Deplorable solipsism? The new face of literature? Or merely a clever procrastination device...

My dad died last week.
The funeral is tomorrow, thus in between his dying and his funeral fell the holidays, which were honestly joyful; the day he died was also the day I saw an apparently healthy and obviously human baby at my nuchal translucency scan. It would be nice if events occurred in emotionally coherent groupings, but as I am all too aware, they seldom do. To be fair, even my emotions seldom occur in emotionally coherent groupings, especially when it comes to my father. I suppose this is fitting, then.

More, much, anon.

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My brother is visiting our mother in Switzerland for some pre-holiday cheer. To me, of course, holiday season in Switzerland means only one thing: everyone’s favorite sack-toting, child-beating sidekick, Schmutzli. I have happily incorporated this particular aspect of Swiss culture into my own seasonal festivities, and so asked my brother to keep an eye out for anything Schmutzli-related. But he had a better idea.

You see, Max and my mother are leaving for a quick jaunt to Barcelona tomorrow, and in the course of his research, my brother had discovered a Spanish holiday custom that seemed to him to demand import. “We’re starting a whole new tradition!” he enthused. And then he proceeded to tell me about it.

Now, Max has a history of playing me for a fool. For instance, he once convinced me that the town of Killdeer, North Dakota was named for a bird called the Killdeer. This is true—what is not is that the Killdeer is so named for its practice of hunting in swarms, hundreds of the small birds rising up as one body to cover and bring down a full-grown deer.
(I know. I know. But you should hear him tell it!)
He loves to trot out the story of how he convinced me of the existence of The Tiny, Bloodthirsty Killdeer, and so when he started in on the story of The Catalan Shit Log, I naturally thought it was not the log that was full of shit, and went online for some fact checking.

My suspicion was almost immediately replaced by some unnameable melange of delight and escalating horror:

So—let me get this straight.

First you find a log. Then you wrap that log tenderly in a blanket and bring it into your home, where, beginning on the Feast of The Immaculate Conception, you ply it with nightly gifts of food. After 16 or 17 days of this, you gather the children, and together you shroud the log and beat it fiercely with sticks, crying “SHIT LOG! SHIT!” until it defecates candy, fruit, and small gifts. Eventually the log has nothing more to give, at which point you throw it onto the fire.

I…I honestly have nothing to add. I’ve never met a set of facts LESS in need of embellishment. There are Youtube videos of cherubic school children gleefully thwacking the Class Shit Log. The traditional Beating Song translates like this:

Shit log,
shit turrón (nougat),
hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
shit log!

What I find most bizarre—recognizing that, in this case, “most bizarre” is high honor indeed—is the fact that families personify this log, paint a face upon it, treat it as a treasured guest, and then, two weeks later, come together to taunt and beat their wooden charge (severely enough that, according to legend, it not only loses control of its bowels but finally urinates) before setting it ablaze. And for what? Nougat, traditionally. Nougat!

When my brother and my mother return to the states next week, they will not be alone: with them will be our family’s Caga Tio. I am not sure I have the heart to participate in this particular tradition, especially given the pains I have taken to impress upon Simone that we never, ever hit our friends. What am I going to say? “Unless they might shit nougat?” I grant that it would likely be safe to add a nougat-feces exception, but it’s a slippery slope, and I’d be setting a dangerous precedent.

These are the kinds of parenting issues I am faced with at the holidays—whether or not to let my child participate in scatological celebratory beatings, given that she does already have a knitted finger puppet of a character holding a staff meant for festive seasonal child abuse. I don’t quite know what this says about me as a mother. I am not convinced I want to.

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Do you ever do that thing, where you are just going to rest for a bit, maybe to help your preschooler fall asleep, and then you open your eyes and it is the next day?
Yeah. Sorry about that.

Anyhow, the appointment yesterday was fine. Weird, but fine. More on that in a few paragraphs.

I never got around to telling you about my FIRST ultrasound appointment, and I meant to, because it was An Experience. I was just over six weeks then, and walking into the perinatology clinic gave me a strange, uneasy feeling. I had been back twice since my last pregnancy, once to check on Ames’ autopsy while Simone was still in the NICU, and then later for testing and discussion of the autopsy results—a post-mortem post-mortem, you could say. Returning in the context of a new pregnancy was more difficult than I had expected. I felt jittery and sick. When I tried to check in, the receptionist told me that the ultrasound was still on, but my peri appointment had been canceled. A nurse came out to explain things to me, and I tried to explain to HER that I needed to start Lovenox, that I’d heard it should be started as close to conception as possible, and that was weeks ago, and to my absolute HORROR, I found myself crying. Which…I don’t even…I was as shocked as anyone, let me tell you. The nurse pulled up a chair (I was that patient) and reassured me that they could absolutely start my Lovenox without a full appointment, and that a doctor would see me for a minute after the ultrasound to get me set up with the prescription. I don’t know whether that nurse remembered me from my last pregnancy, but I’m sure she’ll remember me now, alas.

The heartbeat ultrasound itself went well, as you know, which was a massive relief—I didn’t realize until I saw the heartbeat how much I had been expecting NOT to see it. The tech was very sweet (perhaps she had been warned that I was unstable?) and afterward left to get the doctor. And guess who that doctor was?
HINT: you may remember him from such lines as “You can see here that Baby A is demised.”

It was…something. The adjective escapes me. Of all the ultrasound suites in all the perinatology clinics in the world, you know? I mean of course I knew it could be him, or I would have, had I thought about it. But I hadn’t, and it was a surprise.

He came in beaming and full of congratulations and I shook his hand feeling dazed. I don’t think I’d seen him since that awful day, though it’s not like that was the only time we’d met—he was also the doctor who told us we were having a boy and a girl, and I saw him in Labor & Delivery around 16 weeks. Needless to say, it is the 22 week visit that sticks in my mind.
He obviously remembered me, or at least had remembered upon reviewing my chart, and said he’d order the Lovenox and have a nurse meet me in an exam room to go over the details. I was shown to said exam room, and…it was the room in which the DEMISED ultrasound took place. They hadn’t even changed the artwork. That dreadful poster: faux-hand-colored, boy in Olde-Tymey hat and girl with a bow. The ultrasound machine and exam table, everything was in the spot it had been. I felt I might very well have been on a horribly morbid episode of Candid Camera.

The nurse didn’t come in right away, so I had some time to sit dumbly in the chair (the same chair I’d sat in to chat about the twins’ movements, and later to call Scott) and remember that day with a truly sickening level of clarity that was far less like remembering and far more like reliving than I would have wished. I decided, while I was waiting, that I would simply have to switch clinics, but exposing that decision to even the dimmest ray of logic forced the conclusion that switching clinics was a foolish and untenable idea.

So—that was the day of my heartbeat ultrasound.

Yesterday’s appointment was much better. It is already less unsettling to be back in the familiar office, and the nurses are truly lovely, as usual. It helped that I was in a different exam room this time (I have thought of requesting that I never be put in the other exam room again, but I am afraid that will make me seem even more unhinged that I doubtless do already). I won’t deny that the place still feels a bit grim and haunted, though. If you read Half Baked, you may remember the doctor I called McGleamy. I loved him so, and was sure he’d get a kick out of the book. Back when it came out I’d decided to send him a copy, and it was when I was looking for his address that I discovered he’d been killed by a car while crossing a street in front of the Los Angeles Airport, in 2009. There is a lovely plaque in the clinic, with his picture, and it makes me terribly sad. So yes. Grim, haunted. A little.

I did have the same doctor (I am trying very, very hard not to think of him as Doctor Demised, though this is a challenge). He told me that if ever I need reassurance, I can simply “drop by” and someone will give me a quick Live Baby Check. He was very kind, and in a way it isn’t such a bad thing that he was there for what happened before. Though, to be quite frank, he seems to regard it as largely irrelevant, and this is what made the appointment so odd. Quoth he: “this is a whole new pregnancy, and what happened last time…there is no reason to believe it will happen again.”
Which, okay, but is there a reason to believe it WON’T? I kept bringing it up, and he kept gently steering me away, reminding me that I am on both Lovenox and baby aspirin, and that we don’t know exactly why Ames died, and that there is no reason I shouldn’t just sashay on through this pregnancy like a Normal Lady. He’d say things like “You can stop the aspirin at 37 weeks,” and I’d laugh and mime writing it in my calendar, because COME ON, like “I’ll make a note of that, and also can you tell me about the clinic’s evacuation procedures in the event of a zombie apocalypse?” but he was serious. The nurse gave me a booklet with all three trimesters in it, and information about hospital preregistration and “birth” classes, and I accepted it all with a panicked smirk and some mumbled genuflections, and that was that.

I’m nine weeks tomorrow. It’s still early, blah blah blah, but early, late—will there be a time when I feel reasonably convinced that this is going to end in a baby? Honestly, why would there be? I suppose it’s as good a time as any to be hopeful, then. Right?

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On Friday I was writing you an update post, the gist of which was “I’m Feeling Somewhat Better,” when what should interrupt me but a sudden urgent need to stumble to the bathroom and kneel before the toilet.
The next morning, determined to try again, I found my site entirely inaccessible. I’d exceeded my bandwidth (there is still someone out there, hotlinking something, but damned if I can find it). I am back up and running as of this afternoon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lightning bolt is about to take out a server, or me, so I’ll post a quick hello while I know I can. Hello! I am alive. More tomorrow, after my appointment. 8w5d, for those keeping track.

P.S. Because I wouldn’t want you to be deceived into unwarranted admiration of my mental fortitude (going so very long without a Live Baby Check), I should tell you that I actually had a quick pity ultrasound last week when I first began to feel like I might not die, after all. Appropriately-sized lump avec heartbeat was present and accounted for, and slight easing of nausea thus attributed to an improved med regimen and IV fluids—an explanation I had previously dismissed, feeling that embryonic demise was far more likely.
Hoping to be happily surprised again in the morning…

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Long before I’d begun thinking about children, I knew pregnancy would be rough on me in one specific way. Hormones and my stomach do not play well together. I had birth-control-induced hyperemesis twice. The first time, when I was about 14, my already spindly 93-pound frame was whittled to skeletal proportions—I believe I got down to 79 pounds—and the second time, some years later, I ended up hospitalized for three days due to dehydration. My first pregnancy with Scott was discovered before my period was even due to arrive, because I threw up, and I had a hard time functioning until about a week before I miscarried, when I felt better and knew something was wrong. During my last pregnancy, the nausea started when I was six weeks and change, and by about seven weeks or so, I couldn’t keep anything down at all. I’d already been taking the Unisom and B6 combo, but while that helped with the nausea, it did nothing once the vomiting began. Thus, Zofran. Zofran was a miracle drug for me. I still felt ill, but not terribly so, and I was well enough to go to work, to eat some, and most importantly, to DRINK. On Zofran, I threw up maybe a couple of times a day, sometimes not at all. Yes, I was on the maximum dose, and had to wake myself to take a tablet at 4am (the last dose wearing off functioned as a nausea alarm clock), and I did continue to throw up regularly until I delivered at 25 weeks. Still: Miracle Drug.

This time, I got sicker, sooner. I am already on my strict Zofran/Unisom/B6 schedule, but while the drugs are keeping me from actually puking, I always always feel like I am on the verge, and in general feel leagues worse than I did with Ames and Simone. Imagine the worst hangover you’ve ever had, or the worst motion sickness, a time when you felt like even moving your eyeballs might be too much for your perilous equilibrium. It’s like that.

It makes no sense, because, like I said, the Zofran IS keeping me vomit-free, as long as I am careful not to miss a dose, so it SEEMS like I should feel much BETTER than last time, or at the very least the same, right? Alas, no. (Last time I was on prednisone up until 17 weeks, so I suspect that has something to do with it.)

I haven’t been able to do much of anything. Most of the day I am curled on the couch, focusing all of my energy on Not Puking. I usually have a small window in the early afternoon when I am well-ish—I can read email, talk on the phone, take a shower, and act human. I try to get some food and liquids in me then. Today, though, I didn’t even get my window. I don’t think I am getting enough to drink, and I’ve lost a few pounds. The Zofran side effects have been awful (still working out the best Colace timing/dosage). I can only care for Simone if you broaden the definition of “care for” significantly, and forget work or cleaning around the apartment. Scott has been great, but I fret about the burden on him.

Wednesday marks seven weeks, and it terrifies me to know that this is where I am, even maxed out on my meds, and that it is likely to get much worse before it gets better. I feel guilty that I’m not enjoying this more. I’m afraid that I’m going to go in and find out that the heart has stopped, and that I won’t have it in me to try again. I want this to work so badly, and I know—I KNOW—how lucky, how extraordinarily lucky, I am to have gotten pregnant at all. I am counting the days until the second trimester, and feeling simultaneously scared that I won’t make it that far at all and scared that if I do, this sickness won’t end there, but instead will continue the whole way through, which seems unbearable to contemplate. I worry about taking all these drugs, and I’m angry that I have to, that I can’t be one of those serene natural pregnant women who blithely swallows a prenatal vitamin and CERTAINLY doesn’t have daily injections, suppositories, and seven different pill varieties on rotation. Pregnancy after infertility and loss is complicated enough, and this adds another layer of worry and guilt, and feeling ungrateful and broken.

So that is where I am. Yesterday I fell asleep before I could post anything, and this took me all day to type, so I can’t even promise that was a one-time lapse. Right now, “one day at a time” is the best I can do. It’s good enough. Today, I have no reason to think that this pregnancy is doomed. I have no reason to think that I won’t feel somewhat better at 12ish weeks, if I make it that far.
Simone has recently noticed the sun, or rather the lack of it in the evening, and I have to reassure her daily that it will come back up again, that it always does. I ought to listen to myself once in awhile.

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I know. I know. I thought about not posting at all, because Simone is sick, I am back on Zofran, and the best I can do today is, once again, awfully close to a blank page.

However, I am trying not to be too hard on myself about my lackluster foray into National Blog Posting Month. I am making new ears and a placenta and a heart that BEATS, you know. More to the point (and my current need for distraction aside), the hope of quashing perfectionism is one of the more compelling reasons to attempt something like this 30-days-of-posting rigamarole. When the month is over, I’d like to keep writing here most weekdays–every weekday, if I can swing it—and that’s never going to work if I get derailed by the same all-or-nothing mindset that has proven so destructive in the past. There will be days when I plan to post and don’t, or when I start writing something and can’t finish it, or when I want to share a few paragraphs of drivel without worrying that they don’t merit an entry. If I want this site to be what it used to—my diary, the precious real estate where I think and chatter and worry and confide in my friends—I’m going to have to get comfortable pressing that “Publish” button again.

So, since I have nothing for you, please go read this marvelous, marvelous post by Arwen. It’s about perfection and expectations and the dim lens through which we view our own accomplishments. I could have written it myself, and I’d imagine at least a few of you out there will relate to it as strongly.

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Heartbeat!

I’ve had quite the day, let me tell you. I will tell you, tomorrow, but for now I want to hurry up and get the news posted, blurry cellphone photo and all. HEARTBEAT!

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1. Spiked, presumably for unsavory purposes (spearing the cake-fed babies of the aristocracy?)

2. Horse

_ _ _ _ _ _

Ultrasound is tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.

If the news is good, it will be followed by a 1-hr glucose tolerance test, cervix hunt/routine exam, Let’s Keep This One Alive discussion, and “Lovenox injection teaching.”

If the news is bad, it will be followed by heavy drinking and a D&C. Or, more probably, the excruciating wait for a follow-up/confirmation ultrasound (during which I’ll continue to be ill, thanks to embryonic spite), AND THEN the aforementioned heavy drinking and D&C.

Let’s all hope for good news, shall we?

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You know what goes well with a commitment to daily posting? Having to remain perfectly still, so as not to vomit.

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In all the hullaballoo of the past months, I forgot to show you Simone’s Back to School photos, and you’ve no doubt been bitterly, brokenly disappointed by this omission, so here:

What is shocking about these pictures, taken a measly two months ago, is how different she already looks from them. She has gotten very tall all of the sudden, without any corresponding rise in girth, and is a spindly, bony little thing—she will be four in February, and weighs a whopping 29 pounds.

Simone was in the toddler group last year, but this year has started honest-to-goodness Preschool (there are two classes at her level, the Billy Goats and the Bunnies—given my well-documented love of goats, you can imagine my glee at finding my child placed in the former group). Three has been easily my favorite age thus far, and my daughter has become this talkative, singing, dancing, pretending wonder. We build elaborate block walls with windows in them and then lie flat to talk through the hole, a la Pyramus and Thisbe (okay, it is “a la Pyramus and Thisbe” to me. To Simone it is “a la two people talking through a hole”). We read (favorite book: the Halloween volume of Mercy Watson) and sing (favorite album: Revolver) and draw (mostly fish, snails, and indecipherable letters). We play catch and have dance parties and eat endless elaborate imaginary treats.

She has also become…willful. Not to our extended families, teachers, or strangers, understand—they all believe my daughter to be a sweet and docile child, affectionate, eager to entertain, and amenable to suggestion. And actually she is all of these things, often, but when she finds herself alone in the company of tiresome old Mom and/or Dad, she just as often decides to give her charm and sanity a rest. It’s like her Good China. You know, for company.
This is my oblique way of alluding to the fact that there have been at least two instances in the past two months that ended with me weeping in the bathroom and wondering whether I was, maybe, a terrible mother. In one, Simone had a total meltdown during a public group activity, and instead of giving up on the activity and calmly removing her from the situation (or handling it in some other reasoned fashion), I hissed into her ear to stop crying or I would give her a timeout, and on the way home basically shamed her by saying that she had made me Sad (I meant that I wasn’t angry! It just…didn’t come out as I’d intended). Another evening she was already in a timeout—because she’d refused to stop kicking me—and mid-timeout kept getting down from the chair. I kept putting her back, trying to be calm and firm, but I was so frustrated and upset that the last time I put her back I PLOPPED her onto the chair harder than I’d meant to. It didn’t hurt, but I was appalled by how angry I’d felt—toward a three-year-old.

I’ve been a fairly confident parent, and have generally made my decisions based mostly upon what feels right—and there was nearly always an answer that felt right. When I’m disappointed in myself as a mother, it’s usually because I’m failing to cleave to what I know is best. Dealing with disobedience has been an entirely different beast. My attempts at discipline have often left me feeling helpless and clueless, as if everything I am saying and doing is wrong in one way or another, and yet the right thing remains unclear. This how I came to spend part of an afternoon in a local bookstore, kneeling on the floor and scanning the shelves for something titled Possibly Without My Daughter, If She Doesn’t Stop Doing That or maybe The Will to Power: Taming Your Uberkinder. (I ended up with Positive Discipline, which I’ve just started but like so far.)

I did already own one parenting book—Louise Bates Ames’ Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy. I’d bought it around Simone’s 3rd birthday, after seeing it on Amazon and remembering that Julie had recommended the series. I finally read it a bit over a month ago, and for the most part, it was excellent. A bit representative of the tone of the whole is this: “Your child cannot fight with you about his eating if you absolutely refuse to be drawn into his arguments. If he can be made to appreciate that the whole matter is of only minimal interest to you, you will do best.” That second line delights me, and it’s good advice, too.

At the end of the book is a section of parent letters, in which various mothers write the authors with questions. The book was published in 1980, so I would like to point out that the three-year-olds discussed, be they friends or enemies, were my contemporaries. And their mothers were beset with difficulty:

“Dear Doctors,
In another month our daughter Janice will be Three, and she is going to be left-handed, I’m afraid. […] Should I make a real effort to change her, or is it too late, anyway? Is there any basis to the belief that left-handers see things backward, for instance, see the number 10 as 01, and that if you change them they are doomed to a mental crack-up?”

“Dear Doctors,
My Three-and-a-half-year-old son Donald is giving me a lot of anxiety. The thing which bothers me so much is that he is constantly pulling on his penis and acting very foolishly. […] Sometimes he talks about it, saying things like, ‘I don’t want to have this. I want to be a good man.’ When he says this, I tell him it would be funny for a boy not to have one.”

“Dear Doctors,
My problem is that I can’t stand my Three-year-old daughter. She drives me crazy. Always talking. Always moving around. Always wanting something.”

[The beginning of the authors’ response to this last is wonderfully dry:
“Ideally in high school (we judge that you may not be too far past high school age) you should have had at least a beginning course in child behavior. This would have helped you realize what young children are like.”]

The day I read the book, Julie and I had quite an enjoyable Twitter conversation about the parent queries (see this post, where she mentions the advice regarding security blankets), most of it centered around my very favorite query of all, which I shall reproduce for you here in its entirety—as a gift.

“BOY AFRAID OF TOY CLOWN

Dear Doctors,
I have a problem of fear in a usually fearless boy who is just Three. When he was about a year old, we gave him a clown that rolls back and forth, with a very realistic face and eyes that roll. At first he seemed a little afraid of it, but soon he seemed happy enough. In fact, for a time he liked it so much that he carried it around.
A few evenings ago we saw a TV program about a circus. There was some violence in the picture. A knife thrower was trying to kill some other man, and although he wasn’t dressed as a clown, there were clowns in the play.
I don’t know if that caused it, but the next evening our son said, ‘The clown is going to hurt me.’ His daddy told him no, that the clown was just like any other dolly. This morning the first thing he said was something about the clown.
I thought about burning the clown before his eyes, but perhaps that would be too dramatic. We are going to leave soon for a vacation with his grandma. Would it be best to take the clown along or to leave it at home?”

I don’t know what’s better, the shock of getting to the “I thought about burning the clown before his eyes” part, or later, when the authors respond to say that burning the clown would indeed be too dramatic, because “It might lead to a fear of fires as well as a fear of clowns.”

I reread this letter as needed, and remind myself that at least I have yet to set a clown ablaze in front of my young charge. (I am saving the next book, on four-year-olds, for a special occasion.)

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(This does too count as posting!)

(Good night.)

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I am feeling decidedly less sanguine. Not that I was sanguine before, but I am FURTHER from sanguine now. I was doing so well with my not-getting-ahead-of-myself when the only evidence I had was encouraging, but I seem to give the bad considerably more weight than the good. To be fair, I am still not getting ahead of myself, really, as I am just fretting over the significance of what is already present. I have been painfully crampy all day, you see, and even though I know that this can be normal for someone who is 5-6 weeks…along, it seems like a potentially bad sign. I was crampy last time, but then last time I had OHSS, my ovaries Zeppelin-sized post IVF. Today I am crampy and bloaty and my uterus, or kind sack, to use the German (no) feels weirdly heavy. “Weirdly” because it can’t even be growing or stretching much yet, I wouldn’t think. I am slightly comforted by the fact that there is no bleeding whatsoever and that I have heard that sometimes those who’ve had a c-section have pains the next pregnancy because of scar tissue or leftover sponges/retractors or something. I don’t know.

I think part of the problem is that I am suspicious of this embryo. I don’t mean that I think it is in there plotting against me, but rather that I am unconvinced of its quality, because it didn’t undergo the rigorous vetting that preceded my last pregnancy—the only one to produce live offspring. Ames and Simone were deemed the best two out of my 17 embryos (ahem–none of those remaining made it to freeze, so I realize that this is not a RINGING endorsement). On the other hand, my current inhabitant? Why, it’s just the result of whatever egg I happened to have lying around, and whichever sperm got there first. No embryologist has evaluated its morphology. You guys, there wasn’t even a doctor in the room when it was fertilized.

Now I’ve gone and insulted it, and it will probably gather up its tail and leave in a huff. In truth, I’m quite proud of it, just worried. One little embryo against my sinister, baby-killing, mustache-twirling uterus. I am keeping said embryo fortified with progesterone, but I don’t start Lovenox to thin my mutinous blood until next Friday. I wish I could send it some raw eggs to slurp and chickens to chase as a training exercise. Alas, chicken sounds AWFUL.

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The problem with having posted so sporadically for so long is that it leaves gaps in the record where backstory ought properly to be. I keep trying to tell the tale of how this all happened, and every paragraph or so am brought up short by the realization that I never told you X, and so I start to explain X, and then part way through I realize that I didn’t really write about Y, either, and that Y is CRUCIAL TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF X. Going from posting once every once in a while to posting every day is harder than I thought it would be, and I am away for the weekend, working, and I’m getting settled into my room, and eyeing the comfortable-looking bed, and wondering what housekeeping will make of the progesterone suppositories in the mini fridge tomorrow morning. So if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to direct you to what I wrote on this date in 2007. I was posting every day that November, too. I was pregnant—not just pregnant-ish—and the entry from November 5th contains 3D ultrasound photos of the twins I was carrying. Baby B (who I refer to as a “he” all through the post, for reasons unknown) is Simone.

Reading that post just now made me laugh remembering how FUNNY the babies were at that day’s appointment, and how relieved I felt having made it through what I honestly thought had been the Hardest Part (I know, I KNOW). One of the things I noticed right away this time is that statistics both reassure and scare me less. Specific evidence about this specific gestation (beta numbers, doubling times, ultrasound) compels me, but statistics, with their stories about populations and percentages, leave me unmoved. I’m operating on what information I have, and letting probability alone. Right now that’s a good thing: I’m less afraid than I was early on last time. I’d imagine, however, that if I’m still…in my delicate condition a few months from now, I will see the other side of this failure to be compelled by statistics. I’d imagine that the fact that 99.5% of pregnancies DON’T end in stillbirth, or that they do or don’t do anything, will feel relatively meaningless.

I actually didn’t intend to go off on that particular tangent: I just wanted to show you the neat claymation-looking babies from 2007, because it’s amazing that embryos turn into humans at all, I think. Let’s face it, if whatever is inside of me is still alive (and I hope, hope, hope it is), it currently looks like something you’d recoil from—before slapping it smartly with a shoe. How that becomes a creature with limbs and strong opinions about which socks it wants to wear is beyond me.

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I’ve had all these THOUGHTS about what I might say in this entry, and the proof that thoughts are not typing is in the fact that this sentence, the one you are reading right now, is the first onto the page—and is only there at all because I am falling asleep, meaning it’s now or never. Or at least now or not-tonight.

So! Ahem. There’s a reason things have suddenly gone from famine to feast around here. Yes, I’ve been trying to find my way back to regular posting, and yes, November happens to be National Blog Posting Month, and yes, I DO like to give selflessly of my fleeting youth to make my mother happy.
Mainly though, I’m writing because I am so full of words and anxiety and fizzy energy and plain old needing-to-tell-you-things that if I DON’T post, it seems likely that I’ll expire from the pressure.

I’m pregnant-ish.

Allegedly. According to three betas and an ultrasound this morning. Though at 5 1/2 weeks, all I REALLY know is that I am carrying a teensy-weensy water balloon with a yolk sac in it, as anything else is too small to see.

Still, I’m not NOT pregnant. It’s not impossible that I could be lucky enough to see a beating heart in that water balloon, come 1pm next Friday. It could happen. Stranger things have, I’m told.

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I’ve already posted on two whole consecutive days, and I was feeling compelled just now to post a link to this story I read about octopuses (NOT octopi! On account of Greek and Latin are like oil and water, apparently) and THAT would be THREE consecutive days, so why not make it 30? That’s fewer days than I am years old! If I were to get desperate, I could simply tell you something about a different year of my past each day and have extra material remaining when the month ends—this without taking into account my need to share the exciting (burglars!) events of the present. Why, I could confine myself to Meals I Have Known and still have plenty to discuss, I assure you. Do you know that a restaurant in Paris once tried to kill me via internal suffocation, filling me so full of unexpected courses that I could feel my liver being squeezed upward around my windpipe? True story!

For now, you really must read this article, though please be prepared for the fact that upon so doing you will be immediately beset by fantasies of all the fun you could have with your very own pet octopus. I’m still tossing around names for mine. (Slappy? Griselda? Diptheria—Dippy for short? Archibald? Harvey? Madge?)

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Did I tell you about the local crime wave? Local as in within my apartment building?

Last week, two apartments on the second floor were burgled burglarized burgled: the apartment directly below us (in which we used to live!) and the apartment next to it.

AND! The burglary took place right under my nose! I was home the whole time! Scott and I were going about our business when a policeman knocked at our door wanting to know if we’d “heard anything.” He seemed a little incredulous that we hadn’t, actually, and I suppose I can kiss that career as a crime-fighting superhero goodbye. In my defense, it was 10:30 in the morning—a patently ridiculous time for a burglary.

Anyhow, cops swarmed the halls for hours, and then there were loud drill-y, locksmith-y sounds the next day. Apparently a crowbar or some sort of prying instrument was used on the outside security door, and then the miscreants jimmied the locks on the apartments. (The policeman told us they’d obviously worked on the inside doors for a while. It seemed…judge-y, the way he said it.)
Luckily (for the burglars? the victims?) the residents weren’t home. if I weren’t so reclusive, I might have seen the act in progress on my way out somewhere, and said something, and been shot! Being a hermit has its strong points, you will note.

The whole thing was discovered because another neighbor was standing outside smoking a cigarette when two(?) people emerged from the building carrying a bunch of stuff and ran off. It was near the first of the month, so he called the management company and asked if anyone was moving out that day. (Not under their own power, they weren’t!) The neighbor/witness was able to give the police a description of the robbers—about like this, I’d imagine—and of the Getaway Vehicle(!) For his sake, I hope there will be no retribution.

I was so shocked by it all. I had this very indignant Andy Rooney-ish response. My first thought, once the policeman had left us to our obliviousness, was “Who would do such a thing?” I mean, really! How rude! I kept thinking it, too: Who on earth would do such a thing?
(Robbers, obviously.)
(Still! RUDE!)

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There has been this Internet Meme making the rounds among many of my friends—it originated as a way for those attending The Blathering to “meet” each other before they actually meet each other, posting short videos of themselves saying certain words and answering certain questions to reveal and discuss regional differences in accents and word choice. That…sounds very dull, the way I’ve explained it, but I’ve been captivated by these videos, perhaps because I spend so much time reading my fellow online writers’ words and have so few opportunities to hear their spoken voices.
I am not going to the Blathering myself, though I had hoped to (Airfare + Hotel = Poorhouse, alas), but after watching a few of these videos I decided to make my own. So I did! On Saturday! And then I actually watched the thing, and while I’d been able to view the videos of others without ruminating upon their subjects’ weight or features or physical trappings in general, when I watched mine these things were all I could see, and I quickly nixed the idea of sharing them with the Internet. And then, almost as quickly, I became massively cross with myself for being such an insufferable ninny and was overcome by the urge to post it after all, just to spite me.
I generally go out of my way to avoid discomfort or embarrassment, regardless of whether said embarrassment or discomfort is justified—there is no special award ceremony or Enlightenment Guarantee reserved for those who go on rollercoasters or eat maybe-deadly puffer fish, after all—but I’ve noticed, since attaining my Highest Ever Weight (Copyright Dying Thyroid, 2011) I have been skulking around attempting invisibility, all but hiding in doorways and slinking sideways against buildings, avoiding social gatherings and public outings and movement by daylight to an extent that is frankly preposterous, and must stop immediately, because I am a grown lady!

So, those of you harboring a desire to know how I pronounce “aunt” and “caramel” and refer to various common objects are in luck! The rest of you less so. Sorry.
(It is SO long! My apologies!)
(Also, I forgot to say where I grew up, but as you probably know I was born in Boston, grew up here in Minnesota, went to college for a while in New York, and then returned to the Twin Cities where I have remained ever since):

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Thank you, thank you, thank you all. Though I took pains to assert that imperfect marriages are likely the norm, the rush of relief I felt reading through your comments suggests that while I was sincere, it was more a sincere hopefulness than a sincere certainty. More specifically, I believed that plenty of marriages were host to small or mid-sized problems, but was genuinely shocked to hear that bunches of still-married couples had come close to calling it quits at one time or another. I don’t mean to sound as if I rejoiced at your marital misfortunes, but, well…you know. Misery, company, etc.

I am unreservedly glad that my own parents divorced, but it did leave me without a clear idea of what a healthy, “normal” long-term partnership looks like. Scott is the only person I have lived with, and my only significantly long-lived romantic relationship. Thanks to this inexperience, the first time we had a real fight I was sure it meant we were breaking up. We weren’t, and the next morning Scott was apologetic and blithe. I remained puffy-eyed and suspicious, baffled by his ability to return to normal.
“People fight,” he said, baffled at my bafflement. “Haven’t you ever had a fight before?”
Truthfully, I hadn’t. Not even in a friendship. I’d lost friends, sure, but there had never been any airing of grievances. I am from a tribe that fervently avoids confrontation or Displays. (I do remain a card-carrying member of Pathologically Conflict-Averse Citizens For Change if it’s All Right With You.)

One of the more difficult pieces of moving forward after a dire marital episode is that having scraped the bottom, you remain uncomfortably close to said bottom for a while. You lack the cushion built up by a long period of things going well, so that, for instance, when your spouse uses The Unacceptable Tone, instead of it feeling like a blip on the radar, it feels like the last straw—because honestly, there is only the one straw there right now. Your inner monologue goes straight to “Screw it! I’m DONE.” Clear thinking is critical, because the daunting flip side of having worked to clarify what I can and can not live with is this: I have to be prepared to enforce the boundaries I set, or they are meaningless. Even Simone knows as much. But it is hard to think clearly while pulled in too many directions by fear, by anger, by hope, by exhaustion.

I try not to examine the current upward trend too closely or make any sweeping, definitive statements, because it seems that whenever I catch myself thinking Everything is Fine Now! disharmony rushes in, as if out of spite, and any upset is then amplified and distorted by disappointment. I remember this from dealing with my father—for years, every time he was medicated and doing well, my wariness would wane and I would relax enough that the next bout of mania came as a brutal sucker punch. I’d wonder how I could have been so stupid and naïve…and then, over a slightly longer interval this time, the cycle would repeat itself.

For now, honestly, my priority is less Us and more Me, under the theory that a stronger, happier, healthier Alexa is not a luxury but a necessity, if one that I stubbornly jettison whenever the opportunity to worry about or take care of someone else comes along. In service to the “healthier” bit of that priority, I bought myself a Fitbit, trusting that my competitive nature and obsession with numbers and analytics would make the device an effective motivator. Happily, this has turned out to be true, however the first day I wore the thing gave me a terrible shock. I knew the number of steps that the apocryphal “average person” takes a day, and also knew that, working at home, I would likely come in a bit below this number.
(A ha ha ha! “A bit below!” Oh, bless my heart.)
In reality, it turns out, in terms of steps taken/calories burned, I was a shade more active than your average person in a persistent vegetative state. I have since remedied this, but it was a blow all the same, and eye-opening to learn that it is not so much that I am eating too much as that I am moving nothing save my powerful jaws.

I’m not sure how to segue here, so for a palate cleanser, please read* this adorable news item about a pair of youthful goat-nappers.

Moving on!

One of the better pieces of 2011 thus far (and I realize that this is not as extravagant a statement as one might wish) was our first ever family vacation, which we took during the last full week of August. We went to Duluth, and stayed right on the lake.

The beach was steps from the door, and downtown was just a few minutes further along the shore. On our last full day, the three of us rented a bicycle surrey and pedaled alongside the boardwalk.

Every summer for years, my mother, brother, and I would head Up North, as one says, to the shores of Lake Superior. (We usually traveled much further than Duluth, but with a three year old in the car and limited funds dictating a brief getaway, a two-hour drive sounded perfect for this year.) We’d bring stacks of books and return with rocks collected from the beaches, beaches that are obligingly suited to mental states from giddy to contentment to grateful contemplation and right on through to perversely satisfying brooding (the latter of which was a favorite of mine during the teen years.) I remember every summer, and someday I will have to tell you more about them—suitably embarrassing pictures of Youthful Alexa included.

Simone loved the lake, and our tiny balcony. I read a whole entire book. We all ate hot fudge sundaes. I very nearly killed my husband with a rock. It was lovely.

What? Oh, that?

Well, after dinner on our first night, we tromped on down to the shore, where I skipped stones (rocks are “stones” when you skip them, somehow—why? By alliteration mandate?) and Simone, being a beginner and not yet ready for actual skipping, threw rocks into the lake. The sun was setting, and it was one of those German word moments, full of complicated heart-tuggings and that weird nostalgia for the present that having children seems to foist upon us. I found a particularly good skipping stone—thin and flat and roundish, with a sharp edge, and I whipped it out toward the water. Or rather I MEANT to, I really did. Alas, it didn’t sail smoothly from my index finger, but stuck to me until I was well into what is supposed to be the post-rock-release portion of my swing—the follow-through, to use a sporting term. Scott cursed, loudly, and that is when I realized that I had just thrown a very sharp rock directly leftwards, hitting my husband squarely in the side of the head.

I would have very much liked to disappear (we were not alone on the beach. There were WITNESSES.) but I couldn’t disappear, because I had to make sure that my spouse’s pupils were equal and reactive. Honest to god, you guys, I have no idea how he wasn’t at least bleeding (and the rock hit right about in the middle-meningeal-artery danger zone!), but I gave frequent neuro checks and except for a headache, he was fine. I was relieved because I love him, of course, and also because with a very public record of our recent marital problems, I was pretty sure that if he’d died, my insistence that it had been nothing but an unfortunate Stone Skipping Accident would be greeted with extreme suspicion.

But mild head injury notwithstanding, I stand by what I said before: Lovely.

*Speaking of, I would like to clarify that the new box in the sidebar, over there ——> is not an ad**, just a place where I shall feature people/places/things I like. Nouns of note, you might say! Or not—I won’t tell you your business.

**The box above that, of course, IS an ad, for my book. But I am not paying myself for its placement.

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Deep breath.

Scott and I decided to separate. Thanks to a spectacularly well-timed housesitting arrangement, we spent some time apart. We reconciled. I formed a kidney stone the size of Tulsa. I used my pain-scale NINE for the very first time and passed out in triage. Morphine. More Morphine. Dilaudid. I watched my very own sats dipping and alarming on my very own monitor—sort of like old times! Throughout it all, Simone upheld the reputation of three-and-a-half-year-olds everywhere by shrieking like an enraged (CHOCOLATE BANANAAA!) and often existential (WHY? WHY? But WHY?) Greek chorus.

There is more to say about all of it, of course (I can always find more to say about things—this is my your cross to bear) but seeing as I keep opening WordPress and closing it again, too overwhelmed by how much has happened in the past month to relate even a morsel, I thought the best course of action might be to try spitting out the gist all at once without worrying about the details.

The marital seas are calm for now, and I am trying to believe that they will remain so. I am trying to Give Peace a Chance. Honestly, things are better than they have been in ages, but it will take more than a few weeks before I can stop feeling wary.

In some ways, it would have been easiest not to mention anything about the state of my union. Online, it seems there is Married to My Best Friend and there is Divorced. The messy middle ground is awkward. Where is Married to My Best Friend, Who’s Also Been Kind of An Ass? I understand the reluctance to share, especially for those who aren’t anonymous. It is the same impulse that has probably kept us all, at one time or another, from mentioning fights with your significant other to your family. Once you share the bad, everything is colored by it. Reunions are stilted and conversation stalls. Any future happiness is viewed with suspicion, while future turmoil will be treated as if it had been foretold all along. It’s just what we do: we take what limited data points we have and use them to shape a story around events, and the dramatic and/or negative is always given more weight. But keeping mum is isolating—frustratingly so, because surely an effortless marriage is the exception rather than the rule?

I assumed it would be out of line for me to post about what we were going through, and so I didn’t post at all. And then, post-reconciliation, Scott and I were talking, and I mentioned how hard it had been not to be able to write about our problems here, how after Simone and I were alone for the night on the day we separated, all I wanted was to tell my friends—my online friends, because for me the Venn diagram of the two groups only barely counts as two circles. I’d spent an hour opening my computer and closing it again and feeling terribly alone.
Scott cocked his head. “Why didn’t you ask? You can post about it. Of course you can post about it.” I was shocked, but maybe I should’t have been. We have lived together for seven years and been married for four. This Website turned six shortly after my last entry. He is intensely private, my husband, but he also knows how important this space is to me.

So: I’m okay. Simone and I are both ill with an unpleasantly virulent summer cold, but we’re all okay, basically. The stone finished its transuretal journey and set to rattling around in my bladder refusing to emerge. It was making a home for itself, starting a new life, assembling furniture. From time to time I felt it poke me with one of those tiny IKEA wrenches. After two weeks, just when I was beginning to consider crouching over a bowl of milk to lure it out, the squat singularity that had been visible on CT crumbled into sharp grit and pin-sized pebbles and was finally nabbed by my strainer. I saved the bits in a sterile collection cup, as per instructions, and about once a day I shake them up to the light and think Is that all there is? ala Peggy Lee. Alas, that is NOT all there is—there is also a pile of now oppressively delinquent schoolwork. Anyone want to write a paper about tuberculosis?

(Actually, while I am still in the unable-to-breathe stage of our cold, Simone has progressed to coughing, which makes a redeemingly amusing soundtrack against which to write about Consumption.)

In other child news, mine is still not housebroken. She did successfully train a doll to relieve itself in the proper locale, but this affords me little satisfaction. Camp is almost over, and Simone is suddenly long and skinny and perplexingly tan. If you know me, you know that I am even paler in person than I appear in photographs, and so, unfamiliar with the concept of “skin pigmentation,” I thought her hands and arms were just especially filthy and tried to clean the brown off. To my credit, I did realize my mistake before resorting to steel wool.

And how are YOU?

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—Simone loves tickling. She loves to be tickled, and she loves to be the tickler. Except…I’m sorry, but she is terrible at it. Just awful. It’s good, in a way, because I hate to be tickled yet am extremely ticklish and if someone tickles me despite my protests these two things combine to make me A Danger To Myself and Others. What Simone does, though, doesn’t actually tickle: she scritches at my throat with her sharp little child-claws and shrieks “TICKLETICKLETICKLE!!!!!!” It is more painful than anything, like being rubbed with a hedgehog.

—Simone is getting to an age where we have to be more careful about watching television around her, but sometimes we DO watch non puppet- or cartoon-based programming when she is around, SO SUE ME. The point is, Simone has her own titles for these shows, and they display a shocking lack of originality. For instance, we have “Guy,” “Man and Girl,” and “Guy and Girl.” Her favorite, though—and mine—is the Emmy-award-winning “Man and Girl and Baby.”

—I have finally begun to succeed in consistently drinking multiple glasses of water per day, and I have a question for those of you who have been purposefully staving off dehydration in this way for a while already: does the peeing stop? Because right now I am peeing all the goddamn time, and I do not have time for lazing around on the toilet, not to mention the incessant getting UP from my desk and walking ALL the way to the bathroom and then back again. My theory is that I have deprived my body of water for so long that it doesn’t know what to do with it now, and my stomach radios up to my brain all “Hey, uh…we’ve got some more water here. What do you want me to do with it? Should we be putting it somewhere? Like…into the cells or something?”

“Well SOMEONE in your department ordered it, because god knows the muscles don’t do anything unless they have to. So you want it in the cells? Shunt it on into the blood volume and let it be Vascular’s problem?”

(Massaging Temples) “No, no. I’ll just end up having this same conversation with them. Jesus. I do not need this today.”

“Fine. Just send it through. Dump it. I don’t care anymore.”

—I have begun responding to comments within the comments, which is fun, but I am new at it and am wondering whether you people get notified when I respond to your comment, or whether there is some thing I am not doing that I OUGHT to be doing to make it so that you are notified.

—There was an excellent post at Temerity Jane about ill-behaved children and public places, and I felt like expanding upon it to say that, as a former waitress, I am rather astounded when parents take their children out, let them strew the table/booth/general vicinity with bits of napkin, bits of wet napkin, bits of food, shredded sweetener packets, straw wrappers, and assorted Dining Debris, and then just….leave it all where it fell, as if preparing for some sort of Pompeiian ash preservation of their everyday (rude!) existence.

Now, I understand that parents are busy with their children, and it isn’t a patron’s job to scour the tables or anything, but isn’t it common courtesy to make at least a token effort to gather things up into an easily scoopable pile? Is this really too much to ask?

—I think I may have fixed the pictures-not-appearing issue—have I? Here is a test image:

I did this by disabling hotlink protection, so everyone will have to be on their best behavior until I figure out how to protect the site from bandwidth thievery while also allowing you to see important things like the above, which is a blurry cell phone photo of one of the slips of paper they send home from Camp detailing Simone’s activities.

This one happens to be from Friday, and informs us that “Simone enjoyed making ice cream cones while playing in a tub of flour. She measured herself & some friends using a tape measure while we played in the Nature Room.”

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I have several little items I keep near my deskish area. My rabbit cartoon, a Valentine the nurses made us, which bears Simone’s not-quite-a-week-old footprints, a purple ribbon a friend gave me (in college?), which reads “HOMEWORK CHAMP,” a paper-clipped stack of miniature index cards, which once hung on my Crazy Person’s Bulletin Board—you know, the usual. Precious detritus.
I also have a few photographs, and one of them is of me at five or so. It is singularly unflattering, but it is Very Alexa. It’s what I keep around as an antidote, should I begin to take myself too seriously. I am going to show it to you now. Ready?

That, right there, is the author of this website. No artfully composed self-portrait could capture me half as truthfully. The setting, I believe, is my grandparents’ house in Minot, North Dakota. I am not thinking about how I will look in the picture, which means I lack the slightly frightened, frozen visage that has become the hallmark of Alexa on Film, the expression that says “the person holding the camera has taken me hostage, and I am smiling in order to appease him and hopefully escape with my life.” No, in this picture I am fairly shimmering with enthusiasm and manic, chipmunk-y glee, mostly because of the nightgown, which I remember very well. It came with a matching miniature version for my Cabbage Patch Kid, but that isn’t the source of my giddiness. Mostly, I am intoxicated with my own wit: First Class FEmail! “First class,” like postage, but also like EXCELLENT! Fe-MAIL—like letters! It could mean FABULOUS, UNSTOPPABLE GIRL, or a really important postcard! Why aren’t you laughing yet?

As a youth I was a big fan of clothing based upon wordplay of any kind, and my favorite shirt at that age was a turtleneck covered with pictures of cats, dogs, and umbrellas. (GET IT??) I’d take a break from a subtraction worksheet, look down at my chest or sleeve, and oh how I would chuckle. Another favorite I am just now remembering was a pair of underwear with Garfield on the front, wearing Groucho glasses. The caption, ala Garbo, was “I VANT TO BE LEFT ALONE.”
(Typing this out, I am realizing that a pair of little girl underwear with “I VANT TO BE LEFT ALONE” printed across the pubis is maybe a tad questionable, but there you are.)

My brother’s boyfriend, a devastatingly handsome Brazilian for whom Simone has conceived a hopeless passion, is in medical school. For a while, it looked like he might choose dermatology as a specialty, and this excited me terribly, because I would finally have someone for whom to make my “Dermatologists Do It With The Largest Organ” T-shirt (remember?) But then he had to go and change his mind again for the trillionth time, and now he is looking at Peds, and my “Pediatricians Do It With Children” shirt idea was not nearly as well-received, for whatever reason. The point is, I am still that girl. That nerdy, excited, easily amused girl in the picture, even if sometimes it’s hidden under anxiety or self-consciousness or curmudgeonly grumbling. Most of the time, looking at that picture is enough to remind me to be delighted—that being delighted is my natural state, whether that delight is the byproduct of an unintentionally hilarious sign or a balcony in the bathroom or the really fascinating book I’m reading, about the bubonic plague.

Do you have a picture of yourself that is especially, quintessentially you? I don’t mean this to sound like some cheesy “inner-child” exercise (though all children DO need exercise, even the inner ones), but for whatever reason it does seem that these are usually photos from childhood. If you have one, and have a place to post it, I would love to see. Or you can just tell me about it. Or tell me anything at all. I’ve learned how to respond right in the comment section now, so I think I am going to do more of that. We can talk! Like our own cozy little parlor! Or a literary salon, but with less “literary” and more bad puns.

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The Heat Index reached 107 today, causing roads to whimper and buckle in defeat, shutting down half the lanes on parts of Interstate 94. I assume it has cooled somewhat outside, judging from all the racket made by the thunder and sirens just a bit ago, but no temperate breeze has yet penetrated our top floor apartment. It is hot. The air has an unwholesomely moist quality. For reasons that need no explanation, I am thinking wistfully of Elsewhere.

In particular, I am thinking of our hotel in Paris. I mentioned before that there were multiple balconies with views of the Louvre, one of them in the bathroom, but it’s the sort of thing you really can’t emphasize enough. Here is a picture of the balcony in the bathroom:

See the corner of the shower? Just out of sight is a deep marble bathtub that I still see in my dreams. See the Louvre-ly building beyond the balcony doors? Would you like a close-up of the honest to god CHUNKS OF ART visible from the patch of floor where I stood to brush my teeth?

One of the balconies in the main room overlooks a sort of plaza where people spring up from the depths of the Metro or wander around with cameras or watch various street performers performing things. No performance drew a larger crowd than the jump rope troupe we saw from the window on our first afternoon. I gave up my dream of being a Professional Jump Roper (Jumper of Ropes, more properly) years ago, but it appears in France, all things are possible.

Included with the price of the room was a buffet breakfast, which I assumed meant sundry pastries and juices—not really my thing, in the morning—but instead comprised an assortment of soft cheeses, tiny sauteed mushrooms, dried fruits, bacon, carbohydrates of every possible stripe, yogurt, and multiple varieties of butter. I don’t have a picture because my hands were busy conveying portions of this buffet to my face-area, but I do have a photo taken over lunch outside at the hotel brasserie.

We’d been in Paris for about 15 minutes. I’d just ordered a vat of béarnaise, and you can clearly see the face of Jesus hovering behind me, hoping I’ll offer to share.

Because I’ve been so effusive, I feel compelled to tell you that this isn’t a sponsored post (though I wish to God it were–Hotel du Louvre, call me! I’d be happy to revisit your fine establishment and discuss it on my Internet Weblog!), it’s merely the product of an uncommonly fine vacation and my fervent desire to remember A Time Before Impending Heatstroke. In Paris, they’ll be readying breakfast in a few hours, and I’ll bet it’s lovely on that bathroom balcony about now. Summers may be hot in the City of Light, but it’s a FRENCH heat.

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Simone started Camp on Monday:

The program is run by her preschool, and thus many things are familiar: same location, many of the same teachers, the same friends she’s been babbling on about all year (I’ve now learned their proper names, thanks to Simone’s much improved intelligibility—the last to be discerned was little Quinine, whom I’ve deduced is actually called Caroline). The primary difference between School and Camp is that Camp is all outdoors, weather permitting, and includes swimming in the pool. Simone attends Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on that first day we got a copy of her group’s weekly Camp activity schedule. Allow me to share it with you:

9:50 to 10:15, PONIES.

PONIES is an item on my daughter’s agenda. I need hardly tell you how envious I am, as PONIES appears nowhere on my own schedule, no matter how strenuously I campaign for its inclusion.

PONIESlessness aside, things are a bit better with me, or at least I am feeling a bit better about them, which is something. (I’ve read your comments over several times now—their bolstering effect does not seem to diminish with familiarity.)

One very interesting conclusion I have come to is that food, water, and sunlight all have an effect upon a person’s wellbeing. You’re probably skeptical, as I was, but it’s true: after my last post I made a project of eating more vegetables and drinking plenty of water, and (most thrillingly) of leaving my apartment every day, excepting the one on which the thermometer reached 103. We embarked on Family Outings (many of which involved walking and one of which involved goats) even when I had work I could have been doing, because the truth is, there is always work I could be doing. And weirdly, this leaving the house/having fun thing made me more productive, because I wasn’t worn to tears by constant, grinding stress. Mysterious, because the stressors didn’t actually go anywhere.

Also helpful was tackling small cleaning projects. Even though it seemed that clearing my desk was a silly, deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic sort of enterprise given the state of things, these pockets of order inevitably cheered me. (My mantra, stolen from Swistle, is “Drops IN The Bucket“—explanation in this lovely post.)

The most notable jump toward feeling less mired in hopelessness, however, came simply from writing that last entry. Very few things (excepting the obvious one, weighing in at 29 1/2 pounds and standing a fearsome 3’1″) have brought me as much consistent joy as this site, and yet I feel so guilty about all of the other things I could be, SHOULD be doing that I only very rarely allow myself time to write here. In fact, because there is a neverending stream of work to be done, I have somehow gotten into the habit of not permitting myself any time to myself at all. I do not exaggerate: aside from my recent vacation, I cannot remember when I last took an hour to read or write for sport, or just to wander the neighborhood alone. (One of the reasons I haven’t gotten around to posting more Alexa Abroad! pictures was that for awhile, it made me slightly miserable with longing to look at them.) By evening my brain is too frizzled to allow for anything save sitting lumpenly before something televised, and taking time for myself during the DAY sounds criminally decadent. What am I, some irresponsible flibbertigibbet? Some shirking layabout? Why not just schedule time for “Bon Bon Eating” or a “Slimming Gold-Leaf Wrap?” I tell myself that if I were to add up all the scattered moments when I’m staring at the screen/clicking a link/not mach schnelling, it would amount to a sizeable chunk of non-productivity, which should rightly apply against my Deserved Relaxation balance, plus demerits, plus overdraft fee, plus Disapproval Tax…you see where this is going.

In the last week, my workload has mounted, and I responded by sort of letting the whole drink-water-and-eat-well thing slide, and I’ve left my apartment maybe twice. I certainly haven’t gone on any Family Outings or written here or had a leisurely Kir Vin Blanc while cooking and dancing about the kitchen at the end of the work day (what is this “end of the work day” you speak of?), and the effect on my mood has been swift and unmistakeable. So today, not only am I guzzling water and planning to leave the apartment shortly, I am also writing to tell you about Simone and PONIES, even though I have graphs to make and reports to write and COBRA subsidy expiration to fret over. TIME FOR ALEXA may seem PONIES-equivalent in its extravagance, but so help me god, I am putting it on my schedule.

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Probably, as you sip your morning coffee, you gaze glumly out the window, cursing the day ahead and longing for the halcyon days of high school science classes. And so you will no doubt be delighted to learn that you are about to re-experience one vicariously, thanks to yours truly.

(I am told the experiment I am about to relay is commonly assigned in high school science classes. I was rarely present during high school science classes, so I can neither confirm nor deny these reports.)

Here is an assignment I received this past week for Hands-On Science:

Design a protective container for a raw egg, so that it will survive an 8 foot drop. You may use any or all of the following materials BUT NO OTHERS (e.g., you can’t use cardboard boxes, jars of peanut butter, etc):
Paper cups, Styrofoam peanuts, straws, toothpicks, a baggie, rubber bands, tape, glue, socks, toilet paper, popsicle sticks (or emery boards or tongue depressors), pipe cleaners, and cotton balls.
Your experiment will have been successful when you drop the raw egg in its protective container 3 consecutive times from 8 feet without it breaking.

My immediate impulse was to use paper cups to create a sort of shock-diffusing ball/polyhedra-looking contraption. I’d build this ball—each paper cup attached bottom first to a center capsule—around the egg, which would be in a baggie, cushioned with water to absorb some of the force of impact. I’d probably throw some cotton balls in there as well.

[NOTE: I did not notice until after performing the experiment that water is absent from the list of approved materials. Technically, I suppose a person could say this invalidates my results, if that person wanted to be a jerk about it. But glue *is* allowed, and glue is also a liquid, and far more viscous and egg-protecting than water anyhow, so I'm going to have to rule in favor of me on this one.]

The problem was that I hadn’t really given sufficient thought to the whole attaching-the-cups-in-a-polyhedric-array strategy. I tried cutting two slits in the bottom of a cup and threading some tape through, but this was time consuming and I am not a patient woman, so I was forced to modify the design slightly to account for both this new information and my extreme laziness. What I ended up with was this:

Should you feel like replicating my construction, you will need:
-1 egg, raw
-1 baggie
-1 bag cotton balls
-1 roll “Magic” tape (It says so on the package, but I remain skeptical.)
-2 small Dixie cups
-Some larger paper cups (I used 6, but not for any particular reason beyond my attention span.)
-Working faucet

For the inner capsule, I ran water into one of the wee Dixie cups, and then added the egg (displacing some of the water, naturally—that’s physics). I took the second wee Dixie cup and stuck a few cotton balls in it, and then I taped it, top to top, onto the egg-and-water-containing cup, wrapping the tape securely around the rims and every which way. Here is the inner capsule (viewed AFTER the experiment, hence the dampness):

I put this inner capsule in a baggie surrounded by cotton balls, and ran a little water in there to get said cotton balls nice and saturated. I stuck in more cotton balls wherever I could feel a cup edge or hardness of any kind. Then I took the larger cups—intending, as mentioned, to attach them polyhedra-like to distribute the impact over a greater area—but quickly settled on securing only four of them to the baggie with large quantities of tape in an arrangement that reminded me a little of the bottom of a space shuttle. There was tape criscrossing the mouths of the cups, and so I stuffed a bunch of cotton balls into each cup through the openings in the tape, to further absorb the force of the landing. Here is a photo of the Landing Gear, from below:

At this point I decided to tack two additional cups onto the design, partially to cushion two hard spots I could feel, and partially so that if the contraption should overbalance/not land on it’s Official Landing Gear it would tip onto a support (why I thought it would land on it’s Official Landing Gear in the first place is unclear). And so again, from a different angle this time, the finished product:

Truly, a marvel of engineering. Sort of. At the very least, a marvel of idle speculation/whim/luck. But I get ahead of myself. (Note that this last sentence, despite being a suspense-creating sort of sentence, fails to create any suspense at all. Sorry about that.)

Scott measured eight feet up from the ground, and found that this fell about six inches above the top of our kitchen cabinets. I stood on a chair holding my noble craft, and dropped it. It landed with a truly alarming THWACK. I winced.

“Yeah. That totally broke,” said Scott.

Alas, because of the absurd complicated nature of the design and my overenthusiastic conscientious application of tape, there was really no way to check on the egg without destroying the whole…whatever it was. So I figured I might as well drop it the requisite three times before cutting it open, just in case. I tried to drop it more softly the second time, but it turns out there is no way to drop something “softly.”

(Simone, it should be noted, was delighted by this entire process, and her help was instrumental during the Tape portion of construction.)

After the third drop, I began to cut the thing open, and once I’d discarded the cups and cut open the baggie to feel my way toward the inner capsule, I began to suspect that a great engineering fait had just been accompli-ed, by a humble stay-at-home writer with access only to her limited wits and $15 worth of supplies from Walgreens.
And I was right.

Behold, the S.S. Victory!

You know, it sounds far less likely to result in a Nobel Prize for physics when I see it all typed out like that. I feel I have failed to capture the thrill of it all. Trust me, it was AWFULLY thrilling. Also thrilling was the experiment I performed immediately prior to this one, which I did not photograph, but which I strongly suggest that you go into the kitchen presently and try for yourself. (No, I mean it. It’s fun!) Here is a picture from the Internet:

Basically, you fill a drinking glass with water, and set a pie plate on top of it (I didn’t have a pie plate, so I used a plastic plate with a lip—the lip is essential). On top of that, you upend a cardboard toilet paper roll, and on top of that you place a raw egg (I had to squeeze the toilet paper roll a bit so that the egg didn’t slide down snugly into it). Then, you give the pie plate a good horizontal WHACK, with follow-through, and the pie plate and toilet roll skitter away while the egg drops, unharmed, into the glass of water.

I’d read the explanation of the principles behind the experiment, and it all sounded sensible enough—inertia, science, etc.—but when I actually saw the thing set up on my kitchen floor, I thought to myself, Newton, you are full of shit. But no! It works! Not quite as impressive as the S.S. Victory, but you have to give old Isaac credit for trying.

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