Hubby cracks me up.

1. I forgot how nice it is to have lunch and shoot the breeze with someone who knows you really well, and even if you don’t see each other all the time, you can still hang out in person like you do it all the time.

2. Really good pizza? IS REALLY REALLY GOOD.

3. A beautiful day in NYC? Awesome. If I hadn’t left early on Friday for le Ultrasound du 20 weeks, I’d leave early and shop my brains out. And really? I’m not one for shopping, especially when standing up for 45 minutes means I better find the ladies room STAT.

(That’s one thing about NYC by which I cannot abide: the scarcity of easy-to-find bathrooms that are (a) open to the public and (b) bathrooms you’d actually deign to use. I go out on the street and in the back of my mind there’s a lone gps signal receiving no feedback asking, “Where’s the nearest bathroom? Where’s the nearest bathroom?” It’s like trying to find the exit nearest to your seat on the airplane and knowing there isn’t one, only instead of an exit it’s an “exit.")

4. I had the 20 Week Ultrasound, which I LOVE, on Friday afternoon, and it was a hoot and a half. Thumb sucking! Posing for pictures! Attempts at 3-d scans with no success. And a very very happy, healthy baby shimmying around in there, showing off legs and arms and hands and feet (gotta make sure that there are 5 fingers and 5 toes per hand/foot, since polydactyly runs in my family), and an adorable little baby profile. Of course no revelations of gender, sorry to say.  But oh, how I love the 20 week extended visit.

5. Slightly bad news with a slightly happy twist at the end: my placenta has parked itself a liiiittle too close to my cervix. While it won’t move toward it and cover the cervix up, if it doesn’t move back it’s something to monitor, since it could make a delivery through the Valley of my Lotus Blossom a bit of a challenge (not that I have problem with having a c-section. I don’t care if the baby has to come out my sinus cavity, so long as there’s a healthy baby and a healthy mom at the end). Happy twist at the end? I’ll have another ultrasound at 28 weeks to double check how the internal baby blanket is and where it is, so I will have another visit to say hi to Baba O’Riley.

6. I’m now able to move fully into my maternity wardrobe since it’s finally consistently in the 60s, and I have pieces to layer with. I do need some maternity pants, though, which would be a nice thing to have. Thankfully, I have a gift card for Motherhood, home of the Most Inflexible Return Policy Ever, so I can shop for pants.

7. On a non-mommy, non-pregnancy, non-maternity front, Hubby and I had another one of our “check in with our financial long-range plan” chats, mostly because I was nursing weird notions to pack up and move to Montana, and it’s very comforting to be on the same page with someone as far as immediate money and long term money are concerned.

8. I do need to get cracking on my five-year goals, though. Wonder if i should make a list: what’s the five year goal list? I’ll have to ponder that - and ponder if I want to share it! Telling the internet about stuff like that makes me feel like I left the house without pants on. *checks ass* I do have pants on right now. Phew. 

Need some onion grass? I’ve got plenty - and I broke my ass trying to pull half of it out. So my behind is aching and my hands smell permanently like onion.

Yech.

I should have stayed sitting on my ass writing about doing stuff. Doing said stuff HURT.

So much to do this weekend: laundry, straightening the house, dude wrangling, and then there’s the projects I want to do but realistically won’t have time or energy or even the correct physical shape for, like yanking each and every g-d weed out of my front garden. I have to call someone to do it for me, and damn does that chap my growing ass.

Of course, what am I doing now? Sitting here writing about all the things I have to do instead of, well, doing them.

Grumble. 

1. String ties in the back.

Look, I don’t have a waist. Let’s not give me a three-foot-long string to tie behind my ribcage (which I can barely do without getting light headed) to pretend like I have a waist. Because I don’t have one. All that string does is get tangled in the laundry, untie itself and trip me when I walk, or catch on things like I’ve been tethered to the wall with a little fabric bungee cord.

2. Extremely LOW CUT necks.

I’ve bitched about this before but once, twice, three times the bosom? That’s enough! I understand my breasts are bigger. It’s hard to miss - in fact, people who didn’t know I was pregnant guessed that I was because my already ample shelf-of-womanhood was bigger, and resembled less of a shelf and more of a tectonic plate. So why must I be constantly vigilant that I haven’t winked a nipple at someone on the street because the neckline of my maternity top is pluging into Jennifer Lopez territory? Knock it off!

3. Cap sleeves.

Now, look. This particular pregnant lady? Puffy and swollen, both at the start of the day and at the end of the day. So do I want additional attention paid to my arms and breasts by putting tiny, tight, ineffective sleeves on my shoulders? They don’t keep me warm when I get a chill. They don’t even look good. They make the thinnest of upper arms look like stuffed spiral cut hams. What is wrong with normal sleeves, for the love of chickens?

4. Empire waists.

Who in the name of potpourri decided that the only effective way to clothe a growing pregnant belly, especially if each belly is a different size on different women, is to move the waistline of a garment up under the ribcage? Let me line up the flaws to this realignment: first, not everyone’s boobs fit in the space above that neckline, so effectively I personally am drawing a line across my bosom when donning an ill-fitting empire waist. Second, it just makes everything from the ribcage down look like instead of a garment, I’m wearing an art smock. I might as well be wearing clear plastic with big cartoon characters because I look like it’s art time in my world. I do have other maternity shirts that are flattering and NOT empire waisted, most notably a shirt that has ruching on the side that allows me to fill in the front of the shirt as needed (though, of course, it does plunge down to my belly button in the neckline area) and another that’s draped with a soft fabric from hip to hip, again, with no empire waist in sight.

I love most of my maternity wardrobe, though I do wish it were easier to find clothing that didn’t cost an obscene amount or a manufacturer that didn’t stop offering maternity altogether (ARE YOUR EARS BURNING LANDS’ END DAMN YOU DAAAAAAAMN YOU!). But man, someday, I will be very very glad to see the end of the tug-and-twist and double-check-your-nipples routine every time I put on a shirt. 

Hubby and I are watching Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

This is breathtakingly stupid. 

This post on London Underground reminded me of my ew ew ew moment this morning. I got on a mostly-full bus, which means no hope of having my own seat row, and had to weave my way around too many elbows down the center aisle to the back half of the bus. I thought about sitting in my normal row next to a woman but decided to move further back and sit on the other side of the aisle.

Good thing, too, because the woman I almost sat next to spent the ENTIRE RIDE putting her MAKEUP on. Foundation! Eyeliner! Mascara! Eyeshadow! Lipliner! Lipstick! Blush! And (cough cough) powder.

It was so gross, and really, it usually takes a LOT to gross me out. But there is no reason I had to see all that. Why would you put on your entire face of makeup on the 40 minute bus ride into the city? Just… EW!

Especially the eyeliner and mascara. Jeez. I do NOT want to see the insides of your eyelids. I pity the person who sat next to that lady.