Transplanted

Alice and I took our first trip to the Target at Vintage Oaks together yesterday, and while I spent a good ten minutes figuring out that the car seat is supposed to balance precariously on the shopping cart, I witnessed a true pro in action.

This woman managed to keep track of a toddler straggling behind her, wheel a shopping cart and shop with one hand, and hold a baby to her breast with the other arm, all without losing the toddler, dropping the baby, or providing an accidental peep show.  Whoever you are, lady, I totally worship the ground you walk on.  I can barely carry the baby and the laundry at the same time without tripping or dropping the laundry bag.  (No, I wouldn’t drop Alice, but I bet that’s what you thought I was going to say.)

… until I brought home a baby!  I expect to do most of my blogging at AliceBergman.com, but still may occasionally pop in over here with something that is not baby-related.  Alice is wonderful–she’s alert (when she isn’t sleeping, which she seems to only do during the daytime), hungry, and really, really beautiful.  I’d post a picture, but I’m just so darned tired, so go on over to Alice’s website to gib a kik.

Home to parks, hiking trails, Target, and this guy.

Jason already posted about last week’s hospital odyssey, and that’s pretty much exactly what happened. I’ve been on bed rest and haven’t seen the first floor of my house in a week. I have a doctor’s appointment tonight and I’m hoping that he’ll set me free, but it’s probably more likely he’ll keep me in bed for another week.

Bed rest is one of those things that sounds like it might be kind of nice, and it is, for about an hour and a half. Then you get hungry while your spouse is at work. Or you just get bored. The cat wants nothing to do with you because you’re in his space (the bed during daylight hours) and you can’t even feed him, though he does lick up the soup bowl after lunch. And then you go stir crazy and start to turn into Mrs. Rochester.

Jason is holding up very well, but I know this is stressful for him too. He has to feed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day (not nearly as romantic as it might sound) and he has to do everything around the house. And he has to play Scrabble with me on demand. And watch season four of Lois and Clark, which should probably be considered torture under the Geneva Conventions. A couple of people have brought us meals, for which we are infinitely grateful and will definitely reciprocate when I’m mobile again.

All in all, we can’t complain too much, because there are people who have to do this for a lot longer than we do, and a couple of weeks out of our lives just so that we have a healthy baby is worth it. So we’re just chalking it up to the first of many sacrifices we will make for our child. She, of course, is oblivious and just kicking away!

My friend Diana sent me this link to a neat new baby namer.  You can plug in up to six names and it uses your entries as inspiration for suggesting other names.  You can probably also pick out pet names, I won’t tell anyone.

Today on my walk, I passed the Scottsdale Marsh about half a mile from my apartment and saw a man taking a shit. Okay, I didn’t actually see any poo accumulation, but the guy had popped a squat behind a tree, pants down. About five feet from the sidewalk. It’s nice to know that this place where we’ve chosen to raise our child is so much more wholesome than the city.

I had an ultrasound yesterday, so I have new creepy pictures to show everyone. Actually, she looks like a baby now.

I was hoping she’d do something cute, like suck her thumb, but she seemed to have her arms crossed in defiance. Must take after me.

For those who have asked, here are some pictures of pregnant me.

I think the dress makes me look smaller than I actually am, but you get the idea. 13 more weeks to go, give or take a couple of weeks!

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten up on my Pretentious English Major soapbox. But I just finished a book that I really, really, didn’t like, and I think it’s because of the narrator.

There are all kinds of narrators in fiction. You’ve got your third-person narrator, your first-person narrator, the omniscient narrator who knows everything. Among first-person narrators, there are a lot of options, but the most interesting ones to me are the ones who are unreliable, who force the reader to figure out what is really going on. These narrators are unreliable for many reasons: some are just too self-involved, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s books (I recommend When We Were Orphans); others have medical conditions that don’t allow them to see outside themselves, such as in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (a Sherlock Holmes reference, btw). There are narrators that you are meant to dislike, as in Portnoy’s Complaint.

Then you have what I am now calling the “WTF!? Narrator.” The one that makes you keep reading because you think, this guy can’t really be this dumb, can he? He can’t be this passive. The one who, if he were a relative of yours, you’d grab him and bang his head against a wall. But you keep reading in the hope, the very distant hope, that at some point, somehow, he’ll get his act together. Only to find out, no, he really is that dumb, that passive, that incapable of putting two and two together, and incapable of defending himself against the world as well. That’s Sam Pulsifer, the narrator in An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. He’s the kind of narrator that makes you finish the book, put it down, and start ranting about narrators on your blog. I guess as a gimmic, it’s genius. I mean, the author got me to read his book and then write about it, didn’t he? On the other hand, I feel manipulated somehow. As though the author played a dirty trick on me and now there go several hours of my life that I’ll never get back. Thanks a lot, Brock Clarke.

It seems like only yesterday that my parents walked me down an aisle so I could meet Jason under a chuppah and we could start our adult lives together. But no, it was five years (and a day) ago. Jason has less hair now, and I’ve got a couple of grays myself (not to mention the, uh, belly), but I can’t imagine any other life than the one I am living. Jason is still the most wonderful person I know, and I just want to make sure he (and the rest of the world) knows it. So there, sappy but very true.

And in case you were wondering, in addition to the five years we’ve been married, we can tack on four more years of dating and living together, for a total of nine!