Dec
06

Antici…pation.

Many of you were curious about how, exactly, a piece of Saltine made its way into my underpants. Life is full of little mysteries like this, things that make your head hurt if you think about them too hard: what is nothingness? Is existence a property or predicate? Do all Cartesian worldviews lead inevitably to solipsism? How did that fragment of cracker bypass the dual outcroppings of my bosom and belly? Did I maybe eat a Saltine on the toilet during one of my wee-hour ramblings? What would that say about my hygiene? Just how long has it been since I cleaned the bathroom?
I urge you not to torment yourselves with these questions, as there are some things we simply cannot know—and really, if according to Gettier knowledge requires more than true belief, can we really know anything at all? Now that my days as a philosophy major are behind me and I am no longer required to torture my wheezing synapses for school credit, I have found the most satisfactory way of dealing with a question to which there is no ready answer is to shrug and trundle off to the kitchen for a piece of shortbread. Feel free to co-opt my methodology on that one.

Tomorrow is my much anticipated perinatology appointment. I will be seventeen weeks, and they will be giving me an ultrasound anyway, so I am hoping for a peak at the sexes. Perhaps even Baby B will give up the goods, thereby making up for its uncooperative behavior at previous scans. I have heard that it is helpful to ingest something sugary prior to the ultrasound to ensure active and exhibitionist babies, so for lunch tomorrow I will have a donut or two sprinkled with crack cocaine. I don’t know why I am so wild with excitement at the idea of seeing my children’s genitalia, as we will be delighted with any sex combination and I am not planning to decorate the Other Room in a gender-specific way, but I honestly am counting the hours (just under 22 1/2, in case you were wondering). Adding to my delirium is the fact that we haven’t had a long look at the babies for over a month. Of course tempering my delirium is the fear that begins to snake through my chest in a constricty sort of way prior to an ultrasound, but that is to be expected.
I will post the news (if there is any) as soon as I get home from the appointment, so feel free to speculate in the meantime. Personally, I suspect I am having two white rats, as I have heard that the mother’s dream images of her babies are often accurate, and the one dream I have had that featured me post-birth centered around the (difficult) task of keeping twin rats calm, cared for, and in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on them (I used a broom for this last part).
Of course the real purpose of tomorrow’s appointment is to meet my new doctor, ask about work restrictions and preterm labor symptoms, and take a gander at my cervix, but I’ll be damned if I can think about anything besides tiny penises and/or labia. And the fact that, according to the Internet, the babies now look like this. Just like grown up babies, except shorter and spindlier. And apparently if you stretched them out from their customary and creatively-named “fetal position” they would be nine inches each from head to toe. Nine inches! Why, if you laid them end to end, that would be a full foot and a half of baby! They are now too big to carry in an evening bag, not that I was planning to carry them in one of my nice clutches where they could soil the lining, but still—nine inches.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |