Secret Agent Josephine

There really is nothing exciting going on around here. Just like my creativity, I think my life has just sort of been eclipsed by my baby-on-the-brain disease. My work has slowed down, which is nice. My family is traveling across the country with my dad (which is comical if you can imagine two nieces, their luggage, a bike, a stroller and my mom all fitting in the cab of a 18 wheeler). I can’t make any trips out to Hemet to visit my mom because they aren’t home yet. They are on their way to California but at the mercy of an untrained dispatcher and they keep getting sent to Alabama. Toby is working hard every day all day. So he has no time for much excitement, other than taking me to the diner on Sunday and watch me turn up my nose at a piece of boysenberry pie that I said smelled like molasses. There aren’t really any great movies to see. I’ve been walking a lot with my new friend the lurker but I’m always so busy talking I forget to take pictures.

So what am I doing with myself these days? I’m day dreaming about my nursery. Toby says we can start moving stuff around in August. That’s a long time from now. Just about how long I have to wait to find out what sex it is. I can’t stand the waiting. I’ve gone into quite a few baby shops hoping to buy that one special first thing but everything that is unisex is boring. Some things are cute, but they whither in comparison to the cuteness of the pink things and the blue things. I’m thinking it’s okay to have blue things for a baby girl. In fact I’ve decided that I’m making my nursery soft robin’s egg blue and off white and chocolate brown. Blue isn’t just for boys! It’s soothing and for some reason I’m on a light blue kick. Maybe it’s left over from that blue pineapple invitation job I worked on.

A friend sent me the cutest card of a branch with a nest and two parent blue birds sitting on it. I’ve decided that I’m going to paint over one of my many old stashed canvases with this picture. It shouldn’t be too hard. So yesterday as I watched “Special Delivery” on the Discovery Health Channel I painted the whole canvas off white. This canvas has seen three other paintings so it’s got lots of texture. The last painting was just straight black and it was very depressing. I think it was something I did after a fight with Toby or something. So it’s getting reborn with baby birds! Hopefully I’ll have enough creativity in me to at least copy the card I was given.

I do have one baby thing now. Coffeesoup knitted me some little baby shoes!!!

The Pregnancy Induced Eating Disorder

This is a picture of the salad I have driven all the way across town to get, TWICE. I planned out a third trip but it was foiled by inefficient errand running and restrictive time commitments. Hate that. You would not want to be sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my car on that day! No one wants to endure the wrath of a pregnant woman who has been kept from her Chinese Chicken Salad with poppy seed dressing and driving in traffic at the same time. It was not a pretty sight.

This is the salad that has made me plot intricate plans about how I am going to introduce myself to the owner of the tiny hole in the wall restaurant, endear him to me in my poor sickly state and then ask him to please open up a new location that is not all the way across town. This is the salad that I have decided is the reason I am going to nickname my little bug of a baby, “Poppy”. There is something in this rubbery chicken salad that is the only thing I can digest at certain times of the day. I am trying to work up enough courage to ask the owner what the secret ingredient is, but I am too shy (or embarrassed). I think I will wait until they start to recognize me (because I am there every other day) or I start to show and they will put two and two together. Maybe they will have my salad waiting for me before I even show up.

The thing is it’s not that I’m having cravings for certain foods. That would make things a lot easier. It’s that I’m having anti-cravings. Food “aversions” is a better way to put it. I know I am hungry but I constantly feel like I just got off a carnival ride and I can’t possibly put anything in my stomach when I’m feeling like I might lose my lunch. So I wait and the longer I wait the sicker I feel. My brain knows that eating is the only thing that will make this feeling go away but I’m developing an eating disorder just trying to decide WHAT to eat.

Eating is such a drag these days. I always used to wonder what it could possibly be like for those poor people who want to gain weight and just can’t. I always thought if that happened to me I would just drink milk shakes all day and eat cheese cake and french fries and all the things I don’t let myself have. Well now I’m getting a better idea. It must just feel like this. Not that I’m having trouble gaining weight, I’m not… it’s just that eating has become a royal pain in the… stomach. Nothing tastes like it is supposed to taste. And NOTHING appeals to me.

First thing in the morning I open the refrigerator and scan every item from raw broccoli to last night’s dinner. I’ve long gotten over the weirdness of eating dinner for breakfast or breakfast for lunch. A slice of cheddar cheese, some yogurt, fruit… I have no good feelings about anything. Even my old stand by of a spoon full of peanut butter with chocolate sauce squeezed on top of it doesn’t appeal. There is something desperately wrong with me. And the worst part is, sometimes when I do find something that does appeal (like my favorite Chinese rubbery chicken salad), after I eat it I sometimes STILL feel sick. It’s like the Russian Roulette of eating! It’s started to consume my days. Toby asks me how I’m feeling and I have to restrain myself from giving him a play by play of all the things I’ve thought about eating that day but didn’t. I do nothing all day but think about what I’m going to eat or not eat next.

It is all very wearisome. When I do finally think of something that sounds sort of appetizing you can understand why I might drive all the way across town to get it. At this point I might even drive across a state if I could think of something in Arizona that might taste good. And of course now that I look at that picture up there of my “favorite” salad, I’m starting to think I’m not so fond of it anymore either!

In other news, some people asked for an update from my first doctor’s appointment. I do have some news:

1. My chance of having twins is good. Not because the doctor could feel anything or because my stomach is sticking out prematurely but only because I was a twin (my twin died before we were born) and my Grandpa’s mother was a twin and he had two twin brothers or sisters or something like that. So that’s kind of exciting to think about. Maybe I won’t have to go through this pregnancy thing more than once and I’ll get a two for one deal.

2. I was exposed to Fifths disease and there’s a 1 percent chance that I might have an anemic baby and have to have in-vitro blood transfusions. Of course that was fun to worry about. It’s next to impossible I’ll have any problems but the doctor ordered fifty million blood tests and two urine tests and I had to go to the lab and that was like getting your blood taken in a clinic in a third world country. But I’m sure I’ll blog about that another day. It’s all very entertaining.

3. Next visit I get to hear the heart beat!!!! THE HEART BEAT!!! I think it will be really real when I hear the heart beat. Toby’s even said he’ll go with me. I’m very excited about that.