PhiLLy RoLL

Party Girl

I can't believe it's only Monday. I feel like I've already had a long week.

All of last week I was literally running around trying to get things done. And starting last Thursday, I've had plans every night that have left me pretty tired the next day. I tried to compensate by taking naps, but I think I took one nap too many because I ended up staying out until 3 am on Saturday night. (If only I could have had a beer - I would have gotten tired much earlier in the night.) I woke up on Sunday just before 1 pm (!) feeling really, really drained and decided that that was the last late night partying this pregnant body is going to do.

Tonight I have one last evening out planned. Then I get a night off, but the next day J and I are going to Boston. He has a conference starting on Wednesday and I am going to a different conference that starts on Thursday. And then, unfortunately for J who has also been super busy lately, he has to fly from Boston to San Diego on Saturday, whereas I just get to go home on Sunday.

Belly Warmth

I think my belly must be getting warmer. Although Koji normally lays in my lap whenever I am sitting and watching tv, tonight he wrapped his body around my waist and got this goofy smiley look on his face. Until he got too hot and had to lay out on the floor to cool off.

Tightness and Bloops

My shirts seem to be getting shorter and tighter, and there is no getting into my regular pants and skirts. Every morning I've been going through my clothes in a daily debate about which shirt is loose and long enough to cover the blue band of my maternity jeans, trying various things on and finding that fewer of them are wearable. So tonight I went through and weeded out the clothes in my closet that I would normally have worn during the fall and winter but which clearly won't work now and just packed them away so I don't even have to think about them them anymore.

In other news, I might be feeling some movement. I'm feeling something, but I am really not sure what it is! I started really paying attention at 17 weeks (I'm now at 19 weeks) because this is when everyone says you might start feeling something. What I've read describes the feeling as fluttery, like butterfly wings, or rustling, like little mice. So I would sit still or lie down and rest my hands on my stomach and wait - but I felt nothing.

But then, more recently, times when I wasn't paying attention with my hands on my stomach, I would occasionally feel a ... well, it's hard to describe. It's an internal feeling, not something I can feel with my hands on my stomach. And if was a noise, it would sound like "bloop." But of course it's not a noise. It's just a bloopy feeling. I dunno - is that it?

The past few nights, sitting at my computer, I sometimes notice that my abdomen starts to feel weird. Like there's something brewing in my intestines and that I might get sick, but it never gets that bad. It's just weird and there are usually a few bloops here and there.

So I don't know. Maybe it's just some weird digestive thing that I've never noticed before?

New Photoblog

My new photoblog is up. Enjoy!

(There's only one picture so far.)

Waiting for Fall

Is autumn foliage ever coming? I've been waiting and watching and mostly what I see are green leaves everywhere and a few trees whose leaves simply turned brown and died. Today I went out for a walk, and this is the only tree I saw that showed anything remotely like fall colors. This tree, combined with the abundance of green leaves everywhere, gives me hope that fall colors can still happen.

Recently I did some googling to find out what causes leaves to turn red, and it sounds like we need cool nights. According to this site:

"A succession of warm, sunny days and cool, crisp but not freezing nights seems to bring about the most spectacular color displays. During these days, lots of sugars are produced in the leaf but the cool nights and the gradual closing of veins going into the leaf prevent these sugars from moving out. These conditions-lots of sugar and lots of light-spur production of the brilliant anthocyanin pigments, which tint reds, purples, and crimson. Because carotenoids are always present in leaves, the yellow and gold colors remain fairly constant from year to year."

I'm really not sure if the nights have been cool enough, but at least we've been having relatively cooler nights this past week and a half or so.

Does anyone know of any good fall foliage in the Philadelphia area? Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?

Photoblogging

It's been three and a half months since I've posted anything to my photoblogs. Not so coincidentally, that was a couple of weeks before I found out I was pregnant and suddenly my brain was incapable of thinking about anything else. Shortly thereafter my energy dissipated from my body and even the thought of lifting and carrying a camera around made me tired.

But now I'm 18 weeks along and feeling much better, so thoughts of photography are creeping back into my head. I've got a new domain and new photoblogging software and I'm all ready to go. But the thing about starting a new photoblog, I've discovered, is that setting it up isn't enough. I'm supposed to go out and take pictures or something.

And it turns out, I'm still kind of tired. I mean, I can make it through the work day just fine and I even walk a mile each way between home and my office. I even carry my own bag now (thanks J!). But while the walk in the morning is usually fine, it's the walk home that has me collapsing on the couch when I get in the door.

I was going to get out and take pictures last weekend, but then I ended up making a last minute trip to Baltimore to return some library books (the library sent me a note to point out that they had noticed I was no longer registered and could I please return these books at my earliest convenience?) and to visit Chiaroscuro. Fortunately Chiaroscuro was jetlagged, so neither of us had a particularly raucous weekend in mind and she didn't even blink when one of the activities I suggested was taking a nap. (She didn't actually take a nap herself, but she didn't mind at all that I did.)

Maybe this weekend I will get out and take some pictures... If I do, I'll put up a link here.

My Bump at Four Months

Yesterday afternoon I asked J if he thought I was showing enough to take some pictures. He didn't really think so, but I decided I wanted to document this stage anyway.

Some time later in the day I asked him if he would come outside with me to take some pictures before I went to the grocery store and he grudgingly agreed, mumbling something about how I had refused to go with him on a trip to Staples earlier in the day. I said that this was entirely different (!), but he didn't seem persuaded. However, he did agree to come out with me.

On the way to the park a block from our apartment, he said something about how he wasn't really needed for this, and I said of course you are, how am I supposed to take pictures of myself? I told him I needed him to be the one with the camera. And then he said he got it, that I wanted him to hold my equipments. (Okay, so sometimes he is my bag boy when I'm out taking pictures.) And I said no, I wanted him to take the pictures. And then, suddenly he realized that I didn't drag him out of the apartment to watch me take pictures, but that I wanted him to take pictures of me and my bump! He suddenly got a whole lot less grudging after that. :)

(To his credit, he did agree to come with me on the mistaken premise that I just wanted him around while I took pictures, which really can be very boring for him. So it's sweet that he did agree to come. However, I was pleased that he was happier with the actual reason I had dragged him out with me.)

Anyway, that is a long preface to the pictures he took, in which I hope you can see a growing bump.

It's harder to see in the first picture, and I'm really just posting it because I think I look thinner in it than I really look in real life. (Hey, it's my blog - I can post what I want.)

In this second picture I did feel compelled to crop just to the midsection. If you must know, I'm not looking particularly svelte in the tank top I was wearing. As it is, you can see in this picture that my butt is also growing... perhaps faster than my bump.

So this is what four months looks like. At least, this is what it looks like in those jeans and that shirt. Depending on what I wear it can look a whole lot less obvious. And as you can see from the top picture, just changing the angle makes a difference. So unless you're standing directly to the side of me, it's probably not obvious. I think I'm at that stage where people who don't know I'm pregnant just think I'm a bit round in the middle. Oh well!

Koji's Great Escape

This morning Koji was especially needy and even stood at the door as we were about to leave and begged for more attention. I leaned down and pet him a little just before opening the door, but we couldn't stay any longer. As we walked out the door of our second floor apartment, J and I checked our wallets to see how much money we each had on hand, and then shut the door and walked down the stairs of our apartment building.

As we stepped out into the hallway of the first floor, we heard a very loud wail. We both stopped immediately, and I said disbelievingly, "could that have been a baby?" There is a baby in the apartment right next to the stairwell, and although the wail was louder than I have ever heard coming from that apartment and although it didn't really sound like a baby, it seemed the most plausible explanation.

We stood still for a moment and the wail came again. Now it really sounded like Koji. But could he possibly be meowing that loudly from upstairs in our apartment? Then I thought, what if somehow we caught his tail in the door and he is inside wailing in pain? (You like how I immediately go to the worst case scenario? But in my defense, that wailing was really loud!)

J was sure it was Koji and headed upstairs first. Another yowl came just as J rounded the corner, and he found Koji standing in the hallway, paws up against our door, wailing because he was locked out of the apartment. Somehow he must have snuck out when we were leaving, maybe as we were standing there in the hallway looking through our wallets. I'm amazed at least one of us didn't catch his movement, but somehow neither of us had noticed it at all.

Once inside, Koji kind of ran around, a little unsettled by what had just happened. But he stopped meowing and settled down quickly.

It's a good thing he called out so loudly or we would never have noticed and then he would have been locked out of the apartment all day. I thought it was sort of funny, that after his constant meowing at the door for at least the past year, he finally got to go out and the first thing he wants to do is go back inside. J is hoping that this will stop him now from meowing at our front door all the time, but honestly I don't think he's smart enough to remember what's on the other side of the door and that he doesn't want to be there. I think that he just sees that door open all the time and so when it's closed, he meows because he'd like it to be open. And I'm sure he would love to check out the hallway, just not by himself and not with the return route to our apartment locked!

Busy-ness, Interspersed with Respite

I've been feeling really rushed lately, but in actuality, I think I'm just tired.

I have been busy. This weekend JennyP+husband (he doesn't comment here, so I don't know what to call him) came to visit, plus I had a presentation to give at a seminar/discussion group on Sunday night. I spent all day on Sunday preparing for the presentation (JennyP+husband were away visiting other friends), not to mention much of the week before, and in the end I was tired (of course), but it went well so it was worth it. I'm also tired because I've been working hard ever since I got my energy back. I know that sounds like a contradiction - that I'm tired ever since I got my energy back. But it just means that I have the energy to support productive days of work. (Then, once I'm done, I'm tired again. But still, not anything like the fatigue of the first trimester!)

Anyway, I'm just glad to be having productive days of work. Also, I am actually really enjoying work (you might remember how much I did not enjoy working on my dissertation), and so the productive days are especially rewarding.

But in spite of what feels like lots of busy-ness, there are definitely moments of respite. This afternoon I met up with J for lunch. We got Mexican from Tacos Don Memo (a food truck on 38th between Walnut and Sansom) and then ate our lunches together on campus, sitting in the warm autumn air beneath the trees and watching the flow of students walking past. It was really nice and it occurred to me that this is what I'd been waiting for, as I worked to finish my dissertation. I wondered if there would really come a time that J and I would meet up for lunch, sit there and talk about how our days were going, about upcoming travel to visit our families, about how this crazy bug growing in my belly is going to become a part of our lives ... basically just talking about life together.

After lunch we went back to work for the rest of the afternoon until we met up again to walk home together. I was tired, so J carried my bag for me. (He tells me that I am already carrying enough.) We held hands as we walked, and meandered through back streets and then the park to reach our apartment. I headed straight for the bed when I got home just to lie down for a few minutes, and Tako spent a little time cuddling with me, purring and head butting me. Soon after J made me dinner (artichoke tortellini from Trader Joe's) and here I sit, feeling somewhat revived because of the food, but also looking forward to going to bed.

That is, after I read a 50 page article and go through a Power Point presentation.