY
3) New Orleans
4) small town in Texas

Food I love (must I really limit myself to four? This is going to be really hard):
1) All Ethnic Foods - never met one I didn't like yet
2) Coffee Heath Bar Crunch Ice Cream
3) A certain smoked Brook Trout I had eons ago at a bed and breakfast at Letchworth State Park in upstate New York. Pa and I ordered this as an appetizer 15 years ago and we still talk about it to this day. It is possibly the most delicious thing I have ever eaten.
4) Eating sushi with Mr. Edwards. He is simply hilarious to watch. He loves it so much that he can not stop moaning and sighing as he eats it.

Places I would rather be:
1) Someplace currently having an autumn
2) Someplace more open-minded and tolerant
3) Someplace actually addressing climate change
4) Someplace where I am not asked if I am babysitting or running a daycare. I really dread the comments once I start showing with #6

Movies I love:
1) Out of Africa
2) The Piano
3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but really any movie by the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
4) My Life without Me

TV shows I watch (OK this is going to be hard. I quit watching TV when Seinfeld went off the air, we don't have cable, and reception at our house is pretty much nonexistent. We do Netflix however so I've seen a few things):
1) Seinfeld reruns
2) The original BBC version of The Office
3) The kids and I always OD on the Home and Garden Channel when visiting my mom.
4) Frontline

Friday, October 12, 2007

Catching Up

My brain is beginning to throw off the pregnancy amnesia shackles as I make my way through the morning sickness phase (read: 24/7 constant nausea). It all seems so much worse than before. Is it because I am older? Is it because I am admittedly less over the moon about this pregnancy than my previous two? The answer I have come up with and am sticking with is this: I am just plain busier and have very little opportunity to just stop and surrender to this force. For pregnancy no. 1, I had no other children and was returning to college to work on a second degree. It was easy to catch naps and just be plain miserable for a few weeks. Ditto for pregnancy no. 2. I had one 3 year old and my mother and grandmother were temporarily living with us. Now I have 5 kids who are all being actively homeschooled, who all have classes two times a week, who want to meet their friends and play, who understandably just can't be as quiet and still as I would like. I have turned into grouchy mom and we are all marking off the days on the calendar until, knock on wood, this fatigue and and morning sickness make their exit. Despite my disposition, the kids are being troopers and really helping out with lots of chores around the house.
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A belated Happy Birthday to Mr. Laura who turned 7 last Friday! He had a very nice day with presents, lunch and a movie, and finished off with homemade peanut butter pie. He thoroughly enjoyed all of his presents which were keeping with his current interest of becoming a vet. We have read almost all of the books and played all of the games. The big hit was the Owl Puke kit he received. He has spent countless hours excavating the owl puke pellet for the bones of one unfortunate, yet tasty, little mouse. Thank you notes will be forthcoming albeit slowly.
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I thought I'd share the kids' reactions to the news of another sibling:

Miss Almanzo: Dead Silence. She was completely speechless, a first. I'm not sure if she didn't understand or if she is bothered by the news since she will no longer be the baby.

Mr. Laura: "How do you know you are going to have a baby? Who told you you could have a baby? When will it be here?"

Mary: Immediate jumping, dancing, clapping, and shouts of glee. If Mary has her way, I won't have to lift a finger as a mother of an infant. She has all ready planned out all of the baby's care. Every morning I am greeted with "I'm so excited. I just can't wait."

Mr. Garvey: "You're joking. I don't believe you. You said you were too old to have another baby." This was followed by jumping and dancing after he was convinced that it was true.

Mr. Edwards: Silent disbelief followed by "Really?" followed by "Really?" followed by the clencher "Really really?" followed by jumping and dancing.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Recent Utterances, Cosmic Humor, An Announcement, and Divine Punishment

Some conversations that I had one week in early September:

My mom: Did you know J. (my cousin) is going to have another child in April?
Me: Oh that's great! I wouldn't mind having another baby myself.
My mom: That's the last thing you need.
Me: Don't worry, I'm getting too old for that anyway.

I relayed the above conversation to Pa and we had the following conversation:

Pa: Do you really think you are too old to actually get pregnant?
Me: At 41, yea. As women age, their luteal phase of their cycle often becomes too short and it can make getting pregnant difficult. At this point all of the stars, planets, and moons would have to be in alignment - you know, nothing short of "perfect celestial harmony ".
Pa (laughing): That's reassuring.

Pa and I first heard the term "perfect celestial harmony" in reference to toilet-training toddlers. It has been kind of a joke between us when something lucky happens like finding a good parking space or realizing that all of the kids have busied themselves with something (relatively) quiet.

I also relayed the conversation with my mom to a friend of mine and here's how part of our conversation went:

Friend: Do you really want to have another child?
Me: It's not so much that I want to have another child. I just like knowing that I could if I wanted to. The fact that one day it will be impossible to be pregnant is the one thing that really bothers me about aging. It would be cool to know I still "have it".

One more conversation between Pa and I:

Me: Mr. Laura came down this morning and wanted to sit in my lap. He is getting so big that I realized I don't have much time left before I won't have a child I can carry. It makes me kind of sad.
Pa: What about Miss Almanzo?
Me: She may be 2 1/2 years younger, but she is almost as tall as Mr. Laura and weighs more than he does. Her days are numbered too.

In case you don't see where this is going, it does indeed appear that perfect celestial harmony occurred sometime around August 25. My expected September period was late and then later and then later and so far has yet to make an appearance. I explained it away as the beginning of peri-menopause. The old body is finally starting to sputter and stall -the beginning of the end. I knew deep down this wasn't true though. Too many pregnancy symptoms were beginning to appear - waves of nausea, a ridiculously heightened sense of smell, bone-crushing fatigue, middle of the night trips to pee, aversions to any and all food. I finally peed on the stick and it confirmed my "haveitness". Pa is currently in denial and keeps vacillating between "How did this happen? I'm never going to get to retire" and "adding one tiny infant with no language or grief issues has got to be a piece of cake compared to what we just did" (That is adding three non-English speaking big children to our family at one time.)

I am currently a tangle of emotions and thoughts as the reality sets in. I am on the cusp of being a mother to 6. Yikes! How did I get here? One of my all time favorite movies is Out of Africa. There is a line in that movie that keeps playing in my head over and over. Denys Finch Hatton has just suggested that he could keep his things at Tanne's house and come and go from there. It is not the commitment she is hoping for from Denys, but it is a big gesture on his "live one day at a time" part. She responds by saying "When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers." That is exactly how I feel right now.