One time I dreamt I had borrowed a friend's car and wrecked it. When I told her about my dream, she was all "dude, you wrecked my car!?" and I said "dude, you don't have a car, you don't even have a license to drive!" and she was all "but it's the principle of the matter - you wrecked my freakin' car man!"

So back when I was on anti-depressants all those years ago, I used to have whacked out dreams.  I mean those dreams where you wake up and you aren't terrified, or crying, or anything, just staring up at the ceiling going "dude, what was *that*?" For the most part these ended with the mind and mood altering drugs, but every now and again I get some real doozies.  They can be divided into two groups: airport dreams and WTF dreams.

I've figured out the airport dreams.  Because I fear flying and I hate being late and I really do worry a great deal about missing flights, when I'm anxious I tend to dream that I'm running through an airport trying to catch my flight.  These dreams usually end with me running across the tarmac because the plane has left the gate and for some reason airport security never sees this as a problem.  I wake up covered in sweat and exhausted.  I used to get them quite often when I was writing my dissertation, but now I only get them right before I fly somewhere, and I'm so blasé about the whole thing I usually just let them run to the end, wake up, take a drink of water, roll over and fall right back asleep.  What I can't figure out is why the airports are always designed like something out of the 1970s - orange carpet, brown fabric on the walls and chandeliers made of aluminum rods and glass balls.  (Why, yes, I do dream this dream so often I now pay more attention to the details out of sheer boredom.)

The others, classified WTF, are called that for a very good reason.  I once had a dream where I was standing beside the children's slide in my kindergarden playground.  Kittens were sliding down the slide.  If they hit the ground at the end of the slide, they died.  I was trying to stop them by placing my arms across the slide to block their descent, but I couldn't catch them all.  They just kept tumbling down the slide.  I tried reasoning with them and begging them, "please don't slide down the slide!"  But they just kept coming!  Now, when you wake up, you ask the obvious questions like "where did these kittens come from?" and "why did they die as soon as they touched the ground?" and "why couldn't I just go around to the slide's ladder and stop the damn kittens from getting UP on the slide in the first place?" and they are all good questions, but if you've ever had one of these dreams, you know that logical thought does not apply while you're dreaming.

I mention all this because it's very rare for me to have such weird dreams these days, but I guess the pregnancy hormones and the inability to stay in a deep sleep (due to acid-reflux and an exercising Spawn) means that I may be enjoying some interesting subconscious weirdness for the last 8 weeks of my pregnancy.

Last night's dream went like this:

I was walking through a darkened suburbia, where the houses were set relatively far back from the road and there were a lot of trees and no street lights.  I was wearing high-heels, a short tank-top blouse, and carrying a purse but I wasn't wearing any pants (trousers for the Brits - I was wearing underwear, thank you very much).  The ground was very unsteady, like I was drunk or had been drugged and the horizon kept tilting and I was staggering about, in and out of the street, and on and off people's lawns.  

I knew was trying to walk back to my campsite, where I had a little caravan.  To get there I had to climb over a wooded ridge and I was worried that the drunk who slept in the woods would wake up as I stumbled through the brush and attack me.  He didn't, I made it safely over the hill and into the campsite.  

Only I couldn't remember where my caravan was.  Sigh.  

I started walking in one direction and then changed my mind and walked in the other and then I found my car.  (This would be the car I drove as a high school student - a '72 Chevelle.) Since I had my keys and my purse, I considered driving the car to a hotel, where I could shower and sleep, but then realized that I didn't want to try to check in because I wasn't wearing any pants and people would ask questions and I just really didn't know what had happened to my pants, I just wasn't wearing them any more.  But right before I decided to sleep in my car, it occurred to me that if my car was here, then the caravan couldn't be to far away.

By now the sun was rising and it was getting light enough to see the trees and open meadows of the campsite.  It wasn't anywhere I've ever been (well, in real life, in my dream it was very familiar because this is where I was camping, duh).  I walked down the road and, sure enough, came upon the campsite.  Where everyone was out watching the sunrise.  

Apparently I was camping with a group.  This wasn't in the least bit strange, it just sort of slotted itself into my dream, "oh yeah, that's right, everyone is going to be awake now."

My family was there (minus my sister) along with my best friend, my husband, and my ex (who's very presence is my brain's way of saying, "by the way, this is a nightmare, in case you didn't know") - all sitting in folding chairs, looking east, and drinking coffee.  

My caravan was not in the circle of caravans.  

I walked up and everyone looked at me and started laughing and asking what I'd done with my pants and saying "oh, look what the cat dragged in!" etc.  I was pretty tired at this point, I had been wandering for quite some time after all, so I asked where my caravan was, because I really just wanted to go to bed.  Everyone started looking at each other, all shifty and uncomfortable, like they didn't want to tell me and it was going to be an unpleasant subject.  

"Well," I asked, "where is it?"  

"Well, when you didn't come back," someone said "we let your sister take it."  

"Where did she take it?" 

Shrugs all around.  People begin going back to looking at the sunrise and remarking on how nice everything was.  I was pretty pissed off, but since no one would talk to me anymore, I called up my sister on my cell phone.

"Hey, where are you and why have you taken my camper?"

"Well, you didn't need it."

"Yeah, but I need it now.  I want to go to sleep."

"Not my problem."

"Please, KT..."

"Whatever."  And she hung up on me.

So there I was, shivering in the early morning, without pants, surrounded by people who just didn't give a crap about what had happened to me and were all much more interested in talking about how beautiful the sunrise was and how nice it was to be camping.  All I wanted to do was lay down, but there was just nowhere to go. No offer of a place to lay down, pants, or even a cup of freaking coffee!  Then they wanted me to take a photo of all of them having a great time.  I angled the camera to include the space where my caravan *should* have gone and everyone leaned in towards each other for the picture, grinning and holding up coffee mugs.

And that's when I woke up.  What a sucky dream!

I told the DB about the dream while he was in the shower and when he got out he gave me a huge, rather damp, hug.  I figure the dream was about some fear that no one actually gives a crap about me or loves me.  Thankfully, when fully awake, I know that that's not true, I have a long list of people who care and who give a crap about me and who would be worried sick if I didn't come home one night or if I showed up in the morning without pants and a dazed expression.

So seriously, subconscious, WTF?

I'm not blind... I just don't always look where I'm going...

Dudes, I totally almost walked into a tree on the way to the supermarket.

No joke!

I was walking along.... doo-dee doo-dee doo *TREE*!

And I gave it a good long look, 'cause you know, maybe it had stepped out in front of me without looking both ways and once it saw that I had the right of way, it being a sideWALK and all, it would politely retreat to the park.

Nope.  The tree stood resolutely in my path.

So I'm all, "look, man, I'm pregnant.  You might not be able to tell under this massive parka, which is probably why people look at me funny all the time.  I mean, you know, I'm all walking like a damn penguin but I have little skinny legs and then there's this huge parka and how are people gonna know, you know?  So I'm telling ya, I'm pregnant, and that means you gotta give me some space.  Or I'm a-gonna end up walking in the street and that's just crazy dangerous for a fat pregnant chick."

And I swear the tree proceeded to LOOM.

So I walked in the gutter.  Freakin' tree.  No respect.

See this?

This is a bunch of assholes just waiting to jump in front of your car.

This Break Was Brought To You By: Alot

If I type this very fast, maybe I can get a post out before the cat wakes up.

Wait, "cat"?  Shouldn't that read "baby" or something?

Yeah, let me explain.

Alot is going through a needy patch at the moment.  I mean, if he's in the house he must be touching me or I must be touching him.  If I fail to provide adequate attention, plaintive meowing and getting where he shouldn't ensues.

Alot: (jumps up on table)
AG: Argh, you know you aren't supposed to be up on the table!
Alot: (flings self down and rolls over) I'm not "up" on the table!  Look, I'm lying down!  I'm "lying down" on the table!
AG: Come on, get off the table.
Alot: No!  I'll be good! See, I'm asleep! (closes eyes and grips the table cloth with all claws) *PURRRR*

So I scoop the cat up and immediately he's cuddling in my arms and rubbing his head under my chin.
Alot: Oh, I love you!  How much I love to be held by you!!  *PURRRRRR* (grips sweater with claws, presses body close)

The easiest solution, I've found, is to give in.  We sit on the couch and I lean back so he's resting on top of my belly (by which I mean, he's really sitting on the shelf that the Spawn has created for my dining pleasure) and I pet him and watch TV.  It's a good excuse to put my feet up for half an hour, but it means less surfing the web, I can't man-handle computer and cat into the living room at the same time.

Eventually he gets too warm and moves off of me before going into a deep sleep.  This is when I get up and sneak out of the living room and back to the internet.  He's getting more clever though.  Now he drapes part of himself over me, or lays next me in a way that keeps me from getting up without disturbing him.  Because then we can repeat the process.

Alot: *MEOW* Wait! *MEOW* Where are you going? *MEOW* Take me with you! *MEOW* Are you going to do something with the computer? (runs ahead, jumps up on the table and lays on the computer) 'S okay, I'm here, we can still be together! *PURRR*
AG: (face/palm)

My husband watched this process today and asked, "what does he think he is, a baby?" or maybe he asked "what is he going to do once we have a baby?" I'm not entirely sure because the cat was purring too loudly in my ear.

Spawn seems to find the whole thing a means of entertainment.  If the cat pushes on my belly with his feet, Spawn is sure to push back.  Sometimes Alot gives me this look like, "excuse me, could you not move your belly so much, I'm trying to sleep here!" and I have to tell him, "look, man, it's not me, it's Spawn.  Take it up with Spawn in two months, okay?"

It's probably a good thing I'm going to give birth to an octopus.  I think there is going to be an epic battle for my lap and my child will start off the underdog, lacking in size and claws, but having little fists and feet of steel.   And if Alot's solution to the "Mom is paying attention to the computer when she should be paying attention to me" problem is anything to go on, Spawn is going to get laid on a lot.

Help, I've swallowed an octopus!

It must be an octopus.  I mean, there is NO WAY the child in my stomach has only two arms and two legs.

If I was having twins I would assume that there was a wrestling match going on - but with only one little person in there...  WTF??

I'm pleased to report that my child has all of the expected appendages and has working joints.  At least I'm pretty sure those were elbows and knees that joined in the fun.  Because if those weren't elbows and knees as well as hands and feet, well... I may be giving birth to an octopus.  Only not a soft and squishy octopus.  One with wildly kicking feet.  And flailing arms.  That head-butts.

I'm getting head-butted in the cervix.

You know where I never expected to get head-butted?

In. The. Cervix.

All this flailing about sets off Braxton-Hicks contractions, which of course aren't painful, but are very distracting.

Funny story about these contractions.  See, I get them all the freaking time but I didn't think they were contractions per se, I was describing them as "uterine flexes" because it felt like my uterus was sort-of flexing, like when you are standing in line at the supermarket and you flex your butt cheeks or your leg muscles to keep blood flowing and give yourself something to think about other strangling than the alcoholic in front of you who is paying for his cheap vodka with very small change - one coin dug out of his pocket at a time.  

What, you don't flex your butt cheeks while queuing? Alrighty then, moving on!  

Then one day in my 22nd or 23rd week I was reading up on labor and figured I should google Braxton-Hicks to find out how they would feel so that I wouldn't mistake them for real contractions in a few months.  Because, as the book assured me, I was probably going to mistake this false labor for the real thing and that this was OK, it happens to us all, you gibbering idiot.  LOL on me, "uterine flexes" are Braxton-Hicks contractions.  Color me silly!  I have several every day, but it never occurred to me that this was something other women panic about and run off to the hospital shrieking about going into early labor.

Not that I want crazy painful labor pains or anything, but I kinda hope early labor is a bit more apparent, otherwise I'm going to end up giving birth in the shower on accident because I didn't notice.

***BTW, I'm totally joking here - you don't have to tell me that I will notice and that there will be pain and all kinds of other delightful surprises because I'm well aware.  I'm just being facetious.***

So anyway, two hours of kicking, punching, head butting and intermittent contractions later, I was feeling quite nauseous (surprising facts about pregnancy #43, having your insides bounced around will make you just as nauseous as if you were driving on a winding road, so take *that* Inner Ear and suck on it).  Then the Spawn got the hiccups.

"HA!" I thought, "serves you right, you fetal asshole!"  I hate hiccups, but the great thing about fetal hiccups is that they are rhythmic and pack far less of a punch than, say, A PUNCH.

Alas, the Spawn seems to take after Mommy in regards to hiccups.  I'll get, like, five, and then be done.  Same with Spawn.  So five or so hiccups later we were back to the flailing and the contractions.

"Your child," I announced to the DB, "is an asshole."  And for a few moments my husband tried to reason with my belly.  But like cats and children, fetuses are jerks.  

But I'll get the Spawn back.  Oh yes I will!  In under 10 weeks, I'm a gonna give birth to this thing, whether it wants to come out OR NOT!  Cry all you want, Spawn, you ain't going back in!  I WIN!

And thus I entered the third trimester haze

Don't get me wrong, I love my shower.

I was surprised by how much I missed my shower while in Qatar.  The shower we had this year was waaaaay better than the one we had last year.

Last year's shower.  Yes, it *is* a toilet, how kind of you to notice.  

But I swear to you, water came (sometimes) from a pipe just out of frame.  

And sometimes it was even hot water!

This year I always had hot water and I always had water pressure, and what more can a person ask for?  Okay, it was about 5 inches too short, so I had to duck to rinse my hair, but that put the water at a great position on my back!

And yet the first time I took a shower when I got home I could have cried with joy.  Maybe it was the hormones, but it was just so fabulous!  INSTANT hot water, at the right temperature.  No fiddling with multiple knobs, you have one that's set to the temperature you know is the right temperature and one knob that turns the water on and off.  The shower head can be attached to the wall or you can take it down to rinse off the under bits.  Now that my stomach blocks off pretty much everything from my belly button down, this feature is indispensable.  Not to mention that the hot water helps unblock my sinuses, soothes kicking Spawn, works out kinks in my joints and gets rid of that weird-because-it's-different odor I've developed since I've been pregnant.

Happy happy joy joy, right?  I must be taking showers every time you turn around, right?

Uh, no.  Not at all.  In fact, if I could get away with it, I'd shower a whole lot less.  I'm down to every other day, if I need to leave the house, and when I know I'm not going anywhere you couldn't pay me to get into the shower.

"Why, God, why!?" screams the inner me, the little bit that remembers my love of showers and the joy of all that hot falling water.  This bit of me knows that I'll be filled with happiness if I would just get in the freaking shower already and stop looking in the mirror to convince myself that really, I don't look that greasy, surely I could go one more day...

But what does me in, every time, is the effort needed to take clothes off and then on, especially since drying myself has become particularly difficult and perilous, so most of me is still pretty damp when I'm fighting to get into my clothes.  Really, a person should not be exhausted after putting on socks.  And why must it be so difficult to get my pants over my butt?  And am I lacking a joint in my arms that would allow me to get my shirts and sweaters over my head without getting tangled in the sleeves?  I've been dressing myself for a long time and I don't remember it ever being so damn hard!

Then, horror of horrors, came the day I knew would one day arrive.  I forgot to rinse my hair.

This happened quite a few times in the first trimester, when I lost my mind in a cloud of hormonal activity and I was warned that the cloud would return for the third trimester, so I have been particularly careful to try to remember these things.  But of course, it's impossible to remember that you have to remember when not only are you fighting third trimester haze, but pre-coffee-just-rolled-out-of-bed-brain.  And I didn't notice when I brushed my hair.  Or when I blow-dried my hair.  Or when I brushed it AGAIN to get it into place.  "Hmmm," I thought, "my hair just doesn't want to dry today!"

Yeah, two hours later, plopped on the couch with the cat, watching TV while doing a spot of embroidery (I'll post on that at some point, I swear hope) I finally realized that it wasn't that my hair was still wet, it was still coated in conditioner.

BALLS!

It took a few more hours before I finally convinced myself that, really, I could not just wait and shower again the next day, I should really get up and rinse my hair RIGHTNOW.  DO IT GIRL!  JUST GET UP AND SHOWER ALREADY!  Back in the first trimester, this would involve hanging my head over the bathtub and using the hand-held-shower-spray-thingy (BALLS!  What is that called??) to rinse my damn hair without getting back into the shower or even undressing.  However, those days are long gone and I was going to have to get buck nekkid AGAIN.

Gahragh!

* Funny side note: while typing this post I suddenly remembered that I had a dentist appointment... six hours ago.  BALLS!  And of course they only have appointments when they conflict with the rare other appointments I have so now I have to wait another month to have my teeth cleaned.  Dear brain, where did you go?

I feel I am constantly battling not only Newton's first law of motion (a body at rest will stay at rest, a body in motion will stay in motion), but also my inability to remember what motions I should be doing while in motion.

Ah well, at least I only have 10 more weeks of this.

Then it will get worse.

Hahahahaha *sob*

Work Ethic

A lot could be said about the Danish work ethic.

Things like:
What ethic?
I've never met such a lazy group of drunken sods in my life!
Danes work smarter, not longer.
Family is more important that work.
Danes are extremely hard working and industrious.

I've heard them all.  I've said a number of them.  I've doubted the sanity of some of the people who have said others.

My own experiences with the Danish work ethic have been, well, mixed.

There are the paper pushers who sit at a desk for 3 hours every other Tuesday who look shocked and appalled if you ask them to do something so awful as GOD FOBID look something up on their little computer screens because their job is too look things up for people on computer screens and WHY THEY HELL ARE YOU ASKING THEM TO DO THEIR JOB??

There's the team of painters that came to paint our apartment building who showed up at 8, had a coffee break until 9, painted until 10 when it was beer-and-cigarettes break time (yes, beer, Danes do often drink on the job), started again at 11, broke for lunch at 12 (more beer), started up again at 1:30 and then went home at 3, after having one last beer and cigarette break.

There's the mechanic who opens his doors at 6 in the morning and doesn't close up until after 7 at night.  You can drop your car off in the morning for it's tune up and pick it up after work.  He's cheap, efficient, accurate, and at 23, very ambitious.

There are the pharmacists who are either open or on call, day or night, so when you have an anxiety attack at 3 in the morning and you need your Xanax NOWRIGHTNOWNONOTWHENTHEYOPENATTENRIGHTFREAKINGNOW, you ring them and someone will throw on a robe and fill that prescription for you.  (This does not apply to all pharmacists - you have the best luck in very small towns or very large cities, if you live in a mid-sized city, you probably have good reason to be anxious, so enjoy your demons until opening hours, m'kay?)

But by and large Danes believe that if you go into work earlier, you go home earlier and therefore you have more time to be with your family.

(I call bullshit on this one, by the way.  Because by getting up earlier to go to work earlier you are also going to bed earlier and your net time with the family is still the same whether you start work at 8 or horror of horrors, 9 am.  Do the math, folks.  And stop asking me to be somewhere at 8!)

At some point this "getting to work early" seems to have gotten out of hand.

The mason who is doing some patchwork on the house we are renting arrived yesterday at 6:30.  In. The. Morning.

Six FREAKING thirty.

Do you know when my alarm was set for?  Eight.  8!  Because I don't need to be at Danish class until 9.  In the morning.  When decent people go to work.  When the sun has actually risen.  Right now it's the dark times, the time when the sun doesn't rise until after 8 and sets before 4.  So this means that the mason has no light.  Except he does.  He brings his own flood lights.

FLOOD LIGHTS!  OUTSIDE MY BEDROOM WINDOW AT 6:30 IN THE MORNING!

This isn't the first time the mason has shown up at some ungodly hour.  Last time the DB had to throw on a robe and run downstairs because he thought burglars were trying to get in through the window.  The mason was surprised that my husband wasn't dressed.  The DB said, "???" which translates to "I'm very sorry, sir, but we are neither farmers nor ranchers nor sheepherders.  We have no earthly reason to be up and dressed before the sun rises.  My wife, for example, when she does not have to be up for school, tends to sleep until 10 and then wanders about for a while in her pajamas.  You are just lucky that we're still pregnant because if this were to happen in a few months and you WAKE THE BABY I cannot be held responsible for the actions of my wife.  She's an American, you see.  They tend to be violent."

Alas the mason doesn't speak Tired Confused Husband, which is probably why he came yesterday AT THAT UNGODLY HOUR.

Only the joke was on him.  We didn't know he was coming and because it had snowed, we'd closed and locked the back door.  And since it was Trash Thursday, we thought the flashing lights and the banging noises were from the garbage man.  So we stayed in bed and the mason had to wait in his truck until we got up, showered, and then came down for breakfast.  HA HA!  I WIN!

Re: losing my religion insurance

This is in response to a question posed in my comments.

"How will you deliver your baby now that the government is taking health benefits away from all foreigners who have been in DK less than 5 years? We heard this on DR 1 and were in shock, thinking of all our virtual friends who are having babies, or like Kelli, need serious care. Will your private insurance protect you?"

You can read about what Denmark is thinking of doing here and in other major Danish media.

My answer: I'm hoping they hold off for the next 12 weeks until the Spawn in born.  The DB is putting me on his extra health care that is offered through his work, but that only covers major injuries.  I suppose that if I want to see a doctor for a sore throat, I could always just walk in front of a car...

The hubs is wondering "dude, can we even buy basic health care coverage for you here?" and swearing a lot at his stupid country.  Because basically, if the government takes away my access to free health care unless I have a job that covers me, I'm screwed.  I just came back from working a job because I'm pregnant and no one is going to hire a woman that's two and a half months away from starting maternity leave.  The entire situation makes me mad enough to spit nails.  I wrote an open letter to the Minister of Employment, who's heading the committee, but it's taken until now to get all the expletives out of it and now it's too bloody long to go into a newspaper.  I'm just going to post it here.

Dear Inger Støjberg,

     I’m sorry I have to write this in English, rather than Danish, but it seems that I’m going to have to drop out of my Danish classes in order to work full-time in order to make enough money to pay for my health care.  I’d love to say that I’ll get a job where my employer pays for my health care, but alas, I am not educated as an engineer or doctor or anything particularly useful, so the best I can hope for is something in the hotel industry, perhaps cleaning toilets, because without Danish language knowledge, no company is going to hire me.  I know because I’ve tried.  I thought that perhaps, after I passed my Prøve 3 test, I may want to take an education in something that would benefit Danish society and lead to a full-time job here in Denmark, but it seems you also want to limit my options on that front as well. 

On the other hand, I do manage to work full time for several months out of the year for the University of Copenhagen as an archaeologist.  It’s only a contract job, and in Qatar, but I can work full time and make enough money to be taxed through Skat.   Thankfully, it’s only 5 months long, because I can only be out of Denmark for 6 months per year, but a job is a job and you go to where the work is and I’m trying to make the most of the education I have.  It means, of course, that I can never get permanent residency, because I’m only working full-time for a total of 5 months out of 12, but at least I’m contributing to society.  Society I will soon be unable to participate in, not having any Danish language skills and working full-time as a hotel cleaner in order to pay for basic health care, but I’m sure my children will appreciate being stuck in vuggestuer and børnehaver [daycare for children under 6 years of age] for 9 hours a day so that when Mor [Mom] gets sick she can afford to go to see the doctor like Far [Dad] does for free.

Or I could risk not having any health care and try to finish my Danish language classes.  I don’t get that sick that often anyway.   Gosh, it will be just like living in the US!  In fact, why don’t I move my family back to the US, because what is the point of trying to participate in a society that continually rejects you because you had the audacity to be foreign and fall in love with one of it’s citizens?  Thanks for my husband’s free education!  Oh, don’t worry, he’s a Danish citizen, so you don’t have to worry about having wasted all those years of SU [money from the government to pay for a student's living expenses] on someone like me, instead you wasted it on a citizen who might just leave his homeland to be with the woman he loves.  I’m sure losing two tax paying adults is far better than having to pay my biannual doctor visits.

Of course, you say, it would only be until you reached permanent residency or until you have worked x number of years!  I’m sorry, remind me again why educated foreigners would want to clean toilets for 5 or so years so that they can “earn” the right to spend the next 3 learning Danish so that now, after 8 years they can actually actively participate in society?

When we chose Denmark, rather than the US, to live in, we did so because we believed that Denmark was where we could realize our dreams of lives focused on family rather than on working long hours at thankless wages to pay for basic human needs, such as health care.  What a joke!  Family means nothing in Denmark, unless both parents are native born Danes!   In Denmark you have a saying “it’s an American situation” and maybe I’ve been mistaken all this time, but I thought it was used to mean something was a bad thing.  But you know what?  This idea of denying basic free health care to part of the population is very much an American situation, and that’s a situation many Americans are working hard to change.   Congratulations, Denmark, in just a few years you will have a social welfare system that makes the US look good.

Am I mistaken?  Prove me wrong.  Allow immigrants to better themselves, to work towards integration without having to worry about covering basic medical needs or the education that will allow them to succeed in this society.  Show your own citizens that they will not be punished for bringing outsiders to Denmark, that love and humanity can extend past the borders of this land.   Or continue to show the world that Denmark fears the future, the effects of globalization and multiculturalism on the economy and society, and would rather take it’s native-born citizens and hide down the rabbit hole until the world goes back to the way it was before the twentieth century.

Sincerely,

Exxx Exxxxx

Suddenly it was all so funny

So now that last post has you all thinking that I'm sitting here in my home, crying into my apple juice about the sorry state of my belly.

Never fear, I'm on the great Pregnancy Hormonal Roller Coster!  I can't maintain one emotion for longer than 10 minutes!  It's always changing and we don't know which emotion will hit me next!!  Wheeeee!

Just think of the fun and excitement this lends to our household!  The sound I make when I'm hysterically laughing sounds very similar to when I'm hysterically crying and so the DB often comes running into a room to check on me, finding me holding my belly, tears running down my face, moaning "it hurts, it hurts BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!" and he has to ask "baby, are you laughing or are you crying?"

My husband agrees that on the whole, I've been a model of hormonal balance.
AG: You know, I think I'm holding it together very well.
DB: You are!  I'm so proud of you and lucky to have you as my wife.

Of course, he's got finely honed survival instincts.  He agrees with everything I say.  In return, I haven't thrown anything at his head.  Marriage is all about compromise, the little gives and takes that make it all work out just fine.

So the other night he took me out to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1.  This has nothing to do with my hormones.  Or the rest of this post.  I just thought I'd mention where we were going.

Anyway, as I'm putting on my eight layers needed to brave the snow and ice, I remember that I have a scarf I'd just gotten for Christmas that I'd really like to wear for the occasion, but it's in another room.  So I walk from the entryway to my office, in the dark, because I know my way, and the cat gets eight kinds of excited because he's been playing with the DB's shoelaces and now Mommy is going into another room and who knows what fun she might be up to!  Because even though Mommy walks around the house in the dark in the middle of the night quite frequently and it never leads to anything awesome THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING!

Deep down inside every pessimistic, uninterested cat is a determined optimist.

As cats are wont to do, he ran directly in front of me.  'Cause he wants to get there first?  Who knows why cats do this.  But they do.  They run either in between your legs or right in front of you.  Only it's dark.  And I can't see him.  And when I walk it is a slow transition of weight from one piston-like leg to the other (complete with the hiss and clank of a steampunk robot), while the free leg swings forward like a pendulum.  And not a Edward Allen Poe pendulum, thin and slick, slicing away moments of your life.  This pendulum is canon ball, a powerful, damage inducing, solid object swinging through time and space with unstoppable force.  (Until it meets a coffee table, but that's a different story.)  So as my leg swung forward, my foot scooped up the cat, just in the soft middle bit, where he's developing a sympathy belly to accompany my pregnancy, and lightly flung him through the air about midway across the room, where he landed with a solid thump on all four feet.

To say he looked surprised would be an understatement.

Not my cat, but pretty much my cat's expression

I quickly hurried over crying out "oh, baby kitty, I'm so sorry, oh, honey are you okay?" and scooped him up in my arms.  He pushed himself back away from my chest with one paw and raised the other as if to slap me and gave me the best "you bitch, WTF?!" look.

Still not my cat, but a darned good impression

This is when I started to giggle.

I set the cat on the couch, trying to pet him and check for injuries or at least sore points, all the while trying to swallow the giggles that were now starting to leak out of my eyes and run out my nose.  Alot was having none of it and escaped with as much dignity as he could muster, while trying to look simultaneously disgruntled and disinterested in any more fun and games (it mostly just made him look gassy), to the dining room, where the DB let him out to pout and probably tell all the other cats in the area about the cruelties of fat human women who don't watch where they waddle.

And I lost it.  I just kept laughing.  I had the hardest time telling my husband what happened and his completely rational question of "why is kicking the cat half way across the room FUNNY?" just really couldn't be answered.

I mean, obviously, if the cat had been injured, I wouldn't have been laughing.  I think.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have.  But the way he rose up in the air, the look on his face, the solid *thump* when he landed and the "you bitch, I'm a-gonna slap you" moment were just too much.

And every time I thought about it I started giggling again.  Not "he he he" but full-body-shaking, tears in the eyes, snot running down the nose giggling.  I giggled as we walked up the street.  I giggled as I waited in the lobby while he purchased tickets.  I giggled 6 hours later when we were lying in bed and I couldn't sleep because of the acid reflux and the gymnastics champion in my belly and I was thinking about writing this post.

I woke the poor DB who once again had to ask his wife if she was crying or laughing, because one necessitated cuddling and the other required him to get up, have a stiff drink, and wait until she calmed down again.

Because these days, once I start giggling, I just can't stop.

Confessions from the Seventh Month Slump

The Bump, swathed in spandex

I am 99.9% sure this happens to most pregnant women, apart from the few who are all "oh, my body is a vessel for a new human being and it is SO WONDERFUL and I feel full of happiness and joy!" to whom I say "I got two rolling pins for Christmas and I am not above beating you senseless with them."

Freakin' happy pregnant women!  I hate them.

I was doing so well during that second trimester.  Yeah, there was the belly, but I could tie my shoes.  I could feel movement, but the kicking wasn't painful.  I could get out of bed without flailing like an upside down tortoise.  My underwear stayed up.

I've gained 15 kg/33 lbs over the last 29 weeks and for those in the know, yes, a so-called healthy woman of my size will gain up to 16 kg/35 lbs over her entire pregnancy (40 weeks, btw).  So I'm a little on the fat side.  I blame my butt, which took it's sweet ass time getting here, but arrived with a *bang* in the middle of the night.  I can now sit comfortably in chairs without bruising my tailbone, but my knees are killing me.

But I just feel fat and ungainly.  I struggle into clothes and out of them again because they no longer cover my belly.  Trousers and jeans take FOREVER to get into.  Going to the bathroom has become this epic journey of discovery: "oh, so that's where my panties went," "ah, I see I've got toilet paper stuck between my butt cheeks again," "why look, the hair on my belly has gotten thicker and longer," "is today the day the hemorrhoids return?" and "how am I going to get these pants back up without falling head first to the floor?"

My skin feels completely tight, as though I've been stretched to the maximum capacity, like an overstuffed sausage casing.

And I'm supposed to get BIGGER??

And women who've been pregnant before tell me it gets WORSE??

Thanks, but no thanks, I don't think I want to be pregnant any more.

I miss my old body, the one that went up stairs without creaking.  The one that didn't smell weird.  The one that ached after a night out dancing and drinking and carrying on, not walking two blocks to the post office.  I miss my belly button ring.  I miss my flat stomach.  I miss being able to easily rub lotion onto my legs because I could bring my leg up to my chest.  I miss my morning routine that only took one hour because it didn't take 15 minutes longer to struggle into my clothing.  Who knew socks were so challenging?

I miss my old life.  I read the posts from my friends in Qatar and know the highjinks they are getting up to and I'm not going to be doing that for a long while, if not ever again.  I'm old enough and have enough contacts that I probably could be in the field year round and instead I'm sitting here, gestating.  Soon I'll be lactating.  But not excavating.  No, not for a long while yet.

I miss being able to visit friends and drinking bottles of wine and crashing on floors or couches.  Okay, I didn't do it all that often, but I was at least physically *able* to do these things.  Now it's all about how many pillows it takes to keep the AG upright enough to breathe and not have acid reflux and have a pillow ready in case she rolls over and boobs and belly suddenly enter the earth's gravitational field and are pulled resolutely down past the point of comfort.

I miss uninterrupted sleep.  "Get lots of sleep now, while you can" they say.  Right.  So can we put me in low orbit where gravity doesn't apply because I'm not able to sleep now.  I have gestational rhinitis, so I can't bloody breathe and I snore so I have a constantly sore throat.  The baby flails like a champion kick-boxer about every hour, sometimes going into a prize-fighting routine that takes 20 minutes to subside.   Acid reflux has made it's acquaintance with my esophagus.

To sum it up: I'm a sad sack.  A sad sack of mucus, fat, semi-digested food and baby.

I lumber and I waddle.

And if that wasn't the only thing to get one feeling down, now is when the pregnancy websites think you should start watching birthing videos.

You want to watch something scary and horrible?  Watch a birthing video.

Maybe because I'm not that interested in vaginas, or maybe because I like to keep an air of mystery about some of my parts I DO NOT WANT TO WATCH A BABY COME OUT OF SOME OTHER WOMANS HOO-HA.  How exactly is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable and relaxed about giving birth?  A friend of mine focused on her body opening up like a lotus flower and that's a HELL of a lot better mental image than what I've seen on YouTube.

"Birth on programs like 'A Baby Story' or [insert other TLC show I've never heard of, let alone seen] give a negative view of what child birth is like, because that makes good drama.  For a real birth in all it's beauty, watch Mary, a real woman filmed by her husband Joseph, giving birth at the Bethlehem Birthing Center"FOR FUCKING CRAZY PEOPLE!  WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU??  I DIDN'T NEED TO SEE THAT SHIT!  I'M NOT GOING TO GIVE BIRTH NOW, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, I'LL JUST STAY PREGNANT UNTIL THEY INVENT THE TRANSPORTER AND CAN BEAM THIS BABY OUT OF ME!!!

"One of the reasons so many women have a hard time with birth is due to fear."  AND HOW WAS WATCHING THAT HELPING???  You know when you are learning to drive and they show you videos of violent accidents so that you will become so terrified that you never drive drunk?  YEAH, IT'S A LITTLE LIKE THAT.

If you have no idea why I'm shouting (and waving my arms about - although you can't see that because I don't do video posts), you obviously haven't seen one of these videos while pregnant.  They are bad enough when you aren't pregnant, and when you are seven months along and know that you are only going to get BIGGER, it is quite possibly the LAST thing you want to see.

So that's me, seven months along, having my down days and sporadic freaking out moments.  It's what I'm calling the Seventh Month Slump (I'm sure there will be the Eighth Month Existential Crisis and the Ninth Month Neuroses and don't get me started on Postpartum Perturbations).  The DB spends a great deal of time these days telling me how beautiful I am and how sexy he thinks I am and making sure that he gives me hugs and rubs my belly.  He also holds my hand tightly when we see some woman on TV giving birth.  Meanwhile I hold things up over my belly and examine myself from the side in my full-length mirror admiring how lovely it is to have boobs and a butt and what all I'm going to do with them after I get rid of the belly, because I've always wanted a back and a rack, if you know what I mean.

So it's not all dark days here - but I'd be lying through omission if I didn't mention them.

Just keepin' it real, y'all.

I don't need no stinking resolutions

So let's see, this is the end of the year post where everyone lists what they've done and what they plan on doing for the upcoming year, right?

What I've done:

Stuff.

Some of it was fun, some of it paid, some of it was a waste of time and energy.

Seriously, people with the lists of accomplishments?  Knock it off already, you're giving me a complex.  I don't tally my accomplishments, I like to just go with the assumption that I'm awesome and leave it at that.  So when I read that some people have learned other languages or published a novel, I'm sitting here thinking "crap, I didn't do that... but I got out of bed this morning AND brushed my hair, DOUBLE WIN FOR ME!"

'Cause it is waaaaay too easy to list the things you didn't do this year.  The things that left you disappointed.  Isn't it?

I wanted to be graduated by the end of the year.  Not that I made a resolution about it, because graduating resolutions are made at the beginning of every semester and I was becoming regularly accustomed to emailing the graduate school and saying "kidding, ya'll, I'm not graduated yet.  LOL!"  So when I told my department WAY BACK in April that Enough Was Enough and they were all Tru 'Dat I thought for sure I'd be stroking my degree by now.

But apparently it's harder to get off the chain-gang than it looks.  I mean, the Warden is all "paroled!" and the Parole Board is all "Time Served!" but the idiot with the key is all "yeah, but see we only do scheduled releases during certain times of the year and the rest of the year we don't actually keep the paperwork around because that would give people the impression that there was a system and it's not a system, it's more of an organic process, so the paperwork will be available on-line in December, wait, did we say December, we meant January, and did we say on-line because I'm not sure if that's really possible, have you checked our web-site?"

Seriously Graduate School - don't you want students to, I dunno, GRADUATE?

I.  Guess.  Not.

So the one thing I wanted to get done this year: FAIL.

Whatever, at least the organic process, or whatever the hell it is, means I don't have to keep writing the bloody thing and I still qualify for "student membership" for the organizations I belong to.  That's my silver-lined Purgatory!  Whoot-whoot.

My resolutions for this year are:

Continue to not make resolutions!

I've been wicked good at keeping this resolution.

You could argue the logical fallacy of this argument, but do I look like the kind of girl who bows to logic?  Logic??  I laugh in the face of logic!  I put underpants on my head and dance around slapping my butt in the face of logic!

Instead of sitting down and making a list of things to do and making promises I'm only going to break spectacularly, I'm going to keep my cat inside tonight, watch the fireworks from my deck, and spend the next two weeks writing the wrong year on everything because I'm a little bit special like that.  And I'm not going to dwell on my failure to end the year as Master of Archaeology, Art, and Other Stuff because it'll get done at some point not dependent on a calendrical division imposed by Julian or Gregory or whoever we have to blame for this particular temporal junction.  And I'm going to keep on celebrating the little accomplishments of the day right along side the major ones - I started a fire in the fireplace, it took me two hours to get it going, but finally I made wood and paper BURN - I WIN!!

To you all, readers and friends, known and unknown:
I wish you the best of luck with your resolutions and may the new year bring you greater peace and prosperity, may we have all learned from the lessons of this year and may we not repeat the mistakes of the past, may there be more cookies and less boiled cabbage, may we all forgive and be forgiven, and may we all find our inner grace and beauty and find a way to share it with the world.

The Blizzard of 2010

Okay, maybe it wasn't technically a blizzard on the 23rd of December, but we'd had a heap of snow and then a Very Strong Wind which took said snow and made landscapes of it.

Drifts were indeed drifting.

Drifting across roads.

To take up residence at bus stops and other sundry places where drifts hang out.

It was a white-out kinda day.  A day where I was profoundly thankful that:
A) I had a Volvo
B) it was stick shift
C) it was black

Ever try to find a silver car in a white out?  I'm sure I'll be kicking myself when I have to find my black car in the dark, but for now I am very grateful that I can find it in the snow, because I got a lot of snow.  I have a lot of dark too, but rarely do I need to drive somewhere after dark these days.  "These days" being here in DK where I am not really supposed to be driving but sometimes you have to bend the law in order to obtain a Christmas Duck.

The Christmas Duck is very important to Danish Christmas, unless you are eating pork for Christmas, in which case you don't need a Christmas Duck and driving out into a snow storm to get one is Incredibly Stupid.

I had just returned from the land where pork is Not Allowed and really would probably have been very happy to have a Christmas Pig, but I do like duck and I can do things with duck that you can't do with a side of pork - like stuff it, and make gravy from the giblets and drippings.  And I'm really rather opposed to pork crackling.

Pork crackling is skin and fat that has gone crispy in the oven and it just stares up at me and says "Cardiac Infarction" and I don't like it when my food talks to me.

So anyway, The Duck.  The Danish Boy had ordered a fancy-pants duck, I think it was free-range and organic, but at the very least it was Never Frozen, from the butcher's in the neighboring village (we don't have a butcher here, although according to the sign in one of our bars he does visit on Wednesdays, but whether that's to sell his wares or to get drunk we've never quite established, I mean, a sign saying "Butcher is here Wednesday 12-4" is rather vague, don't you agree?) to be picked up on the 23rd.

When we had a white out.

I'm fairly sure that the Danish Boy had not anticipated this turn of events and even if he had, I'm sure that he fully intended on being done with work in time to go get The Duck himself, but with the white out there was a surprising little amount of news for the newspaper because everyone stayed home and you can't really write a full news spread about how no one did anything because it was bloody awful out.  So while my husband waited for someone's kitchen to catch fire (never did happen), I was left to sort out The Duck.

(At this point I should state that my MIL was completely panicking about the prospect of me out on the road and insisted that the DB would surely not wish me to do such a thing.  I mollified her by calling the DB and telling him my plans and the DB, knowing his wife is freaking AMAZING was all "right, call me if there's a problem with the butcher.")

I loaded my BIL, his girlfriend, and my SIL into the car with two shovels and we drove off.  Hey, I'm not stupid, if I got stuck in a drift I knew I couldn't dig myself out or push my car out of the snow - I'm freaking 6 months pregnant!  I drove the entire way in 2nd gear, dropping into 1st to bring the car to a controlled stop.  I did manage to get the car into 3rd when we were on our way to the supermarket in the other town on the island (hey, after a successful duck acquisition, it seemed prudent to go ahead and get the rest of the shopping done in case the snow got WORSE). I navigated by sign posts and trees, which generally mark the edges of the road, but I also had to try to remember where the road might be because in some cases the snow drifts gave the impression of bends where there were none.  This would have been easier if I drove the roads regularly or hadn't been out of the country for the last 7 weeks, but I'd ridden shot-gun enough times to remember the way.

Apparently everyone else in the car was slightly terrified and very relieved when we made it home, but Spawn and I had a blast.  We'd totally do it again!  I'm thinking that I should be one of those rescue vehicle drivers because I think the "where is the road again" game is ACE!

We (and I use that term loosely, I kept the car going and the heat on for the others, I'm all heart like that) dug a Mercedes station wagon taxi out of the snow on our way to the butchers.  We never got stuck.  We never slid.  We came home with a Christmas Duck and loads of other food, including more citrus fruit than I've ever had in my house at one time.  If anyone manages to come down with scurvy in this house, it can only be through willful negligence.  Or a surfeit of gingersnaps.

How to Become an Intolerant, Racist Asshole in One Easy Step

Step One: Work in Qatar.


I would make a joke about how tired my arms were after flying in from Doha, but I wouldn't be joking.  It took almost three days after I landed in Denmark to stop feeling like I had just spent 48 hours on spin cycle.

I was due to fly out in the wee hours of the 20th, and the 19th was one of those days that will go down in infamy as "If It Can Go Horribly Wrong, It Will and the Timing Will Be Impeccable."

First, the internet went on holiday, which is why the resulting events of the day took 3 times as long.

We discovered late late late on the 18th/in the wee hours of the morning of the 19th that people needing to leave Qatar needed an exit visa.  This can only be gotten via the Qatar Moron Authority's man-who-deals-with-visas-but-apparently-has-never-seen-one-before-in-his-life-which-is-why-we'd-all-been-issued-the-wrong-freaking-visas-even-though-he-was-in-charge-of-getting-us-visas-LAST-YEAR-so-how-could-it-be-a-completely-foreign-concept-to-him who ended up being on vacation IN SUDAN.  Since it was a holiday in Qatar, just trying to figure out WHO needs to get us exit-visas, WHAT do we need to get an exit-visa, WHERE is the man who will get us exit-visas, and WHEN IS HE GETTING BACK took ALL DAY.  Remember, myself and two others were getting on a plane at 2:55 AM, aka less than 24 hours from when all this was happening, so we were justifiably apprehensive.  The poor guy who was supposed to be on a flight on the morning of the 19th who was not allowed to leave Qatar (and thus the reason we discovered about this exit visa thing) was LIVID.  He's trying to get back to the UK for Christmas and as the airports were shutting one by one he was sitting in a hotel waiting to get his exit visa watching his chances of getting home vanish before his eyes.

We drove to Doha at 6 PM with the idea that maybe we might be able at some point to leave the country.  We were then in a car accident, because what is better than having to deal with one bureaucratic nightmare than TWO!  The Nissan Exterra was undamaged (well, we did get hit by a Ford Escort, which I know from experience are horrible little cars), we were only bumped, but we had to go to the police station and stand around for a while, during which the Qatari tried to blame us for being in the way when he crossed 3 lanes of traffic to exit the round about.  Yes, you horrible fat man, so sorry for being in your way, I am SO AWARE my position in the pecking order is below you and that it is my job to improve your country without disturbing you in any way, especially by getting in your way when you drive your little crap car like it's the freaking Indy 500!  My job was to look pregnant and American (HA HA! You need us to buy your gas and protect you from Iran, you fool, so don't piss off the hormonal chick in the maternity gear), which must have worked because we were let go without incident.  We all wished we could go and get rip-roaring drunk at that point, but we couldn't.  I was ready to get a pet pig, name it Mohammed, dress it in a burka and parade it through Doha before ritually sacrificing it to the God of Abraham, bathing in it's blood and having me a bacon sandwich.  Hormones, remember?

So we went to the souk to eat Indian food.  Just as our food came (at 10 PM because of the accident palaver), we got the call to go to the Qatar Moron Authority main building (newly finished, which means 50% of the building is non-functional, including some of the ladies' loos) because the vacationing visa man had come back to Qatar and was going to go into the office and get us exit visas.  I have never eaten Indian so fast in my life.  I had the worst acid reflux for hours afterwards.  Pregnancy, Indian, and speed eating do not mix (you can have two of the three, but not all three).  Eventually we made it to the airport in time with exit visas in hand.  Because Al (the poor Brit) had to reschedule his flight, he still had several hours to wait while we got through with no problems.  (He did make it back to England and had a lovely Christmas with family and friends.)

By the time the Danish Boy picked me up in the rental car, I'd been awake for 38 hours (I'd even worked a full day that day, moving finds crates and objects around the compound and had gotten no afternoon nap).  I'd gotten some cat naps in on the flights, but I also needed to keep getting up to pee, keep the circulation in my legs going, eat, drink water, stretch, get off my bum so that I don't get hemorrhoids again (too much information? sorry), etc.

The DB took me back to his brother's Copenhagen apartment to sleep while he ran around delivering Christmas presents.  I slept 8 hours, was woken for dinner, slept another 8 hours, was awoken to run out and buy a new old Volvo (more on that in a second).  I then drove the new old Volvo in the snowy and icy conditions back to Ærø where I pretty much collapsed and slept another 8 hours, according to the DB I didn't move once I laid down.  He even managed to vacuum and I didn't so much as budge.  I remember none of this, being asleep at the time.

I got up on the 22nd and began to run around like a loon - I bought the DB's Christmas present, food (seriously, the man had eaten us out of everything in the house - but then again, he had been busy WREAKING THE CAR - see below), and made it to a midwife appointment before everyone (BIL and GF, SIL, MIL and MIL's dog) arrived for Christmas.

MEANWHILE IN DENMARK

Before I left Qatar, I got a call from the DB that began with "I'm fine.  I'm not at all hurt.  And I'm really sorry."  He was driving back from an interview on Thursday, the 16th, when he lost control of the Volvo in the slush and ice and spun into a clump of trees.  The Volvo did exactly what it was supposed to do and which is why we will never buy anything but Volvos ever again and he walked away without scratches or even bruises.  Even the trees were fine.  But the car was a total loss.  It could have been fixed, but it would have cost far more than it was worth and almost as much as the cost of a newer Volvo station wagon in better condition.  We know because we just bought one.  The DB also pointed out that our old Volvo was due for a major re-haul this spring, which also would have cost more than the car (we were really not looking forward to that bill), so in the end the accident may have saved us some money.  I don't particularly care - I'm just so thankful that the Volvo did what it was supposed to do and saved the father of my unborn child from harm.  That's why we bough a Volvo (although HE insists it is the for the huge powerful engine), it's impeccable safety record.  I would have been heartbroken to have to sell it for scrap just because we couldn't afford to overhaul the engine or something, but to have it go out in a blaze of glory and validate it's very purpose of being was a death anyone would be proud of.

So we drove out from Copenhagen yesterday to a farm where a mechanic who's got a degenerative bone disease was selling his Volvo (he couldn't get in or out of the car comfortably any more, but had kept his Volvo in pretty good condition for a 15 year old car).  It's back to stick-shift, I'm afraid, but it's nice to know that we have a newer Volvo to protect us as we drive around Denmark.

It was very useful, for example, when I braved the Blizzard on the 23rd to pick up our free-range duck from the butchers.  But that's a Christmas story for another post...

And all that was heard was the whine of the mosquitos

So you are possibly wondering what happened to me.  No posts, no comments on your blog posts, heck, I'm not even showing up on your stats, obviously I've decided you are all horrible people and I'm never speaking to you again.

Kidding!

I have the world's most terrible internet connection.  It's rarely strong enough to check email and when it is, all eight people living in my house jump onto the shared network to try to Skype home.

As you can imagine, it slows the connection down considerably.

[Insert pity-fiddle here]

Today most of them ran off to the big city and I stayed here because I'm a fat pregnant lady who can't bear to be parted from the refrigerator and it's goodies for longer than 1/2 hour.  And look at this - INTERNET!!

I've got 10 more days in the land of camels and sand before returning to Planet Iceball, at which point I'll have internet on demand.  I'm afraid this trip hasn't resulted in oodles of pictures.  I haven't gone anywhere, so it's pretty much the house I'm staying in, which is a cement box with holes for mosquitos and cats to enter at will.  Not photogenic.  My work has mostly been the rebagging and retagging of numerous finds objects and cataloguing the odd find that makes it's way to my desk.  I have filled my bedroom with boxes of finds, so at least I feel like I'm on an excavation.  Otherwise it feels like I'm working in some sweatshop stuffing cards into dime bags along with little treats for rich spoiled men and women to gloat over in the comfort of their air conditioned offices.  Oh, wait, that *is* what I'm doing.... drat.

I'm spending a lot more of this trip with my feet up - those swollen ankles finally arrived and I'm doing my best to keep them in line.  This involves lying on the bed with my legs elevated, eating tubs of ice cream and watching Battlestar Galactica.  (Don't tell me how it ends - I've never seen it before!!)  When I get back home I'm going to have to organize some way of getting a sofa into the dining room so that I can keep an eye on the fire and keep my feet up at the same time.  I'll then switch to copious amounts of hot chocolate.  But I don't think the rocking chair is going to cut it any more.

So ladies and gentlemen, if you have a blog that I normally read, I haven't cut you out of my life - I just haven't had the bandwidth.  And readers, I'll try to return you to your regularly scheduled program as soon as possible.

Hugs and kisses to you all!

And suddenly after working only a week, we got a week's vacation

Uh, Eid Mubarak folks!

It's a holiday in Islam where you eat a lot of stuff.  I think there's some religious reason behind it and I would TOTALLY wiki the crap out of it for you and maybe even give you a link, but the Archaeospawn is stretching in a weird way and at any moment I may leap from my bed into the bathroom to either pee, pass gas, or possibly have a nice sit on the toilet for no good reason whatsoever.  Or I may get half way there and decide I need juice.  Since I'm an adult, I can drink juice when I want juice.

It's nice being a grown up sometimes.

I mean, the upside to being an adult is that you get to do what you want most of the time, the downside is that sometimes you can actually do all the things that might possibly jump into your head to do and the only drawback is that you don't have enough hours in the day and some of the things you want to do are stupid, like peeing, and no one is proud of you any more for peeing in the toilet and not all over yourself, but then at the end of the day when people are like "what did you do today" and I say "I watched a couple of episodes of Supernatural, I made French Toast for something like 8 people (maybe more, they just kept coming and I was enjoying myself), I tried to catch up on the internets, but then I got bored, I peed a lot, I had some awesome gas, I poked the baby because THE BABY STARTED IT Y'ALL, and generally lolled about the house" and then people are all "dude that sounds so dull" and I'm all "It rocked!  I did what I wanted to do!" and people are like "you wanted the awesome gas?" and I'm all "fo' shizzle" because it takes about 5 years for Denmark to get American pop culture references and I was never quick on the uptake.

But like I was saying, we only just started working and then Eid happened.  And while last year we got treated to three days of gluttony and sloth, this year we got jack because we live in run-down cinder block houses that are apparently a step up from living in tents and so we don't deserve three days in a 5 star resort spa.  I'd love to be back in a tent.  I mean, I like only having to walk 10 steps to go to the toilet and I don't have any tourists oggling me or wandering into my tent, but it is really hot inside a cinder block house that absorbs the sun like a brick oven and what with the walls around the house we don't exactly get a cross breeze.  I was originally supposed to be sharing a flat with a couple and their small daughter (age 3 or maybe 5 - who can tell, really, she's small and doesn't ever stop talking, not that I can understand her accent - where have her consonants gone to? she asked me "ca' oi 'ach a dee-eee-dee on 'or co'u'er?" and I was all "whut?" but at least I get her when she says "oor iz moi mum'ee?"- but no one gets my joke when I say "are you my mummy?" because we don't have serious Dr. Who fans this year - and I've suddenly had to child-proof my office which I wasn't planning on doing for a few years yet, but I may end up duct-taping her to the wall if she tries to help me work on my Mac again).  The flat had high-speed internet and air conditioning and a separate bathroom all for me.  So of course I begged to be moved to the cinder block palaces, with no AC, volunteered my computer to be the internet router, and said I would totally share space with anyone and everyone but please let me be in the house with my office space and near to all the folks from last year who are the main reason I wanted to come back here again and please don't make me commute, even a little bit.  I got my way.  Eight people and one toilet is not that bad, really.  And I still got my own room, strangely enough.

Anyway, so suddenly I have this week of vacation because Eid falls in the middle of the week and it's a three day holiday and the workmen realized that if they took Thursday off they'd have a whole week to go home and visit their families (and by "home" I do mean Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, etc.) and had we all known this in advance, it's possible we could have gone home ourselves, or more likely, organized a mass trip to Oman or Dubai or Bahrain, since we don't get paid until the end of the month and can't really afford to fly all the way home.  I could have gone to Cairo or Damascus!  But instead I'm going to lounge around in my own sweat here.  I am not exposing the unsuspecting expat community to my huge belly at the swimming pool (I don't care what anyone says, I'm totally grossed out by pregnant bellies and so I'm not going to show off to my veiny, hairy belly) and I can't really enjoy the expat bars, so there's not much point in me paying money to go stay in a hotel in Doha.

But honestly, lying here in my sweat?  AWESOME!  I love it.  Baby loves it.  We are enjoying not having numb bits or getting teary at the prospect of getting naked (I don't know if the spawn cries, but I'm sure spawn prefers Mommy *not* to be miserable).  And if I'm awake in the middle of the night because Someone thinks midnight somersaults are The Win, I'm not trying to stuff my sausage legs into sweats and wool socks and piling on extra wool sweaters so I can huddle downstairs in a blanket, I'm turning on the lights and sprawling half nude on the bed and reading random books.  And poking baby.  Fair's fair.  If it's exceptionally hot, I take myself out to the porch and lounge out there.  So far being hot and pregnant is winning hands down over being cold and pregnant.

So you've all gathered then that the baby is moving?  I mean, it MOVES.  I went from going "is that it?" to "sweet Jesus, I'm trying to sleep here" in less than a week.  And I can see baby moving under my skin.  In a word: creepy.  I swear to god on a stack of latinate bibles that I'm not having twins.  But I may be having a gymnast or a marathon runner (Daddy is SO proud of his little powerhouse).  It's not really interfering with work, although sometimes mid-sentence I make a random weird face because THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY BELLY (read that as Shatner's infamous line "there's something on the wing" and you'll enjoy the moment that much more).

Now I've got to toddle off and find me some more food.  We've run out of gas (damn it, why do we have the funky contraption that means we need a special gas canister instead of what everyone else is using?) and so I've been taking ingredients 'round to the other houses looking for a place to cook.  It's a good way for others to get fed, too, if I make more than I can eat, which is not really all that often, because sometimes I can really put the food away.

Boobs, Belly and Butt

I certainly can appreciate the boobs.  Okay, I’m not sure what the rest of you endowed women do all day with the things, but I’m pleased-as-all-get-out to learn.  As a long time member of the itty-bitty titty committee, I sure don’t have much room to complain about finally getting what I’ve asked for: puberty.  But WHOA, ladies, do you find them as distracting as I do?

Not asking the menfolk, I already know they distract you.  Just try to keep your eyes on my face.  I know it’s hard. *Ahem* No pun intended.

So here’s a little TMI for you all.  Because if I’m going to write about constipation and poop, you KNOW boobs are totally something I’ve got to mention.  I started off this crazy breast adventure way back at the tender age of mumble-mumble and by graduation from college I was definitely a 34 B.

Men, this may sound like a perfectly reasonable size.  It is.  There are women who would kill to be 34 B.  A 34 B should make any petite girl happy.  Alas, it does not make long tall skinny ones with knobby knees happy.  (Speaking of knees - they were bigger than my boobs.)  Had I been six inches shorter, they would have been great boobs.  As it was I was built like a runway model and moved like a cat coming out of anesthetic.  I'm only slightly more graceful than my best friend.  We both share a disturbing amount of pride in our coffee-table bruises, but I tend to not break bones when I fall down.

Flash forward a few years of hard archaeological activity.  I gained back muscle, which was sorely needed, so that my backbone no longer stuck out further than anything else on my back (seriously, I had what I thought was permanent bruising on my back from sitting in chairs, it came as a total shock when I finally had enough padding to prevent my skin from being bruised just by sitting long hours in a class room chairs and the dark purple painful patch on my back up and went away) but that threw off my boob to chest ratio and I dropped from a 34 B to a 36 A.  THIRTY-SIX A???  Oh hells no, I’m not going BACKWARDS!  Especially since I’d invested so much in Victoria Secret over the years. I may have been particularly petite in the boob department, but they were some finely dressed boobs.  A good bra helps a girl's self confidence level enormously when she isn’t, you know, enormous.

So I stopped wearing bras for a time.  I mean, what was the point?  By then I was dating my current husband, he seemed fine with the boob situation, I was a poor student and had better things to spend my money on (beer rather than bras).   But I finally gave in and bought some cheap bras in the right size ("ish", because cheap bras fit like cheap bras and I’d gone and expanded my back muscles again) because at some point a girl has got to support the girls and I was getting chapped nipples from my shirts.

Yeah, laugh, it’s true.  And I hate chapped nipples.  It’s something I get to look forward to when I start nursing and I am *so* not looking forward to that.

Last year I took some of my hard earned cash and bought a few really really nice bras.  Elle McPherson may be a fool of a model, but her bras are magnificent.

Right, so then came pregnancy.  And BOOM cazungas! 

Oh and weeks of pain.

Because boobs don’t just grow like they did when you were young (or maybe they do, seeing how I never did really get any before, I’m not sure how they are supposed to grow).  It's not this gradual increasing in size that one stands before the mirror every day trying to figure out if they're really bigger or if you've washed your clothes at too hot a temperature... again.  This is one day, no boobs, next day, engorged mammary glands.  And glandular swelling is not pain-free.  The closest I can come to comparison is the boob pain some women suffer right before their periods.  Then there was the week I switched birth control pills and had the most amazingly sore boobs EVER where I couldn’t walk without them moving and hurting and so tip-toed to the bathroom for a week while carefully holding myself still with my hands.  I switched pills the very next month and the doctors were all “well, hell yes you should switch pills, that was just awful and we’ll make a note in your file that we will never try to put you on those every again 'cause DAMN girl, that sucks.” (Only not quite like that, because the doctor was Danish and they tend not to speak in American patois.)

So it was that pain for about a month.  I wore a sports bra to bed because them sliding off my chest when I rolled to one side was waking me up and causing me Great Sudden Pain Whilst Sleeping and I'm morally opposed to GSPWS.

Eventually they settled down.

And by settled down I mean, they completely and utterly outgrew my old bras.

I was warned that they’d keep growing (thank you ladies!) and so when we went out to purchase more maternity clothes, I picked up just a few cheap bras slightly larger than what I needed.  Also we picked up some nice nursing bras that will happily expand and expand and expand about two or three boob sizes bigger than I currently weigh in at - and “weigh in at” is the right term, these suckers have got to weigh a pound each.

So here I am at a 38 B, which doesn’t sound like much until you hold the things up next to a 36 A.  The smaller bra held my tightly clenched fist (hey, I have small hands - long fingers, but small little fists, okay?) and the larger one holds, like, my head.  YES I HAVE A SMALL HEAD ARE WE GOING TO KEEP DISCUSSING MY SMALL BITS??  And you know what?  I’m outgrowing these bras.

It’s like my boobs are watching my belly expand and are going “oh, no you don’t, Ms. Bellybutton - you think you can just wander off for a good time without us?  We’re coming with YOU!” 

I am the great expanding Northern Front and nothing can contain me!

This goes for my shirts.

Maternity shirts are great.  They give you all this room for your belly and your boobs, but they are cut awfully low in the chest.  What do pregnant women who were already well-endowed do?  I’m constantly losing things down the front of my shirts.  I have got to stop leaning over and talking to people (by whom I mean “men”) and I have got to stop looking down at myself and going “HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD THEY ARE HUGE!”  Because that is on the list of things one should not shout out in supermarkets.

The belly and boobs are now big enough that they meet each other half way.  Without a bra on, this is a very odd feeling, I assure you.  (This is where the large cheasted women want to whack me, because of course this is what they feel every damn day, but for the IBTC girls, it’s crazy shit.)

So I’m a little front and top heavy.  Surely I will gain some in the back to cantilever this action?  Right??

The butt has gotten a bit bigger.  After all, the 16 lbs that I’ve gained (at least, and it’s been over a week now since I’ve weighed myself, so it could be more) can’t have just gone to boobs and belly.  But the butt is still nowhere near enough padded to handle the additional weight that is now thrusting downwards.  My tailbone is Not Pleased by this turn of events.  I’m pondering getting one of those hemorrhoid rings to sit on.  My butt continually asks me Why Why Why I must constantly be on it - sitting and lying down, even lounging is always putting pressure somewhere on my toosh. So then I stand for a while and my feet start telling me to please put the backpack with the entire Oxford English Dictionary in it down, please, please, we asked nicely, what the hell are you carrying woman, this is just awful!

So here I am, lying in bed on my day off (ah, weekend, I do love you so).  My boobs are trying to hide from each other by sliding off into my armpits, my butt is crying out in horror because I’m Still Putting Pressure On It and my belly is moving in all kinds of weird ways because we’ve gone from the Quickening to the Awakening to the Alien Presence That Will Claw Its Way Out of My Gut In the Next 48 Hours (only 19 weeks to go - whaddaya mean “it’s going to get bigger”??)

If you think this means I want smaller boobs… Are you freakin’ kidding me?  They’re AWESOME!  I just need to get used to them, learn to dress them properly (they need to pick a size first and then Oh Mercy Honey, we’re going SHOPPING!!) and stop being distracted by them (heeeeeey, look at this - BOOBS!).  I could do without the pregnancy belly.  But I suppose as that is where the baby goes (intelligent design would have given us all pouches, pouches are the way we should be doing this mad reproduction thing, I guarandamntee it), I’m sort of stuck with it for a while longer.  But a bigger butt wouldn’t be amiss.  I’m sure I’d hate it once I had it, bigger butts are harder to fit into pants and stuff, especially since I have a tiny waist (under all that baby), but to be able to sit comfortably for longer than 20 minutes… oh, that just sounds heavenly!