What are you doing, 'col?

Well, I'm doing laundry, which hardly bears mentioning, since I'm always doing laundry. Unless I've given up on the laundry, in which case spook is doing it. This morning he said that he had put in all the laundry last night, and I thought no way, and then I discovered that all the laundry did not include the two sets of sheets and mattress pad that have been waiting to be washed, oh, since Jacob was born. I don't want to diminish his achievement; there was a lot of damn washing to do. He also washed all of the bottles and all of the breastpump paraphernalia, no minor feat. So today I'm trying to get through the aforementioned sheets, and to assemble all the diapers and put them away. For ten seconds we could have clean diapers.

Can we talk about cloth diapers for a second? They are not nearly the nightmare that I was afraid they would be. When I told Adam about it, he said "You're doing all that folding?" Incredulous, wide-eyed. I know there are people who do all that folding and think nothing of it, but I am not of that tribe. No, in fact, we bought the BumGenius diapers (I am embarrassed just typing that), a diaper described to us (more embarrassment coming up) as "the Cadillac of diapers." No lie. These are pretty awesome, and totally straightforward, a big plus for me since when the Diaper Lady was demonstrating prefolds for us, I realized that I would need a degree in engineering just to understand how the damn thing was supposed to go together. The other big factors in the ease of our cloth diaper experience are:

1) Flushable liners. You wouldn't think this would matter much at the infant poop stage, but they cut down on the rinsing.
2) A spray head for our laundry sink tap. Thank you, Jenny. Before this I could not get the water pressure high enough and had to scrape poop out of the diapers by hand. (Ew. I know. But babies are gross, so stay with me.)
3) Laundry in our apartment. I cannot stress this enough.

The other thing I've been doing lately is reading a lot about food. I just finished Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. He says in the introduction that he wrote it after The Omnivore's Dilemma was published partly in response to the reader questions he received: now that you've done all this research about food production, what do you think we should eat? What do you eat? So it's two parts critique of the way nutrition science filters into the public imagination and one part his guidelines about what he thinks makes sensible eating. His ideas feel possible to adopt, unlike the dogmatic and rigid thinking which makes up so much of food discourse. Instead of feeling squashed by impossible standards, I came off the end of this book feeling inspired to change our food habits--both shopping and eating.

she's a jukebox with a knack for fighting

Oh, the things I would like to blog about--I would like to tell you that I'm methodically working my way through my packing, making sensible decisions, scheduling the cleaning that needs to be done around here--but that's spook. I am mostly staring in dismay at the boxes, bereft of any sense of what needs to go in them or how to go about it. Or, in the rare occasion when I know exactly what needs to be packed and how, void of motivation to do it.

I hate transition periods. I want to be in the new place, already, and then we could unpack things. That part is not so bad.

Similarly, I'm impatient with my pregnancy. I should say that things have gotten better. Both the nausea and the dizziness have passed, and it wasn't until they were both gone that I really knew how exhausted I've been for the last four months. I have a personality again, and the resources to look for the positive in things, whereas when I look back I can see that I was coasting on the habit of cracking jokes about the things that make me want to cry. Now I'm happy to see people. I can think about something other than how wretched I've been feeling. So aside from the fact that all my connective tissues are loosening up, which means that if I stand for any length of time it feels like someone is taking a chisel to my pelvis, I'm doing pretty well. (For those of you who wonder about it: try not to be working in retail sales when you're pregnant. Every frustrating limitation will directly impact your ability to do every aspect of your job. I'm just saying.) I think it's a good sign that I feel better enough to feel antsy. I want to meet the shrimpbaby--on the outside. We have seventeen weeks to go. (I checked; I keep screwing up the count and thinking we're farther along than we are.) I am trying to be grateful that we've got the time; after all, there are nine million things to do between now and then.

nom nom nom

It's not all throwing up and fainting and complaining about how my clothes fit, 'round here at Newly Human--some of it is waxing rhapsodic about the grocery store near our new apartment. We went over today to measure some room sizes and sign our lease, and on our way home we stopped by to do a sample shop.

From a neighbourhood grocery where icing sugar and veggie burgers have both been known to qualify as a "frill," we are moving to one where the No Frills has live Tilapia, a butcher's counter, and seven kinds of ready-to-bake pies (four if you want them in the "pie for two" size). They have bean curd in hot chili oil, they have Mole in jars, and cans of tomatillos, they have fancy snack nuts. About halfway through our shopping spook started giggling helplessly and widening his eyes at me, like can you believe this shit?

This in addition to a Sobey's right around the corner and about six fruit stands within a ten-minute walk, two coffee shops selling fair trade beans, a cheese shop and an organic meat store. It is food heaven.

those garden pictures I've been promising you

Well, some of 'em.

things that grow

I am sunburned and dirty, but perhaps ready to try posting a little more. No, I have not fallen down a hole; no, I have not been eaten by wolves; no, I have not been abducted by aliens--you all know I just disappear for weeks on end sometimes. This has been one of those times.

spook and I have been gardening, or pre-gardening, really--turning over the soil and sprouting seeds for things that have to germinate inside first before you put them in the unforgiving earth, and digging up a whole new bed along the other side of our backyard. For a yard with a pitiful, uneven scratch of grass in it, there sure are a lot of root systems. We will be growing tomatoes and zucchini, spinach, basil, thyme, rosemary, lavender, peas, sweetpeas, phlox, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and raspberries, as well as taking a stab at corn because we thought it would be hilarious. Well. I should say we'll be attempting to grow these things. I am under no illusions that they will all grow, but I'm trying to remain optimistic.

I'm also having conversations with the kids next door as I diligently but inexpertly prune raspberry canes, weed, etc. We've talked about compost and when/why it's not stinky anymore and vitamins in the soil and how I'm not sure about all the things I'm doing but I'm reading books to learn about them. So far, so good.

the country where we sleep, hopefully better

We bought a mattress! We kind of didn't intend to--we just went in to Sleep Country "to look." But realistically, who "looks" at mattresses? We lay down on a lot of them at the behest of our very enthusiastic salesperson. And, eerie moment, after the first one she said "I love the communication, the way you're looking at each other right there, but I want to know what each of you think. It's important that you're both comfortable." Uh, dude, that's totally what our marriage counsellor said. She was some kind of Mattress Jedi. And then she found us the model we liked which had been ordered for a floor model for another store, but was too big. So it was brand new, but being sold at the floor model price, which was four hundred dollars cheaper.

So yeah, we're gonna have a real bed. Woohoo!

hot water and Kitty Jesus. never a dull moment.

Hot water update: spook came home and looked at it with me, and he managed to find--get this--a youtube video explaining where the pilot light was located and how to light it. Who says the internets can't teach you anything? So, several hours later, we had hot water again.

I was also supposed to tell you about the dream I had wherein Bird (one of our many cats) was playing the role of Jesus Christ in a pageant. To that end, he was towing a little wagon full of buckets of goulash. ("Was he feeding the poor with it?" E asked, incredulously. Yes. Yes he was. My subconscious is like that, okay?) This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been worried he was going to wake up Adam and Miche and their many, many children...who were apparently already up to surprise their parents by installing the shelves that they had built with my grandfather...

Fortunately, her mom can craft...

Tonight I finally got up the nerve to try sewing together the sweater that I knit for my niece. I think we can safely say that she will not be wearing this sweater any time in the forseeable future, unless she has some freaky incident with a bicycle pump.

It may, with a little tweaking, work as a shortie jacket for me.

"It fits me. It's my size."
"Yeah, but you're really small."
"Okay, but--let's say for the sake of argument that I'm the size of a six year old child..."

Ah, crafting failures: how would I know who I am without you? It's okay, I'm regrouping, principally by...burning dinner.

just put your hands in the air and back away slowly

I am not the world's greatest cook. Despite this, I've had some minor successes recently, and plan to go on having them. Tonight, however, I have been completely defeated by pork souvlaki, which might not be embarrassing if it was not the kind that comes already set up.

How does one go about fucking up pre-marinated meat on sticks?

Everyone has a skill.