Light and Momentary

Better

I think the pharmacist made a mistake and gave me Emesis instead of Premesis. I am imagining the ad campaign: Syrup of ipecac? So last millennium. When your vomiting is irregular and infrequent, ask your doctor about Emesis. Perhaps George Weasley was behind the counter and slipped me some Puking Pastilles with the helpful end cut off. I don't know what happened, but the prescription that was supposed to cut my nausea seemed to ramp it way, way up instead. Ugh.

Last night I was trying to talk myself down. You're stressed about the weekend. You know you're always sicker when you're stressed. You can take an incomplete if you really can't finish those papers for your psychology class. You'll feel better in a few weeks. It's going to be all right. It wasn't working very well. There's a point on the nausea spectrum where I lose perspective. There's probably an algorithm: dry heaving ≥ 3 = wailing + gnashing of teeth.

So I just went to bed early, and thankfully was not awakened by nausea in the night -- probably because that stupid pill was out of my system. I am back to ordinary-sick this morning, and hoping hoping hoping that it was really just the Premesis making me so much worse. Did they change the formulation? Did I get the batch with the secret mustard ingredient? No idea. But I'm grateful to be a paler shade of green (sung, of course, to Procol Harum's tune).

Yea, Verily

I was going to write a silly post about morning sickness, kind of a King James Leviticus at a 21st-century Kroger. Last Friday Elwood offered to make spaghetti with clam sauce for dinner and I blanched a little and said, "You know, levitically speaking, clam sauce is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord." Which was code for, "I can't eat that but the kids are listening."

(Parenthetically: I don't know exactly why I have told the entire internet about my pregnancy but have not told my family. I guess I think my mother and MIL will worry and perhaps one of them will say "I told you so" (Lordy lordy I hate to hear "I told you so"), and if my children know this weekend then the grandparents will know before they leave here. About which more below. But I am pretty much operating at maximum capacity here, and can't handle anybody else's worry on top of all the other stuff that needs handling. So mum's the word.

(We are hosting both sets of grandparents this weekend, and an uncle and a cousin, because it is Marty's First Communion and Petely's third birthday. If I were picking a time to throw a party, it would not be the weekend in which I needed to pull together a final draft of two chapters of my early research project along with revisions for my advisor's in-press publication. But you don't always get to pick, so we'll take our celebrations where we find them.

(Our car went belly-up last week -- the fuel pump failed in the church parking lot as I was trying to take Marty to CCD. Except there was no CCD that night. I suppose the timing was providential, because if I had been clued in and skipped that trip, I would likely have been stranded on my way to campus the next day. But buying cars is one of my Least Favorite Things Ever, so it's hard to see providential anything there. Will keep squinting. It seems to have worked out -- an hour ago I signed my name to the title of a 2000 Honda Odyssey. Long may it last.)

Anyway: I was going to write this silly post that went, "Know ye that the sauce of clams is verily an abomination unto the Lord, and know ye likewise that [fermented cabbage, the actual name of which makes me gag] is a further abomination in His sight," but I decided not to. It was partly because I got queasy enough that I didn't think I could write it without gagging my way through it. It was also because I thought it might sound like I was affirming Voltaire and making God in my own image. So why am I telling you about it?

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling dreadful. Just awful. I hate to throw up first thing in the morning because it makes it harder to stay on top of the nausea for the rest of the day, but it was only force of will that kept my stomach contents discontentedly in my stomach. I was nibbling at some cottage cheese, which we don't usually keep in the fridge but which is good preggie food -- high-protein, bland enough to be tolerable on the way back up as well as on the way down. Marty saw me eating it and said, "What is that?"

"Cottage cheese."

He asked, "Isn't it an abomination in the eyes of the Lord?"

And, queasy as I was, I laughed out loud.

Advanced

I called the doctor's office today to see if they would give me a prescription for Premesis, because after a week in which I thought, "This nausea isn't too bad. I can function like this," my inner Emeril decided to kick it up a notch and I have had a green and wobbly couple of days. Premesis is not a miracle cure but I have found that it cuts my nausea by about 30% -- enough to let me be vertical and not couchbound.

Anyway, the nurse had some questions for me and then said "...schedule screenings blah blah blah advanced maternal age..."

Ahem.

I know I just went on and on about my aged eggs, but it's a different thing entirely when a stranger calls them my aged eggs. Whippersnapper.

I'm going to focus on the advanced part. Advanced is good, right? Everybody likes to be advanced. Better than beginner any day of the week.

Say It With Flowers

Until last summer, my 5yo was the most affectionate of my four boys. He would pepper me with kisses and make extravagant declarations. "I love you all the way up to heaven," he would say. But then one day it turned off like a faucet. Maybe one of his brothers teased him. Maybe it was some developmental thing. He decided that boys didn't do that stuff.

These days he will tell me he loves me, but sneakily. "Mom!" he will call across the room, and when I look up he will flash the "I love you" sign. He will kiss me if he is sure no one is watching. It makes me a little sad.

Sometimes it also makes me laugh. Last night we were talking about how he doesn't like to say that he loves me, how he doesn't want his brothers to know. I said, "Honey, boys always love their mothers and mothers love their boys. Even when mothers do really awful things, they love their children and their children love them. It's a law of the universe."

He said, "Oh."

He said, "Maybe Alex and Marty aren't smart enough to figure that out."

Yesterday as we were coming home I saw the first dandelions of the season. I love dandelions -- their color, their tenacity. I love it that a cheery yellow flower can sprout up from a crack in the sidewalk. I will never kill a dandelion because I think they are like little spots of sunshine. (My neighbors love me, I tell you, and my little spots of sunshine too.) Joe went out to see if his friend around the corner was home and came back a few minutes later. He hadn't found his friend, but he had found dandelions. He brought back all that he could carry and pushed them into my hands wordlessly.

Sometimes you don't need words.

Ready

Come on, ladies, how could I be pregnant? I have an early research project to defend, a semester to finish with five papers left to write, a poster presentation to prepare for early June, two different publications in progress with my advisor, and that's not even the whole of it. I also have 15 years' experience with licit and effective means of avoiding pregnancy, and a husband who is 100% on board with not having a baby at this time. I can't be pregnant.

Fill in the Blank

I received that award in a surprisingly nice departmental ceremony. The MC had good things to say about me and my future, my project director introduced me and said more good things about me, and the professor emerita for whom the award is named remembered me from my time as a master's student and had still more kind words. I kept thinking, "What would they say if they knew--?"

Got a guess?

Deliver Us From Banners

Last week I didn't quite get Marty's First Communion banner finished before CCD started, but I thought I could still pull it together by pickup time. I spent a frustrating 45 minutes at Hobby Lobby, where all the dowels are 36" long and the teenaged girl at the counter said, wide-eyed, "No, I don't think we have any saws in this store. I don't think we can cut that for you." This is a quarter-inch dowel, one which a frustrated person could bite in two without incurring too much soft tissue damage. I decided instead to find the framing guy. As you might expect, he did have a saw and was willing to slice the dowel for me. Unfortunately, I realized 20 minutes before pickup time that I had forgotten to sew the pocket at the top to hold the dowel. And I still didn't have all the stupid letters cut out and glued down. Argh.

I went in and said, "Can I bring this by later tonight?" The deacon waved an unconcerned hand. "Next week is fine."  A more organized person, or a person with a less fierce and fiery loathing of felt banners, might have finished it up that night to get it out of the way. But I am typing this with gluey fingers, having put it off until just before my extended deadline.

And I must ask: what is the point?? Surely I am not the only person whom this project filled with dread and resentment and the urge to tear at things with her teeth in public places. (Well, maybe that last one was just me.) I am on board with the idea that handcrafts can be meditative and imbued with prayer. I'm the person who gave her goddaughter a pair of prayer socks as a First Communion gift last year, after all. Is it a sign of spiritual immaturity that I cannot pray, just cannot do it, with fabric glue and felt fuzz stuck to my fingers?

These banners happen every year, and it's nice to see the names of all the kids preparing for the sacraments. Isn't there an equally effective way to get their names in front of the congregation? I very much doubt that this is a fun parent-child bonding experience, because not many second-graders have the fine motor skills for the necessary cutting and arranging. I am imagining a parish chock full of exasperating* mothers, swearing under their breath as their children say, "No, wait, I changed my mind about which saying I want."

*ETA: Meant "exasperated." Perhaps I spoke truer than I knew.

It seems like a 70s leftover to me. We are required to include a host (ivory), a chalice (gold, or painful sunshine yellow (and I love bright yellow, so you know this is a seriously ugly color)), a bunch of grapes (or an alien from the planet Blob, in my case), the child's name, the date. The 70s part is that we can also include a bunch of other stuff, like rainbows and hearts. Okay, yeah, the flood as a symbol for baptism, the heart representing love of God, I get it -- but doesn't that scream 70s to you? Doesn't it sound like they only cut "unicorns" off the list in about 1981?

The boys like it, at least. "It's splendid," said Marty, who is chary with praise. Pete wanted me to make him a Thomas the Tank Engine banner for his very own. Pete, my love, I would give you a kidney in a flash; I would pluck out my eye for you if you really needed it. But I'm not making any more stinking felt banners.

April Haiku II (& III)

Blast and damn and heck
Lost my checkbook register*
Can't do taxes now

*the old one, the one with 11 months of 2007 charitable giving and childcare expense records in it

ETA:
Swearing retracted
It wasn't lost, just hiding
Thanks, St. Anthony

April Haiku

"Render to Caesar"
But must I do it gladly?
Taxes are a pain.

Whiplash Warning

I've been thinking about posting all day, but I felt a little silly putting up a happy post after that hand-wringing post. I think periodically, "Maybe I should drop out of school. It is just too crazy to be a mother of four and a full-time doctoral student. With two part-time jobs." But the thing is, I love school. I'm good at school. If I could drop out of bill-paying, or laundry-folding, or or or -- then maybe I'd be on the right track. I had a great day on campus yesterday and my stress level is lower.

Today I have been working away (I started to say slogging but it honestly hasn't felt like a slog) on my results and discussion sections. I have a beautiful sentence to share with you:

The results of this test were significant, χ²(2, N = 46) = 6.3288, p = .042.

Which means I can assert in print that my idea, my baby idea that hatched almost ten years ago and has been waiting to flutter out of the nest, was right. It feels awfully good.

I might see some fluctuation in that p value as the last of my data trickles in, and I might end up back in marginally significant territory again. But I have several marginally significant results, from testing various ramifications of my hypothesis, and collectively they are enough to say, Hey, we should pay attention to this. I am hypothesizing a modest effect size and my sample is not enormous, so the consistent trend toward significance in my results is pretty intriguing. And I'm going to enjoy that .042 while it lasts.

Tonight I wrote a rather emphatic conclusion to my paper; before I submit it to my project director I will have to go back through and sprinkle in some potentiallys and putatives. But here on my blog I can say what I am really thinking, which is, Yes! My idea was right!

The Cruellest Month

April is kicking my butt, y'all.

Pete has chickenpox. His doctor was kind of a jerk about it. As in, I almost cried in his office this morning. I was biting back tears. Ugh, embarrassing to remember.

Shingles: 80% of the way back to normal; still hurting intermittently. Now I have a cold, complete with wicked headache and ooky eyes.

Major revision is proceeding at the pace of molasses in April (an unpleasantly cold and windy Midwestern April, which is to say, not fast enough), though I did get through one section that has been making my head hurt for a long time. No, a sub-section, really. Not even a section.

Communion banner, due at 6:20 tonight, is about 25% done. Taxes are untouched.

My mother turned 60 this week and I sent her...a text message. How's that for discharge of filial duties? I have a plan but just have not executed it yet.

Blogging is not going to get me any further forward on any of these things, I know. Maybe I will go right now and take care of the birthday delinquency. Prayers, kind words, good jokes or funny YouTube links (short ones, 'cause I don't need any help procrastinating) would be much appreciated, because I am kind of a weepy mess today.

Oh, dear, poxy Pete is driving his riding toy through the articles I had strewn on the floor around the computer during naptime. Damage control time.

Found and Lost

Hello out there! We got back last night from a spring break trip to Colorado, and I found the missing pills almost as soon as I got into the house. I am still a little puzzled about their disappearance, though. Sometime after I put the pills into a snack-sized ziploc, someone (who??) added Easter candy to the bag. The little bag wound up in the pantry, inside the big bag of leftover Easter candy. This is mysterious. It's possible that I thought it was a good idea to take along some Easter candy. But I would not have packed myself a private stash of Easter candy without also taking some for the kids. I would never have put candy for the kids into a bag with medications. What happened? Your guess is as good as mine.

I am trying not to think about all the things I have to get done in the next few weeks here, because panic is never good for the to-do list. I told the director of my project that I would get her a major revision of my draft by the weekend, which means I have to majorly revise it. Eek. Soccer season starts this week; taxes are due in two weeks and I haven't gone beyond entering names and SSNs; I could go on but other people's lists of things to be accomplished are never very interesting so I shan't.

My second-grader is getting ready for his first communion on April 27th, Pete's third birthday, and I am supposed to have made a felt banner for him by tomorrow. I forgot about banner day at church, when they were handing out dowels and cording, and now I have lost the instructions for making the banner itself. UGH! I finally have felt but I have no directions, no stencils, and no clue about how to wing it. Before we left Elwood suggested that I could work on the banner in Colorado, so I am wondering if I packed the instructions?? Maybe I will check the Easter candy bag. If there aren't any banner instructions hidden there, at least there will be a little chocolate consolation.