1000 days

That is how long Justin and I have been married. No, I haven't been counting, I found that out from my profile on a newlywed chat site I hang out on. (Are we even newlyweds anymore? I don't know. It's been three years in July.)

This is also what I'm going to count as the beginning of my second trimester. Maybe this means I will start being hungry today! Well, one can always hope.

I hate food

I don't have morning sickness, for which I thank God, my mother and grandmother, and/or whoever else is responsible.

However, the effect raging pregnant hormones have on me is that I don't want to eat. At all. At any other time in my life, some kind of (moderate) appetite suppressant would have been most welcome. But now I'm supposed to be gaining weight, and instead I've lost something like eight pounds in the first trimester. This would be rational if I did in fact have morning sickness, but I don't, and a little person is growing inside me, so it's just weird, and a little freaky.

Granted, this may also be the result of stress, a frantic midweek schedule, and a husband who has been out of town a lot and therefore not inspiring me to cook for him. But I need to reverse this trend by the end of my first trimester, which is next week.

So today I went to Kroger without a list to restrain my impulses and bought everything that looked like I could persuade myself to eat or drink it: produce (strawberries always look kind of edible), meat, lemonade and limeade, Newman-Os...okay, the baby probably does not need Newman-Os, but I don't even like chocolate as much as I used to (weird!), so I won't eat a whole pack in two days, as I've been known to do. Also they have a little bit of protein and fiber. Protein and fiber are good! The baby likes one and my digestive tract likes the other, especially when I'm taking prenatal vitamins with probably more iron than I really need this early in my pregnancy.

I had three full meals today, including a nice pasta with shrimp and peas, and I even ate dessert, so I am feeling pretty good. Baby With Flat Hat should be dancing around my uterus on a bit of a sugar high.

Proof

At the lake house, the kids bring up "proof" from the bottom of the lake to prove they made it all the way down.



I was reminded of this when I remembered that I have better (and cuter) proof than a positive ept that I'm pregnant. It was attained by diving into my nether regions with an ultrasound wand, which sounds uncomfortable but isn't that bad when it comes right after a pap smear.



This ultrasound is about three weeks old. I've had another since then, but I didn't get a copy that time. The only reason I needed a second ultrasound was that my doctor couldn't find the heartbeat on the Doppler. It turned out Baby With Flat Hat is so wiggly that she was chasing him/her all over my uterus without nailing down a heartbeat. Baby With Flat Hat actually looked more like a baby on the second ultrasound and less like a smudge. However, I like how my smudge is looking straight at the ultrasound thingy and clenching its fists in smudge-rage.

Announcement

Or should I say annunciation? Wait, that's not till next week. I don't want to wait that long.

Now that I've told all my blog readers that I've seen in person since I found out, I can tell everyone else: I'm pregnant! Here is proof:



My mom wanted me to send it to her. Not a picture, the actual test. Justin pointed out that it is illegal to send human waste through the mail.

Now we know why I felt like this (more than a week before I tested).

Baby With Flat Hat is due October 3, according to my calculations. (My doctor says September 29, but I was present at the conception, so I'm going by what I know.) So I am twelve weeks along today, which seemed like a good time to go public, in the blogospheric sense.

This means, in case you were wondering, that this will absolutely become a mommy blog. Sorry if you're not into that. It's hard for me to think about much else, which is one reason I haven't been blogging much. Now I can talk about babies all the time!

Dear UPS

You know, once in a while, it would be really nice if I could order something online like a pair of pants or an iPod shuffle or an engagement ring and have it delivered in the amount of time I paid for it to be delivered without you losing the package or failing to read the apartment number that is right there on the packing label or pretending you attempted to deliver the package when I know you didn't even bother trying because I was home all day. I mean, since you job is to deliver packages and keep track of them until they get delivered, it would be super cool if you did that. Otherwise I have no idea why you should exist. I'm really not into guys in brown shorts.

New blog

My friend Ben, who I've wanted for a long time to have a blog, now has a blog, Arrow Through the Sun. It's about science and theology, mostly. You should read it.

Great moments in pedagogy

Today in the class I'm TAing we discussed an essay by Stanley Hauerwas. As always, my sections went better than I expected considering I'm always preparing for them the day I teach them. Two moments stand out:

1. When I asked them what was significant about Constantine, in two of my sections students started talking about how he decided what books would be in the Bible. The first time I had no idea where they were getting this; the second one of them mentioned The Da Vinci Code, and I burst out, "Oh, don't read The Da Vinci Code!", which the class found amusing. I never know how much of the general Christian freakout about TDVC is hype and how much of it is legit, but apparently it does influence what my very intelligent students think about the history of Christianity. But it gave me an opportunity to riff on New Testament criticism for a couple of minutes, and that's something I really know about even though it's not relevant to the class. So that was fun.
   
2. One of my students referred to Hauerwas as a "shock rocker," which I thought was great. Stanley Hauerwas, the shock rocker of theologians.

Grandma's birthday

Justin and I are in Seattle this week. We didn't plan it this way (for now my vacation time is limited to spring break), but our visit coincided with my grandmother's 85th birthday. So everyone on my dad's side of the family, with the exception of one of my cousins and his wife, who live in California, celebrated with a birthday dinner.



My grandmother is an awesome woman. I want to be like her. Her memory is fading now, but for most of my life she's been on top of everything, anticipating her children's and grandchildren's needs before we even think of them. She's educated and made sure we all were too, and continued educating herself as an adult; she has always been an avid reader and taught herself Spanish when she was in her fifties. She is a quiet person, but strong and kind.

This has been a really good visit, with very little family stress, and a lot of time with friends, some of whom I haven't seen in a long time. The week has flown by.

New template

Well, I redesigned the template yet again, because the old one was fussy with the new Blogger. I think it still works okay with pictures.

Home alone

(This is my first post using New Blogger, which I've resisted because so many people complained about Blogger Beta, but at this point apparently I don't have much choice and if I have a problem with it, so do millions of other people, I guess.)

Justin is in NYC to hang out with friends and visit this law school that is courting him (I'm trying to be secretive about which one it is, but if you know how brilliant my smarty-art husband is and how many really good law schools there are in New York City, it does narrow it down). They have an admitted students program this week that spouses and partners are welcome to attend, but it's conveniently scheduled on my two busiest work days, so I can't go. I'll probably visit later this spring, though, if it looks like we're headed there. So the dean of this law school called last week and I answered the phone:

Dean: Is this Justin?
Juliet: Um, no...?

Granted, I have a low voice and I was sick, but I'm rarely mistaken for a guy. Once I realized he was a law school dean and not just a confused telemarketer, I immediately got over being offended.

I put Justin on a train yesterday morning--nearly three hours after it was scheduled to leave, because Amtrak is like that--and I won't see him again until Saturday probably, when I'll pick him up in DC, and then we'll probably head straight from there to Richmond the next day to fly to Seattle. I guess Richmond's as good a place to fly out of as any, although it occurred to me after I'd booked the tickets that I had been thinking of flying out of Raleigh instead so we could see all the Chapel Hill people and park our car there for free, but I forgot when I was actually making the reservations. Oh well.

I am obliged to clean while Justin is gone, as I keep promising to do. I don't wanna. Also it's raining/snowing/sleeting/wintry mixing and I'm trying to determine if I can use this as an excuse not to go to a tutor training thingy tonight. Probably not. I got to church fine this morning, although there were only three of us in the choir and I was the only alto. Aside from screeching one note of the gospel acclamation ("praise to you, Lord JEEEE!!-eeesus Christ"), I did all right. But I don't know why there were so few of us singing. Maybe everyone else is giving up choir for Lent.

Checking in

I know, I haven't posted in a long time. Bad, bad Girl With Flat Hat.

This semester I undertook three part-time jobs: teaching an introductory course on religion at a community college about 45 miles away; TAing sections for a course on Islam here in town; and continuing to tutor student athletes, although with somewhat reduced hours from last semester once I realized I was insane. All this is packed into three days a week. I'm realizing now I overburdened myself, but there's not much to be done now as there's nothing I can back out of gracefully that would really make my life any easier.

Meanwhile, Justin has applied to law schools and has heard back from several of them. One has made him an offer that will be difficult to turn down unless another school makes a comparable one, which will mean moving again this summer, to a place with a much higher cost of living. I am a little irked that the law school down the street whose name I won't mention but of whose commonwealth Justin is now a legal resident has done less to recruit him than law schools than are higher ranked. But maybe they're being coy. Anyway, I have no idea how that will all turn out, and I don't have much leisure to worry about it till the end of the semester, which is about when we have to make a decision anyway.

Also, we spent the past two weekends out of town. Last weekend we were in Ithaca to watch the Super Bowl with Justin's family, and the weekend before that we were in New York to see Blue Öyster Cult.

So, that's why I haven't been blogging. I'm looking forward to spring break the first week of March, when we're going to Seattle. (We are going to try to see everyone this time, really!)

Marriage

I like being married. It's cool. It's hard sometimes, but it is infinitely less depressing than the asisine game-playing of single dating life that other people seem to find exhilarating but which sickened me well before I met Justin at the age of 27.

The New York Times had a chirpy article which you probably can't read for free anymore about how 51% of women over the age of 15 (yeah, that's a bit young to count) are now unmarried, including interviews with chirpy swinging single New York females who are happy to be free of the shackles of matrimony. Which is fine, if they're happy that way.

But the Columbia Journalism Review Daily took exception:

...America is not a monolith. As much as we would like to persist in thinking that we are a classless and race-blind society, the Times, of all papers -- having run groundbreaking series on both race and class -- should realize that a phenomenon that might bode well for middle-class white women might be absolutely disastrous for poor black women.

Apparently, though, we are the only ones to see it like this. Because apart from a tossed-off paragraph that reminds us that, buried within these statistics, seventy percent of African-American women are single, there is nothing to indicate how the epidemic of single parentage in the black community contributes to this statistic. We imagine -- though aren't told -- that many of these women are raising children alone and being dragged deeper into poverty because of their unmarried status.

How un-chirpy. But true. (And not just for black women, of course, but for women of all races who don't have a swanky loft in the East Village.)

It seems like there are only two ways to talk about marriage: 1. as the bedrock of traditional mores that every adult who is not a priest or hideously unattractive should partake of, heterosexually, or 2. a somewhat antiquated institution of at best neutral moral value that is fine if it makes you happy but doesn't bear any relationship to the good of society at large. Are those the only alternatives? Isn't it possible to encourage marriage as generally beneficial to individuals, their children, and society at large without imposing gender inequality or heteronormativity?

And does the fact that 51% of women are now single have anything to do with men? Should they be glad we don't expect as much from them, or should they be concerned that society's expectations of them are lower? Should we even care what they think?

I don't mean to suggest that marriage is necessary for people to have happy relationships or healthy families (I know plenty of exceptions), but it seems like, no matter what the trend is, women get the raw end of the deal and often don't even realize it. That there are a number of educated, upper-middle-class, happily unmarried women does nothing for the many single women who barely get by and have no one else to provide for themselves and their families. Who do you think is suffering more from this trend toward singleness, men or women? Surely it's not men as much as women and their children?

(That was the first thing I've gotten worked up about in a while. I've been taking a break from blogs, mostly.)

Bourbon Street

I took this picture the night before the Sugar Bowl, so there were lots of LSU and Notre Dame fans about.

meh

This week has made me kind of cranky. No individual thing has made me feel that way, and if I had been in a better mood generally I would probably consider it a pretty good week all in all, but something about my attitude is just sour.

But Justin is sweet, even when I'm not, and this picture of him makes me smile.

When cousins attack

At our Swedish breakfast, Justin's cousin Catherine was living up to the first three letters of her name and scratching Whitney, who was being very patient.

Steamboat

In New Orleans, Justin and I took a ride down the Mississippi on the steamboat Natchez. Just like the old days! Except for the audio guide and the lack of exploding boilers.

Pudding

Every family has its holiday food traditions. My mom's family always has lasagna for Thanksgiving and Christmas, along with the usual turkey and everything. (You think we're weird, but really you're jealous! Wouldn't you like to have lasagna?) Justin's family, being about as much Scandinavian as I am Italian, has God Jul pudding for breakfast when they celebrate Christmas. (I know there are umlauts in there, but I'm too lazy to put them in.)



There are two things you must know about God Jul pudding:

1. Somewhere in it is an almond whose discoverer will, according to tradition, be the next to get married or have a baby. This might be why Justin's family is so large.

2. God Jul pudding is really gross, and also it must be eaten with fruit soup (pictured to the left of the pudding), which if anything is even more gross. And you actually have to eat it, not just poke through all the rice and raisins and tapioca or whatever the hell's in it so you can find the almond.

Last year Justin's brother had a girlfriend he really liked and must have eaten half the pudding, a feat of remarkable fortitude. Nevertheless, his sister has found the almond the last two years running. She's holding the rest of us up.

(Yes, I did kind of want the almond. But only two small helpings' worth.)

Swamp

We returned on Sunday from our road trip through the Deep South (2.0), but I had to take a few days to recover, get things in order after our absence, and prepare for my first class at the community college where I'm teaching.

This is my favorite picture from our road trip and probably one of my favorite pictures ever. It's of a bald cypress/water tupelo swamp (I don't know which of those these trees are) on the Natchez Trace near Jackson, Mississippi. The weather didn't favor us as much as it has on past trips, but the cloudy skies were good for getting a picture without too many shadows or reflections.

Spam box haiku III

Too good to pass up!

ready made crayfish
tired looking vegetables
piles of dried Floyd

Live from somewhere else

I haven't been blogging the past week and a half because we've been away from home, first in Chapel Hill for Christmas with Justin's family, and now on the road in the Deep South, again, because that's how we roll.

Take note, everyone: When New Year's Eve is a Sunday, and you're planning on spending the night in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, you must buy your champagne before entering the state. Wait, it's technically illegal to bring in alcohol from another state, so really you're pretty much screwed . Oh, and if you're looking for a college town without a Barnes & Noble or Borders or any bookstore aside from Books-a-Million, go to Tuscaloosa. No wine and no books make Juliet and Justin very cranky.

Fortunately, we're making up for our dry New Year's in New Orleans. You can drink alcohol on the street as long as it's not in a glass container. And there are bookstores. And good coffee. And beignets. I didn't even know about beignets until last night, but now I'm not sure I want to live without them. Come spend your tourist dollars in New Orleans. The French Quarter is ready for you.