this must be the place

On the Sunday before Scott was born, we witnessed the wedding of two sweet kids (jk!) at our church, and attended their lovely reception, both of which of course gave us opportunity to reflect on our own marriage (see how selfish people are? I'm not sure it's a bad thing, though.)

We hadn't been to any weddings since our own, three and a half years ago. If you look at the pictures taken right after the ceremony, you'll see us looking extremely stoned and confused, hardly smiling at all. That's because we were floating in a haze of incomprehension and joy (the sober, unsmiling kind.) I told my husband that I was glad to attend another Orthodox wedding so that I could finally listen to the words (and was it just my parturient brain, or are all the prayers about having babies??) When we were getting out of the car at the reception one of our friends said "Hey, we found the program from your wedding in our service booklet." We said "We had a program?" That's how little attention we were paying to the details. It was a slapdash sort of affair, just a church service with gyros and an iPod afterward. I wonder if people thought it was a shotgun wedding. Nope, we was just anxious to get hitched before Lent.

At the reception as we were dancing, we realized that among the many other nuptial conventions that we did not observe, we did not have a "first dance" as a couple, nor did either of us dance with our parents. I guess we would have felt silly, but I don't know why because I like it when other people do it. That started us wondering what song we might have chosen for a first dance. The problem, we decided, is that most of our favorite touching songs range from wistful and bittersweet to downright tragic, and people definitely listen to the words in these situations.

This is the most appropriate song that I can come up with. And we did dance to it at our wedding, but with all of my drunk or eleven year old siblings and father, and Matt's sister, and my best friend from college, at the very end of the wedding when everyone else was cleaning up, and we just played all the Talking Heads songs that we had in iTunes. It was awesome.

I've been putting off this post for two weeks because I thought it should be amazing, but that is how things never get done.

Well, I had a lot of ideas about what I was going to do while I was waiting for my baby to come. I finished work three weeks before the due date and I was convinced, based on family history, that I would go to 42 weeks and deliver a 12 pound freakin' baby. So I planned to swim a lot, do some romantic stuff with my hubz, read this and that, write up the birth plan, buy diapers and stuff, work on my baby shower registry, write in my journal a lot, etc. One thing we did immediately after I quit working was attend a birth class with seven or eight Amish couples, so Matt finally knew about things like cervices and uteri and perineums. Whew. (Foreshadowing)

After two full days of freedom from work, I waddled through Wal*Mart etc and gathered up all the supplies I needed for the birth. I wrote a blog post about it (see below.) Then I furiously tidied the room in which we planned to have the birth pool. It was full of camping stuff and golf clubs and it had been a load on my mind. I sighed in relief, feeling pretty much ready for my midwife's 37 week home visit which was to occur the next day (more foreshadowing,) and went to try on my new swimsuit bottom, for the purpose of all the swimming I was about to do. During this process, I felt that the swimsuit was quite wet, and thought "how embarrassing! well I certainly can't return it now," assuming that I had peed my pants, which happens a lot to pregnant women there at the end, I guess. The funny thing was that I had personally never peed my pants during this pregnancy, and it was rather a lot of liquid, much more than my bladder contained. Well, I continued "peeing my pants" for about a half an hour until I finally poked my head in to the room where Matt was serenely reading Rousseau or something, and querulously announced, "Umm... I think my water has broken?"

Thank God for that birth class. Long bloody messy rather painful story short, 29 hours later, we met this guy:

Scott Maximos; 8 lbs 15 oz; May 22

and what can I say? He's perfect. The last two weeks have felt like life on a new planet.

The labor itself was certainly the hardest thing I've ever done, but also undoubtedly the best. And it wasn't really as bad as I thought it would be. I only had a couple flickering moments of panic ("IS THIS HELL") but otherwise I felt emotionally capable, well prepared, and supported by people I loved and trusted. And just as Christ says, she forgets all about the pain, because of her joy that a new person has come into the world.

So I guess the blog has come full circle. I started it to chronicle my observations during an internship with the midwife who attended my delivery. Then I kept it around for five years and continued doodling in it. And now I have a baby delivered by the same midwife (well, delivered by me, but you know what I mean.) It would be a dramatic time to quit blogging but I don't have any plans to do so. Just wanted to mark the occasion and acknowledge that I do recognize the literary appropriateness of such a gesture.

I should just wear a sign.

IT'S DUE JUNE 11

OH YOUR BIRTHDAY IS IN JUNE TOO?

YEP IT'S GONNA BE A SURPRISE

IT IS INDEED MY FIRST CHILD

IT'S PROBABLY NOT TWINS I'M JUST 37 WEEKS PREGNANT (you fool!)

Jk. People are just being sweet. I understand that when they see someone who obviously has a life-size baby inside of her, they want to interact. There is something special about the sight, especially if you've experienced it yourself. And I try to maintain a generally approachable countenance in public, so people talk to me a lot. One just gets a little tired of saying the same thing over and over again. I can't make it through the grocery store without having the same conversation at least three times, whether I see people I know or not!

You don't see a pregnant woman who is practically at term every day, so the size can be a little surprising. Even I am surprised when I wake up in the morning. Matt is taken aback at times too, and my brother has done a double-take every time he's seen me for the past few months. The last time he kind of nervously asked if this was normal. It's funny that he's always surprised because I feel like my mom was always 8 or 9 months pregnant when we were growing up... and with babies ranging from 9 to almost 11 pounds, she got BIG. (Mother of God.... please.)

I think I've gathered almost everything needed for the birth. (Still need a few receiving blankets, and we need to figure out how to fill the birth pool.) I was a little self conscious about checking out at Wal*Mart with my collection of towels, hydrogen peroxide, olive oil, adult diapers and, ahem, aquarium fish nets, but whatever. I'm very excited about finding a Boppy and an unopened sitz bath at Goodwill! Don't laugh at me. There's so much indignity involved in this Majestic Miraculous Event.

My embarassingly enthralling series is available to be checked out as audio books online from my library! I'll see how I like listening to it around the house. There is another library patron who is reading them at the same pace as me; perhaps slowing down to listen to this book will give me enough of a lag so that he or she will get ahead (and thus return the book so I can read it.)

Here is the latest progress on my icon. It is modeled after Panselinos' "Christ Enthroned."

I haven't been taking pictures at each step for this icon because the camera on our ancient Android broke and I'm too lazy to get our even older digital camera working. I think in the future I will wish that I had taken pictures, because I'm using a different method than I did with Sts. Katherine and Nicholas. My teacher (I'll just call her Mother because she's a nun and she doesn't want to have an internet iconography presence) was a student of Ksenia Pokrovsky for several years, so in class we used Ksenia's techniques, which employs many many different pigments, takes a very long time, and to me, felt a bit arcane. Of course the results were always beautiful, but it was a pretty complicated process.

But whether by providence or coincidence, Ksenia's passing in June 2013 (Вечная память) occurred just as Dr. George Kordis came to town to paint, lecture and teach. So Mother took it as a sign that perhaps she was being given a new mentor, and she's taken off like a rocket. Kordis' method is much faster, only uses 4 pigments, and I personally find it much more intuitive. Modeling volume quickly with a dry brush makes more sense to me than slowly building up layers with thick wet paint and sitting around waiting for it to dry. And limiting the palette to four pigments means not only that I can afford to paint at home, but that mixing colors is simply a matter of ratio. With Ksenia's method, you could have a medicine cabinet full of pigments, and you'd just have to know how each one behaved in the presence of other pigments. The way of four pigments makes a lot more sense to my geometrical brain. I feel much more confident about being able to do this by myself at home than I was with Ksenia's method.

Mother says that Ksenia would say all this Is Outrage. But we honor her memory and move on.

Another nice thing about this is that Kordis is an academic, and has written books which we can read at home, and flits around lecturing. There's a lot more information available for his method.

To the tune of "Woke Up This Morning" by Blind Whoever:

Woke up this morning
Woke up this morning
Woke up this morning
I couldn't breathe
So I made a calzone

Well, there wasn't anything else to take to workschool (I never know which to call it) for lunch, and not being able to breathe was making me too mad to stay in bed!

Not to complain, but, to complain: sleeping (and actually, satisfying most basic bodily needs) is hard when you're eight months knocked up. Allergies on top of that just feels grossly unfair. (As I told my dad last night when he said "poor thing" to me, "Not being able to inhale makes it hard to inhale tacos.")

Suffering from allergies during the month before one's due date is not as unfair as being thrust into labor by vomiting due to influenza, which memory my supervisor recently shared with me. Good grief.

Anyway, I like being up early, and now I have a calzone.

Well I went ahead and got the sequel to Outlander from the library. There's more political intrigue and less romance, but don't worry, it's in France, so the political intrigue is necessarily a little... tu sais ce que je veux dire... 

I'm off lunch duty this week and here at the end of the year, the kids are just messing around and playing games on the computer during my classes. They don't really need me for much besides caps lock troubleshooting... so I'm probably gonna burn through this one during my last three days of school. (Bad teacher! Come and see the apathy inherent in the system!)

catalog of grievances

Delirious with allergies! Cannot take medicine because there is a person inside of me! Finished with smutty fantasy novel, to the detriment of my sore, scratchy eyeballs! Took an unpaid day off from work hoping to recover, but the pollen blizzard has no cure! Would like to protect myself from the swirling yellow breeze but don't want to turn on terribly inefficient air conditioner! Toilet is gurgling ominously!

But I enjoyed finishing the novel, and slept until 10. My nightgown is more comfortable than whatever I would have worn to work, a nice cup of coffee has made my head ache a bit less, I haven't had to strain my voice to speak to any children who don't listen to me anyway, and the lethal breeze is very pleasant. The toilet is another matter but whenever it stops working I realize how much I appreciate it.

I don't know if I'll keep going with the rest of the Outlander series. I enjoyed the first one, but I don't know if continuing the binge will be as pleasant. (See post on coffee below.) As I was making my way to its shelf in the library, I passed the E section, from which George Eliot reproached me sternly. One of the books had her horsey old face on the spine, right there at eye-level. You haven't read Adam Bede, or The Mill on the Floss, or my translations of Nietzsche. Are you sure you have time for such utterly feminine frivolity? Are you really going to read a book that includes a CD recording of the Broadway musical? I told her that not all of us held to our aesthetic principles as naturally and easily as she did, but I can't say I walked away without a pang of guilt. Oh well, she was ugly, I decided in a base and savage moment. But I do love her, so I will return. But I won't apologize to her for reading Outlander because she didn't even exist when it was written so she doesn't get it.

What's another big fat novel, whether smutty or respectable, to enjoy during the next few weeks, if my eyes ever stop watering? Don't say Ulysses, or Recherches du Temps Perdu, and Tom Clancy is right out. I've already read Kristin Lavransdatter. I could do War and Peace again, or another George Eliot. But it doesn't have to be a Great Book. I don't mind if there's a bit of time travel and sex involved.