12, 13, 14, 15 = 100 lbs!!!

STILL NAUSEOUS!!!!! But steadily gaining weight because I eat almonds, peanut butter, whip cream, all the fruit I can manage, and cheese. (well, that's practically gourmet, right?)

Wild Things Part Two

And for those of you who are afraid that now that Daniel is 30 he is settling down....I give you this video taken just this August in the middle of our little heat wave.

Obviously the directors of WTWTA got the opening scene idea from our house.

May I present my own two special wild things. Simone (the other wild thing) likes to watch from the couch...where we both try and stay out of the pile.

Wild Things

It hasn't been a great week.

First it began with an evil flu shot. Which turned my world upside down the ENTIRE (I'm not exaggerating people, that thing threw my body into panic, AHHH FOREIGN INVASION MUST PUKE CONTINUOUSLY FOR THE NEXT 12 hours mode) next day AND weakened Daniel's impecable immune system (seriously, he usually gets a cold for A DAY but has now been sneezing and coughing for 5 days). Now, I've had the flu and it's no picnic and I would rather not have it pregnant and I ride the subway to work everyday so I literally can SMELL the germs that are bombarding me. HOWEVER, I still and will always classify the flu shot as EVIL.

I can't wait to see what the H1N1 shot does to me....perhaps I'll actually hallucinate. I hope to god though that it's not about pigs because I just can't handle dreams about pork right now

Second, the wild child that it is in me is quickly turning my entire brain into mush as I whither away from lack of actual dinners.

LUCKILY as Daniel slowly fades away into a large coughing nose, I have taken a turn for the better. I am on a steady breakfast diet of a bottle of Ensure and I am now eating again...although I am afraid that salads will forever be forbidden to me.

Yesterday we went to see Where the Wild Things Are. Because, well, it's Daniel's b-day on Monday and I actually felt like going out into the WORLD so we took the opportunity. Also, I think that there might be a wild thing in me. Daniel started cracking up as soon as Max makes his first on-screen appearance and I had a sudden realization that our child will be the one with bugs in his pockets, a hidden fort somewhere, a wolf costume that he won't take off, and a pet squirrel that he keeps in the corner of his bedroom closet (note to future self: buy next house without closets...use only open cubbies and have Daniel take plumbing class).

Also I realized that I will never be taking my child to the movies. Is that wrong of me? Am I an evil mother? And look, I don't mean when they are 8 or 9. I mean when they are 4 and you have to explain the plot of a movie that IS FOR GROWNUPS and is about NOSTALGIA OF CHILDHOOD AND THE HEARTBREAK OF ANY FAMILY...it's not really about cute monsters folks (sorry to ruin it for you :)

It was a beautiful movie ruined by children. Ugg...I DO sound evil right now. I promise I love kids. But really, as soon as I would get all into the crazy monsters the child behind me would start kicking my seat and the child next to me would start asking his mom to take him to the bathroom and the child in front of me kept opening and shutting his mom's cell phone which would all promptly take me out of 'movie zone' and remind me that I am pregnant with my own wild thing!

So remind me readers....to leave my children at home and just rent them a fun movie and also remind me to stay up late, pay the evening movie charge, and go see the cute- kids- movie- that- is -really -for- grownups at the 11:00 showing when all the 4 and 5 year olds will be in bed.

That sounds like an awesome date night.

Please apply for babysitting.

Why Blog?

(Oh, the pumpkins are ours, homegrown in the backyard!! The neighbors told us "...for real, when I look out my back window I had to go, they got pumpkins in their yard!"

but our house is not pictured....maybe when we carve the pumpkins I'll get one up of our house!)

I didn't quite say all I wanted to about community. I wrote a really fun paper about it though on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics....so if you are really interested, I will be happy to send it your way! And if you do read it, please send me comments back (I know a few of you are crazy English grammar maniacs who love to take a red pen to anything)!



But, I did want to say one last thing about why I have started blogging. I truly did want to chart what it was like to be a graduate student who is trying to write and grow a little one at the same time. And in a few months, I would like to write about how it is to write and take care of a little one. I think we don't talk about this enough in our culture. We applaud mothers. We understand that there is an ongoing debate about work and mothering and where the two shall meet or never mix. But, in the graduate school culture we don't talk about what it means to live a life of the mind. To think, to be a thinker, a researcher and to be a mother at the same time. And this is a conversation that I wouldn't mind being a part of.

But also, I want to not feel so distant from the people that once knew me. I would like to be able to meet them occasionally and give them a big hug and not have to start with, well, for the past 6 years we've......

I'd like to have a way to share bits of our daily life so that when we meet up with people from our old community, we can begin anew. I doubt that it will feel the same but I have hopes that by keeping small connections across time, space, and place we'll be able to sit down and be merry together.

In that spirit I share the above pics from our weekend walk which showcases Fall in our community. (The extra dog is simply a guest for the weekend, thankfully, we our a one dog kind of family!)

Community

So I've been watching, pretty religiously, the Thursday night NBC comedy bloc. This is due to three reasons:

1) I haven't been able to watch t.v. on Thursdays since I started work on my PhD because we have this special conference on Thursday nights and I've given myself permission to skip it this year because a) I've never liked it to begin with and b) I'm tired.

2) I'm tired. I teach and have class on Thursday so when I roll through the door at 7 I'm tired, like achey, feet-sore, eyes burning kind of tired.

3) I think laughing is good for nausea.

So there is this new show called Community with Chevy Chase. It's okay, not nearly as funny as the Office but it has a few moments that have been enjoyable. But I do enjoy the premise (and I have one major beef with the writers).

Okay what I like: So the show centers around 6 people all attending a local community college for a myriad of reasons. And like at most colleges, they are 6 strangers who happen to fall into each other's lives. They don't know each other from their past lives. They haven't slept with each other yet (although obviously that is one of the subtext....it is t.v...). And, they aren't really sure why they have been thrown together. And this is how I feel almost everyday, even after 6 years in New Jersey. I mean, sure, Daniel and I have formed a bit of community ourselves. I'm learning to tolerate our neighbors. Daniel has a few people at work that can talk to him about non-work-related issues. We have a small network of folks around the area that sometimes come over. And after 6 years of 2 different graduate schools, I've made some actual friends.

But, really, it's all been about throwing us into these strange little places of work and school and trying to form a community out of them. And it's really difficult. Especially for Daniel and I. We like our little habits, we liked the people in our past, heck, we usually like our families! And at times, if we don't laugh we would cry -which is a pretty accurate description for what makes a comedy, comedic. It borders on the insane and tragic and then laughs at it all. I don't think forming communities gets easier the older you get. I think it probably gets more and more accidental and comedic. I see all these mommy groups and think, gosh, it's simply their children that hold these women together. My yoga class is held together by the fact that we all are IN LOVE with our yoga/doula/magical calming voice for a pregnant lady teacher.

I try and form a community in my classes and my students often (I know) are saying in thier heads, "Really, I just like my friends, can't she simply lecture and not have us get to know each other and each other's thinking?"

The thing is when people start to pull away and you understand that your community is drifting apart it hurts. After college there was a rash of marriages and moves to different parts of the country and Daniel and I still haven't recovered that community or recovered from the loss of that community.

Of course, I've always thought it important that we not hang on to nostalgia and longing for what was. It is important to keep going and trying new ways of forming new communities and new ways of renewing old ones...and it's wonderful how much of those CAN be recovered with a short note or a new picture of a new little one.

So I suppose that this is all to say is that acknowledging that your community changes over your lifetime is difficult but it can also be a good thing -a growing, changing, thing. And something that hopefully gives you something to laugh over every once in a while.

MY BEEF with the show: They make ALL the professors buffoons and while this is funny it just renforces the norm about what a professor does, what a teacher does. It makes the classes simply a joke and doesn't really applaud the efforts of what some community colleges really strive to do. My hope is that the writers write in a good professor at some point.

Apple Pie and Writing

One of the purposes of this blog is to share my experiences as a working graduate student while being pregnant. So, it is important I think to share that my writing has been going severely downhill. Methinks it has to do with a few things:

a) my morning cup of coffee and my afternoon expresso shot/latte often helped set the stage for a good long writing session and they are sorely missed

b) when you have to make 4 breakfasts to eventually get 1 to stay down, your motivation for much else disappears and when you are again nauseous by 7:00pm every night really, would YOU write or would you get a Popsicle out of the freezer and watch Thursday night NBC comedy?

c) On Friday I cooked an apple pie for my dear husband who has worked tirelessly to keep me and baby satisfied. Now, I am an accomplished pie maker so it's not like this was a brand new task where I was nervous about the crust and wasn't sure what it meant to "roll dough evenly". I like making pies and make them frequently. HOWEVER, by the time the pie was out of the oven I was dog tired. Like, so tired that when Daniel came home and saw the pie on the table with a little card and a framed picture of the ultrasound he also saw a wife with flour all over her sound asleep on the couch and the dog curled up next to her flour/butter hands. So, you can imagine, that if a pie puts me to sleep, a 6 page essay probably might put me in bed for the weekend.

But, this post is not a dismal post. For, I did manage to write a 6 page single spaced essay over the weekend. It isn't my best ever. We aren't talking prizes with this thing. But, it is written. It isn't half bad. And I managed to spell check it.

And it was a damn good apple pie. My best ever!

So, yes, is this pregnancy/writing thing difficult. You betcha' but possible, yes. Especially if you save the eating of the apple pie for writing time. Almost as good as coffee...almost.

Race, Class, Gender....oh my!

So we've been fielding (ever since we announced) but more so, ever since we had the ultrasound the 'sex' question, no NOT THAT ONE, the "will we find out the sex of the baby" question.

We've decided that we want to know. For one thing after 20 weeks I'm sure that I will want to call the little one something other than, the little one, the third one, the one, the baby, it, and then there is Daniel's list of Greek heroes: Athena, Hermes, Achilles, and Hercules (he obviously thinks that the baby will either sprout from my head, be faster than light, or be 10 feet tall with weak ankles!) And we wouldn't want the little one getting a hero complex too early in life, it would stunt the emotional development!

For another thing, it's true, there are some names and some clothes and some colors for the nursery that I just wouldn't do or have for a little girl or little boy. But that point brings me to the crux of this post.

I try and teach in my philosophy class the beginning fragments of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation consciousness. It's not all I teach in my classes, nor is it the focus. But I try to make sure that throughout the semester my students are exposed to the idea that those things can be socially constructed, that those characteristics are used to dominate and control groups of persons, and that we normalize white, male, middle-class, straight values in our society.

Today was the day that I brought it all up big time. I call it my RCG explosion day. It never goes over very well. I always have a few students who voice awkward racist/classist/sexist statements all prefaced by saying, "I know this sounds bad but....." And I always watch my minority students sit very still, with wide open eyes, watching me carefully for what I will say and watching the other students as they judge the tone of the classroom. It's really difficult to moderate well. I'm still not good at it but I'm learning.

It's always a very challenging day. I struggle to remind myself that my students are young and have not seen much of the world and that they ARE entitled to their beliefs and opinions and values. They also struggle because I challenge them and they are forced to reflect on questions that our U.S. society hides from.

And deep down I do empathize with them. I'm not radical enough to raise our baby without a gender like that family in Sweden is doing. I probably will dress our little girl in dresses or our little boy in little pant suits. I'm not going to name our baby some tribal name from a West African village in order to challenge society. I'm sure that I will normalize values from my family and the dominant culture in which I reside.

But while I empathize with them, while I care that they are struggling I also can't bear to bring up a child in a world that isn't just, that isn't struggling to always make its self better and more good. And that means that I am going to keep having RCG Explosion day over and over again...however difficult and however long of a nap I need afterward.

And however much that I will have to explain over and over again to my dear family, I know that women can vote, I know that women can be in the Senate but damn it THERE IS STILL A PLACE FOR THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT around here!

Peace To All.