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Last week I panicked — my pants were just not going to cut it anymore. I still have a few pairs of capris that are working, but their days are numbered. So I started with the pants I bought at the sale back in March and finally went to my mom’s so we could measure them for hemming. I hemmed the khaki pair that night and wore them the next day — we cut them to capri length and they are going to be great and light for the summer. The other two are long pants (jeans and tan cords), and since the weather has been so nice, I’ve been waiting to hem them up until I really need them.

So, I had some pants, but my shirt situation was getting pretty desperate. What to do? I turned to craigslist. I hate the idea of spending tons of money on a wardrobe I’ll only fit into for 5 months at the max. And I like used clothes — it feels like such a bargain. There aren’t too many listings for plus size stuff, but I made calls and pounced on a few listings as soon as they showed up, and then zoomed all over town to pick things up. Here’s how it shook out:

From a free bag of maternity clothes from a woman who just desperately needed to get them out of her house:

A black empire waist top
A patterned black and cream top
A red top with deep vee neck and a sort of ribbed pattern on the top
A pair of pajama pants
A flannel nursing nightgown with pink and blue flowers that makes me look like I have been committed to the loony bin, but it will be perfect for the fall.

From a very nice lady in the Fremont area:

Khaki shorts
Khaki capris that look like pants on me
3 tshirts - light blue, red, and olive — that are giant on me right now but will work great in August (or earlier, hopefully not)

From the nicest lady who ever gave birth two days ago and still wanted to sell clothes on craigslist:

Black dress pants (need hemming)
Black pinstripe capris
A cute black top with cream and blue polka dots

From my friend H who brought a huge bag of stuff for me to try:

A cute animal-print (undetermined origin) tank and matching shrug
Another black top, sort of sheer, that will look great with a colored tank underneath
A salmon/orange top, very loose and light
A black and white sundress

For all of this, including the pants I bought way back in March, I have spent $75 on maternity clothing. I bought one top new at Motherhood for $10 on clearance, because it is my favorite shade of green and will go with practically every pair of maternity pants I own. And I bought one black and white polka dot wrap top at Goodwill, for about 6 dollars. I also have 5 (I think) other empire waist tops, not maternity, just trendy, that I’ll be able to wear for a while yet.

I love a good bargain, and cute clothes, and this has made me feel really good about the whole thing. I am finally wearing comfortable clothes (elastic waists and belly panels, ahhhh) and feeling adorable in the process. I totally win at maternity fashion this week.

Having a three day weekend makes me wish we had one all the time. Three days is the perfect amount of time off, especially if it happened more often so you could get used to the weird 4 days workweek. We didn’t do anything amazing over the holiday, but we did have a great time with friends and family, and I got some more use out of my KitchenAid mixer.

Saturday was a good day. I went to a garage sale with a friend and looked at maternity wear. Didn’t find anything, but I did get a pair of canvas baby shoes for my father in law to decorate. After the disappointing show at the sale, we did a little shopping (Trader Joe’s and New Seasons) and made fun of the clearance racks at Fred Meyer. Good times! It was fun having someone to mock fashion with; my sister and I do it when we go shopping, but we rarely get a chance these days unless we are tearing through a store desperately shopping from a list with either 3 kids hanging off of us, or someone at home with kids hanging off of them waiting for us to get back.

In the early afternoon, I zoomed up to Kenton to get some maternity clothes from a very very nice lady on craigslist (that’s a different entry, I think). After that I prepped for having some good friends over for dinner with their little 9 month old girl. She is charming, already standing and cruising, and she provided the evening’s entertainment while H and I looked over the huge bag of baby books and maternity clothes that she brought me. I made chocolate cupcakes and homemade rolls and we had salad and cheese and chicken and various spreads for dinner. Very satisfying. And then we talked long into the night until the baby was asleep and our husbands were heading there, too. It was so nice to hang out. We did a lot of mommy talking, but also touched on a lot of more theoretical issues of parenting and feminism, and that was a good conversation to have. It’s something that I read about online a lot, but I don’t yet have a lot of young moms around me. We’re all navigating this weird transition time, and figuring out how to balance life and work and parenting, and it’s something I am thinking about a LOT lately, so it was nice to get a lot of it out. Also, there might have been some squealing and patting my belly, just to round things out.

On Sunday Katie and I went to the farmers market, where we ran into my mom, who was just leaving. We wandered around and picked up a few things, and then went to Starbucks and Cost Plus for lattes and wine glasses, respectively. Baby Joe went with us, and of course he spit up on me when I was holding him at Starbucks. I think I am 3/3 the last 3 times I have seen him. He likes my shoulder as a vomitorium, apparently. Fortunately, tiny baby spit-up hardly even qualifies as gross. And I threw up that morning too, so it’s not like I can throw stones (yeah, I still throw up some mornings… go figure).

After that we went to the store, where I found out that my wine guy, the one who is always so good to us that we hang out with sometimes, passed away last week. I was shocked and really sad. He was a great guy who just hadn’t quite figured out his direction yet, and I kept hoping he was going to find his path and really be happy. It was an accident of medications and probably booze, and I am sad and mad about it, for him and for us and his family and friends. Plus he was so so excited that we were having a baby, so it makes me wistful every once in a while, thinking that he won’t ever meet the little tyke. So that was a bummer, and it cast a pall on the rest of the day, though we did have a nice time.

In the afternoon we went to Katie’s for a barbecue. I got to see her good friends and their cute little babies who were up visiting from California. Said babies are almost 18 months old, but I have never seen them before, so they have to be babies to me. Twins, what a handful. Two handsful! I made strawberry shortcake with homemade biscuits and fresh-whipped cream and also took along some delicious organic mango that tasted, as toph said, “just like a tropical island.” It really was amazing mango, and it went nicely with whipped cream and shortcake, if anyone is wondering. Strawberry shortcake is the easiest dessert and it goes over like gangbusters at parties. I always take it to barbecues this time of year, because it is always a win.

Monday morning we slept in like lazy sloths, and then got ready to go swimming with the kids. We packed a huge lunch to have a picnic afterward, and headed off to the community center, where Mom met us with the kids. All three of the kids were so excited to go swimming; we have to do it more this summer, because they will paddle around forever and it exhausts them. We swam for almost 2 hours, and they were in the water constantly in their little water wings or innertubes. Magdalena and toph went down the big water slide at the pool, and then the little kids wanted to try too. Liliana didn’t like it the first time because she got splashed in the face at the bottom, but toph solved the problem by holding her up right as they hit the water, and then she and Joaquin both loved it, and even went down by themselves, with toph catching them in the water at the end. He missed Liliana on her last round and she went right under. Fortunately she paddled and kicked and got back above the water, but he really had to grab for her. She was pretty freaked out, but about 30 seconds later she was back in the water. Magdalena and toph even went in the big pool and he worked with her on practicing her strokes and swimming on her back. She’s a good swimmer already, just needs more practice. If we can keep the kids in the water, the little kids will be swimming in no time, too.

After we finally got everyone out of the pool, we went to Gabriel Park and had our picnic — sandwiches and chips and fruit and cupcakes. The kids ate amazing amounts of food and went off to play and made some new friends, but they were all fading, and Mom reported that they all fell asleep in the car on the way home. toph and I were pretty fried too, so he went home to play video games, and I went to Katie’s and hung out with Baby Joe and Casey for a while. Then I went home and we made hamburgers to go on my homemade rolls (delicious), and we watched part of Top Gun while I folded laundry. We stayed up too late waiting for the last load of laundry to dry, but I got to clean out my closet — purging it of all the tshirts that are now obscene belly tops, and pants that will no longer button and packing them away in the spareroom closet. My wardrobe is considerably less varied now, but at least everything fits me and I am not just looking at shirts over and over, thinking maybe today they will fit.

Overall it was a really nice weekend. The weather was ridiculously good. I am feeling great except on the rare moments when I am not, and I feel very connected to my people and energized by the connection, which is a nice way to feel after a very social whirl of a weekend.

After hearing the heartbeat last week, I didn’t think being pregnant would get much more exciting. But we had our 20 week ultrasound this week, and it was just amazing. My stepmom emailed me back after I sent her a note about it and she said “I never had an ultrasound. They just weren’t standard back then.” I guess people just didn’t know what they were missing, but it is just amazing, from a personal and also a scientific perspective, that we can peer into a body and see what’s going on in there, even to the point of being able to see the valves of my tiny baby’s heart clicking open and shut at 154 beats a minute. I was in awe. I saw the entire spine, the arms and legs, and even fingers and toes. Baby toes might be the cutest thing in the world anyway, but they are extra cute when they are your very own tiny baby’s toes! Seeing the feet pressed together, like they were standing on the screen, with the little toes at the end, made me break down in tears. It’s really a real little baby, and I am growing it in me.

I know people have been doing it forever, and I know women get pregnant and have babies every day. And it never seemed like a big deal to me, though it was something I always wanted to experience. But now that I am doing it, it feels like the most amazing thing in the world. It’s just a trip.

I am definitely feeling the baby move, and I even got to see it moving on the ultrasound and feel it moving at the same time. That really helped connect the movements to an actual baby. It’s still gentle flutters most of the time, but I have gotten a pretty good whomping from the little guy/girl a few times. It sure is surprising, awesome and weird! Maybe it was from this fist here:

So here I am, halfway through the first part of this journey, episode one of the series “Harmony and toph raise kids” which will be on the air for at least 18+ years and then in syndication forever, hopefully spawning some spinoffs in due time. And I am so excited to be here.

This weekend I am going garage-saling to find some used maternity clothes (I am on a kick to get as much stuff used as possible… we’ll see how it works out), having dinner with friends and their little girl, going to a barbecue, and then maybe taking the nieces and nephew swimming. A big family weekend, as Memorial Day usually is. I hope there’s some potato salad out there somewhere with my name on it!

Time flies. I keep thinking that it hasn’t been that long since I updated, but it’s been a month! A very uneventful month, pregnancy-wise, which is just fine by me. A boring pregnancy is just what I am after.

Life in general has been very good. I feel so lucky right now. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing, my job is going well, it’s finally spring, my family is doing well, my relationship is great. It’s hard to talk about it without sounding like I am bragging. I really just feel so fortunate. And happy. I don’t know if that’s hormones or just finally being pregnant, which I’ve wanted for a long time, but I am so damn happy. I feel like even bad things can’t bother me. Don’t get me wrong. I still get upset about a lot of injustices, especially to people I care about, but the grand scheme is just looking so good.

A lot of that has been how toph and I are bonding over the baby. Our relationship has always been very good, and though we’ve gone through tough times together, we are good at sticking together when things are bad. But we actually do not have a lot of experience with things just floating along blissfully, so getting used to that has been a little weird. His job is finally good, mine is just fine, our finances are in better shape than ever in our whole relationship, and we are celebrating 11 years together today. And after 11 years, we are still crazy about each other. We still look at each other and say “How did we get so lucky?” We still want to rip each other’s clothes off (not as often as 11 years ago, but we’ve got a lot of other things to do that take up time, man). We still make each other laugh until we cry. We still lie in bed at night and talk for hours sometimes, about nothing at all, or big important subjects, or YouTube videos. And lately, we end every day with his hand on my belly, and we talk to the baby for a minute. And then we kiss goodnight and curl up, and sleep blissfully. Until I have to get up and pee 3 times, and he wakes up at 4am and can’t go back to sleep. It’s not all perfect. But it’s damn good. Damn good.

Yesterday we had the best day of my pregnancy so far, except maybe the day I found out I was pregnant. At my monthly OB appointment, we finally heard the heartbeat on Doppler. Last month we couldn’t hear it, though we saw the baby on the ultrasound, so I wasn’t worried, but I was really looking forward to hearing it. My doctor put the Doppler right on the swell of my belly, where it’s getting rounder and starting to push out right below my bellybutton, and immediately said “There it is!” And we heard it, swish swish swish. I cried through the whole thing. It was just amazing. it swished a long for a few seconds, and then the sounds got all uneven and sounded like someone moving around underwater, and she said “It’s moving around - you’ve got a little gymnast in there!”

Want to hear it? Try this short .wav file, or this longer .aiff file that only works in iTunes. You have to turn the sound way up, because otherwise it just sounds like static. (Warning: At the very end of the .aiff file, there’s a horrible needle scratching sound when she moves the Doppler off my belly, so turn it down once you hear her start talking.)

Other than the heartbeat, it was a quick and boring appointment, because everything is going just like it should.
We have our 20 week ultrasound and anatomy scan next week. I am looking forward to seeing the baby again. It’s the size of a baked potato, and half a pound now. That’s so tiny, but considering it started out like a little dot, it’s pretty giant! And it’s starting to feel like it’s taking up a lot of room in there. I am finally putting on a few pounds, which seem to be mostly baby and the assorted additional stuff that go along with it. My belly really is starting to pooch out more, and when I am lying down on my back (which I can’t do for very long anymore), you can really feel the hard round shape in my belly, right below my bellybutton. It surprises me every time I feel it. And I swear it’s getting bigger every day. Every morning I wake up and think, oof, I have to be more pregnant than yesterday. However, the only place I am pooching out if I am standing up is on my upper belly roll, which is nowhere near the actual baby. I finally took a progress picture, so you can see what I mean. I’ll start taking more now that there’s something to see (sort of).

Emotionally I am still a mess here and there. I get all choked up at the silliest things. Thinking about taking my kid out into the world, to see the beautiful mess that it is, and to be able to help teach it how to be a part of the world, man. That just blows my mind. It’s hard to watch any sort of violence, especially to children or parents. I sometimes have these horrible waking nightmares where I think about something bad happening to my kid, or even someone else’s, and it hurts my heart and I have to think about something nice until I don’t want to just lie down and cover my head in blankets. But mostly, I am just excited, so excited to find out what kind of little person we are going to get to meet in October. A whole new person that we made ourselves, a unique little person that isn’t me or toph, but some sort of mystical combination of genes and personalities and ideas and idiosyncrasies. I just can hardly wait to meet her/him. I just know that kid is going to kick ass.