Sleeping In

As a kid, this rhyme didn’t make sense to me:

Elsie Marley’s grown so fine

She won’t get up to feed the swine

But lies abed till eight or nine.

Lazy Elsie Marley!

Eight or nine did not seem that late to me (school days excepted, I suppose). Obviously, I did not grow up on a farm.

This year, I don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn or before dawn to catch a bus to my university. The pregancy makes me tired. I wake up in the middle of the night with stomach aches and go back to sleep. So, I’ve been sleeping in. I only set my alarm if I have to get up for an appointment or for yoga. And it feels decadent to sleep so late–9 o’clock–that I miss Morning Edition on NPR.

I Didn’t Forget That Time

I posted the “Men, Women, and Children” yesterday, I’ll have you know. It’s just that the wordpress timestamp is still on daylight savings time. Humphh.

Men, Women, and Children

Every now and then, a discussion will start in the infertility blogosphere or the feminist blogs about why women wait to have kids, if they do, and whether they should. Since women’s fertility declines more with age than men’s, the issue is usually the women.

In my case, I didn’t meet Mr. Luo until I was 35, and we got married when I was 37. I planned to start trying to get pregnant immediately, since I figured I was too old to wait for some ideal amount of time together just for the two of us. Circumstances intervened, and we have had three years of being married without children-almost four by the time my due date rolls around.

Most of my women friends who want kids have had them. My dissertation group consisted of four women from two departments. The other three all got married to men who were also graduate students towards the end of their grad school careers (to other grad students), and each of them has two kids now. My cohort in my department consisted of four women and one man (an unusual gender balance at the time). I’ve lost track of the guy. The other three women married men who were also graduate students at some point before finishing. One of them women, as far as I know, is not planning to have kids. The other two have kids already. These women are all either my age or younger.

Mr. Luo is about two and a half years younger than me, but got out of graduate school a couple of years before me. Of his group of male friends from graduate school, only one has one child (and it took Mr. L a couple of weeks to remember that after I asked him if any of them had kids). I’m not sure of the age range of the group, but it includes at least one man who’s rather older than Mr. Luo, if I recall correctly.

After thinking about it, I’m wondering about the grad student specificity of my examples. Of the friends I am still in contact with from (undergraduate) college, who are all my age, one woman got married a few years after graduation and is now a divorced mother of two; one woman married a few years ago and has two kids; one woman is recently married, and I have no idea whether she wants to have kids; another woman friend is unmarried and childless/childfree; a male friend is also unmarried without kids.

One reason that I can’t draw good  conclusions from the undergrad friends is that I don’t see or talk to these friends enough, or maybe I’m just not close enough to them now, to know what their plans or dreams or frustrations or tragedies related to potentially bearing, adopting, or aquiring through marriage any (more) children; that is, I don’t know if the ones who don’t have kids want any or not.

Remember: “the plural of anecdote is not data” as the cliche goes.

Cilantro Pesto

A while ago, when I was going to make soup, I bought two bunches of cilantro when the recipe called for one. Rather than just stick the extra in the soup, I asked Mr. Luo to check Cook’s Illustrated online for a cilantro pesto recipe, because I remembered seeing a few there when I was looking for basil pesto recipes. He had forgotten that we still had an online prescription to Cook’s, so he just did a search and came up with this recipe for cilantro pesto, which I recommend.

Forgot Again

Another NaBloPoMo failure.

I did work on a post yesterday, but I wanted to review it before posting. Then I finished cooking dinner, and we watched a video, (”Lost in Translation”: thumbs down), and I forgot. I’ll save my anecdotes about gender difference and age of childbearing/fathering for another day.

Thanksgiving has knocked me back into a lot of fatigue. Not as bad as 7 weeks ago, but still. Yesterday, I thought I would have a relaxing day. After my prenatal yoga class, I was planning to write Christmas cards while I made turkey stock and turkey soup. Instead I mostly lay on the guest futon (still on the living room floor weeks after the departure of our guest) napping and reading a newly re-published bit of Heinlein juvenalia (Red Planet). I did manage to get most of my laundry done between naps.

Recap

Thanksgiving went well. Low key.

We didn’t have guests because I didn’t know ahead of time if I’d be able to stay awake all day, much less entertain. Turns out I made it most of the way through TG supper before making my way over to the futon for a nap. Since my stomach capacity is currently much smaller than my husband’s, this worked out well; he cleaned his plate while I rested.

We had thought about going out, or cooking something non-traditional, but the thing is I like turkey and cranberries, and gravy and so on, and I like cooking it, and I like eating the leftovers and making turkey soup. And, since I’m not teaching this year, I had time to spread out the preparations. I figure the Thanksgiving when I am teaching and have a five-month old kid will be a good year to go out for dim sum and give thanks.

Our menu:

Thankful

1. My family members are relatively healthy. I really mean this, despite the incurable progressive genetic disease problem. Everyone is okay at this moment.

2. My pregnancy is healthy so far. Because I am a rational person, I know that writing that sentence won’t really jinx it.

3. I have a good job with benefits.

4. I am slightly more hopeful about politics than I was a month ago.

5. I am not depressed. If I were depressed I couldn’t have written this list, tentative phrasing and all.

The Day Before

[NaBloPoMo note: I backdated this, but only because it didn't publish Tuesday night when I tried to post it.]

I did the first couple parts of the gravy recipe. I’d probably have time to do it tomorrow while the turkey’s in the oven, but this means I can get out of the way when Mr. Luo is doing the stuffing and cranberry sauce.

I brined the turkey.

I made a pie. Ginger-pumpkin with struesel on top.

It didn’t seem like a stressful day-I didn’t yell at all while making the pie crust, because I’ve gotten a lot better at rolling it out-but I didn’t get out of the house except to check the mail, which means I didn’t go swimming although it was a beautiful day for it.

Preferences

Note: I believe this post qualifies for the category of “things I might decide against posting if it weren’t for NaBloPoMo.” If you are really lucky, I will post the history of my hair before the end of the month.

Things Mr. Luo would rather do:

1. He would rather clean out the kitty litter box than review our finances. This is a man who when he lived alone, cleaned out the litter (one box for two cats) about once a month. Of course, he would also leave the mail unopened until the unpaid bills accrued late fees and the telephone got turned off, which is why I do all the finances now. All I wanted to do was review our financial situation with him at a previously-agreed-upon time, and he still went running for the cat room.

2. For Sunday afternoon cleaning, he chose to clean months of accumulated dust-turning-to-dirt off all the windowsills and transom-sills in the house rather than clean the bathtub. I wrote “dust me” in the dust on one of the sills in the stairwell a couple of weeks ago to shame myself into doing it, but when push comes to shove, I do the basics first: kitchen, bathroom, floors. Mr. Luo would usually rather do the non-basics. He’d sharpen the knives every week if he could. I am so inept at knife-sharpening that I don’t mind him getting out of cleaning something to do it, but it isn’t necessary that often.

Oh, our deal is that we both clean for an hour and a half on Sundays to keep the basic housecleaning under control. We alternate who does the bathrooms and who does the floors. This is not actually enough to keep the house clean (hence the dust-dirt problem) but covers the most urgent stuff. It would be easier if the cats helped out, but they are content to shed on the furniture and barf on the carpet without contributing anything to cleaning. Our carpets are a disaster, and I want to pay for a professional steam cleaning, but it seems complicated, so I have never gotten around to it.

I Am So Efficient

Not really. It’s all relative.

1. Because I was late for yoga class, I decided to go to the nearby gourmet supermarket, where I had a hot chocolate and did most of my Thanksgiving grocery  shopping, though I still need the turkey. (I’m holding out for one that is both small in poundage and organic, so I will check the mega-gourmet-organic place too.)

So, not so efficient about getting to yoga, but points for the shopping.

2. I called three medical offices: to schedule the amniocentesis, to schedule a dentist appointment for Mr. Luo, and to schedule an appointment for him with his new primary care physician.

Aside from the wifey-ness of scheduling my husband’s medical appointments (let’s just say he is even worse about getting these things done than I am - he hasn’t seen a dentist in the five years I’ve known him), I am peeved that both the doctor and the dentist had appointments available only two weeks from now. As I recall, I had to wait a lot longer to get my first appointments with them. Also, the doctor’s scheduling person called back a lot faster than she ever called me back for myself. Is it him, is it that he doesn’t have to schedule around work, or is December just a lot slower for these people?

I hate phone calls, so making three counts for something.

3. Sent email to the high school student/Early Decision applicant that I am supposed to interview for my alma mater. This counts as efficient because I just got the email asking me to do the interview today, and because last spring I managed to schedule my student interview for a date after my interview report was due.

-1. You may notice that none of the above examples of efficiency are related to my paid employment.