The perfect frickin mother

So as Mark and I get ready for parenthood, I am trying to hold on to the values I went into the pregnancy with - that kids don't need a tonne of material things to be happy and have a life of abundance, that kids don't need perfect parents to grow up strong and healthy and that really, somehow you are going to inevitably mess up your kids so you can't put the pressure on yourself to be perfect at all times. But of course as the pregnancy progresses, I feel guilty about all the ways that I am not the perfect parent. And I see lots of pretty, slim, glowing pregnant women on the street and in stores who seem serene and fashionable and probably do not require large doses of psychiatric medications to get through their days and I start to feel insecure. Don't get me wrong, I know enough to know that in actuality these women have their problems too but from the outside, they look like they have their shit together.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, I had an experience that just seemed to be the perfect expression of this whole dilemma. I was coming home from work, having worked a long day and feeling tired and cranky. I was starving, too hungry to make the walk from the subway station to my apartment without eating so I bought a snack at the kiosk in the subway station. I picked the second healthiest snack, a bag of Smartfood popcorn (the healthiest was probably the pretzels) and headed home, achy, snarly, sweaty, disheveled and eating cheddar cheese popcorn. As I was plodding down the sidewalk, I saw a lovely pregnant woman, maybe seven months along or so in a pretty maternity outfit and glowing suntanned skin and pretty flowing hair. As I watched, she stopped suddenly in her tracks. About three inches away from her toe was a little earth toned butterfly. She tripped prettily around the butterfly and then it fluttered prettily away. And I just thought "good god, that is the perfect mother." I mean seriously, she might as well be feeding a baby dear while woodland creatures gather at her feet and birds sit on her shoulder.

It also made me think of a story Mark told me the other day about how he squished a dragonfly with his bike wheel. It had been buzzing all around him while he was setting up a trials line and just didn't get out of the way fast enough. Draw from this comparison what you will...

Mathemagician!

I have a recurring dream that I am back in high school and cannot remember either my locker location, my locker combination, or sometimes both. In this dream, I am always at first with some people and casually trying to look like I'm not desperately looking around trying to scrounge up some glimpse of a memory that would tell me where my locker is. Eventually they go off and then I slink from locker bank to locker bank trying to find mine. It's often in a sunny corner, though I never had a locker in a sunny corner in actuality. Then I must open my combination lock. Generally I have more luck with this part. I think this is because I'm decent at memorizing number strings. Not in that "you say 15 numbers and I'll say them back perfectly right away" kind of way. More in that I memorize my everyday numbers fairly easily kind of way. I know my credit card number, my bank card number, my old bank card number, my student number for U of T, my student number for York, my social insurance number, my library card number, and a bunch of phone numbers of people I haven't called in years.

Though really, I'm not as good with phone numbers. The other day I totally spaced on my friend's phone number, which she's had for over a year and which I never bothered writing down because I had it memorized. I was reduced to pressing buttons on my touch tone phone trying to produce a familiar sounding tune. I got it eventually. I'm chalking it up to pregnancy brain. I have been waaaaaay more flighty since being pregnant and since I'm not used to it, have not yet devised clever organizational scheme like oh, writing things in my planner and then checking it later.

I have been irritated with pregnancy issues a lot this week. In particular, I am tired of people giving their seats on the subway to women who I believe to be the same or less far along in their pregnancy than me. Being a larger person, I think people are afraid to assume I am pregnant. So little skinny women with their cute but tiny little 4 month bumps get to sit down and I am left standing with my back stabbing with pain, my shoulders aching, and my stomach nauseous as the driver lurches the subway or streetcar along. I often feel like screaming "I'm pregnant too you know. Asshole!" Not to mention the cuteness of maternity wear for skinny women and the floral/animal print nightmare that is maternity wear for plus-size women. I'm really not sure what I'll do when I outgrow my two-sizes-to-big normal clothes and have to really move into maternity clothes.

On the plus side, I feel the baby kicking often these days, which is pretty cool. The first time it happened I was excited. Then later it was kind of creepy - there is a creature not just living inside of me but moving around inside of me. Strange. But now it's pretty comforting. I'll feel him moving around when I'm in a meeting, or watching tv, or going to bed and it makes me feel good to know he's still there and still growing. You go, little baby. You go!

i robot

So a couple of years ago Mark and I got our first air conditioner - an awesome and much needed early wedding present from my parents. Those of you who live in Toronto with the summertime humidex of 40 degrees know what I'm talking about. Sadly, because of the shape of our apartment, the lovely coolness has never reached our bedroom. And absolutely no cross-breeze reaches our bedroom. No matter how comfortable the rest of the apartment is, the bedroom has remained a hot sweaty sauna of misery.

So this year, with being pregnant, I decided enough was enough. Last summer it would take an hour or more to fall asleep just because of being so hot and if you woke up in the night, you'd have to go through it all over again. And I anticipate waking up frequently in the night this summer. Plus, in order to ensure the correct sleeping position, I am surrounded by a little cage of pillows that keeps me from rolling onto my back. Not exactly conducive to airflow. So after playing the "for the good of our baby" card with Mark, we decided to get a portable air conditioner for the bedroom (we can't have a window one in the bedroom). Mark's dad got wind of this and was awesome enough to give us the cash for it - yeah Al and Kathy!

So we wasted no time and went off shopping. Behold our frosty beauty.




Mark just finished installing it and I'm loving it. Could it look anymore like a robot? The little exhaust tubes look like arms and everything. It reminds me of a cross between Rosie on the Jetson's and some of the less than stellar droids that the Jawas had on that huge transport in Star Wars, especially the one that was just a brown trash can with feet. Now as long as it doesn't try to kill me in my sleep, it will all be good.

Can you return from the dead twice?

Ha. As I was typing in the title I started thinking of Days of Our Lives where Hope has returned from the dead no less than 4 times. So I guess the answer is yes. Anyway, it has been almost a month since my last entry, which is just inexcusable. But lots has happened. I was away in the lovely British Columbia for 10 days and also I have been struggling a lot with my mood and motivation as it has been over six months since I went off my antidepressants and I'm starting to feel it. The last few days have been especially bad but today things were a little better so I'm feeling hopeful.

BC was awesome. Went out for a family wedding - spent a day in Victoria, three in Tofino and three in Vancouver and a couple of days traveling from Victoria to Tofino to Vancouver. My family and I encountered many weird, wondrous, and beautiful things on our trip such as these:

Miniature World in Victoria - a little museum made up of miniature scenes. Except instead of being handcrafted art pieces, the scenes are just made up of dollar store toys slapped together with model kit buildings.



In some cases, they ran out of even these toys and substituted home-made crocheted dolls or ceramic figurines that had nothing to do with the scene represented. There was also a surprising amount of nudity!





The giant trees of Cathedral Grove (there were also giant slugs in Cathedral Grove):





The market between Victoria and Tofino where goats graze on the thatched roof. They also had amazing wooden toys and I would have bought a tonne if I had had a bigger suitcase. As it was I was very restrained on the whole trip - go me!




The beautiful Tofino, where there is a man named Turtle who laughs so loud that they have placed an 11:30 p.m. curfew on laughing (this is not a picture of Turtle, this is Mark, who laughs like a normal person, though he generally calls "quiet times" on laughing after 11:30 p.m. too).




And finally, perhaps the strangest thing on our trip, our hotel door. We stayed in the Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver, a fancy conference hotel downtown. Anyway, their guests must have a lot of security issues because the doors each had six peep-holes and none of them were at head level. You can make them out in this picture but it's blurry because the people in the room started to open the door as I was taking the picture so I had to run away and never bothered getting another pic later. lol