No, the Bella Band is not the newest indie rock band out there (a mixture of Belle & Sebastian and the Beta Band perhaps ?) but in fact is this bizarre (to me) apparatus that pregnant women wear to keep their pants from falling to their ankles. This cummerbund basically acts like an elastic band that ropes around your pre-pregnancy jeans and precariously prevents…well, the obvious. To be fair though, I have to give credit where credit is due - this ingenious contraption will probably save us a good amount on pants that Jill might wear once or twice before she’s too pregnant for them. Seriously people, that’s good money that can be spent on some other baby necessity that I haven’t even heard of yet. Crap. I almost have a Ph.D. in biochemistry and yet everyday I feel more and more clueless. 

On a related side note - I’m amazed on a daily basis that the human body can undergo the massive hormonal and physical changes that occur during pregnancy and come out in one piece. 

Three more weeks until we find out whether Jill and I should expect a girl or a boy. Exciting times indeed. 

By the way, you should check out both of those bands I mentioned earlier if you have a second.

Jill has already posted her thoughts on our first visit to the OB-GYN for little Bobby Jones, (on a side note, don’t ask me how we decided on this name for our unborn child. My best guess as to how it originated was that I said we should name him or her after someone famous from Atlanta. The first person that came to my mind was the famous golfer Bobby Jones. You should also note that this was probably a month or so before we found out Jill was pregnant…I know - we’re weird) so I thought I should post some of my own. 

First, I should paint a picture for you all as to how this went down. I’m watching TV, Jill comes in and says, “what do you think this means” and hands me that little pee stick. My jaw dropped and I looked at her and said, “you’ve got to be sh#$ing me.” Apparently she wasn’t, and now she’s four months pregnant. 

My emotions on this subject vary not with the day, but with the minute. That’s how crazy this all feels to me. And I’m not even the one who has an obscene amount of hormones running through my body. Jeez. I don’t even want to imagine how Jill feels. No wonder she goes crazy after food. I go crazy just thinking about her going crazy. I’m excited, proud, scared, jubilant, nervous, and did I mention scared? All these things happen one minute after the next.

Now things seem to have settled back into routine mundane existence. Jill teaches, I go to the lab, we come home eat dinner, go out with friends, all the while talking abstractly about an event in the now-not-so-far off future that will forever afterwards alter our existence. Jill is starting to get a little “bump” as she likes to call it and finally I think it’s starting to settle in. I somehow, not surprisingly, need this physical reminder that yes, things are going to be a little different very very soon. 

Well, we’ve arrived back from our 3 week venture through France, Italy, Austria, and Germany and while I loved every second of it, I’m more than relieved to be back in the US.  Since the slight not-so-intuitive impressions of things are always the first things to fade for me after returning from a place, I thought I’d simply write about some of those first before I really go into the meat of things we saw, travel tips for newbies (like us), and other such things. I guess these “impressions” as I’m calling them, are things I was struck by - things that surprised me, things that I longed for at home, things that I just plain didn’t expect. 

First, the pace of things, especially meals, is drastically different in the Europeans cities we visited than here in the US. Instead of a waiter bringing your main course before you’ve even finished your appetizer, it comes 15-20 minutes after he or she has seen you finish the appetizer. At first, this was somewhat frustrating. Then I realized, I have nowhere to be, nowhere to go and I should just enjoy this slower pace. As I’ve thought to myself before, the pace of things in the US is way to fast paced for me. The mentality that we always must be on the move, is one that I say I don’t prescribe to, but it took noticeable effort for me to slow down at meals, and just enjoy each other and the best conversations Jill and I have had in years. It surprised me by how much I do actually buy into that (wrong) idea that things need to be done yesterday. Then I spent three hours at one meal in Florence. So I guess I’m over this point now. 

Another thing that surprised be was how little Americans walk. For three weeks Jill and I walked everywhere. We walked to the train station, the bus station, the metro station, the grocery store, restaurants, etc. etc. etc. At first I was excited by this. I enjoyed the physical activity and the fact that we were using less fuel and so forth. After a week or so of being crammed into trains with random people I did start lamenting the fact that we would be doing this for two more weeks. Everything went much more smoothly, however, once we left Paris. I’ll have more to say on the Paris metro in later posts - I’m sure. 

I realized that even though the US has alot of problems, I really love my country. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to start wearing one of those shirts made out of an American flag, but there was just some things that you find in the US that you don’t anywhere else. Perhaps it was just the comfort of something familiar in a foreign place, I don’t know. I found myself watching CNN at night before bed just to hear people speaking in English. I ate at McDonalds for the first time in probably 5 years (don’t judge me…). I found myself missing just everyday life, my small apartment, my dog, my friends, my life as I’ve come to know it. It made me extremely thankful for all the things I have. It also made me compassionate towards the people who have not. It opened my eyes to see myself from afar and there were some things I liked and something I didn’t. This trip was a powerful experience in so many ways, most of which I probably don’t even comprehend yet. 

More posts and pictures yet to come. 

   This is an odd task, writing my first blog about pregnancy and my new role as mommy-to-be.  I’ve had this on my to do list for several days now, so I’m going to give it a shot and hope that it will get easier as I continue to write.

   I went for my first OB visit last week.  Everything was fine, which is wonderful and terrifying. 

   First we had the ultrasound - a few seconds of staring at a dark screen, then tada!  There was this little blob with a strong flutter in the middle of it, the heartbeat.  I freaked out for a second when I saw how fast it was beating, over twice as quickly as mine.  But the tech assured us that it was perfectly normal.  She also pointed out the head, body, and little arm and leg buds.  A living blob, our baby. 

   Then came the lecture and exam with our midwife, a dear friend of mine.  We heard about all the things to do and not to do, most of which I’d already read during one of my many hours of staring at pregnancy books and magazines.  We also heard about some tips for quelling my morning (or rather all day) sickness.

   Finally I had some blood drawn and signed up for visit number two.

   Seth and I are very excited about this new addition to our family, but as I mentioned above, the experience is also very scary.  What will we do for childcare?  Will I still be able to start a Master’s Degree soon?  Where are we going to put all of the new treasures that will come with this tiny person? And how will we ever be able to afford this change? 

I keep coming back to something my dad said a few years back, just after Seth and I were married.  “Babies don’t know moneyy, they only know love.”  We have joked about that for a long time, about how Dad just wants us to give him some grandkids.  But now, after lying on my bed for an hour, trying to figure out how to actually care for this child, I know that he’s right.  We surely won’t starve, and I believe that God will watch over our little family and bless us with an abundance of love.

This whole election “process” just irritates the crap out of me. Excuse my brief rant, but there are several reasons why this absolutely inane Democratic Primary should have been over a long long time ago. 

1. First and foremost, all these people have raised about a quadrillion dollars by this point in their campaigns. What is all this money being spent on? Well let’s see, first there’s all the fast food and Starbucks to keep their staff up all night blogging and surfing the internet and digging up all the littlest bit of crap about their opponents voting records, driving records, medical records, dental records, selection of vinyl records - oh wait… Still, do these people really care about this country? Now I agree that all this spending alone has probably done more to stimulate the economy than any of G.W.’s so-called “economic stimulus” plans, but the fact must be raised as to how many homeless, jobless, hungry people could have been helped if this money was given instead to some humanitarian relief fund. We see the unemployment rate sky rocketing and the r-word on the lips of every economist to grace the screen of msnbc, but according to the center for responsive politics, the Obama campaign was raising over 1 million dollars per DAY. Yes, that’s alot of money. The Clinton campaign machine was raising not quite as much, but has been keeping a close second. No wonder the country is in a slump. All of our money is going into an election process and not into the people of this country (yes - please read by sarcasm here - but it’s still something to think about).

2. The other reason is this: think about the amount of energy required to move the vast amount of people from state to state, small town to small town that this drawn out primary has used. A national primary would be far easier on the economy. While there might be more energy used for a shorter period of time, this long drawn out process of zig-zagging across the country would be out the window. Both candidates talk about our dependency upon foreign oil and our need to remove ourselves from this oppression. But how did they get to that debate tonight? How do they plan on getting the town next weekend for that huge rally? I know I’m on my soapbox here, but this is a real problem that isn’t going to go away. Our governmental officials may think that by waving their hands around in the air and talking something big, we can rid ourselves of our greed for black gold, but truth be told, it’s like taking a needle from a heroin addict. Oil runs deep in our country. We need a nicotine patch the size of Texas to put over …um…Texas. Even better, I had a friend once who was trying to stop smoking and he had this nicotine inhaler. Every time he’d want a smoke he’d take a puff on the inhaler. Well if you stood next to him, you’d get a little second-hand spray. Maybe we should just stand next to countries that are on the right track and see if we can get a little second-hand spray to ease us off our oil addiction. 

3. Don’t even get me started about the “super”delegates and all that crap.