They Know About Us

I've felt twinges of self-consciousness about our having another baby rather quickly, such as when a colleague recently responded to the news by saying "SO! Are you two planning to be our local Jon and Kate?" (Uh, no. There was a cautionary tale.)

Still, even having weathered that question, I was a little taken aback when this flyer showed up in our mailbox:

Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be nothing more personalized than an ad for a new line of Huggies diapers, called "Little Movers." I guess Facebook's almost creepily targeted advertising has gotten to me.

The Mortifications of the Flesh

I had read that with the second baby, you show a lot earlier, and I have definitely found this to be true. It's as if my abdominal muscles (such as they were, let's be honest) just said, "We know where this is going" and surrendered.

Thus, I am facing a more extended season of maternity wear and therefore more total cycles of the same outfits. Last time, I inadvertently put off wearing maternity clothes probably too long. I had a pair of maternity jeans that I kept trying on, and they kept slipping down, so I thought that I wasn't big enough for maternity clothes yet, but as it turned out, those pants were just an exceptionally poor fit. As a result of this misjudgment, I persisted in wearing regular clothes to the point that 1) it probably looked tacky and 2) when I finally did realize my mistake, I actually felt relief at how comfortably maternity clothes fit.

I'm still in my regular wardrobe for now, but I began steeling myself for the inevitable by looking around for a couple of things to supplement my maternity wardrobe. The whole experience was incredibly demoralizing. Worse than shopping for jeans, worse than shopping for bathing suits. There is something just so depressingly delusional about a clothing line that advertises its "secret fit belly." Especially when you look at the online models, and all you can SEE is belly. Whom do they think they are kidding? Me, I guess (hence demoralizing). I looked at a couple of dresses, and for an instant found myself pathetically hopeful that the design of one seemed to offer a certain camoflauge. But then I thought, come on. Seriously. Are my students really not going to notice that I gain twenty or thirty pounds right before their very eyes, in the time it takes them to write three essays and read six novels? I don't think so.

Meanwhile, there is the diverting challenge of managing a toddler and bouts of (thank you, God, that it is not as bad this time) morning sickness. Which means that on those (not as frequent, so I'm really not complaining, I promise) occasions that I find myself hunched over the kitchen sink, I am also holding Allison Clare's hand in one of my own, while she, fascinated, jumps up and down next to me and says, "Blaaaah! Blaaaah!" because she is a stage of imitating everything I do. Charming child.

Now Showing

Or, Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

If you scrutinized the Boardwalk videos as closely as I did, this may not come as much of a surprise, but I seriously doubt that anyone else shared my motivation to determine whether my pants were bulging, especially with Allison Clare's wow-ing dominating the foreground. If you did notice, however, let me say at last that it was not just the Mack & Manco's pizza, Johnson's (warm, gooey, yet crisp) caramel corn, Kohr Brothers' ice cream, and boardwalk fries I had just consumed; it was a little early second birthday present Sam and I have been cooking up for Allison Clare. A bun, if you will.

First, some explanation: As anyone who has ever seen Sam in (. . . s . . . l . . . o . . . w . . .) motion can attest, he never moves quickly. We can be way late, or crossing a parking lot in the midst of a downpour, or in the path of an oncoming semi, and Sam merely accelerates from a stroll to a mosey. If I attempt to proceed at a normal rate, I feel him reach out from behind me and put an arm around my shoulders in a way that might look like a caress, but is actually a restraint, a lot like the hook that used to come out to pull the vaudeville act offstage. We say that he goes at Kentucky speed, while I go at New Jersey speed.

Thus, it seems poignantly ironic that he would be the architect of what feels like an accelerated family planning schedule. We had Allison Clare nine months and three days after our wedding, and this baby will be born pretty much exactly nine months after I conceded that we could even begin considering the possibility of having another. But Sam gave me the old "I have fertility problems!" song and dance, and being somewhat overly planful myself, I figured that it could take a while, that I was not getting any younger either, that we might end up pursuing adoption this time around, etc., etc. And there you have it: conceding we could start thinking about it was apparently all it took.

My last post was certainly no advertisement for our parenting abilities, but nonetheless, we are very excited. I am deliriously thankful not to have experienced morning sickness as severe/constant as the first time around. We won't know for about six more weeks whether it is a boy or a girl, but I feel certain that it is a boy. So far my prediction rate has been 100%, but one is hardly a statistically significant sample, so who knows?

AAAAAAAGH!

. . . that's the sound Allison Clare chose to make, at the top of her lungs, while we tried to have dinner with my boss and her husband at our house last night. Our little monkey was not in a bad mood or throwing a tantrum, just in the mood to YELL . . . smiling the whole time. Nothing I tried worked--not giving her a bowl of blueberries to eat, or getting her attention and giving her a firm "no." She would look back at me seriously, then smile, suck in her breath, and let out another "AAAAAAH." Thankfully, our guests were very, very gracious and good-humored about it.

At her age, we can't reason with her, or bribe her, or threaten her, since she doesn't understand abstract language or cause-and-effect. I think we are just going to have to wait her out. Sigh.

Manly Talk

In the various stages of demolition, renovation, and maintenance that we have experienced in this near-hundred year old house, I have gotten to witness lots of communication among tradesmen. It's a world that I'm not really familiar with, partly because I'm a woman and partly because I had almost never seen an actual repairman until I moved here--when I was a kid, my dad fixed pretty much everything himself; then I was a tenant; then I bought a condo, but it was pretty new. Even when I bought my own old house a couple of years before we got married, I mostly just pointed out the problem to whomever the home warranty company sent over, maybe got a "we'll take care of it, little lady" in return, and wrote a check, and all was said and done.

But my relationship with this house and particularly with it as Sam reconstructs it piece by piece has meant that I have gotten to witness much more rhetorically and sociologically complex dealings. I have seen the gleam in the eyes of two handymen, an electrician, assorted assistant craftsmen, and even friends who have stopped by, when we had what seemed to be an indestructible laundry chute that needed to be taken out. Each wanted to try his hand and his own set of tools at the destruction, as if it were some kind of fantasy or video game come true. I have also seen a row of seven tradesmen from different, unrelated companies who happened to be at the house for different, unrelated purposes, as they converged on the ridge by the side of the house to peer up at the chimney and emit guttural, good-natured mutterings that somehow--with no intelligible remarks I could make out--resulted in a plan of action for the masonry team.

For the past week, we have had a drywaller and his assistant with us. They've pulled down the wallpaper in the entryway, stairway, and hallway, which was a job Sam and I had been putting off doing ourselves since buying the house, and they've been working on replacing the ceiling in the basement, which has not been going well. Last night, Sam realized that there was a problem with the tiles, and they were all going to need to be replaced. I was dreading the conversation about it, since we didn't really want to pay more for the job, but a lot of the work was going to have to be redone. I had to break the news to the guy at first because Sam was in the shower, so I went down to the basement, showed him the tiles, and said that we were concerned about how they were fitting into place and thought that we were going to need to get different ones. He understood, but we both just sort of looked glumly at the miserable, poor-fitting tiles for a while, so then I said Sam would be down in a few minutes and made my exit.

Then Sam goes down, and I hear some lively conversation. Not unfriendly. Some back and forth and some "hmmm" and "umm-hmmm" and "ah!" and sounds of things being moved around. Then a burst of laughter and "Okay, man" and then some "I like this solution" and "Well, I really appreciate that." And then Sam comes upstairs and they're both all smiles and not only is the guy going to replace them for us, but he's very cheerful about it.

I feel that I could have achieved approximately the same practical outcome (tiles getting replaced), but I could never have made this fellow feel so happy about it. It's as if by having the conversation with Sam, he gets to feel that he has participated in some shared manly project, whereas if I had had to negotiate him into doing it, he would have just felt backed into a corner. I don't think it's malicious sexism as much as it is a de facto separate world, a world as encoded with subtleties as any female one, perhaps even more so because so much of its communication occurs without language.

Wow!

Allison Clare and I are visiting my parents in NJ while my sister is in town from Colorado with her baby Dominic, and yesterday we took both kids to the Ocean City boardwalk. Last year, on seeing the ocean for the first time, AC was totally unimpressed--she slept through most of the trip, awakening only to cast a vaguely grumpy look in the general direction of the ocean.

This year, however, she more than made up for her previous lack of enthusiasm, running out to the railing over the water to yell, "Wow! Wow! Wow" We caught about a wow and a half on video:

Similar thrills at the music, lights, and carnival rides on the Wonderland pier:

And walking proudly down the Boardwalk, taking it all in: