For those who don't obsessively Facebook stalk...

So here we are, making our photo début as two conjoined entities: the fetus and me. A lovely sunny photo exactly on the 14-week mark: so 3 1/2 months pregnant. It doesn't stick out but so much yet, but if I sit still at the right times of day I can feel it wiggling its little arms and legs. At least once, I've woken up in the morning to inform the Husband, "your baby is awake. It's moving." It seems to particularly like to move in the mornings once my bladder isn't encroaching on its personal space.

It's terrible that I keep calling my baby "it". I know that. Sometimes, I've taken to saying "he" instead, but I don't really have a feeling for whether Piggly Wiggly is a boy or a girl, and typing out Piggly Wiggly every time I need to refer to my unborn child takes just enough time to make me not do it. I feel like I should start a poll to guess the baby's sex. That said, it'd be a boring poll as there are only two choices (I do not concede to the possibility of a hermaphrodite baby...the odds are probably quite staggeringly against it anyway), not to mention, I'm not planning on finding out what sex the baby is until he's born. Unless, of course, Baby decides that the suspense is too much (or it doesn't want to be dressed in gender-neutral greens and whites) and brazenly flashes the sonographer in another six weeks. I figure, if the baby is waving its bits for the camera, who am I to deny its clear request that we buy it gender-appropriate accessories in preparation for its arrival? If my baby is already that concerned about removing any ambiguity about its sex, I'm perfectly willing to respect those wishes. In the meantime, the policy is to wait and see.

The other policy is to healthily prolong the moment at which I officially weigh more than The Husband. Even though it'll be because I'm technically two people, that is a day best kept in the distant future. However, the gaining of sympathy weight to postpone the inevitable is not an option. I refuse to see his trim figure hidden under love-handles, man-boobs, and bingo wings. Thankfully, he refuses to see this happen, too. Great minds think alike.

New Easter Tradition

As his contribution to his mother's insistence that we cultivate new family traditions, my husband suggested that we play beer pong. Funnily enough, this suggestion did not go down as expected: everyone - even the husband's parents - really got behind the idea. So what did we do last night after going punting on the Cherwell and sitting out in the uncharacteristically blistering English sun? Played our first annual family beer pong tournament.

To be fair, it wasn't with beer...we played with copious quantities of cheap soda, but Soda Pong just doesn't have the same ring to it as Beer Pong does.

What was the saddest part of this whole endeavour? My dreams of beer pong champion status were crushed...by my husband's mom and dad! His dad was actually disturbingly good at the game. Clearly, this is the guy you want with you to challenge the table at a frat party. A good sport and deadly accurate.

Never, even through my years at WF, have I had such a frat-tastic holiday. Long live family beer pong!

Illustrating my feelings

Though I'll never have such an amazing set of illustrations come out of MS Paint (because I don't have the patience for it unless I have a manic bout of useless productivity), I have summed up today's post in one picture, inspired by my love of the hilarious Allie Brosh. (I highly recommend her blog...especially The God of Cake and the post about her pet fish...oh hell, I recommend all of it!)

I was trying on bathing suits today. Why? Because I had free time and had actually driven myself to the shops to get some errands done...like a grown-up. Why else? Because I'm pretty well convinced that my current bathing suit's days are numbered. It's super cute, but it will only last me so far into the actual summer, what with my rapidly expanding baby inside my rapidly expanding middle.

Anyway, this picture should probably be the other way around, because it was a tiny epiphany today when I tried on a bikini: with the right clothes on, I actually look pregnant, not chunky and lazy and genetically predisposed to go apple-shaped round the middle. My other epiphany was that people aren't kidding when they talk about other things besides your uterus expanding when you're having a baby. I mean, I knew some of my dresses were starting to get low like Lil' Jon in the front, but holy cow! I've always appreciated my curves, but until I get some maternity clothes, I'm approaching new frontiers of indecency. At least it makes my waist look smaller by comparison! :/

Right - on to the picture! Because I said I was summing this post up in a picture and I've totally written enough to give the lie to that statement now. Boo.

The (slightly more realistic) Joys of Parenthood

After reading a recent post on BCC, I've come to the conclusion that - at least in the abstract - you have to find a way to love even what could be the most aggravating parts about parenting small children. (I'm not worrying about kids from about 9 or 10-18: that's an entirely different kettle of fish.)

So with that in mind, I have a list of my favourite misdemeanors and misdeeds that I've witness from other people's children...sometimes while I was the one in charge of them.

1. The wily 6-14-month-old who, with something of a Michael Scofield complex, consistently attempts to escape its parents clutches by crawling under the pews during church. These attempts invariably end with the child suddenly disappearing from view as they are pulled back by an an ankle to sit and fuss under their parents' watchful gaze.
2. A Sunday School class full of 5-year-olds who wouldn't sit still and listen to a lesson unless they were given time to "dance" to some guitar music before we talked about the fishes and the loaves. Of course, "dancing" meant imitating grand mal seizures, crawling under the chairs, and launching themselves from the windowsill into one another.
3. A particularly hilarious little girl who, after insisting that she was the baby bird and I was the mommy bird, informed me that as the mommy bird, I had huge "nickels". Needless to say, she enlightened me as to what she meant by pulling her top over her head and pointing. We were on a walk with several other families at the time.
4. The child who, as the sacrament was passed, kept begging loudly for another piece of bread because the first one had been too small and he was still hungry.
5. A 1-year-old in the supermarket wandering away from her parents to scoop up a few baguettes and toddle off with them. When the baguettes were returned to their display a box of lunch snacks, a jar of hot cocoa powder, and what in the end was a slightly squished bag of blueberry muffins had suffered the same fate.
6. The little girl who, at 10 months, finds that her favourite activity to keep quiet is the violent unpacking of everything in her diaper bag. Everything...from every container.
7. The sneaky defiance of a 3-year-old. After being told by her mother that no, she was not allowed to go wading in the water, waited until her mother's back was turned to slowly remove her shoes and stealthily slip off her stockings to make a slow progress towards the pond and her goal of wet feet.
8. My uncle's 4-year-old mind coming to the conclusion that across the kitchen his baby brother's head (my dad) was the perfect target at which to aim the hard plastic darts that fired from his toy gun. Needless to say, the babysitter did not approve of his high marksmanship.
9. My own little sister at age 3 or so taking a fist-full of crayons or markers and running around the house with them, held high over her head. The result was a very avant-garde chair rail along several of the walls that my mother did *not* appreciate in the least.

It makes me start to wonder what sorts of stories I'll be telling *my* children about their own antics later on in life.

Rejoice and Be Merry

That's right, John Rutter, it may not be Christmas, but I'm feeling like a little merry rejoicing. The husband has reinstalled WindowsXP on my laptop, which means that all the superfluous and useless programmes left on it from my time at Wake Forest are now gone, essentially giving what was otherwise a slowly decaying pile of junk a new lease on life.

It can reboot without the worry that it'll crash on start-up! It has free space on the hard drive! It's fast! Suddenly, I don't mind that it's not as good of a computer as the T-series I got as a freshman. Maybe that's because only now does it work as it ought to.

Now, I just have to win the stupid fight with getting my music off my iPod and back onto my computer. This is one of the many times I curse Steve Jobs and the crap job he's done at making my iPod a useful piece of tech.

The Snark of New-Motherhood

I've just been doing a bit of reading on TheBump.com - a partner website to the one I used to help me plan my wedding. It's been quite entertaining to read the message boards and articles and keep up with different people's experiences of being pregnant.

Just today I came across an article, and several un-related message board threads, about moms judging moms. The apparently popular phenomenon where whatever you do isn't good enough for either your mom, your mother-in-law, friends who already have babies, or women you meet in things like LLL or some other local mommies club. It's as if, along with the instinct to reproduce and nest, women come biologically programmed with an innate need to viciously critique one another. Talk about having to overcome the natural (wo)man to be a good person!

Now maybe I'm just snarkier and generally meaner and more sarcastic than some pregnant women, but I feel like the minute someone felt the need to unilaterally undermine and critique my decisions without knowing my full situation I'd lay them out! I'm no stranger to the snappy and vicious retort. And I'd like to think that I mastered the ever-effective Contemptuous Sneer at a very early age.

So what sorts of things do moms get flak for? Everything. Which ones do I think are ridiculous? Let's review:

1. Formula-feeding your baby is not the same as tying a big rock around his neck and dropping him into a swift-moving river of piranhas. No matter how many people give you the bitchy side-eye for choosing to formula-feed, formula is not Satan. It will not make your baby lose IQ points, give it a horrible disease, or cause some other irreparable harm. If it did, we wouldn't still sell it.

2. Stay at home moms (SAHMs) do not all stay home because they can't afford daycare or because they can't find a good job. Some of them do it because they feel like that's the best thing they can do for their children. Some women would rather sacrifice earning power in order to personally see to it that their kids are looked after and raised in a way they approve of from the very beginning.

3. Working moms are not selfish, suit-wearing, high-heeled narcissists who chase those elusive six figures at their neglected children's expense. Some work because they have to, others because time with grown-ups makes them a better parent, others for still more diverse reasons. It does not necessarily follow that they're selfish or irresponsible for choosing to have kids when they aren't ready to stay at home all day changing turd-filled diapers and telling the baby not to put her finger in the sockets.

4. Disposable diapers are a choice that does not necessarily mean that you hate Mother Earth and have a personal mission to see how many vegan environmentalists in Berkenstocks you can run over with a diesel 4x4 each week. Likewise, cloth diapers don't make you Mother freaking Theresa.

5. As long as the TV isn't a babysitter, raising your children with one in the house doesn't guarantee that they'll be drooling idiots who flunk out of school and work at McDonald's for the remainder of their natural lives (that is, until those government benefits kick in!). Conversely, banning the TV from your children's lives is no guarantee that they won't turn out to be vapid delinquents with the intellectual capacity of a bag of chips.

6. Everyone shows their pregnancy at a different stage - and that even differs with the same woman from pregnancy to pregnancy. Remind me when people decided it was socially acceptable to ask otherwise inappropriate and personal questions of someone just because they were growing new life in their uterus? Unless you're my doctor, it's not your business if I'm planning to have that epidural or not! And the next person who calls me fat, whoever it is, I promise will get a black eye. I'm not fat! I'm pregnant! Believe you me, if there wasn't a baby pushing my guts out of its way and making me sick enough to sit in bed for 3 weeks, my stomach would be beautifully flat and tight. It is not okay to comment on my similarity to the side of a house just because I have a bun in the oven. If it was rude before, it's still rude.

7. This has nothing to do with judging people, but the first person who makes an unsolicited move for my baby bump to rub it like I'm a crystal ball will lose a hand. Just because the bubble that delineates my personal space is bigger does NOT mean that it's any more permeable than it was before. In this respect, I have to follow the example of Cristina Yang from Grey's Anatomy:

Cristina: Ow, ow, ow, ow!

Sidney: What? Am I hurting you?

Cristina: No; you're touching me.

Hello Tiny Person

I made an actual tiny person! How cool is that? There is a little person with fingers and toes and a tiny bum and a tiny nose in my tummy! And that person hiccups! And is 2" long!

Hello, Tiny Human. Your daddy and I had fun getting to see you today.

My $.02

So General Conference is coming up this weekend. For those who need an LDS lexicon, it's when the prophet and other general authorities in Utah broadcast a series of sermons or talks (and hymns) as a world-wide church service. We do it twice a year and I tend to feel like I get something useful out of it. As you may be expecting from the tone of my blog, however, I do have one complaint. (Why can I only write sustained pieces about things that cheese me off?)

So whilst reading the LDS-authored blog By Common Consent, I found a humourous thread about predictions for this April's GC (themed to follow disastrous NCAA basketball bracket picks). I found the following comment in response to several on the subject of Conference's female speakers (one of which, I do confess, was written by Yours Truly).

jks Says:
April 1, 2011 at 9:44 am

I predict that the bloggernacle will continue to judge women on their clothes, their hairstyles, their makeup, their looks, their facial expressions, and their tone of voice.
In fact, some of the same people who claim no one should judge or be distracted by an immodestly dressed women or a tattooed, extra earringed body will not be able to help themselves but be distracted by the cultural affectations of conference’s women speakers.

Now my problem with this comment I don't think is the obvious one. I did not jump up in indignant wrath to assert how I judge no one. That's a lie: I judge everyone. My slightly-skeptical, slightly-disgusted judgement face (I know you know which face I mean) is not reserved for female general auxiliary leaders in unflattering skirt suits who have the same hedgehogy hairdo and very similar insipid breathy voices. (It's already dark in there so you can see the screen, are you trying to make me sleep?) My judgement face is equally bestowed on all. Including the hypothetical sluttishly dressed, beringed, bejewelled, over-tattooed and makeup'd women that blog troll JKS brings into her argument.

That said, I've met girls -and guys- whose initial appearance raised my judgement face. That didn't stop me getting to know them if the opportunity was bound to arise, and some of them have been good friends. The only way your appearance will put me off even attempting to talk to you is if you look like a serial murder or a malicious pervert. Those individuals are few and far between. And anyway, so long as we still leave open the possibility of being mistaken in our snap assessments, is it really wrong to judge someone at first glance? I say no. That tendency is probably in-built for a very good reason. It may not be as evolutionarily germane to our lives today as it once was, but I feel confident that there are situations in which making a snap judgement can be a positive decision.

So with that out of the way, my real problem is this: examples of strong, inspiring womanhood in the LDS church come in all shapes and colours. They aren't all stay-at-home moms from Utah with 6 kids, 24 grandkids, and an unfinished or unused college degree. That's not to say that the aforementioned stereotype of Mormon women can't be useful: it can. But increasingly, as the church's demographic is more often than not found outside of the cultural and geographic bounds of happy valley, Utah, the model becomes unrealistic and at times patronising.

For once, I'd love to hear a woman in Conference give an intelligent, slap-you-in-the-face-with-brutal-honesty talk on an issue that isn't about love in the home or raising children in a world of ambiguous morals or how to be a good wife. I want a talk that doesn't centre around the object lesson of a baby, toddler, or some other tiny human. While I'm personally planning to be a SAHM if I can, that doesn't mean I relate to these women.

I know that some people will say that it's my fault: that I'm letting my judgements and prejudices get in the way of lessons these ladies could be teaching that may -though I don't realise it- be just what I need to hear. But the onus isn't entirely on me. If I get up on a Sunday to talk to my congregation about how to be a disciple of Christ through the virtue of charity, if everyone walks away uninspired, bored, or wiping drool off after an impromptu nap, I can't blame it solely on everyone else: it's my job as a speaker to make an attempt to engage with the larger portion of the audience to whom I'm speaking! So clearly, if people get nothing out of my talk, sure, maybe they should have listened better, or invested more in the experience, but maybe I should have tried to see things more from their point of view as well!

While I do freely and without grudge admit that sometimes there are nuggets of wisdom in these talks that I write down for later remembrance, more often than not I feel disinterested and annoyed...feelings which I quickly channel through pithy and snarky remarks under my breath, or full-scale impersonations later. It is a fault and I admit it. (Though I don't imagine that I'll succeed in changing it by the end of the weekend. I know: self-fulfilling prophecy.) That said, I know the church has more to offer, as I've met some amazing women who inspire the hell out of me because of it. Women who make me feel like John the Baptist about Jesus when he said he wasn't worthy to tie His shoes. I also know that the truth of my religion for me isn't based upon its ability to produce soul-stirring female speakers twice a year for my personal enjoyment and edification. It'd be nice...really really nice, but not essential. I know that these women exist, even if they don't take the pulpit in Salt Lake every April and October. And who knows, maybe by the time I'm one of those grandmothers with 5 kids and 12 grandkids, I'll see someone more like me standing at that pulpit telling me a story that shows her discipleship and has nothing to do with her lovely children or anyone else's lovely children.

Until that day, I reserve the right to wish that the most visible ladies of the church would give me a little something more to be inspired by, and to aspire to.