Emotional Outbursts and Other (Not Really) News

Spring break is over.  I'm back to teaching today--Dante's Inferno, which I thoroughly enjoy.  The high today is 90 degrees and yesterday's search for my one pair of maternity shorts I had from being pregnant with Eliza was fruitless, so it looks like I will most certainly need to buy some summer clothes, stat.  I'm annoyed about that because I had so many nice wintery things that I should have been able to wear well into March, but what can you do.

To recap:  I spent spring break barfing, grading papers, defeated by sciatic nerve pain, grading papers, and watching documentaries on the Amish.  It could have been better.  It could have been worse.

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I'm officially entering my third trimester, but won't be posting a belly shot today as I am wearing a dress that makes me look like a whale.  The second trimester definitely seemed to move more quickly than the first, but my anxiety is building as we draw closer to the time that Something Went Mysteriously Wrong for Eliza.  Fortunately, I start weekly monitoring very soon, but I can't help but worry.  Already I think sometimes that the Deuce's movements have slowed down, but I can never tell if it's my imagination or not (according to my phone app's kick counts, it is my imagination).

I know David worries, too, even though he doesn't talk about it much. When he calls on his way home from work, he always asks how I'm doing and if the Deuce is moving around for me, and when his alarm goes off in the morning, he snuggles up with his arm around me and puts his hand on my belly so he can feel some kicks before he gets up to shower.  The Deuce has been cooperative for him, so I like our unspoken morning ritual.

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I have had two emotional outbursts that I really believe were pregnancy-hormone-related (and therefore rather embarrassing in retrospect).  The first one occurred when I was doing laundry after David returned from Dallas.  He'd emptied his suitcase in our clothes hamper, so I was sorting through everything when I came across a white lacy bra that did NOT belong to me.

OMFG.

It was like my worst nightmare.  Six months pregnant, sorting laundry, feeling huge and unattractive, wearing an old t-shirt over a gianormous and practical flesh-toned bra, and suddenly here is a lacy little number intermixed with David's golf clothes.  I seriously felt light-headed.

I yelled for David and he came in the room with a strange look on his face.  My voice must have sounded weird--not exactly panicked, but ominous.  I held the bra behind my back and said in a weirdly frozen tone, "Is there anything that happened in Dallas that you need to tell me about?  Because now is the time to tell me."

He looked totally bewildered and said, "No..." but in what I thought was a WEIRD tone (perhaps because I was acting weird?  Whatever.).

So then I dramatically flung my arm in front of me with the bra hanging down and said icily, "Then what is THIS?"

David said, "Uh, I have no idea.  Could that be Grandma's?"

(David's grandma spent a couple of days with us at the beginning of his spring break.)

I stared at the bra.  Frankly, I thought it looked kind of sexy for a grandma-bra, but on closer inspection, it really wasn't that sexy.  I looked in the hamper and saw that lying right on top (under the bra) was, in fact, a shirt that she had worn while she was at our house.  AND a pair of granny-panties (literally).

So evidently it was his grandma's bra.  Crisis averted, but I still felt like crying because OMG what IF I had actually found some stranger's bra in David's suitcase and what the hell would I do with myself?  I looked at David and said, "Do NOT make me break up with you."

David's response was somewhere between amused, offended, and relieved.

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In other emotional outbursts, we got new a new sofa for the living room and ordered a new recliner as well.  The plan was to get one recliner and one small chair (as it's a small room) but then David wanted matching chairs (he loves all things to be symmetrical; it's sort of cute but also sort of tiresome) and the chairs were so comfortable that I said I'd think about it and we did a lot of measuring and furniture shifting and decided that it would work to get TWO recliners, even though (as mentioned previously) I was opposed to them for aesthetic reasons and also because it makes me think of my great-grandparents and their matching recliners.

So after much anticipation, the two recliners were finally delivered!  And... NO.  They do not fit.  Too big.  House is too small.  It looks... odd.  At best.

This is not the end of the world.  My original plan was only to get ONE recliner anyway.  I know rationally this is a total first-world problem.  OMG!  I have too much nice, big, brand new furniture to fit in my very comfortable little house!  How sad is my life!  I would think that what we've been through has given us a little perspective on such problems.

But we really wanted to make it work.  So we moved around everything.  Television stand, book shelf, bobble-head case (yes, we have an entire display case full of baseball bobbleheads in our living room; no I don't really want to talk about it), sofa, two recliners, end tables.  It was like musical chairs except (1) there was no music and (2) every configuration was miserable instead of amusing.

And even though I swore I was NOT going to cry because THIS was NOT a big deal, I was hot and cranky and David and I ended up talking to each other in voices that made Cooper run and hide in his bed, which hasn't happened in AGES and I found myself on the verge of tears.  (I just don't know what to say when he thinks something looks good/bad and I disagree.  It's not a matter of opinion; he is simply WRONG and I should have complete veto power because I look at Pinterest and also home decor magazines and therefore I have a level of expertise regarding furniture arrangement that overrules his ideas, and I don't know how to explain this in a nice way but NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SYMMETRICAL AND YOU ARE PSYCHOTIC.)

Finally I said we had to get out of the house and walk the dogs and then I sniffled a little bit on our walk because it really was disappointing that the furniture we'd so looked forward to wasn't working the way we'd hoped.  So David was really sweet to make up for his mean tone of voice earlier and we held hands and it was very sweet and romantical until a big black dog ran up to us and we were afraid it might eat our little dogs.  Fortunately, that dog (who looked just like my parents' dog, Blackjack) was very friendly so we just had the awkward problem of an uninvited THIRD dog on our walk, who did not obey my suggestion to "Go home!"  Then a nice neighbor spotted our predicament and came to our aid.  We realized where the dog lives and saw that the gate to his backyard was standing wide open, so she helped me corral that dog back in his yard and we continued on our way.

The walk helped immensely, but David was still a bit out of sorts even when we got home because the house is kind of mess, what with an extra ENORMOUS recliner sitting about, waiting to get picked up later this week (David has a really hard time when things are out of order...  see my accusation of him being "PSYCHOTIC" above), so while he made dinner, I surprised and delighted him by organizing the linen closet and I even printed cute labels from Pinterest to label the wicker baskets in it because I am a Pinterest CHAMPION (labels include:  "first aid supplies," "bug spray and sunscreen," and "doggy care").  Also it was a useful exercise because I found a heating pad and some nail polish that I had been missing for a long time.

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FIN