Lawyerish

All A-Flutter

I started feeling the baby move a few weeks ago -- on the early side as these things go, but it was infrequent and easily confused with...you know, digestion-y stuff -- and now it's like a party in there almost every afternoon and evening.  At first it was sort of burbly, a little vibration from time to time, but it has since increased in intensity to discernible bumps and rolls, and occasionally I burst out laughing because I swear it's like being tickled from the inside.  He (or she) seems to like cocktail hour; between about 5 and 7pm, things get funky in there.  If I could eat hot dogs, I'd serve the kid some pigs in blankets to contribute to the ambience.

Speaking of which, here are some of the other things I haven't been eating, thanks to Pregnancy Fear-Mongering:  lunch meat (not that I ate it all that often before, but this does make me one of those people at a workplace lunch who stands over the sandwich platter for forty-five minutes trying to figure out which unidentified offering they can eat); burgers or steak (oh, the pain this brings, but if I can't have it medium-rare, I'm not having it at all); pepperoni (some "expert" on one of those crazy-making Ba*byCenter emails said it can harbor listeria, just like lunch meat, sigh); or any soft cheese that I have not confirmed to be pasteurized (I had a slice of white pizza some weeks ago and then nearly perished of anxiety because I hadn't made CERTAIN that the ricotta was "safe"). 

It's all quite silly, since I recently read that two of the foods that most commonly harbor food-borne illness are spinach and tomatoes, and I have been consuming those by the truckload.  So logic and accurate assessment of risk may not play a central role here.  Related:  I heard that in France, the pregnant ladies are told that all meats and cheeses are fair game, but they should avoid salad.  Salad!  Zut alors!  But since no gestation-related pamphlet or e-mail blast has specifically warned me against eating my beloved veggies here in the great US of A, I am forging ahead. 

Also, there's no easy segue into this, but tonight I almost ate a spider.  I was merrily finishing up my rosemary-garlic oven fries and suddenly something skittered across the plate, and it was a tiny SPIDER.  I have no idea where it came from or how long it was lurking under my dinner, but all things considered, I was fairly unperturbed by it.  I guess because spiders aren't on the verboten list; so while I'd really rather not eat one, at least I don't have to live with crushing guilt if I accidentally do.  Whereas I have the distinct feeling that if I were to sneak a frankfurter into my diet, the Bad Mother police would find me and pummel me with rubber flipper-babies. 

So!  Next Monday, we have our big anatomy scan, which means that if the babe cooperates, we'll get to find out if our squirt is of the boy or girl persuasion.  OMG, I CANNOT WAIT.  And next Thursday, we'll be at 20 weeks.  Halfway through!  Holy moly.  Time flies.  I thought the big 20-week reveal would NEVER ARRIVE (and I'm sure this week is going to CRAWL by), but now it's mere days away.   So place your bets, ladies and gents!  You've got a 50-50 shot.  (Not to bias you, but I am still totally convinced it's a boy, and I will fall off the ultrasound table if it turns out to be otherwise.) 

Ill-Suited

I went for a checkup last week (at 16 1/2 weeks), and I got the dreaded "you've gained too much weight" scolding.  Sigh.

Admittedly, my weight has gone up, um, substantially since the beginning, and we're not even halfway through yet, but since it seems to be concentrated in the belly and chestal area and everything else appears to me to be mostly the same (arms, legs, face) AND I started at a low weight for my height, I wasn't terribly concerned.  Plus, in the first trimester, when I gained more than the typical amount (most of the guidelines say you should remain the same or gain maybe ONE POUND in that first 12 weeks; my body laughed at those rules and put on nine pounds right off the bat), my doctor assured me that it was mostly water retention and increasing fluid, blood volume, etc.  Now, though, she's more concerned -- well, not concerned, exactly, and she was super nice about it, but she wants me to be attentive to it and keep my gain down in the next month so as not to put myself at risk for gestational diabetes and so forth.

In my defense, by the way, I was weighed in my clothes AND shoes around 3 in the afternoon after a lunch that included, in part, pasta salad and about a liter of water.  When I got on the scale at home the next morning before breakfast and in the altogether, I was FIVE POUNDS LIGHTER.  Which still puts me ahead of the power curve, but isn't quite as dire. 

Mind you, I'm calm about it, but the point is well taken.  I've been doing a lot less running than I was pre-bebe (regular half-marathons to...irregular 3-mile jogs/walks), which seems to make a big difference, since I haven't changed my diet all that much.  So we're eating lots of big salads and fruits and less pasta and all that sort of thing, and I'm trying to squeeze in some more exercise around my crazy work demands of the moment.  It's fine.  It was just kind of...startling, at first.  

Also startling is the apparent fact that the maternity clothing industry does not believe that pregnant women should have to wear business attire at any time.  I need suits for my job, not for every day, but for client meetings and court appearances, and I had to canvass the city for weeks to find anything that was remotely appropriate for such things.  I finally located exactly two -- TWO -- suits at A Pea in the Pod, and even though they're somewhat ill-fitting (the jackets are a bit comicallly large, despite my RECORD BREAKING weight gain), I had no choice but to get them both. 

And then I nearly DROPPED DEAD when I saw how much they cost -- these are clothes, let's remember, that one can only wear for a period of about six months.  Six months!  It's OUTRAGEOUS.  Yes, suits in general are pricey, but generally you can wear them for YEARS and you don't have to buy more than one at once.  Good lord, people.  This is deeply distressing to someone who is as cheap as I am about apparel.

Naturally, I also find this to be evidence of a vast conspiracy to force pregnant women out of the workplace.  My suspicion is that Old Navy pays these companies off to limit business-wear production so they can sell more yoga pants.  (Although, let's not kid ourselves, when I'm eight-plus months along and my belly is the size of an exercise ball, I'm totally wearing yoga pants to the office.  And I DARE anyone at work to say a WORD about it.)

Finally, we watched a little documentary the other night called "Life After Tomorrow", and since I know that lots of you all were die-hard "Annie" fans like I was, I have to recommend it to you.  It's about the girls who were in the Broadway and the touring show and how the experience affected their lives -- really interesting and well done, and appealling to the "Annie" nostalgia in all of us.  There are also some quite riveting interviews with this random old dude who collects "Annie" memorabilia and wrote an "Annie" newsletter and lives in a house bedecked with "Annie" figurines, posters and original costumes.  They didn't say, but I am fairly certain he lives alone.  Anyway, you should rent it. 

Waiting for Gilbert

You'll never guess what I did last night.  I went out to New Jersey and met up with a long-lost friend, and we went to see (dun dun DUNNNNN) Little House on the Prairie: The Musical. 

Dude.  DUUUUUDE. 

There were no songs with the word "wagons" in the title, but there were wagon wheels on stage, along with plows and a somewhat conceptual wood-frame house (which had a door, yet the actors never used it; they just sidled in and out through the invisible side wall -- the hell?).  One thing that was not on stage, much to our chagrin, was Melissa Gilbert, who has been playing Ma throughout the national tour but was allegedly felled by a back injury during the prior evening's show.  SIGH.  The understudy was fine and all, but hello?  Melissa Gilbert, people.  Part of the reason we wanted to SEE this thing.  FAIL.

Aside from that, the show was...well, how to put this.  It had a certain "Waiting for Guffman" quality to it.  The staging involved a lot of moving in slow motion, like pioneers bending against the stiff prairie winds and migrating west...in slow motion.  And Almanzo driving his Morgans in the Fourth of July race, which was accomplished by the actor holding onto some reins tethered to the front of the stage and slapping them against the ground while leaning back and doing wide-legged squats...in slow motion. 

Aside from that, the show was both overly long (running time: TWO AND A HALF HOURS) and too rushed, like they wanted to cram in every possible episode of the Ingalls family's life in De Smet, so there would be about five seconds of dialogue (and/or slow-mo action to swelling music) and then they'd launch into another song.  A bit of editing would have been appreciated.

Some of the performers were really good, like Pa and Ma's understudy (SIGH) and Mary (who, contrary to the books, wasn't blind when they left Plum Creek but instead caught scarlet fever in De Smet, which just WASN'T RIGHT); but Laura was rather grating and had an extremely shrill voice that made it sort of impossible to like her character.  She seemed to play her as about eight years old at the beginning and by intermission she was suddenly a teenager and ready to move to the Brewster settlement to teach so that Mary could one day attend the Iowa College for the Blind.

Also, OMG, NELLIE OLESON.  The girl who played her looked EXACTLY like Alison Arngrim from the TV series and played her, to a cartoonish degree, EXACTLY like Alison Arngrim did on the show.  They had her do this absolutely ridiculous musical number when she sees the Ingalls girls outside the schoolhouse and makes fun of them, and I guess it was supposed to be like Tori Spelling's pratfalls and slapstick in "90210", some comic relief from all the high drama (here, the Pioneer Hardships and Laura's Journey of Personal Growth), but it so did not work. 

I mean, there were lots of familiar moments from the books, which were kind of fun to see brought to life, but on the whole it could have used some...refinement, I guess.  We, ah, left at intermission, feeling that we'd gotten a sufficient taste of the thing and didn't need another hour and ten minutes.  But I'm glad I went, first and foremost to reconnect with a fabulous friend, and also because I otherwise would have always wondered how the musical depicted my favorite series.  I think if we'd had a couple of little girls to take with us in calico dresses and sunbonnets, it would have been more palatable.  MAYBE.

Which reminds me, if they ever revive "Annie", we'll be the first in line for tickets.

All Over the Place

We watched the original "Fame" movie the other night, and all I could think was, damn people in the 70s were skinny.  It was a different kind of skinny than even the willowiest movie stars now, too; they were all ribcage and gangly legs, nothing but bone without muscularity and a hollowed-out area where a stomach should go.  You didn't have a sense that any of these people exercised for 8 hours a day or followed the Zone diet.  Instead, they probably smoked their asses off and ate nothing but grapefruit and an occasional lump of cottage cheese.  Then in the 80s everyone started jazzercising like crazy, which produced those Jane Fonda leotard butts and, somehow, bigger boobs.  Maybe that's when they started pumping hormones into our meat?  I really have no idea, but seriously -- the 70s.  SKINNY PEOPLE.  Even the men -- those white bell-bottom trousers were narrow.  Odd.

This weekend, amid the usual errands and the lately-usual work obligations, we squeezed in a jaunt downtown to check out the New York International Pickle Festival, which involved much sampling of delicious brined goods and several pickles-on-sticks.  I was also surprised and somewhat thrilled to see that there was a booth offering peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, as my mom used to make those for us and I have always believed that we were the only family in the world to eat such a concoction.  I swear, though, they are delicious -- white bread, creamy peanut butter, and crunchy bread-and-butter pickles?  Mmm. 

Sometimes we also had peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, which I can't recommend in good conscience.  On the other hand, several years ago I had a peanut butter and bacon sandwich, which was one of the greatest things I've ever eaten -- recoil  in horror if you will, it was tremendous. 

(At Allison's house, they would have peanut butter and cheddar cheese or cream cheese and jelly sandwiches, which I used to think was also unusual, but I'm guessing they were more widely consumed than PB and MAYO.  So now I have to ask, what kind of unique things did your parents make for you?  Was anyone else out there in the PB & Pickle club?)

Anyway, after having a spicy pickle that almost seared the inside of my mouth off, we headed over to Il Laboratorio di Gelato and inhaled several scoops to cool the burn.  Which means that I have now fulfilled the Number One Cliche of Pregnancy. 

On an entirely unrelated note, if you've been watching the new season of "So You Think You Can Dance", did anyone else think Mary looked a little...I don't know...rough last week, especially on Wednesday's show?  I'm not sure if they'd been bar-crawling on Bourbon Street and slamming hurricanes until 4am or what, but her face was all puffed up, nearly to the point of obscuring her eyes, and there was sort of this thickness to her voice and a generally subdued air about her and...well, it wasn't pretty.  I wanted to hand her some Advil and a Gatorade and tell her to go sleep it off. 

Also, the guy in Atlanta who had been a crack baby and was raised by his toothless, convalescent aunt?  He got to me, man.  I'm rooting for him. 

Finally, to close, another belly shot.  And dudes, I think it's the angle of the camera or the way I twist a bit to get the shot, but it looks SO MUCH BIGGER than this in real life.  Like, there's almost a SHELF demarcating the belly at this point, but try as I might, I could not capture it in a photo.  You'll have to take my word for it.  (Also on Flickr, some pics of our Georgia visit, including several where I look like I am about to abscond with my niece.)