I suspect that Pete’s taken to subtly rearranging the silverware basket whenever he goes to put something in the dishwasher.

He referred to himself as “Commander of the Spoon Phalanx” the other day.

One of the things that constantly comes as an honest surprise to me is just how presumptuous literature about birth and parenting is.  Everything, even your crunchy-hippie-attachmenty texts, assumes that the parenting unit consists of a married birth mother and a father, which… really?  We’re not going to allow for same-sex couples, adoptive parents, unmarried parents, or single parents at all?  I know a ton of them, yet they simply don’t exist in the universe of parenting literature, which is disarming — like as soon as I give birth, my world will be transformed into a vision of lily-white heteronormativity.

There’s also still a heavy reliance upon the ol’ comic chestnut that fathers are all cloddish oafs.  “Let Daddy change a diaper once in a while,” one book encouraged me (before I threw it across the room (metaphorically speaking, it was from the library)), “even if he puts it on backwards!”

Whoa.  Neither my husband nor I have ever changed a diaper.  Between the two of us, my husband is by far the more mechanically-minded, and, I imagine, will apply himself the task of perfecting the most efficient and structurally-sound diaper change with vigor, whereas I will probably be more in the trial-and-error / “eh, good enough” camp.  But, you know, he is a man!  Without all of those womanly mothering instincts that will serve as my biologically-ingrained spiritual guides through diaper application!  Ha, ha, ha — of course he’ll put the diaper on backwards like a chump!  I also expect him to bring home a recliner and discover a heretofore unrealized penchant for beer and football while he’s at it, because, according to the experts, that’s just how dads work.

Lastly, my (admittedly very limited) experience with baby clothes indicates that baby boys get decked out in images of sports and dogs.  Sports… well, that’s a durable trope, but why dogs, exactly?  Where are all the baby onesies embellished with cat decals?  Are cats somehow deemed emasculating, even for an essentially sexless infant?

This really only leaves me with one choice.  Defy the dominant paradigm!  Dress your baby in feline imagery!

I found this set of magnets online yesterday, and immediately decided that they were the best things ever.  I don’t even know if I can get them shipped to the U.S. yet, and I’m already debating between the virtues of magnets or buttons.  Magnets would allow me to engage in Montreal-related nostalgia whenever I open the fridge, but buttons would mean that my baby would have one precociously pretentious diaper bag.

No, this isn’t going to be a post about my tight bond with the city of Montreal, or wanting to move back to Wisconsin or Quebec.  (I mean, if Pete’s college decided to up and relocate itself to either of those two places, we’d follow in a heartbeat.  But one rewarding, teaching-centric tenure-track job in a collegial liberal arts environment is a rare and handy thing in what’s inevitably referred to, in dismal and ironic tones, as The Current Academic Job Market.)  In North Texas we stay and settle for the foreseeable future.

But those pithy little distillations of the city-via-Metro-architecture make me wonder how I could construct the cultural and aesthetic equivalent for where I am now.  The names and images of local Sonics and Targets?  The abbreviations for local farm-to-market roads, with grass and cattle?  The awesomely earnest new business development styled as a dead-on accurate replica of a Croatian village, complete with stone bell tower next to unfinished parking garage?

You know, I really need to get out with my camera more.

Pete’s sister and her husband — who have now gained the designation of the “nearby” family, despite having to drive a solid eight hours each way to get here — came to visit for Thanksgiving, and it was roundly satisfying to be able to host guests in a space larger than our apartment in Montreal, featuring amenities like a big kitchen with dishwasher, extra bathroom, and an actual spare room (albeit one populated by craft supplies) with a luxurious IKEA PS Murbo.  It was also really nice to have company, period, since we’re not really within driving distance of anybody else, Pete no longer has the postdoctoral prerogative of casually taking a week or two off from work at a time, and I know that travel will soon become A Production.  (Not something that we won’t or don’t do, mind you.  Just much more of A Production, in the sense that, for example, kids apparently don’t thrive on a travel diet of an apple and a family-sized bag of Munchies.)

We also ran some errands — not as a Black Friday kind of thing, but as a “oh, you guys also live eight hours from the nearest IKEA and have been fixing up your house for the last six months” kind of thing — which ended up revealing some unexpected delights.

• “Oh, and there’s See’s,” somebody mentioned as we stepped into the mall.  “WHAT?!” I screeched ungratefully in reply.  See’s, as I’ve probably mentioned a bunch of times before, is a West Coast kind of candy company, but I hadn’t remembered that they open up seasonal kiosks during the holiday season for the benefit of Pacific Time expats and very lucky passerby.  I have my 1-pound box of Scotchmallows waiting for me on the kitchen counter to act as the world’s tastiest ad hoc Advent calendar.  Merry Christmas to me, indeed.
• After years and years of planning, Timbuk2 are finally coming out with a particularly well-timed diaper bag tomorrow.  I haven’t seen it, I haven’t tried it, I don’t even know how much it will cost, but I will most assuredly be buying one.  I’ve been using their bags for… about twelve years now.  When you hear so much about how Having Kids Profoundly Changes You, You Know, it’s reassuring to know that some of my preferred materialistic trappings can remain the same, and that motherhood won’t instantaneously transform my closet into a repository of Vera Bradley.
• The reappearance of Bath and Body Works’ Fresh Balsam candles, which give our fake Target tree the authentic olfactory ambiance of the real thing.  (Related tip: we store our ornaments nested inside of styrofoam cups inside a plastic storage bin carrying a Pete-penned Sharpie label of Christmas Oraments, and they all made it through the move intact.  I think that’s a pretty good recommendation.)  I think that ours might sputter out before the end of the year, but happily BBW is also the kind of place that inevitably puts everything on sale at some point and then lets you stack a coupon on top.  I mean, I’ll happily shell out $10 to pretend that I live in the middle of a northern pine forest instead of the Dallas exurbs.
• Lastly, we went to a matinee on Saturday — at a normal multi-screen Cinemark movie theater — and confirmed that our adult matinee tickets cost $3.50 each.  $3.50!  That’s what the internet initially told us, but I simply refused to believe it.  Even when I was in high school matinee tickets were somewhere around the $5 range, and they were more like $8 in Boston.  But $3.50!  I don’t know why we live in some kind of local bubble of cheap movie ticket-ness, but I plan on exploiting it nevertheless.

Materials: A half-yard each of five different cotton prints (though I only used a quarter yard of each, and could have used even less than that). Crazy gingham bias tape that I’ve had kicking around forever, and am pleased to have finally found a purpose for.

Time: A couple of hours.

Cost: Around $10 for the fabric.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t generally take or have a lot of photos of myself, unless I’m taking them for a craft project or I’m doing something fun with other people.  Sadly, my increasingly difficult-to-fit proportions have recently nullified the necessity of the former*, and the work-all-weekend nature of Pete’s job (and a general lack of funds) have reduced the latter, at least for the time being.

All the same, I’m getting to the point where I’m going to be very picky about what photos I post of myself online, and where.  This is not because I feel particularly fat and ugly — I mean, I’ve always had the great, soft, round face that some women develop during pregnancy, and the growing proportions of my torso make my limbs look positively tiny by comparison.  So, my self-image hasn’t been too bruised; drape a towel over me strategically, and I still look recognizably like my old self to myself.  It’s just that I’m at the point where people sort of decide that your pregnant body is now public domain, and therefore give themselves a pass for making the same stupid comments about it.

Not that I’ve been the recipient of many stupid comments, mind you.  But, in some kind of burst of cosmic procreative synchronicity, I have about three four five friends on Facebook who are currently about as pregnant as I am, and oh, how I have winced at the comments I’ve seen on recent photos that they’ve posted.  Here’s a verbatim sampling:

• You are getting big!
• Are you sure there aren’t twins in there??  You do look big :-)
• Wow, you look more pregnant than [mutual friend 8 weeks further along]
• good lord woman, you look awesome but your belly is GINORMOUS!!!! you are lucky though because it is only your belly, so i bet that baby weight will melt right off!
• Woah! You look like you’re about to pop!
• OMG your belly is ENORMOUS!
• I’m getting pulled in by your gravitational force.

And on and on, ad nauseam.  Third trimester: a great way to feel like a circus sideshow, instead of a person.

Let me put it this way: I saw a ton of friends and family during my first trimester, before we’d told anybody that I seemed to be pregnant, and nobody had anything to say about my slightly bloated physical appearance.  Now, however, I’m at the point where my body is now regarded as an acceptable object for public commentary, and, as I have to get more and more creative about my approaches towards picking objects up from the floor, I don’t want to hear it.  I feel fine, so I don’t want to be told that I look massive.

In case you’re wondering, though: “you look great!” is always welcome.

* One extra difficulty that I don’t think I previously appreciated about finding clothes for the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy: not only do you have to find things that fit you circumferentially, but also vertically.  The select few of my trusty oversized gym and sleep t-shirts that still fit comfortably now clear about two-thirds of my stomach, which makes me feel really, really klassy.

Until this weekend, our laundry machine had been out of commission for about two and a half weeks.  There was a bit of inevitable runaround regarding the initial repair visit — such requests travel an obscure and contorted circuit between us, the management company, their appliance repair people, and the owner, and sometimes one of those parties won’t realize that the others are waiting for a reply.  But, as it turned out, the machine’s transmission was shot and it would’ve been cheaper to replace the thing than to fix it, so this weekend the owner — who lives in Austin — came by with her husband and switched it out for a new (to us, at least) one.  Not only was it nice to meet our landlord (and particularly flattering to hear an honest exclamation of “Wow, the place looks great!” as they came inside), but it was really nice not to have cram the trunk full of laundry baskets and drive twenty minutes to the nearest laundromat.  It’s a pleasant enough place, but even if you take advantage of the location to walk over to the taqueria next door, it’ll still take a chunk of time that you don’t have out of your day.

What I learned during the preceding 2.5 weeks is that there’s nothing like an inconvenient laundry situation to seize you with a compulsive desire to wash the most random stuff.  I’d take dirty clothes and linens to the laundromat, but couldn’t quite justify the extra $1.50 that it’d take to run a separate load for, say, the cats’ favorite (and, therefore, hair- and dander-covered) fleece cushions.  And I had about six cuts of crafty fabric that all needed to be separately pre-washed and pre-shrunk multiple times before use.  And the crib linens that had been sitting on the crib mattress in a crumpled pile for the past three weeks.  And then I realized that I’d never washed the zip-off cotton covers for our IKEA-brand memory foam bed pillows, which we bought in 2008.  I don’t care how benevolently you might be reading this and clucking, “oh, she’s nesting!” — three years’ worth of collected drool, dust mites, and God knows what else is revolting.

So I did laundry all weekend.  And it felt amazing.

When I was young, I reasoned — totally logically — that fall leaves don’t change color south of the Mason-Dixon line, and that deciduous trees in the southern U.S. remained perpetually evergreen.

My family lived in San Diego, where the weather was always warm and temperate, and the plants all large, showy, and tropical year-round.  I also knew from books and Sesame Street that, where it’s cold, the trees turn colors and lose their leaves for the winter.  Ergo, it made total sense that the trees in other parts of the southern U.S. where it stayed warm — like Texas, for example — would remain perennially verdant.

This was pretty solid reasoning for a five-year-old.  But after we moved to Ohio — sufficiently cold, trees dropped their leaves in fall — I didn’t have any further reason to question this schema, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until my late teens that I got wind of the fact that the more southern parts of the U.S., unlike Southern California, did not remain a quasi-tropical paradise year-round.  And then I promptly forgot again.

You can imagine my surprise earlier this week, then, when I saw that the leaves on the trees across the street are turning shades of what can only be described as yellow and red.  Not spectacularly, but turning nevertheless.  (We’ve also been getting some clouds and rain between cooler temperatures, which all slot in nicely with my mental “fall” schema.)  When we moved to Texas, I was under the expectation that there would be no fall, full stop.  The revelation of some seasonality — despite the lack of apple orchards, so-sharp-it’ll-cut-you-like-a-knife light, and crisp leaves mixed with early-season snow — makes me unreasonably happy.  I keep craning my head around the window to see if the big yellow tree in the creek across the street is still yellow-tinged-with-orange.

Still there.