Cognosco

I’m leaving tomorrow on a 2 and a half week road trip. There’s piles of "stuff" all over the house in various degrees of packed. I am ridiculously giddy.

I’ll try to post frequently from the road.

I described how I feel about driving once over here. 

Woot! woot! 

So, apparently, Tuesday was my very first blog-o-versary. I discovered the blog world when I was looking for info on homebirths. I was led to Jeanette’s blog, and then Leigh’s blog, and MB’s blog. Then I followed their links. And then those folks’ links. That was back when I could stay up until three in the morning without someone being up for the day two hours later.  And then I had the makings of an addiction. So I decided to start one myself. I don’t know how many readers I have. My stats say lots of people come here, but only a handful leave comments, and I don’t understand all of the stats anyway. But at the very least I have a nice record of the last year of my life.

I went back to read the first few posts, and I find it hard to believe that I had ever thought I would willingly have a hospital birth. I look at the belly pictures, and am amazed that that bump is now the monster pulling up on my chair, grabbing at my computer cord, and conducting all sorts of physics experiments (a.k.a. throwing, dropping, and banging things).

I find it hard to believe that there was a time in my life when I didn’t know M and C, my sweet and loving midwife team. It’s even harder to believe that I didn’t know the wonderful mama friends I have made in the last several months as a result of this blog. That alone has made any time I have put into this so worth it.

I am currently working on (or perhaps, not working on) a paper for a "Child Language and Drawing" course. It is the last thing that I need to finish for the semester, and so rather than pay it any attention in the last three days, I am of course starting the paper now. The course was really interesting and much more challenging that I had anticipated. A lot of debates about different theories of language and how children begin to recognize words as distinct meaningful units of sound and such. One of the things we talked about was that for a long time, a lot of researchers thought you had to talk directly to an infant/toddler and emphasize a word for the child to learn and understand the word. More recent studies show that even if the toddler is just present for a conversation and seemingly not paying attention, the toddler learns the new word. Well, duh. How many times have you heard a story about a precious 18 month old using their new favorite word, fuck, or its equivalent. I’m quite certain that most parents don’t devote a lot of time to making sure their kids learn how to swear, but magically, they learn to do it on their own.

So, my project is looking at cross-cultural differences in children’s drawings. I was hoping to find studies that would maybe show whether or not there are certain universals that children do in different cultures before their drawings take on culture-specific images and properties. Alas, I have had no such luck. So now I am sitting here with a pile of largely unrelated articles trying to brainstorm about how they fit together. Or that is what I was doing before I started procrastinating here. 

Went to meet with a midwife yesterday. I am interviewing another tomorrow. I was completely blown away with the difference in the "office" of this midwife versus any doctor I had been to. It was more like a home. I wish I had known sooner how big the difference really was. 

A good friend of mine blew through town yesterday. We were good friends in junior high and high school. Then, adulthood happened, and we sort of lost track of one another. Finally got in touch last spring and emailed a decade’s worth of stories to each other. Funny how with some people, it really seems like no time has passed. I went to stay with her overnight in Yuma last summer, and it was so comfortable. I really missed that feeling. We did a whole bunch of tequila shots that night. Here’s a tip. Get yourself some orange wedges and cinnamon sugar. Lick it, slam it, suck it, just like if you had salt and lime. It is soooo tasty. It might seem gross, but seriously, it is the only way I can do tequila shooters, and it makes a fantastic holiday-time shooter. We did those shots Friday night and stayed up all night talking. When my hangover lasted until Sunday (and we didn’t drink that much), I decided to take another pregnancy test. I had taken one the previous Thursday. In my impatience, I didn’t wait the full time on the Sunday test, and just went, "oh, of course not, whatever". When the hangover then lasted until Monday, I took another one (this was becoming an expensive habit…). It was positive. I dug Sunday’s out of the trash, and there I saw a very, very faint little line that I would have noticed had I waited the full five minutes. Oops. Needless to say, that was the last time I did shooters…and I have craved citrus constantly through the pregnancy. The way I see it, little babe was probably implanting that night…hope s/he likes oranges.

So I hadn’t seen my friend again until yesterday, when she was on her way home from the Prescott area. She stopped to see the new house (hubbie and I bought our first house a few months ago) and we had a cozy little breakfast and it was really nice to see her. I have asked her to come up for the birth, even though I have other girlfriends, she’s the one that I most want to be here with me. I never would have thought that when we met (oh my god) 16 years ago that she would some day see the birth of my baby.

Okay, back to work.