She Laughs at the Days

Friday afternoon the Genius Husband calls me from work and says, “Ask my mother if she will watch the kids tonight so that we can go out for dinner.”

I’m a little bit shocked at this unexpected gesture and stutter something like, “UH….Okay, why?”

Brace yourself ladies, here is his not so romantic answer. “Because I want to like you right now, so I figured we could go out and talk for a while.”

The background to this conversation involved an earlier one we had been having about what happens to our relationship when I get pregnant. I get a little bit, some would say a lot, hormone crazy, and he starts to pack up and leave inside his head until the baby comes. We were debating whether I go crazy first, prompting him to want to leave, or if he gets emotionally distant first, prompting me to go crazy. It’s an unsettled argument, but I know that he likes me the least during my pregnancies. So he wants to like me, um, woohoo?

The Boy asked where we were going so I told him we were going on a dat…

The boy had a difficult morning yesterday. He wasn't consulted about whether or not he wanted berries in his porridge before his aunt put them in. This was a very sore point in his morning even though he loves berries. Then he took it into his head that he didn't want to go to church today, as everyone was getting into the car and rushing to leave. No one stayed home with him as he wanted, so he had to come.

I could tell he was about to have a melt down, because he doesn't react very well to not being in control of his little life, so I opted to sit with him outside for a while once we arrived instead of make him go to class, and help him cope with all of life's injustices, which are many when you are 4.

After talking for a while about the fact that he couldn't change that we were there but he could decide whether or not to have a good day and enjoy the things that he likes about being there, even if it wasn't his choice to come. (Sometimes having a recovering co…

My husband is one of those guys who makes rejecting all sympathy into an art form. While he lies on the couch today after dinner, looking exhausted, I sympathetically ask, “Tired?”

“No, I’m just lying here because I’m full of energy and can’t wait to get up and do something else.”

Nothing kills sympathy like sarcasm, unfortunately he is very sarcastic, in a dry sort of ironic way that I like, except when he turns it on me in a cranky moment.

I think a mother may have thought of Father’s Day. It’s a day that you can with cultural justification tell your workaholic husband that he needs to take at least one day off, he hasn’t in the past three months, and hang out with his kids. It’s also a day that you can tell him to stay at the pool and play with them for crying out loud and go back to the house and make dinner in peace and quiet. In other words, while mother’s day ought to be known as mom’s day off, Father’s Day ought to be known as dad’s day on, with presents and amateur homemade card…

Foremost in my brain is my pregnant body and it’s unceasing demands, and the book I am reading right now, Birthing from Within, by Pam England. I wish I had read this book when I was pregnant with my first child as it talks all about how what a mother really needs to know in order to give birth and become a mother isn’t something we can learn in our heads, it’s a transformation our hearts and spirits and bodies must undergo. Learning everything about the way birth is perceived medically isn’t actually that much help when you are labouring because a woman experiences birth much differently than in the stages we learn about in childbirth classes. Anyway, I’m fascinated, and from experience know how true this is, so I’m enjoying the book, and I’m excited to do the birth art projects in it. MY doula for the last birth did some of the projects from this book with me and they were very helpful. But I don’t want this to turn into a pregnancy only blog, so here are some of my other thoughts f…

I cried this evening, it started out as quiet tears and turned into deep sobbing for a couple of minutes after that. Now what, you ask, could possibly cause an extremely emotional pregnant woman to cry, besides a slight change in the weather, a puddle of mysterious liquid on the floor, the unexpected, read nauseating, smell of garlic when I open my fridge, any kind of disappointment, or thinking about what to cook for dinner? Since we all know I don’t cry without a VERY GOOD REASON these days, and the suspense is now killing you, here it is.

While I was on the phone happily accepting an invitation to a 1 year-olds birthday party, happily because I like his mom a lot, my children were being mysteriously quiet in the bathroom with the door closed. (I don’t know how my mommy instincts have become so deadened, but there were no flashing lights going off when they should have been.) When I was finished on the phone I called the Girl so I could brush her very snarled hair.

It was as I was bru…

Once upon a time, before this new child took my body hostage and threatened unpleasant and painful results if I did not satisfy its demands for food every single hour of the day, I used to exercise.

I had almost forgotten all about it, it’s been two months and my butt is huge and my belly is too, but it’s not really because of my uterus yet, just the extra 3000 calories a day that I need to keep things semi-comfortable, and the total lack of aerobic activity that I have sunk into.

Yesterday, as testament to the fact that I used to set a healthy example for my children and take care of my body and brain, the Girl tottered over to me with a workout video in hand and told me she wants to exercise. She had gone and put on “exercise clothes” and was demanding something that used to be part of our daily routine. So we cleaned all of the toys off of the living room floor and I put in the show for her, and watched. I watched her still baby soft little body try to go through the Pilates for buns…

Captain Mom has been graciously walking me through all of my HTML questions even though she's in the middle of a house renovation, a move, and several children that she homeschools. So go check her out.

Also in celebration of my newfound ability I will let you know what an avid fan of homebirth I am by sending you over to look at this sweet family birth slide show of an at home birth. I got a touch teary. But I'm pregnant and hormonal, so it's okay if you don't.

And since my husband gives me these dark brooding looks when I spend ALL of my evening on the computer instead of spending some time with him, I will write no longer and instead direct you to my very first blog post because you probably haven't read it yet, and you will laugh when you see the subject that first inspired me to start blogging.

We spent an almost idyllic weekend at the inlaws. It was actually a welcome relief from our place which is strange because when I am pregnant I usually want to stay in a hole and go nowhere. But I'm out of groceries and my fridge has this weird smell that I haven't been able to get rid of even though I've cleaned it twice. And the European style butter on the counter that my husband bought I can actually smell and it makes me sick every time. Oh yeah, and that summer garbage smell when the wind stops blowing that hangs over everything and reminds me of why we WON'T be buying a house in this otherwise okay neighborhood. Let's just say I was glad to leave. I spent way more time just hanging out with and talking to my little brothers and sisters in-law than I have in a long time and remembered why I like them so much. We were also on hand to say goodbye to the oldest sister in law, she's 17, before she went to the airport for a month and a half in Thailand, stayin…