Of course, at five months old, Lenora is too young to have opinions about anything besides “I love Mommy!” and “Wet diapers are uncomfortable!” But still, we watch Nova together, and I’m planning to take her to see the transit of Venus when the local astronomical society hosts a viewing next month. We go outside to look at the stars. The night of the supermoon was the first time I ever heard Lenora really laugh–I’m not sure if it was the bright, shiny moon or the breeze in her hair or being held by her daddy, but she let out a beautiful laugh, the likes of which I have not heard since.

Anyhow, the dual tuners on my Tivo are currently hard at work, recording my two favorite shows: Nova and America’s Next Top Model. These shows may seem mutually exclusive, but I love them both. Weirdly enough, I learn from them both, too. The lessons may be completely different–Nova teaches me about scientific developments, and ANTM teaches me about how to pose for photos without losing my neck–but I learn from them both.

For the last three years, I’ve been mentoring a middle schooler. She’s a wonderful young woman who has grown more confident and poised as she’s progressed through middle school, and I love that about her. Middle school can be a real self-esteem killer, and she’s survived–or, more accurately–flourished in that environment. Like many young women her age, she’s a huge fan of the Twilight series and has read all of the books and seen all of the movies multiple times. We usually play Mancala and talk during our weekly meetings (and she almost always wins), but today she saw a chess board and wanted to play.

Neither of us have ever played chess before, but as she said, “it’s a teaching set, and the pieces have information about how they can move on the board.” I was surprised that she wanted to play chess, but as the game got going, I realized that her interest was likely spurred by her love of the Twilight books–one of which includes a pivotal scene where the main characters play chess. It’s a situation where something that is considered “low culture” (Twilight) spurs an interest in something that is considered “intellectual” (chess).

I’m sure the game of chess that we played didn’t follow the rules correctly. Anyone even remotely familiar with how the game is actually played would have been pretty amused by our attempt. But it’s a reminder that curiosity about the world sometimes comes from curious places, and that we can learn new things from unexpected sources.

Thanks to our viewing of America’s Next Top Model, Lenora and I both know how to “booty tooch” (this is a move involving sticking your behind out just so) and how to “smize” (which is smiling with your eyes). There’s no booty tooch in this photo, just some smizing, and Tyra Banks would be proud of my (ahem) gracefully extended neck.

Oh, and my last name is Donohue, not Donahue.

Now, on with the show.

(Note: I started writing this about a week ago, and am just getting back to it now.)

Approximately eight and a half years ago, I wrote a blog post on one of my old blogs about how much I hate library blogs. This was during the heyday of library blogs, when everyone with a library job was busy pontificating about boring library stuff or telling “funny” stories about the stupid things that library patrons do. It made some people surprisingly angry–I guess they were showing their hidden sensitivity or something–but it’s still true. For the most part, I hate library blogs.

But I’m not above an occasional post about library-related things, so here goes.

The big story in the library world today (at least, in the public library world–you academics are probably all aflutter about something related to scholarly communication* or whatever) is that the Brevard County Public Libraries** in Florida have yanked all of the copies of bestselling smut-lite book Fifty Shades of Grey from their shelves. I am not ashamed to say that I have read Fifty Shades of Grey. I have also read the second book in the trilogy. I know that it is Twilight fanfiction with the names changed. I know that it has been derisively called “mommy porn.” (As if giving birth changes a woman’s tastes in erotic literature.) I’d love to tell you that I read it out of librarian-ly duty, because I wanted to be aware of current trends in patron demand, but that would be a lie. I read it because it is purportedly a dirty book, and I am a sucker for a dirty book.

And you know what? It wasn’t that dirty, really. It was very tame. The language was very euphemistic (do recent college grads really refer to their genitals as “my sex”?) and the BDSM scenes–which are what has made the book such a media sensation–are downright tame. Yes, there are references to some sexual paraphernalia (Wartenburg wheel! Nipple clamps!) and kinky practices, but the hero and heroine really don’t get down to it in any graphic detail that goes beyond anything that appears in a typical mainstream romance novel. It’s not a work of classic literature by any means, but I was surprised at how compulsively I read that damn book. I knew it was awful, but I could not stop reading it.

I will even admit to reading the second book in the trilogy, which is just bad. It’s not compulsively readable, it’s just bad. I guess I was willing to forgive the first book because I was so swept up in the awful, implausible story (and perhaps because I was expecting something really dirty to happen), but the second book was just…bad. I finished it because I paid money for it and therefore felt that I should finish it, but I had completely lost interest by the time I was halfway through the book. I bought the third book and will eventually read it, but I am in no hurry. I can pretty much tell you what happens without reading the book:

1. Ana and Christian will get married.
2. There will be some sterile, clinical sex. With light bondage.
3. Ana will bite her lip some more.
4. Christian will brood until the power of love and vanilla sex cures him of his need to dominate women.
5. Ana will, undoubtedly, get pregnant (without any problems, of course) and have a baby, because that is the default happy ending for all couples who are in love. Right?

In short, Fifty Shades of Grey is a romance novel with some not-particularly-graphic sex scenes (featuring milder language that what is found in most mainstream romance novels) and some mild BDSM. It is no more shocking than a lot of things found in your typical public library, especially a public library the size of Brevard County. The big difference between Fifty Shades of Grey and, say, anything from Kensington’s Brava line of erotic romances is that Fifty Shades of Grey is getting a crapton of media coverage, thus making it an obvious target.

So Fifty Shades of Grey is too hot for the readers of Brevard County. Okay, whatever. Communities have the right to determine which items to add to their collections based on local standards. But I wondered to myself if they owned books that I would consider hotter than Fifty Shades of Grey (which is pretty much most things with a few sex scenes). I decided to take a look at their online catalog to see if I could find some smutty stuff. I avoided the obvious targets, like nonfiction books about sex (e.g., The Joy of Sex or The Joy of Gay Sex) or boring-ass classic literature with sex scenes (yeah, they own Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but that’s tame by modern standards). I narrowed my list down to twelve authors, titles, and series, but I could find more. Lots, lots more. Go forth, administration of the Brevard County Public Library, and weed! Bowdlerize your collections! Make your library safe for readers!

Here’s my Dirty Dozen Books that Brevard County Library Hasn’t Removed from Their Collection:

1. An e-book by Lauren Dane, who is one of my favorite erotic romance writers. I met Lauren Dane when I was in Seattle for ALA–my friend Katie knows her. I’ve been reading her books ever since.
2. A novel by Lorelei James, a well-known author of graphic and non-clinical erotic romance. James’s novels are often recommended as “additional reading” for readers who liked Fifty Shades of Grey and are interested in exploring erotic romance with BDSM themes further.
3. Most of the works of erotic romance author Robin Schone, whose first novel, Awaken My Love, includes a scene involving time travel via masturbation (I learned this on the first day of my Adult Popular Literature class in library school and purchased the book that evening). They also own The Lady’s Tutor, which was the first erotic romance I ever read (also when I was in library school).
4. A copy of Around the Way Girls, an urban-fiction anthology that had some pretty high smut content. I know that urban fiction/street lit is low-hanging fruit when you’re looking for potentially “offensive” material in library collections, so this pick feels a bit like a cop-out.
5. Most of the Zane canon, including The Sisters of APF, which made ME blush when I read it. I may not be a huge fan of Zane’s books, though I have read a few, but I appreciate the way she has built such an amazing brand for herself.
6. Several installments of the Bad Boys erotic romance novella series, including Bayou Bad Boys and Bad Boys of Summer. These tend to be more graphic than, ahem, Fifty Shades of Grey.
7. Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus and Little Birds. I suppose you could use the “classics” defense on these, but they aren’t classics of anything other than erotic literature. They are mostly just old. I read these in college when I was trying to be “cool” and “edgy.”
8. Most of the Lora Leigh “Breeds” series, which are shapeshifter romances that consist of a string of sex scenes filled in with some weird futuristic fantasy stuff. I find these books almost uniformly awful, but I do have a game that I play with them. Whenever I see a new one, I try to open the book up to the spot where the buttsex happens. This is Lora Leigh, the buttsex is her trademark, and it’s usually between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way through the book. I am really good at finding it.
9. A book called To Serve and Submit, which is probably more explicit in its depiction of BDSM than Fifty Shades of Grey is.
10. For that matter, they have Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, which a co-worker suggested as a potential read-alike for Fifty Shades readers who want to know what BDSM is REALLY like.
11. Herotica 2 and a 1990s edition of The Best American Erotica, which makes me wonder if the Brevard County Public Library selectors are sneaking into my personal library and poaching books from my shelves, because these are pretty old and I own both of them but can’t find them anywhere. If Fifty Shades is “pornography,” these should be illegal.
12. The Smart Bitches covered this one nicely–Brevard also owns quite the selection of Longarm books, which are nothing if not FILTHY. I remember finding out how dirty Longarm (and Spur, too) are when I took Adult Popular Literature. My grandfather used to read those things like crazy. When I learned how raunchy they were, it was like a little piece of my childhood died or something. Not that I fault the guy for liking some raunch, but I thought he was reading about stampedes and cattle rustlers, not loose women and even looser men.

Now, I have no problem with libraries adopting collection development policies–as long as they stand by them and enforce them uniformly. If Fifty Shades of Grey is “pornographic” and your library isn’t going to purchase it (or, even worse, you’re going to BUY it and then pull it from your shelves, thus wasting money, because seriously, with all the media coverage about the stupid book, you KNEW what you were getting when you purchased it), that’s a-OK with me. But don’t present yourself as the gatekeeper of holy learnin’ and clean content, because you aren’t.

—

*I have threatened to start a blog called “Scholarly Communication is Boring” several times. But the idea of a blog about scholarly communication, even one that is a parody of scholarly communication blogs, puts me in an instant coma.

**I keep wanting to call them the Broward County Public Library. I think this is because when I think of counties in Florida that a) begin with “Br” and b) do not like filth-flarn-filth, I think of Broward County and the 2 Live Crew obscenity charges from the early 1990s.

In babies, RSV causes a respiratory infection that leads nervous parents (like us) to the ER in “holy shit! the baby’s not breathing!” mode. In adults, it causes the worst fucking cold of a lifetime. I’m not kidding. I have been out of work for a week with this stupid cold. I haven’t been out sick from work or school for a week since I had chicken pox in first grade. And that was in 1980. My body is producing levels of mucus that I can only describe as “unprecedented” and “large.” We have gone through six boxes of tissues in the last five days.

Lenora has gone from “wheeze wheeze wheeze” to “cough cough cough,” and I’m hoping this means that she’s finally going to expel this virus from her body. Her appetite has finally recovered, which is good, but she’s not herself quite yet. Meaning…she is not smiling. She has not smiled for almost a week. I understand that it is hard to smile when you feel like shit, but come on, baby, I am doing my level best to entertain you, and it would be really kind of you to just humor your mommy just this once. For real. I feel nasty too, but I am willing to spend five minutes shaking your favorite “Lamb Baby” toy over your head and making up songs about your toes to help you feel better. You could do me a kindness and give me a smile–a half-assed one will do–to help me feel better.

So, to recap:

• Someone has stolen my baby and replaced her with a living, sorta-breathing ball of mucus;
• Someone has stolen my husband and replaced him with a sorta-living, generally-breathing, sweating, snoring ball of mucus;
• I am full of mucus and I feel like crap.

I’d like to raise my middle finger to RSV! Let’s hear it for RSV! Scourge of my life!

—

Returning to work wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I’ve told everyone that the anticipation was far, far worse than the reality. I think I’m just a very routine-based person, and over twelve weeks of maternity leave, you develop plenty of routines that become normal. I liked maternity leave well enough, but I was glad to return to my job, which I really enjoy, and which gives me a feeling that I have actually accomplished something with my day. I am peeved that this illness has managed to regress me to the second week of Lenora’s life, where I was off the major painkillers and alert to the fact that the baby was, quite possibly, the most demanding creature in the world. Even worse than Grace, our tortie cat, who can communicate with very manipulative meows when she wants FOOD RIGHT NOW, and will proceed to jump on things, run around under your feet, and pester one of the other cats when she does not get what she wants RIGHT NOW. Grace: most loveable shithead cat in the universe.

—

I’m working on some book reviews for my crafts column in Library Journal, and I’m reviewing a scrapbooking book. I find scrapbooking really creepy, but it is popular, so whenever I get scrapbooking books of decent quality, I will review them. This one is a collection of pages that can be “scraplifted,” which sounds like stealing or plagiarism but isn’t. It is encouraged! Let someone else do the really creative work for you, so you can have fun taking 9000 pictures of your nine-year-old daughter’s first zit. (I’m not kidding. There’s actually a page layout featuring photos of a nine-year-old washing her face, along with a story about how her skin got “suddenly oily” and how she is too young to have a pimple. I fear for what will happen when this poor child gets her first period. I wonder if there’s a page design that can be “scraplifted” for such an occasion, or if you just use the “first zit” layout and replace the artsy photo of Noxzema face wash with an artsy photo of some maxi pads and tampons in a pretty basket.)

I totally understand parents wanting to scrapbook the big days in their child’s life. Birthdays, family vacations, holidays, important firsts, etc. But this process of scrapbooking the not-so-big days of your child’s life (first zit? the day your child annoyed you, so you felt like a bad mother? your trip to Jamba Juice?) creeps me out. Especially when they involve dimensional letters and chipboard shapes. A one-off Facebook update like “Today we took Hannah to Jamba Juice and she loved her smoothie!” is much, much less freaky than taking umpteen photos of the experience and then spending three hours and $50 in supplies to create a colorful two-page spread of the blessed event.

I hope all of these children whose lives are being scrapbooked to death become goths or Juggalos or whatever rebellious kids these days are becoming. I’d love to see a scrapbook layout of “Ben’s First Gathering of the Juggalos.”

The best metaphor I can think of is that maternity leave is like a really long vacation where your wallet gets stolen on the second day. You spend the first couple of weeks freaking the fuck out and wondering what you are going to do about it. You have to scramble to get everything replaced before someone steals your identity. You have no money, no credit cards, no ID, so you are losing sleep and the stress is killing you. Then everything gets resolved, and you start to have some fun. You see the sights and get active and do a bunch of cool stuff. After about seven weeks, you get lazy and start spending long hours sitting in your hotel room, happy to be on vacation but kind of bored with your surroundings.

And that is where I’m at. I’m happy to be on leave, but I’ve noticed a steady decline in how much I am able to get done lately. A couple of weeks ago, I’d spend the morning cleaning the house or cooking something interesting while Tim kept an eye on the baby (i.e., she was asleep in his office while he worked). Tim still keeps an eye on the baby in the mornings, but I don’t get anything done. I have cooked some good meals, though. Hopefully, I will get some kind of second wind or whatever during my last four weeks, because there’s a lot I’d really like to get done around here before I go back to work. I am convinced that my house will start looking like something out of Hoarders after I go back to work if I don’t get it cleaned now.

My big accomplishment today (thus far) is that I went to the grocery store. I think Tuesday must be markdown day at the grocery store, because I picked up a bunch of sale stuff to throw in the freezer for later. I also picked up some beer that had been marked down. Our local store carries a pretty decent selection of craft beer, and they recently started carrying beer from Flossmoor Station. As a native of the southern suburbs (but not Flossmoor), I wanted to try it, even though my opinion of Flossmoor Station was somewhat tarnished by a complete nutsack who was on the Three Floyds brewery tour with Tim and I last year. He kept going on and on about how he had just finished going on the tour of Flossmoor Station and how he tasted their newest beer and blah blah blah…while he was on the Three Floyds tour. Admittedly, Flossmoor Station Nutsack wasn’t as annoying as the father who brought his hyperactive four-year-old on the brewery tour and expected everyone to find his antics completely adorable, but still…ANNOYING.

I may be a parent now, but my attitude toward poorly behaved children hasn’t changed very much. I told Lenora that she can move into a cave and be raised by wolves if she wants to act like an ass in public. (Perhaps “move into a barn and be raised by donkeys” would be more appropriate.)

• Superbaby by Dr. Jenn Berman (1/4/12): I started this while I was still pregnant, and finished it a few weeks after Lenora was born. This book ties in with the bit in my last post about Research Lady, because it focuses on all kinds of research on infant and toddler development. There’s interesting material here, and some of Dr. Berman’s points gave me some things to think about. However, some of her suggestions seem difficult to implement unless you’re in a stay-at-home parent situation or you have your child care provider completely on board with the plan. For example, I’d love to teach Lenora some basic sign language, but to make that work you really need to make sure all caretakers respond to the signs, otherwise the baby will give up. (Seriously, why keep signing “my diaper is wet” if nobody’s going to pay attention?)
• Your Scandalous Ways by Loretta Chase (1/5/12): Loretta Chase’s books are always winning awards, so I decided to do some “light-duty” reading and try this one out. It was an entertaining historical romance about a courtesan who gets herself entangled in some intrigue and falls in love. Good stuff, I’ll read more.
• Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Fraser (1/11/12): I started this in early December, but it was too dense/thinky to read during the post-birth haze, so it took me a long time to finish. Excellent historical biography of the women in Louis XIV’s life. It went well with Karleen Koen’s Before Versailles, which I read in December.
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire (1/16/12): This is one of those books that I have been meaning to read for years, but never got around to finishing. I started it several years ago and abandoned it partway through, mainly because I’m an easily distractible reader. You probably know the story: it’s a re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz from the Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view. I enjoyed this a lot–it was thoughtful enough that I felt like I was reading something substantive, but light enough that I could sneak little bits of it while doing other things. It was also a lot more political than I would have expected.
• Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire: I decided to read the entire Wicked Years series, since I enjoyed Wicked so much. This one focuses on Liir, Elphaba’s son. It wasn’t quite as good as Wicked, but it wasn’t awful. I’m not necessarily the sort of reader who has to connect with or identify with characters in order to enjoy a book, but I didn’t find Liir quite as engaging as Elphaba, which may have lessened my enjoyment.
• Prelude to a Scandal by Delilah Marvelle (1/23/12): A recovering sex addict enters a marriage of convenience with a feisty young woman whose father has published some controversial research about homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Romance ensues! This was bathtub reading for a few weeks. The large type and giant margins made it a quick, light-duty read.
• A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire (1/23/12): I’m now 82% of the way through the fourth book in The Wicked Years (thank Kindle for useless stats) and they are all starting to run together. This one focused on the Cowardly Lion, who is not so much cowardly as self-centered and overly focused on covering his own ass at the expense of others. Easily the weakest in the series, but I did love the parts about Yackle, who is probably my favorite character in the series.
• Balance is a Crock, Sleep is for the Weak by Amy Eschilman and Leigh Oshirak (1/27/12): I read this hoping to get some good advice on returning to work after my maternity leave. Instead, I just got annoyed. Anything useful was eclipsed by the parts that irritated me, including all the stuff that perpetuates the stereotype of the uninvolved, hapless father who is more interested in playing golf than being a parent. It’ll probably be a while before I go on another business trip, but when I do, I don’t think I’ll need to provide Tim with a laminated guide to everything that Lenora needs. He already knows what to do. I know I picked a winner, but sheesh, are most fathers really that clueless?

Stats for the month:

• Total books finished: 8
• Fiction: 5
• Nonfiction: 3
• Review books: 0 (this is probably the first month in years where I haven’t read anything for review)
• Books started but not finished: 3 (I’m still reading all three, so they’ll show up on next month’s summary)
• Favorite book of the month: Wicked

My house is cleaner than it’s been since we moved in. When we moved in, it was brand-new and empty, therefore clean. Then I filled it with all of my crap, then I added some more crap, then I lived in it and it became cluttered. Then I added cats and purple bath towels, and it became dusty and hair-y. (I will never buy purple bath towels again. Every time I clean the bathroom, I wipe up gobs of purple lint, and I’ve had these towels for YEARS.)

So I’ve been spending a couple of hours every day cleaning and organizing the house. My goal is to have things looking decent enough that I won’t need to spend several hours every weekend cleaning shit up around here. Tim helps out a lot during the week. Since he works from home, he’s willing to throw on a load of laundry or do dishes or empty the dishwasher when he’s on break. This is further proof that he is a better person than I am, because I would spend my breaks doing absolutely nothing useful if I worked from home. I am happy to vacuum and wipe down the bathrooms on the weekend, but I hate doing dishes more than most other things in the world, so I’m happy to pawn that off on someone else.

I’ve also been trying a lot of new recipes, and they have mostly been winners, with the exception of some really bland cornbread that I made a few weeks ago.

I’m enjoying my time off, and I love spending time with Lenora, but I don’t think I could do this long-term. My house would be immaculately clean and I’d eat really well, but I’d be spending an awful lot of time plotting my escape. I don’t do well with unstructured time.

—

I do my best to avoid online arguments. They tend to be counterproductive and annoying. But someone in one of the parenting forums (I know, gag) I frequent made a comment that not only got my goat, but tied a rope around its neck and yanked its poor goaty beard. So I responded calmly, and she came back at me with “WELL THE RESEARCH SAYS BLAH BLAH BLAH I AM RIGHT! YOU GAVE BAD ADVICE! SHAME ON YOU!”

One thing about consorting with academics (and most of us who live in college towns consort with a lot of academics) is that you learn, quickly, that research can prove many things, especially in the social sciences. (It’s a lot tougher to force your research to back up your dumbass, misguided opinions if you’re a scientist.) The research on parenting changes frequently and is often contradictory. It is also frequently used as a means of guilting people (especially women) into doubting their choices and abilities. As much as I’d love to follow all of the current research to a T in order to raise a Superbaby who will cure all the world’s ills AND be socially and emotionally well-adjusted, it’s just not feasible. I refuse to feel guilty about going back to work, giving Lenora a pacifier when she’s wigging out and nothing else seems to work, or watching TV while I breastfeed.

Besides, next week the research will probably change, and the best practices will include something completely different. All I can do as a parent is make sure that she feels secure and loved and do the best I can to keep her reasonably happy. I trust my ability to do what’s right by her, and that’s good enough for me.

I’m sure the research also says that Naked Raygun is not an appropriate musical choice for an infant, but that’s what I’m listening to right now. Surf combat!

—

THINGS THAT MAKE LENORA CRY:

• Wet diapers
• Gas
• Boredom
• Rick Santorum (Whenever he’s on the news, she loses it. I hope he drops out soon because it will help preserve my sanity.)
• Hunger
• Dirty diapers

—

Found on a sticky on my desktop, something I wrote while I was pregnant:

“If anyone ever refers to my cervix as a ‘baby door’ I am going to kick them square in the box”

Fortunately, nobody ever did, so nobody got kicked square in the box.

In an attempt to leave the house for more than an hour at a time, I cleaned out my car today. This will allow Tim to install the car seat base in my car, which will allow me to leave the house with the baby. My car wasn’t dirty, it was just cluttered. I like to have a cluttered car because it means that I don’t have to drive people around in it. If there’s ever a situation that requires carpooling or ride-sharing, all I need to do is point at my backseat and say, “well, we could move that stuff over, or just throw it in the trunk.” They usually respond with, “oh, we can take my car instead.” Yay, that. Besides, my car isn’t the most comfortable car to ride in if you are, say, taller than 5’4″.

So I had to clean the clutter out of my car, because a) I need to get that car seat installed before I go nuts because I can’t go anywhere besides the grocery store; and b) Tim learned at his New Dads class that clutter in your car can become a baby-harming projectile if you get into a car accident. Not that I am concerned that Lenora will be gravely injured by the pile of handouts from a meeting I attended in 2009, but still, I will do what I must if it means FREEDOM!

Things I found in my car:

1. Receipt from pizza carry-out, dated July 15, 2009
2. Aforementioned agendas/handouts from meeting attended in August 2009
3. Temporary parking pass for the county courthouse from my week of jury duty in (ahem) Summer 2007
4. Wadded-up straw wrappers from Sonic. Lots of them. During my first trimester, I lived on slushes from Sonic.
5. Two dollars!
6. Three umbrellas, one of them broken.
7. Thank-you gifts from a committee that I served on a while back. It disbanded sometime in 2009. This is actually some nice stuff, including a glass tumbler that is just the right size for bourbon on the rocks, and a laminated bookmark. And a tote bag. Can you tell that this was a library-related committee?

—

Maternity leave has been interesting, so far. I recovered from the birth pretty quickly, and Lenora isn’t all that fussy or high-maintenance, so there’s been enough down time for me to do things like cook, read, knit, and sew. I am getting plenty of sleep, even with the interruption of night feedings, and I am getting dressed and showering every day (and have been since the beginning). One thing I have learned is that I am not good at managing my time if I’m left to my own devices. I need some structure, or I find myself looking at the clock, noticing that it’s 4:30 PM, and realizing that I spent my day dicking around online (when I wasn’t soothing or feeding the baby). Without structure, my days are a blur. It’s like they run into each other, and I forget what day it is, what time it is, and what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m thankful that I have this time to be at home with Lenora (and it’s paid, too, since I had enough accumulated sick and vacation leave to cover twelve weeks off) and I know it’s going to be difficult when I return to work, but there are parts of me that are looking forward to getting pieces of my “old life” back.

I know the baby is coming tomorrow because she is stubborn. Rather than doing the normal baby thing and turning herself head-down, she has decided to stay butt-down, with her head, arms, and legs sitting underneath my rib cage. Standard protocol with breech babies (at least, in the U.S.), is to schedule a cesarean delivery. My gestational diabetes (or cryabeetus, as I sometimes call it) and my “advanced maternal age” add to the argument for a cesarean. So I go under the knife tomorrow at 8 AM, and the baby comes out approximately 20 minutes later.

Then they’ll remove the placenta, which caused the cryabeetus, and I’ll give it the finger for causing me so damn much grief. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to eat Greek yogurt, string cheese, or peanut butter toast ever again. There’s only so much of those foods that a person can take.

Yesterday was my last day of work before my maternity leave, and it was kind of bittersweet. I’ve been involved in an all-consuming, huge project at work for the last several months–we just transitioned to a new automation system, and I was one of the leads on the project. We went live on December 8th, so the last three weeks have been insane. I’m not the kind of person who feels that my job is a huge part of my identity–it’s something that I do and something that I enjoy very much, but it doesn’t define who I am or what I am about. But it’s something that I do every single weekday, and not having that routine to cling to is kind of freaking me out. I have no worries about the people that I supervise, because they can handle whatever gets thrown at them without my intervention. And I’ve heard all the old chestnuts like “oh, when the baby is here, you’ll be doing plenty of work,” and I’m sure that is the case. But it will be a different kind of work, a kind of work I’m not used to (and that I’m a little afraid of).

Tim has just informed me that my eggs (one of the few things that my cryabeetus will let me eat for breakfast, and I don’t even really like eggs that much, but at least it’s variety) will be finished shortly. I think I’m going to go hog wild and have some apple juice with them, even though fruit and fruit juice are strictly forbidden as breakfast foods when you have gestational diabetes. But I am having a baby tomorrow, and I am a little weirded out by that, and I’m not going to deny myself apple juice right now.

Anyway. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write something, it’s that I’m too lazy/busy/uninspired to actually DO it. There’s been plenty going on around here. Most noteworthy: Tim and I have reproduced. We have spawned. We have learned how babby is formed and we have made it happen. It is a girl. Her name will be Lenora, which is my grandmother’s name. She will arrive around December 20. I am thrilled that it’s a girl, because a) I can indulge my love of Hello Kitty that much more freely; and b) I do not have to pretend to be interested in superheroes or Transformers.

I am doing my damnedest to not act like a smug pregnant lady, because even though I now qualify as a potential member of that group, I still dislike smug pregnant ladies. You know, the ones who walk around rubbing their swollen bellies, smiling like the Virgin Mary in an Italian Renaissance painting. The ones who come up with “clever” nicknames for their unborn child, like “spud” or “fingerling” or “tadpole.” (We call ours “the babby,” or “Lenora.”) The ones who can’t talk about anything other than the exciting thing their fetus did last week, which is usually something like “the spud was totally punching me in the bladder yesterday.” The ones who are all “OMG I CANNOT FUNCTION like a normal person morning sickness pregnancy brain weight gain Braxton-Hicks contractions waddle waddle baby kicking me in the butt cheek.”

Pregnancy is not without its inconveniences. I miss being able to bend at the waist to pick stuff up. I don’t like peeing all the time. Being tired for no apparent reason sucks. I miss beer and cocktails. This gestational diabetes (or pregnancy-related glucose intolerance) that I have magically developed can seriously go fuck itself. But overall, it is really not that bad. I have little right to complain about it–this was definitely planned, I knew what I was in for, I work at a sedentary job that does not require me to do anything particularly strenuous. I will, however, say that it is very weird having something alive inside of you that occasionally thumps against your innards.

So I’ve been pretty quiet about this overall, with no EPIC FACEBOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS about my delicate condition. I feel awkward telling high school classmates from 21+ years ago know that I’m having my first baby, at the ripe old age of 37. There are people I went to high school with who are grandparents. In their late 30s. But what the hell…I was always a late bloomer. That’s what happens when you skip kindergarten.

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Tim is sitting next to me on the couch, messing around with Picasa. He’s got a bunch of hard drives backed up on his laptop, including his mother’s, so he has apparently imported a bunch of pictures of his mother’s friends onto his laptop. And also a picture that I took of him while he was eating something. I don’t know why I took such an unflattering picture (or, more accurately, why I kept it) but it’s impossible to tell whether Tim is putting something into his mouth or regurgitating something out of his mouth. Charming!

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So I will try to update more often. Fair warning: some of it may be baby/pregnancy related content, but I won’t be icky about it. I will not post pictures of the birth or the placenta or a slimy newborn or anything like that. There will be no poopy diaper stories. I will steer clear of the TMI, because nobody gives a crap about what’s happening to my body except for me. And maybe Tim.

The one thing I will share with you as part of my birth story: whether I remember to grab my husband’s ass when I am in labor. I told him I would. He doesn’t believe me. He thinks I will be “too busy” and will forget about it. I reminded him that there are downtimes between the contractions, and I’ll grab his ass then. Now that it’s in writing, I have to do it. Maybe I will take a picture and share it with everyone on Facebook. “Look! Here’s me grabbing my husband’s ass while I’m in labor!”

I will leave you with this harrowing story of prenatal yoga, which I posted to a web board for women due in December:

I’ve been in prenatal yoga for the last six weeks or so, and my experiences have ranged from awesome to eye-rollingly irritating. The usual instructor for the prenatal class around here is very hippy-dippy, and last night she had us visualizing a light shining from between our eyebrows, down our spine, through our womb, and out through our perineum. All I could think about was shooting a laser out my crotch, which made me laugh during what was supposed to be a Very Serious Visualization Moment. If I could shoot lasers out of my crotch, I’d be making money off of it, because I am opportunistic like that.

Also, she must have said “perineum” fifty times during the hour-and-a-half class last night. I’m not squicky about my body or anything like that, but there comes a point where I have pondered my perineum enough for one evening, and I don’t wish to think about it any further.

I urge you all to spend a few minutes each day breathing deeply, contemplating your taint, and imagining lasers shooting out of your genitals. If you can do this while sitting on an exercise ball, you get bonus points.

The place was lousy with the usual suspects: foodies, hippies, and smug parents. But the breakfast was good.

When we were sitting at the table eating our savory scone (which contained sausage, cheese, and sun-dried tomatoes), I turned to Tim and said, “I want to punch that guy.”

Tim said, “the one with the hat?”

I said, “You know me so well. That is why I love you. Because you were able to instantly identify the specific guy I wanted to punch out of the hundred or so people in this crowded room.”