Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Baby

To start, there was supposed to be a picture of my mom and myself in that last post about my anniversary. Don't worry, she reminded me. Very subtly. Surprising. My mom is usually so quiet, never speaks her mind. Kind of like me ;0)

I had it all cued up to go in there, and then I apparently got distracted by something. So here is the picture that was supposed to be in there:

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My schedule is all thrown off. I was in Des Moines for that court reporter convention for three days, then I worked an entire regular week, which sucked, then I had Monday, Tuesday and Friday off last week. I’m normally a night owl, so on the nights before the days I had off, I stayed up late (well, late for me these days. I think I made it to midnight one night. Normally “late” is 10:30 or so in my current pregnant state) and slept in the following day. As a result, I’m now not sleeping through the night. I get up to pee (normal), then I can’t fall back to sleep. I spent about an hour, from 3:30 to 4:30, this morning trying to effing fall back to sleep, because I had the goal of getting up at 5 and working out before work. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. I am now massively exhausted and I kinda feel like shit. Just queasy, lethargic, unmotivated, etc.

Oh, and my car didn’t want to start this morning. It kept stalling. I have a feeling it’s because I didn’t drive it at all after Thursday, but I could be wrong. It’s working fine now, but I’m going to have my uncle Gary take a look at it. I need an oil change anyway. We really only want to have one car payment at a time, and Brian’s new car is high enough. I don’t want to have to buy another car, but mine is approaching 9 ½ years old, and it shows. Even with regular maintenance, it’s acting all geriatric-like. Mark my words, though, I’ll be driving that car until it sputters its last breath. I don’t care if it’s tired and old and ugly, I’m going to push it ‘till I can push it no more. We’d like it to make it until Brian’s car is paid off, but we’ve got, oh, four years left for that, so I don’t think that’s going to happen. Bummer.

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Today is just annoying. It’s Monday, it’s nice out…so of course I’m at work instead of it being nice on oh, say, 4TH OF JULY, when I could have been floating around in my grandparents’ pool all day. Instead it rained and was cold…..I have a transcript to work on and I’ve made it through about eight pages (in my defense, it’s really dense testimony stuff, and it takes longer to edit than a normal Q&A kind of thing), I’m stressed about another situation that I can’t talk about at all, I miss Maidul a lot today for some reason, and I’m just plain grumpy. But, hey, at least my hair looks really awesome today.

**Side note: “At Least My Hair Looks Good: One woman’s story of life with a fantastic stylist and a faulty reproductive system” is going to be the title of my book if I ever get around to writing it. Having good hair has little to do with me. I have good genetics that don’t involve cowlicks or overly thin/thick hair, and the girl who cuts and colors my hair is FABULOUS. In fact, the only real credit I can take for my hair looking good about 95% of the time is the fact that I finally mastered the art of the round brush. For a while there every time I tried to use it, I tangled it into my hair so badly it almost had to be cut out. I’ve got the hang of it now, thank God. I can’t even tell you how many times I got my period over the past four years, but then looked in the mirror and said, “Well, at least my hair looks pretty awesome.“ Because, seriously, had I had to deal with infertility AND bad hair? I’d be in the nuthouse by now. Heavily medicated and under suicide watch.**

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On the working out thing…..yeah, I haven’t been working out. I was, then I had that whole weird muscle pain thingy going on, so I stopped, and then my second trimester “energy boost” disappeared, and I haven’t gotten back to it. And it shows. I’m flabby. REALLY flabby. And my 10-year high school reunion is in less than a month. I doubt I’m going to get un-flabby by then, but I’d like to try. I’m going to try to work out tonight when I get home, if for no other reason than maybe it’ll wear me out and I’ll sleep tonight and get back to a regular freaking schedule.

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Thirteen court reporters were let go throughout the State about a week and a half ago. The new fiscal year started July 1, and they claim these cuts were due to budget constraints. The e-mail we got said they were eliminating or laying off 15 people through the state. I find it none too convenient that 13 of them were court reporters. Our chief justice must think we’re morons or something. The reporters who were let go all worked in Associate Court. I work in District Court. Associate Court does non-felony cases and juvenile, and District Court does mostly felony work. The Code of Iowa says, in summary, “Each Associate Court judge MAY appoint his or her own court reporter. Each District Court judge SHALL appoint their own court reporter.”

Welcome to life in the field of law. The distinction between that “may” and “shall” made all the difference in the world, and allowed the associate reporters to be dismissed. It reminds me of when Clinton asked what the definition of “is” is, albeit in our situation the distinction is actually clear, and Clinton was just a horndog trying to get out from under his own jizz-stained lie. But I digress.

The entire thing is very sad for the reporters who were let go, and has the rest of us worried that we’re next. They claim two more reporters from our district may be cut in December. While the two associate reporters who are left are worried, I wonder if they’ll go by seniority, which means bye-bye Cort. I’m low-man on the totem poll. My boss’ old reporter is now in Associate Court, and he could easily “appoint” her to come back to District Court. I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I love my job and my benefits and having a regular work schedule. On the other hand, freelancing would have me home more with more flexibility and more time for the baby, but it’s not as stable as far as money and there are no benefits. My noncompete with my old firm is up in November, so if the cuts come in December, I’d be free to go out on my own, in which case I could possibly make much more money than I made freelancing before and more than I make now. That would be nice. I keep saying, though, that the State is going to make this decision for me, and that seems to be true, so I’m just going with the flow for now.

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Our ultrasound to confirm Baby E’s gender is on Wednesday at 9:00 a.m., and I’m obviously totally NOT excited and NOT at all wishing I could just sleep until then because the anticipation is NOT killing me one bit. I want to see him/her again, mostly. I want to watch him/her moving so I can tell if I’m being punched in the bladder or kicked in the bladder. I’m not sure why I care or want to know that, but I do. For some reason it matters. Life is about the little details, ya know.

My grandmother is totally convinced that the gender of Baby E is the opposite of what I saw. So every time I see her, she says, “Oh, *insert opposite gender of what we think the baby is* looks big today!” or something of the sort, and won’t call the baby by his/her name. For whatever reason, this annoys the ever-loving crap out of me, but I can’t yell at my crazy grandmother. First, I love her too much (despite the crazy), and second, she likes to buy me things, and, ya know, I’d like to keep that going. I keep saying, “Grandma, I saw a *insert gender-appropriate anatomy here* , like, for realz.” She doesn’t believe me. Now, granted, I’m no ultrasound technician, but what I saw was CLEAR. AS. DAY. It wasn’t a fuzzy ultrasonic picture of genitalia, it was like someone just took a black and white photo of it. Seriously. AND the u/s technician agreed with me. So if we go on Wednesday and it’s different, I will be TOTALLY shocked. Not disappointed in the least, just really surprised.

My aunt actually agrees with my grandma, and then came up with a name that she loved for Baby E if the gender isn’t what we think it is. She told me the name on Sunday while we were at the pool, and I kind of smirked and said, “Go ahead and run that one by Brian.” So she did, and he laughed hysterically and said, “He/She would come out with his/her collar popped. I don’t think so,” which was the reaction I suspected that name would get. He cracks me up.

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I’m really starting to hate maternity clothes with a passion. It’s so difficult to find things that flatter a figure you’re not used to dealing with. I only have a few items I really love, and even fewer that are comfortable. At this point, comfort is really my main concern. My boobs have been particularly difficult as far as this stuff goes. I didn’t want to invest in new bras. Bras are expensive, and these changes are obviously temporary, so I was trying really hard to get by with what I had. So I was at my cousin’s graduation party, sitting talking to my aunt and my mom, wearing one of my regular bras. This one happened to have a plastic front clasp. Sometimes, those just pop open. I have no idea why, but that is my experience. So I’m sitting there when all of a sudden my bra did exactly that. I headed to the bathroom, lifted my shirt, only to discover that my clasp had not popped open, it had SHATTERED INTO A MILLION PIECES. It was like my bra finally just said, “Bitch, I give up. I’m not fucking doing it anymore. You be crazy,” and then it died a quick but painful death right there in my aunt and uncle’s living room. RIP, bra. You will be missed. You were one of my favorites.

Of course, me being me, I come back out of the bathroom laughing hysterically and tell everyone in the room, including my dad and uncle, what happened. Don’t worry, my family is used to my penchant for oversharing.

My husband the engineer, of course, thought we should do some kind of test on the bra to see how much force had to be exerted upon said bra to cause it to shatter like that. I mentioned that I had been stretching it to its limits for weeks, so it was probably just weakened, to which he replied, “Well, we’d obviously had to do a fatigue test, too.” You guys think he was kidding. He was not. He was actually a little upset when I told him I had thrown it away. I was happy it was already out the door, because I could just picture him and his engineer buddies all hunched over my bra testing it to see how much force my girls had exerted to cause such damage. I’d never be able to look them in the face again, which would be bad because I haven’t even met half of them, and also, one of them is married to our daycare provider.

So off I went to Target to try to find some cheap bras to accommodate my expanding chest. It was then and there that I discovered exactly why my poor bra had just given up and died. I had gone up roughly two cup sizes. So, um, yeah, no wonder. I might as well have water-boarded the poor thing until it gave in.

PSA: Ginormous bras are not nearly as cute as the smallish ones I had to buy before. These things serve a FUNCTION, and that function clearly has nothing to do with getting men excited. Aesthetics be dammed; these things are masterfully engineered to hold up to thousands of pounds of force. Like a bridge. Or the space shuttle. In fact, I’m pretty sure NASA had a hand in getting them up to par.

But, OMG, THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE COMFORTABLE.

“Cort, please stop talking about your underpinnings.”

Yes, I can hear your inner monologue. I’ll stop now.

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I will update as soon as I can on Wednesday after our ultrasound. Hopefully, the baby cooperates so we can get a good picture of the business (which I will not be scanning to show everyone. I’m still sticking to that. Whether it’s considered kiddie porn or not, I’m not putting my kid’s genitals on display on the Interwebs).

For now, I need to get back to this transcript. Blah.