You Are Getting Very Sleepy (except that you're not because there's a human clawing its way out of your body)

I'm afraid of giving birth.

Like for real so afraid.

And it doesn't help that every single show that Matt and I watch, it seems, has featured some woman giving birth this season. After watching one of these episodes a while ago, I felt a little shellshocked, and just started crying, blubbering, "I don't want to do that."

It also doesn't help that every woman who sees that I'm knocked up deems it necessary to tell me all about her birth experience. I mean, I get the whole shared experience thing, but can't we wait and talk about it in the summer? Let's remember that I'm the wuss who won't even look when I get a shot, the one who was in tears while getting a tattoo the size of a quarter.

A while back, Ann suggested that I look into Hypnobirthing, explaining that it's basically a mind-over-matter type of deal where you convince yourself that the labor is not that bad. As far as I know, there's no clucking like chickens or anything as it's not actual hypnosis, but she said a few of her friends did it and loved it and had fast, easy labors and whatnot. So I got the book, and lately I've been trying to buy into Hypnobirthing, but I'm struggling a little bit with the goofiness of it. I'm very much a mind over matter kind of gal (I can cure my hiccups by just thinking about them!), and I think that if I can buy into the method, then I'll have a much more pleasant birth experience. Not that I think it's going to be completely pain-free or anything, but maybe better. Cassie had said that hypnobirthing lost her when it started suggesting that she visualize pretty rainbows, and I felt myself becoming more cynical when I read that I would think of my uterus as "blue satin ribbons." But I'm trying. I really am.

Can I wrap my blue satin ribbon uterus around the base of a cake?

I had my hypnobirthing book with me at my last doctor's appointment, and tried to put it away before he saw what I was reading, but ol' doc asked to see it, and then proceeded to sit and read it for like five minutes, stopping only to shoot annoyed glances and read me select passages from the book.  At one point he just shook his head and said, "That's bullshit."

And here's the thing.  My doctor and I have a little bit of an antagonistic relationship, but he's really been growing on me.  He's really bananas about me not getting too fat, which is annoying but ultimately a good thing**.  So when he does something like call me a cow, I do something like tell him about peanut butter bacon cookies.  And when he says something about how I should never leave the baby alone with a dog, I say something about how we have been planning to have Mitch just be our babysitter.

So I think I've figured out now that the key to my accepting and embracing hypnobirthing is to do it for two reasons: 1.) to annoy my doctor, and 2.) to have a more tolerable birth experience.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be visualizing blue satin ribbons and rainbows.





*Except for Top Chef, because that would be just plain gross.  Ew!  What if they had a quickfire where they had to make a dish out of placenta for some crazy mothers?


**I actually appreciate that he's such a pain in the ass about me not gaining too much weight, because if he was all delicate and sweet and "you're beautiful no matter what blah blah" I would probably have gained like 95 pounds by now.

Spelling Bees and Rainbow Cakes

Before we do anything, can we please take a moment and do a happy dance because today was my last day of school until 2011.  Shoot yeah!

Okay, so let's back it up.  My eleventh graders have their American Literature end of course test on January 5.  They return to school on January 4.  I have many things to say about this, but it wouldn't be prudent to post those things on the world wide web.  I actually like having a job.

So, anyway, we've been doing EOCT preparation stuff/review all week.  And here's something about EOCT review: it sucks.  It's dry and boring and it's tough to make it fun.  I wanted to do something fun for the students,  kind of a Christmas break send-off/good luck on your EOCT thing.  I decided that that fun thing was a spelling bee.

"What do we get if we win?" the students asked.

I responded [obviously without thinking], "A cake."

Shoot.  As if I didn't have enough to do this week, I had to go and commit myself to making a cake?  What a stupid thing to say.

And even more stupid was when I decided that,  hell, if I was going to make them a cake, I was going to make them an awesome cake.  And I'd never made the rainbow cake. 

So I made the rainbow cake.

They LOVED it.  Apparently, Savannah's eleventh graders aren't big Martha Stewart or mommy blog readers, so they didn't even know that the rainbow cake was a thing.  Hell yeah!

There were oohs and ahhhhs and screams of "That cake is awesome!"  And I'd be a damned liar if it didn't admit that it made my chest puff out a little.  (The chest puffing could also have to do with the fact that I ate four entire meals by the end of today's school day.  There was puffing all over.)

So we ate cake, and talked and laughed and spelled words.  I spent a good portion of the lesson focusing on commonly misused words, so I'd say something like "Put that paper over there.  Spell there."  And then they'd spell the correct form of the word.  Not terribly complex, I thought.  Until. . .

Me:  There are a lot of cliques at this school.  Spell cliques, you know, like exclusive groups of people.

Student:  C-L-I-T-S.

Me: Um, no.  That's something very different.  Moving on!

I guess we've got a little more studying to do.

Blackout Monday

Matt and I were so excited for a quiet night at home last night. We'd been on vacation, we'd hosted Chloe, we'd gone to Augusta, we'd driven approximately 1.3 million miles. We were ready to relax, watch the news and Jeopardy!, cook dinner, and do very little otherwise.

Nature and Savannah's shitfest of a power grid had other plans. A huge thunderstorm came through and knocked out our power around 6:00 p.m., which crippled our plans for the evening. (Not to mention that the storm interrupted my viewing of a really dramatic episode of 90210, the one where Valerie pretends to be pregnant to make her married boyfriend give her $100,000.)

And Mitch isn't so much a fan of giant thunderstorms. Throughout the storm he nervously laid between Matt and me on the bed, pretty much being the cutest thing ever. Once it passed, he came out to inspect the damage.


There was no real damage caused to our house, but there was a pretty pretty rainbow.

And the sky looked pretty great.

We decided to go out for dinner with the hopes that the power would be back on when we returned. Yeah, right. This is Savannah. The power would be out for a long while.

Fortunately, I'm a candle freak. Years ago I bought these lanterns at IKEA. Since moving here, they've been quite handy. Go buy some if you're planning on moving to a city that hasn't updated the power grid in 300 years.

We played the most excruciating game of Scrabble of all time. I blame it on Matt, who started off our game with the word "oak." It was miserable, and he was winning handily before I decided that we should just quit. Matt is so much better at Scrabble than I am, and it sometimes makes me feel like I'm more stupid than Valerie's married boyfriend.

The really shitty part of the blackout was that the people two streets up from us and one street down still had power. Ours didn't come back until 8:30 this morning. I'm going to put this episode in the "Reasons to Leave Savannah" column.

Our power's been iffy today, and if it goes out again tonight, I'm writing my congressman!