March 31, 2003. It's my birthday! I'm 32. And World of Julie is officially a year old. I started last year after I bought myself Dreamweaver and Fireworks as a birthday present (hmm, I haven't done anything this year like buy myself a few hundred dollar's worth of software; I'll have to get right on that). I'm happy to share a birthday with Herb Alpert, Al Gore, Shirley Jones, Christopher Walken, and Gabe Kaplan.
For my birthday, it's snowing. Sigh. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground this morning, and now it's actually snowing pretty hard. My birthday always makes me want to frolic amongst the bunnies and crocuses, not...shovel. Well, I moved to Maine because I wanted snow, so.
The other exciting news is that we found out we're having a baby boy! I completely thought it was a girl, which has me all worried about my mothering instincts. Dave thought it was a boy, going solely on the way I've been shoving food in my craw, which would be indicative of the other boys in his family. My mom came here for the ultrasound, and I'm really glad she did. She got her very own picture from the ultrasound, which I think she's showing everyone, even though it's one of those that makes our baby look like a skeleton alien thing.
Oh, and I finished my first sweater for our tyke.
March 25, 2003. Today I am officially halfway done with pregnancy. I celebrated by falling for no good reason in a parking lot. I knew this was going to happen soon; I'd heard about pregnancy making you more klutzy, and, since I wasn't exactly a graceful swan to begin with, I've been bracing myself for a new level of clumsy. The past few days, I've come close to falling. Then, today, I had to sort of lurch out of the way of a carful of speeding Old Country Buffet diners, and the movement totally threw me off balance, and I did one of those slow-motion falls that is still fast enough to skin a knee. Poor me. I'm totally fine (really, Mom, I'm fine!), except for being embarrassed and feeling sorry for myself. I'm glad, really. The anticipation of knowing I was going to fall at some point was probably worse than actually falling. I had a friend years ago who, whenever she spilled something on a shirt, would say, "Good, now I don't have to worry about spilling something on this!" and that's sort of how I felt about finally falling.
The cats were completely nonplused by my parking lot adventures.
March 20, 2003. Clara and I took a jaunt up to Halcyon Yarn yesterday, so I could finally use the generous gift certificate my mom gave me for Christmas. It's a huge yarn and weaving store, and was a little overwhelming. We were probably there for three hours. I came home with various weaving accessories and books, and this pile of yarn:
It's "Gedifra New Age" to make a woven plaid baby blanket. This stuff is so soft you can hardly believe it. It's 100% microfiber, and I think it will be sort of like a fleece blanket when it's woven. Oh, and that dark color's not black, it's navy blue. I can't wait to get started on this, though first I have to finish my current quick project:
I really wanted to try the weave called "log cabin" but didn't necessarily want to make a huge, time-consuming project, so I'm making coasters. The first one is shown above. I'll probably make four altogether. The weave is coming out a little looser than I thought it would, but it may fill in more when I wash the finished coasters. I have also realized that I'm not very good at keeping my woven edges neat. I don't know if that just gets better with practice, or if there's something I'm actually doing wrong. At any rate, for the baby blanket I'm going to try this technique where you use a "floating selvedge" which is basically a thread on each end that is supposed to keep the whole thing neat. I hope that helps.
March 10, 2003. Pregnancy has given me a chance to explore a whole new magazine genre. I love love love magazines, and so it's been fun checking out all of the various pregnancy-related ones. By far the most frightening product I have seen to date in any of these mags is the "BabyPlus Prenatal Education System." Basically, it's a speaker thing that you strap to your belly, and "audio lessons" are transmitted to your unborn baby. The ad makes it sound like you're a neglectful parent if you don't give your kid this jump on learning, and actually uses the phrase "prenatal curriculum." Um, no. No prenatal curriculum. In fact, my kid should not even hear the word "curriculum" until he or she walks through the doors of a school.
Now, I am all for teaching your kid things, and for having a generally educational household (my nieces and nephews can attest to this, since I'm always the one who's forcing educational toys on them at Christmas). And I've even been talking to my belly, as ridiculous as that feels sometimes, and playing music that I think a baby of mine might enjoy (not Mozart, mind you, but so far a lot of Talking Heads and the Magnolia soundtrack). But I think it puts a ridiculous amount of pressure on any child to make them feel like there's a specific curriculum, and educational goals to be met. Let alone educational goals to be met before the tyke is even born! Never mind the pressure it puts on the parents: "I don't know why he's crying! I did all 16 weeks of the BabyPlus prenatal curriculum! He's supposed to be more alert, more relaxed, with a longer attention span and an increased ability to self-soothe!" Uch. No wonder the entire country's in therapy.
March 9, 2003. My favorite story of today: Man Fakes Choking to Attract Women. I particularly love how subjectively this story presents the facts ("A short, dumpy man has been going around town faking choking episodes...").
Apparently when we're not home, the cats like to sleep in our bed. On our pillows. No wonder Dave often gets all stuffed up at night. Here they are pretending they're not doing anything wrong. You see how bored Theo is by our presence.
And then Peatie suddenly decided he was going to play the part of the impetuous rocker, who only wishes the paparazzi would go away.
I don't think he's ever stuck his tongue out at me before.
They must be getting swelled heads from the continued outpouring of fan mail. Their latest favorite is the missive from Jenny, telling the tale of her cat Drucilla (excellent cat name!). Drucilla was so enamored with her new wonton, that she barely let Jenny stitch it up because she was so desperate to bat at it. And, best of all, Drucilla actually woke up early the next day to play with her new toy! Just like a kid at Christmas. I love it.
March 5, 2003. Peatie and Theo are exhausted after staying up late to read all the fan mail they received after their recent appearance in Knitty. They apologize to those fans they haven't been able to respond to, but both of them are trying to get by on only 22 hours sleep right now (they're used to 23).
March 4, 2003. Before I got pregnant, I had gotten to a point where I pretty much had stopped shopping for anything but food. I threw away catalogs, and never went near the mall. It was completely liberating, and I had a lot more money. I'm not sure what started this -- probably a few too-high credit card bills, and the realization that all the stuff I had was making me less happy, not more happy.
But now that I'm pregnant, I am suddenly faced with a situation where I do need to go shopping, since I needed some clothes. I borrowed a bunch of maternity clothes, but I still needed a few more to get me through the winter. One byproduct of not shopping for months is that I can barely tolerate to be in stores anymore. They are so overwhelming that I either feel the need to get out immediately, or I realize I've been staring at the same container of bath soap for 15 minutes. Something else that happened: I'm not that good at shopping anymore. I used to be able to go into a store and pick several things off the racks which would probably look good on me. Not only is my ability to judge what looks good on me confused by being pregnant, but I seem to have lost my sense of what I should be wearing at all.
I think maybe I thought that suddenly, being pregnant, I would have a completely different body type. That I would look cute in clothes that never looked cute before. While I may have a somewhat different body, it's still my body. It's not like pregnancy is going to make me suddenly look like one of those supermodels who is all skinny and just has that little abdominal bump. So why am I trying on floral peasant blouses and flared embroidered jeans? Those clothes didn't look good on me before, so it turns out they only look much worse on me now. Therefore, my pregnancy wardrobe has turned out to be exactly the same as my pre-pregnancy wardrobe: black pants, black cardigan. Though I did buy a cute striped button-down shirt at Target today; we'll see how long it sits in my closet before I return it.
I don't even want to think about how I'm going to manage to shop for baby stuff. I think I'll just try to get everything online or something.
March 3, 2003. Well, I guess it's finally time for me to explain my sudden lack of updates the past few months. I know it seemed strange that I went from updating at least every week, to suddenly writing something semi-lame about twice a month, if that. Seems I had stuff on my mind. As it appears that I'm pregnant. Huge news, I know! It's still sinking in. I was convinced that it was a hysterical pregnancy for quite a while there (well, not really convinced, but it just seemed kind of surreal), but I have now been assured that I am, in fact, pregnant. I'm a little over four months along, due sometime mid-August. So, there you go. The truth is out!
(Reading over the above paragraph, it sounds like I'm not excited. I am! I'm very excited. Fear not.)
So, many life changes. Longtime readers may recall that Dave (my husband) quit his job in September, because it was the worst job ever. He had been working on building his own ergonomic chair since then, and the chair's progress was coming along really well. But then, when I got pregnant, we figured at least one of us should have an actual job (I had been doing contract -- non-permanent -- work), and, since Dave tends to be a bit more employable, he started looking around. He ended up getting a job at a company where we've both worked before (in fact, it's where we met) which is strange in some ways due to having history there and feeling like he's not starting anew, but good in some ways because of history there and that people know him. So he started last week, and so far, that seems to be going well.
And we started looking a lot more seriously at houses to buy. We actually put in a bid on a house yesterday, but I have absolutely no idea whether we'll get it or not, so I'm not going to say anything until something happens there.
