Dr. Ruki

The weekend is almost here, friends! If you live anywhere near me that means you're also looking forward to a respite from rain and a weekend filled with sunshine instead of clouds. Like, seriously, will summer finally show up this weekend?

The good news is that the summer fruits are definitely here, though perhaps not completely ripe just yet. Lately I've been eating a lot of strawberries, and most recently I bought cherries and a mini-watermelon.

Those little brownie looking things on the side are Goodbody Bites, which are just slightly healthified brownie pieces. I'm using them to stave off complete sugar binges, and so far it's been working. The bad part about being pregnant is that an upset or full stomach feels eight times worse than it does when you're not pregnant. And my stomach isn't even in my ribcage yet. I can't wait to find out how that affects my eating/appetite.

Ahem. Also of note lately? I went to get my cap and gown and Ph.D. hood yesterday.

It was pretty surreal. I keep trying to tell myself that this is all a big deal, but really I'm just no longer impressed. I suspect I'll be more impressed if I can keep my baby alive for the first year of its life.

Ruki is also not impressed with my new degree, especially since David and I tried to make her wear my cap this morning. Here is David giving her an initial sniff:

Here is Ruki giving it her initial brush off:

And here is Ruki just before she shook the cap off again and then proceeded to run around the house in an effort to avoid the cap.

We are so proud of her!

*Have you abused your pet in any way lately?

P.S. Because tomorrow is graduation day I'm not sure that I'll be able to post. I'll try to pop in if I can, else you'll all just have to imagine how f-ing cool I looked wearing that blue foreskin-like hat in front of all my family and friends.

Car Wrecks and Chinese

So guess what happened to David the other morning?

He got rear-ended by a cement truck. Heh. He's okay so it's okay that I find the cement truck part funny, right? Sadly his poor little Subaru Outback, which is still sitting crumpled in our garage, looks like it will probably be totaled. Boo. Am I the only one who thinks that it really sucks when you get into an accident--especially one that is not your fault--and your car is totaled? This happened to me when I was approximately twenty years old. My car was trusty and reliable though not technically valuable, and instead of getting a check from insurance that represented that reliability, I got a check for two thousand dollars which, as you might know, is a paltry sum to go car shopping with. Sigh. The bad news for us is that if they do total the car we will be forced to get a new car and probably make payments on it. (I don't mean a really "new" car, since we would never buy a brand new car.)

Anyway, it is lucky that David is okay. Haruki was in the car with him at the time and luckily she was in her dog seat belt/harness. Apparently she was pretty shaken up and immediately planted her entire (long and 50 lb.) body into David's lap.

Since it's WIAW I thought I'd also share what I ate for lunch and dinner yesterday.

Lunch:

Yep, that's chicken people. I ate chicken. The more important lesson here is that one should never eat Indian-spiced chicken before working out. (That weird lump in the upper right hand corner is two pieces of potato.)

Dinner:

Last night's dinner was courtesy of our friend Brian, who came over to cook Chinese food for us. He even brought a real wok and a huge butcher's knife! From the left: broccoli with fermented soybeans and garlic (my favorite--sooo good!), cumin tilapia fish with celery, and refreshing salad-y thing of cabbage. With brown rice. It was delicious, and luckily Brian left us with a copy of the recipes that he works from.

On a non-food note, I also wanted to share another mountain photo that I took from the car on the way to the ultrasound appointment yesterday.

Cross your fingers that it stays this pretty (and non-rainy) until my graduation day on Friday!!

*When was the last time you were in a car accident, if ever?

20 Week Ultrasound

Well, actually, I'm nineteen weeks pregnant, but it turns out that "20 Week Ultrasound" is really a misnomer, and actually occurs anywhere between 18 and 22 weeks.

Note to y'all who might get knocked up someday? That gel they put on your belly is really sticky, and it gets everywhere. In other important news, our baby is definitely a girl and she is completely healthy. She is apparently quite active and likes to put her hands near her face. Maybe she is shielding her face with embarrassment at her parents' jokes already? Since that's what David spent the entire ultrasound doing--cracking jokes for my Dad (who also came along) and the ultrasound tech. Impending fatherhood clearly doesn't have him overly worried:-)

I know this is a straight-up baby topic, but I did want to say a bit about the experience of having the ultrasound. It's not my first ultrasound--actually it's the fourth since becoming pregnant--but I have to say that it doesn't get any less strange. I wonder if I'm the only mom-to-be who looks at the screen and feels stumped about what's really inside her body, but that's what it feels like--just weird. I mean, I can see the pictures, even pictures with the baby moving, and I know that in theory the pictures are "streaming" directly from the wand that's pressing on my belly. But there's some kind of disconnect that makes me lay there and think "Is that thing really in my belly?" I bet it's kind of like cancer, when they show you an x-ray or MRI and you go home thinking "Is there really a big tumor in my brain, or has there been a mix up at the hospital?" If you can't see it, is it really there? Obviously I have lots of symptoms that point to me being pregnant, though because my placenta--or the baby's placenta, I guess--is in an anterior position (that means against the front the my abdomen where all the nerve endings are) I'm not able to feel the baby kick as early or as frequently as some other mamacitas. Here's to hoping that once I do start to feel kicks more frequently I'll really start to believe that there's a baby where my intestines used to be.

And with that I'm going to sign off. We're having two friends over for dinner tonight and I ought to cut up some watermelon for dessert. OK, for our pseudo-dessert, since we all know that watermelon isn't _really_ a dessert.

*Have you ever had something in or going on within your body that you had a hard time believing was real? (Or did I just lose my last reader?)

Busy Bee

Yah, that's me! Sorta. It was a pretty full weekend, though, excepting about twelve hours on Sunday when I did nothing except watch TV/movies and drive to Alfalfa's to get kale salad. On the way back from Alfalfa's I did remember how lucky I am to look at this as I drive home:

Another reminder that I'm lucky? These flowers, which David brought home for me last night.

To be honest and less cliche, I didn't really feel lucky per se when David brought these home. Actually, I told him beforehand that he should bring me flowers. He had asked if he could do anything nice for me and I chose flowers, though he reminded me that when we started dating I once told him _never_ to get me flowers because they're dumb and a waste of money. My my how my hormones things have changed. Now I'm just happy because they're pretty.

Less pretty was Haruki's weekend activities, which included a lot of digging in the dirt. David says he's always wanted a Dalmatian.

Can you see the spots on her legs and back?

Saturday night was an improvised date night, or, I should say, afternoon, since David preferred to see a matinee movie followed by dinner. We saw The Company You Keep. It was pretty good. Afterwards we hit up Native Foods for a quick dinner...ummm...buffet:

Lucky for me David is okay with sharing. Close up on those sweet potato fries:

They look really tasty, right? But for some reason I found them less than wonderful. Lucky for David, who snarfed them all. By the way, which kind of fry eater are you--one at a time, or a big clump at a time? I like to eat fries one by one to really savor that I'm eating fries and that they're really delicious. You know, so the fries hit all the fat/sugar/pleasure triggers in my brain.

*What did you do for Cinco de Mayo?

The Hummus Destroyer

Woo-hoo! It's Friday! And it's feels especially nice because hopefully spring and summer are finally here! Look--fresh strawberries!!!

Are you all eating like a pound of strawberries every day too?! No? Just me? Well I chalk it up to being knocked up. I just want to eat lots of fruit--all the time, and any kind. I don't think my parents _ever_ brought a kiwi into our house as a child, but now I'm hooked on at least one kiwi per day. This baby I'm schlepping about better be a freaking genius is all I can say...

On a related note, people keep asking me if I'm craving strange foods or strange combinations of foods. I can't speak for all pregnant women, but so far I can say that pregnancy cravings aren't much different from regular cravings. I mean, sometimes I want to eat something a lot, but I wouldn't say, for instance, that my husband had to drive fifty miles in a blizzard to get it. Instead, I just keep having these short rotations of cravings, e.g. for about a week straight I'll want to eat only x for breakfast. Lately I've been wanting to eat hummus, like a lot.

This was a new container of hummus just after I started lunch today:

And this is what it looked like once I was finished with lunch:

Uhhh...whoops? Guess it's better than a cream-filled donut, but let me just say that I barely stopped myself from finishing the whole thing. That's twelve servings, people!

We also got new bar stools in the mail (two days ago). After some prodding from David, without which I might've left those chairs in their boxes in the doorway until third trimester nesting struck, I opened them up and began the arduous task of, well, simply removing them from the box and setting them on the floor. Sometimes it's the dumbest tasks that seem so challenging before you do them, right? But, in my defense, I did think there might be assembly required, which, in case the English degree didn't clue you in, is not my strongest suit.

What do you guys think?

I plan to eat many pancake breakfasts from these guys...

*What have you eaten nearly twelve servings of at once? Also, are there any tasks or chores that aren't that difficult but which, for some reason, you have a hard time making yourself do? (In other words, make me feel better about my own gluttony and laziness, please.)

Positive Thoughts

OK, so my bad on all the weather boo-hooing yesterday. I realized after I posted how tactless it was to make jokes about crashing in the snow. So it snowed again. Maybe that means that next winter, when I'm taking care of an infant, there will be fewer snow storms that keep me housebound. How's that for positive thinking? OK, semi-positive thinking.

I did take a few pictures yesterday, including of the Winter Wonderland.

.

And of my face as I tried to avoid the snow flakes while walking to get my hair cut.

Speaking of other positive news, I passed my drug screen for my job at the Humane Society! Whew! That really had me worried...haha. I asked the tech who took my pee sample and from the sound of it, being a drug user is pretty stressful. I would've had to use some pretty sophisticated measures in order to "beat" the drug test, and the whole time I was there I just kept thinking what a relief it was to know that I never had to worry that I might not pass. It was, however, kind of strange to take a drug test at all, seeing as how I'm a thirty-two year old pregnant lady.

But the best news of yesterday? I ran into these at the store yesterday:

Thank you, sweet Jesus, it's finally cherry season!!! These cherries are like a diet plan in themselves, since cherries in the summer prolly stop me from eating about sixty after dinner muffins between May and August. But don't tell David--they're not organic. He's a bit of a stickler when it comes to organic, though excepting the "dirty dozen" of pesticides and fruits/veggies I will occasionally buy non-organic fruits/veggies.

*What's your policy on organics? Will you only eat organic stuff, do you sometimes eat "conventional" produce, or are you all about the pesticides? :-)

Nevermind...

OK, not so much on the fresh starts and spring veggies around here:

This is from inside our house, looking up at the mini cliff behind the house.

Really?! I knew it was supposed to snow, but I was all, like, "Well, it is just getting to be May now, perhaps the forecasters are mistaken and it will all fall as rain." Not.so.much. Eighty degrees on Monday and now I'm forced to drive to the gym in blowing snow on roads that are icy from it having rained before it snowed. Part of me hopes I crash and die because if it snows again after this I'm going to have to injure myself anyhow. Show of hands, by the way, how many of you are sick of hearing me complain about the snowy weather? Sorry.

On the plus side, I am getting my hair cut after my bootcamp class! Yes. I could really use a head rub right now. And someone putting fruity-smelling hair products on my head.

So! People! What should I do with this snow day? Sitting here and thinking about how much I complain about the snow makes me realize that most people would be glad for a snow day if it meant that they didn't have to go to work. I have the next week and a half to do whatever I want before starting my new job, so perhaps I should soak up the snow as a reason to do nothing and eat whatever I want? Hmmm? I could bake some bread. I could watch some movies. I could dress up Haruki in t-shirts that are too small for her...

*What are you doing today, and what would you do if it was a snow day and you were stuck inside for most of the day? (I should clarify that I'm not completely stuck inside, but because David needs to go down to town for meetings from 2-8 p.m. I either need to be back before then with his car, which is the better snow car, or I would have to go with him and basically camp out somewhere in town until he was ready to go home. Since I get tired more easily now the second option isn't really much of an option to me.)