Power Mad with Blogging...

Okay, okay.... I know that I opened this blog by indicating how much more Austin was going to post than me, but now that she is too sick to post I am drunk on the thrill of online publication :-)

So today my thoughts are centered on sheer number of items that are available for babies...

Last weekend, Legacy Park, a very large and somewhat affluent neighborhood near where Austin teaches school held its annual communal yard sale. This event is apparenly known far and wide for its veritable treasure-trove of high quality lightly used baby loot, so we both decided that though we are months away from needing most of the items in question, it would not be wise as cost-consious parents to skip it.

I think that the trip was a successful one... as we picked up a jogging stroller, bouncy, Baby-Bjorn, and Pack-and-Play for veritable peanuts... my only problem is that I have no real idea whether these items are useful or not.

While doing our yard sale rounds I was struck by two things: The first was that there are a whole lot of baby items out there that look like they cost a lot but that don't look like they were ever used. The second was a comment from the woman that we bought our jogging stroller from when we were looking at her car seat. She was an athletic and alert looking woman who struck me as a bit of a friendly type A triathlete. "Eight weeks along!" she said,"Well then I am sure you have read that book on all the baby items that you actually need." Austin and I nodded knowingly while she went on to describe the reasons why car seats that hook in directly to the floor are much better than the "death traps" that just use a regular seat belt around them. In truth, we had no idea what she was talking about.

So my questions to anyone who is reading are these... What is this mythical book she is talking about? How will I know that I have the book that is steering me around the crap that I don't need and not the one that is a marketing ploy to direct me right to it? and In the absence of said miracle book, what are some items aside from those mentioned above that are indespensible to parents to be? On the opposite side...what are some that are completely useless?

Sleepless nights...

I generally fall asleep quite easily and am a very sound sleeper but on occasion I have nights where what in the daytime seems to be an utterly boring idea fascinates me so completely that I refuse to let go of it in order to actually fall asleep.

Last night was one of those nights and I tossed and turned for a couple of hours (much to Austin's chagrin I am sure). This is only relevant to this particular blog because the ideas I couldn't rid myself of were mostly baby related.

I think it all started with how much I enjoyed it when my mother read to me as a child and how that led to my overall interest in books, how their stories shaped my life views on what is good and evil and who I want to be, and how I think that more than anything is what led to my success in school.

This led to thoughts that I really wanted to read to our LP and questions about if Austin wanted to read to him/her too, and how we would decide who gets to. I wondered whether we would have to alternate... in which case I need to work on my inflection and voices so that I will be the more popular reader :-) This then led to questions about the many diverse genres that mom read to me and how she chose the books that she did and questions about when a child actually starts to enjoy books like the Chronicles of Narnia and Tom Sawyer, and how I can get LP to that point faster. :-)

Somehow this moved on to food preferences and learning and how quickly you can actually teach a kid about his/her physiology and why things are good for them, which degenerated into I was going to teach our child about trigonometry and how to determine the height of our telephone pole outside. I must've been really tired at this point because somehow that morphed into me spending my last 30 minutes of wakefulness trying to figure out how one calculates the force on a spinning object if you know its rpms and the radius of rotation.

Ahh, the thoughts we have when we know we should be asleep...

In any case, I now officially have babies on the brain.

Our child is going to be raised to be a total dork, isn't he? Good thing you're so cute.

9 weeks pregnant and it feels so...pukey

At nine weeks LP is now no longer an embryo but now a fetus. Good for him! He's the size of a medium green olive. Also, "The head has straightened out and is more fully developed, the ears are much more prominent, and some new organs (the liver, spleen, and gallbladder) are forming. Your fetus is also making spontaneous movements of his or her arms and legs now that minuscule muscles are beginning to develop."

All in all, baby and I are really quite busy.

How am I feeling? So nauseated from morning to night that I could cry. A small price to pay, for sure, but still sucky. Also incredibly tired and prone to nodding off whenever Kevin and I are on the couch watching something.

So that's baby and me at nine weeks.