When Out of A Doorway the Tentacles Stretch I need someone to talk me out of being a jerk. We have a group of friends up here who are all Gray's childhood friends, so I inherited them as friends when we got married and then their wives as friends when they got married. And they're all pretty good friendships, like I go out with them sometimes without Gray and everybody gets along. There are four couples, five counting us. Four out of the five couples have kids - two have one, two have two, so half have already had a second child. The fifth couple doesn't have kids and they've been trying since the second they got married three years ago. Everybody in the group knows about their infertility issue and is sensitive about it, unlike one of their other friend-couples who got pregnant just by looking at each other on their wedding night and likes to tell the story of how freaked out they were over and over as the wife pats her round belly. So we're all mindful. When I found out I was pregnant I told the husband separately and asked him how to tell his wife, my friend, about it, and he goes, "Don't do it, I'll do it, and I'm so glad you came to me first." She's been known to avoid kids parties, and I'd heard that she cries when she finds out other people are pregnant. On the flipside, they've hosted a bunch of shindigs at their house since we've moved here and everybody's kids are always there and she seems to be fine.

So I kind of waited for her to send me an email saying hi and congratulations or something vaguely acknowledging, but after a month of silence I asked him if he'd told her and he said yes, so I know at least that she knows.

But now that two and a half months have passed and I haven't heard from her and she keeps ducking out of all the things that the whole group does together (last weekend big picnic, she didn't go and was "at home relaxing") I started to get mad. I didn't want to feel it and I felt like an a-hole for feeling it, but couldn't stop. To another friend in the group I said I was bummed that she seemed to be staying away from things because of me and my belly, and this friend said, "I might do the same thing. I wanted kids so bad and if I couldn't have them I'd probably need to be as far away from visual reminders as possible."

I'm still feeling mad. I'm feeling like if she can't say congratulations to me and be around me, when she knows I'm not going to talk about baby stuff and will 100% have her feelings in mind when she's in front of me, then we aren't really friends. And after the picnic I heard her husband invite one of the other friend-couples back to their house for dinner. But not us, and in the past we definitely would have been invited too.

Maybe this is all non-sympathetic whining on my part. It's just that even when we had a hard time getting pregnant the first time (granted, 10 months is not 3 years, but it felt like a longgg time) I never begrudged anyone their joy and never avoided them and would never have not said congratulations or made them feel bad for what's such a happy time.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not being understanding enough. But I'm also pretty sure that if this continues for the next 3 months I don't think I can be friends with her in the future. If anybody's got infertility experience and you think I'm being a jerk, let me have it.

  ¶ 12:07 PM 1 Comments

  Prepare For the Best and the Fastest Ride May miracles never cease -- I just set up a new mail account on my Mac and it worked. Lately things aren't so easy on the easy Macintosh, so I feel like I should get a trophy or a plate of cake or something.

After I wrote the last entry, we hired our babysitter and went out for dinner (Macaroni Grill, fattening and delicious) and to a movie (Observe and Report, stupid and lame) and the baby was still alive when we got home. Dang, it's hard to trust other people. Maybe when he's older we'll feel more secure about him staying with a sitter because he'll be able to tell us if they stick him in a dark closet or feed him beers, but for now it's nervewracking. And yet it was so nervewracking that we did it again two weeks after the first time, when we went to dinner (Carl's Jr., because we ran out of time) and saw a movie (Star Trek, pretty good overall) and had a nice time. Dates are good, I guess. But how important are they, really? When we were on them all we did was talk about Gray's lack of job and the baby back at home, so it's not like it was especially unique or revitalizing or anything.

The latest is the whole preschool issue. I always laughed at waiting list preschool people, but now we're some of them because there aren't enough to go around in our area. I'm also thinking about putting him in daycare (which is more like pre-pre-school) for two mornings a week before the new baby comes (3.5 months away) and this preschool business is all anybody wants to talk about in the mother's club. It's preschool. I don't think that the place we choose will determine the course of his life like some people seem to. All I remember of mine is that we sang Frere Jacques and played in the sand, so really. How much should I stress about it?

Because I have a father who grew up during the Depression (he's 81, whereas Gray's dad is 63 for comparison), all that save and don't spend stuff was fully ingrained in me and still sticks with me even though I've tried to to be a good American and spend some money once in awhile. So what do I do the second Gray gets laid off? I start selling stuff on ebay in order to hoard money. And it's been awhile since I've done it, and I've forgotten what a pain in the ass it is. I sold six things, and only three people have paid, and two of them are foreigners (Germany, Australia) who have picked whatever random amount they felt like to pay me for shipping to their far-off land, which will probably be too low. Somebody else wants a tracking number for a $5 item, and it's just such a pain. Nobody behaves normally there. Stupid ebay.

So Facebook always reveals funny things, and the funniest thing lately is that I'm friends with an old boyfriend (who has gotten really fat) and someone wrote on his wall: "I see you got married to X. Are you guys still together?" Normally a pretty rude thing to write, right? But fitting for a (formerly, at least) wandering cheater such as he.

On pregnancy: I am really obese and uncomfortable and still have a long way to go. Nothing fits, my boobs are huge and uncomfortable, I keep worrying that my belly fat is peeking out from under my shirt, and I get winded when I climb stairs. Man, the injustice. At least I don't have gestational diabetes, but I have to drink a grose iron drink because I'm anemic. All of the babies I cook in my belly like to sap me of iron. This one did, too.

  ¶ 12:16 PM 0 Comments

  All These Tapes In My Head Swirl Around Stealthpunch Junior is two, and he's never had a babysitter. That is to say, we've never hired him a babysitter, or had someone watch him who wasn't related to him or that we haven't known for fifteen years. And Gray and I are notoriously bad at going out on dates -- like those books that say "Couples should go out on dates once a week after having children for their own separate alone time" would frown at us so hard their faces would stick that way. I think we've been out alone once together in the year we've lived here, and once when we were all staying with Gray's parents and once when we were all staying with my parents. So three times in a year. And we're still married. Take that, couples counselors.

But this is not what I want to write about. What I want to write about is sixteen year olds. We marched down the street to our neighbor's house, a neighbor who recently said, "My daughter would love to babysit for you," so we walked over to take her up on it. She wasn't home, so we talked to her parents, some nice people who look like they're about a decade older than us, say forty-five give or take a few years. Twenty minutes later the sixteen year old knocks on our door and we hang out and introduce her to the baby and we're all talking and about her babysitting him in the future, and she'll make our fifty dollar dinner and a movie turn into more like ninety, but whatever, the experts made us do it. So she leaves, and Gray turns to me and goes, "That's what sixteen is. Didn't you feel OLD?" and I said yeah I felt like a fricking grandma, and then he goes, "She could be your daughter if you had her when you were a senior in high school," and I go, No, I would have an almost twenty year old if I had her in high school. And then we kind of got depressed. And then I said, But didn't you feel like you have way more in common with her than you do with her parents who are way closer to us in age? And he said, "Yeah, totally." Does this mean that we're stunted somehow? That we have a Peter Pan thing going on? Or that we're of that Gen-X segment that just doesn't feel adulty no matter how old we get?

Also, Gray got laid off on Friday. So I don't know how we're affording this babysitter.  ¶ 10:12 PM 0 Comments

  I Run the Streets and I Break Up Houses This is going to be a complainy couple of minutes. Mostly because I'm in this terrible in between place of my clothes not fitting, where I'm not huge enough yet to fully fit maternity clothes, but my normal clothes don't fit either, and my bras are pinching me like a motherfucker. I haven't consulted last pregnancy's photos yet, but I'm pretty sure at 21 weeks I look like I did at about 31 weeks belly-wise. People who I haven't seen in awhile are starting to greet me by staring at my stomach, and I can see their wheels turning, and I kind of wait an extra beat to see if they'll say anything, but then I kill the awkwardness and just tell them I'm pregnant. "Oh, yeah!" They say. "I didn't want to say anything, but I thought so." My god, and I'm only halfway through, feeling like this. What will 19 more weeks be like?

Gray might lose his job tomorrow. He's not sure, but from what he describes it sure sounds like it to me. I'm trying to convince him to convince them to hold onto him for another 90 days, because we just refinanced and got this deal from Bank of America where if you get laid off after 90 days of signing they'll pay your mortgage for a year. That plus COBRA paying 65% of health coverage under the new federal socialism act when you get fired might actually be an inexpensive way to live our lives.

I thought I had a baby name picked out, but now I'm not sure. It's complex, the naming issue. It can't just look good on paper, it has to sound good, and it has to be suitable for baby, teenager, adult. The name I want to give will provoke some quizzical eyebrows and a lot of "Where'd you get that name?"s, so it's risky. Plus it's the name of a semi-celebrity's kid, and this kid is about 12 now, and I imagine that in five years this kid will be dancing on tabletops in Hollywood nightclubs, and what if their name becomes laden with negative meaning like, say, Paris? It's risky. Maybe dumb to be worried about it, but I still have to weigh it. Like my son was almost named Dashiell, but I was convinced there'd be a whole slew of Dashes after The Incredibles came out, and I've heard a couple. That stuff matters to me.

Also, I'm trying to make up my mind between giving birth at a birth center and a hospital. I asked the doctor at my current OB's office if they and the hospital would ever let me do natural labor for 28 hours like my first time around, and she looked at me and said, "Um, no." So it's looking like I might avoid the hospital yet again.

I think it is stupid that the toy brooms at Toys R Us are located in the girls' section next to the dolls. What kind of sexist crazy crap is that? While it's true that my life is exclusively about child-rearing, cooking and cleaning, it doesn't mean that future generations have to feel that way. Oh god i'm depressed.

Also, finally, I wish I had an advanced missile system on my car expressly for people who clean their windshields in heavy moving traffic, ie. when I'm right behind them. Because they might get a clean windshield, but then mine gets sprayed with their mist and gets totally dirty. Why don't more people realize this is what happens? Or do they not care?

I wish it were possible to drink whiskey and be pregnant, because I would totally sign up for that.

  ¶ 10:57 PM 0 Comments

  There's No Victory As Big As The Lesson Ugh, taxes. Still not finished. Our accountant wants us to tally all the money we spent fixing up the Burbank house, and I don't know if you remember the stories I told here way back when about what a pit of despair that place was in the beginning, but it took a lot of cash to spruce it up. Gray is sitting next to me going through old checkbook registers tallying the damage, and I think we're up to about $75k, and that's just for the stuff we wrote checks for but not including the many thousands of trips to Home Depot that fell to the credit card. Truthfully I don't want to think about it anymore. We turned it from a hovel with four families living in it to the place where our first baby was born, and I don't want to relive the stressful expensive parts. I still wonder what those church services in the backyard must have been like before we moved in, though.

I went back to Burbank this past week for the first time in almost a year. I had a great time, but it was like the twilight zone seeing our house with somebody else living in it. I got to go inside for a tour, and they'd changed it pretty dramatically. On the one hand it's great because they've made it completely their own and will probably stay there and be renters for a long time, but on the other hand it messed with my head kind of a lot. Because nothing else in the neighborhood had changed -- all the other neighbors are the same and they all came over to say hi, including one who filled me in on all the crazy gossip within literally two minutes of getting out of my car, and our house is the same on the outside -- but we aren't living in it. I had to go drown my sorrows immediately in a Porto's Cubano sandwich.

And driving six hours each way within a three-day period is not recommended with a two-year old. Luckily he had his Sesame Street saxophone with him which got stuck under the backseat and so played what sounded like the Benny Hill theme over and over for two hours until we stopped and I got out and got it.

The new DM album is good for those interested. Not all tracks are great, but some are really good. They're playing the Hollywood Bowl and I have to miss it, and also Shoreline Amphitheater up here. I'll be two weeks away for giving birth, so it's not a good idea. Also, the fetus decibels. The injustice of it all.

Here is a funny picture from a website I like. They have really cool wall stickers for kids rooms, but I was looking at this going "I don't think this designer a) has kids or b) lives in earthquake country." Imagine that spiky clock falling off the wall. Ouch.



  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 Comments

  Because When I Arrive I Bring the Fire This pregnancy's weird. Now that I've talked about it it's all I'm going to talk about for the next five months probably. Half the time I don't feel like I'm pregnant even though my belly is getting exponentially rotund each day, and I've had 17 weeks to get used to it so far. I waited a long time to tell anybody because I was freaked out that something would be wrong, so freaked out that I had that CVS procedure where they stick a giant big fat needle in your belly, and I think everybody here knows how I feel about needles. If there was one thing Gray and I learned from my last pregnancy it's that we're both the kind of people who need to know everything there is to know about the baby inside. For instance, last time I had a nuchal translucency test, which measures the bridge of the baby's nose and the folds of its neck in utero to statistically determine whether or not it has Down's. Even though the numbers came back well within range of being fine, we spent the entire 40 weeks thinking something was askew since it was a statistical test and not a diagnostic test. So this time, diagnostic. And everything's fine. I'll have the big ultrasound in a couple of weeks where they can see how everything's flowing to all the organs and where my placenta is and if everything's good. And then if things are okay maybe I'll relax. What was that, you ask? You want me to say placenta again? Okay. Placenta, placenta, placenta. There's a town outside Los Angeles called Placentia and I always thought that was a little close/grose.

So everything else is cool I guess. One of my Burbank friends came to visit a few weeks ago and it made me realize that I still don't have any real friends here so it took me a few days after she left to get un-bummed. We'll have lived here a year next month. Next week I'm going to Burbank to see what $4000 buys you plumbing-wise on a house you don't live in anymore and also to visit with some friends, also to buy a Porto's sandwich, and also to hit a small bookstore up for the money they owe me but refuse to pay me because I don't live there anymore. Jerks. Which reminds me that the big indie bookstore in this town is closing at the end of April because of the dang economy. And also the sales tax here in this county is going to 9.25 at the beginning at April, which if you ask me is the crime of the century. Way to let people get back on their feet, California government. Hit us in the wallet on a daily basis. Things are a mess.

The baby isn't a mess. He likes donkeys.

  ¶ 4:05 PM 0 Comments

  Someday You Will Find Me Caught Beneath the Landslide I'm on hold with my life insurance company. Now that we have no money because of the stupid economy we decided it would be a good idea to get a living trust, so that if we die all of our zero dollars won't go through probate and it'll be easier for our zero-dollar-receiving heirs to inherit their non-money. So to get an address to mail the revised paperwork I have to be on hold for half an hour. At least it's toll-free.

I have a minor situation that's bumming me out. Periodically I get snailmail from people pitching me children's book ideas. My instinct is to help them, to tell them how to approach getting a publisher or how to self-publish, whichever fits their material best, or to urge them to get a little more schooling before trying to publish, which is most often the case. But Gray won't let me write back to them. He goes, "There's a reason half the production companies in Hollywood say 'We won't accept unsolicited material.' It's because they don't want to get sued." He thinks I'm going to respond to one of these people and then they're going to claim that I used their idea in a book and take me to the cleaners for all my zero dollars. So what do I do, not help people? It's so lame. But I don't write back to them because he scared me into not doing it.

So, um, should I say now that I'm pregnant or should I save it for a fresh entry?

  ¶ 11:05 AM 1 Comments