Resolutionish

-House-leaving. Including baby classes, meet-ups, whatever it is one does, and I have some promising leads on that front but am open to more suggestions. But also a bit of leaning into home-with-baby hermit-ness where needed.

-Exercise, once this is medically possible. Jogging and weights again, I guess? But also keep up with meals, which is trickier than it sounds. (I may not look Worryingly Thin - and by "may not" I mean I certainly don't, as in I was only barely able to squeeze into my usual winter coat in time to need to do so - but for baby-feeding and hangriness-avoidance purposes, this is key.)

-Move to a place with an additional bedroom.

-Maaaany writing goals, including getting somewhere with the beginnings of fiction (heh) and non-fiction (more realistic but still heh) drafts.

-Find a few hours at some point, when few-hours excursions become possible, to go to this incredibly hip-seeming and expensive-but-worth-it-looking nail salon I was planning to try pre-pregnancy but never got around to, and get something minimalist but complicated done (gel, half-moons, something along those lines), and combine this with a trip to the nearby taco place.

-Sleep for five or more consecutive hours.

Ready or not

Hello, this time from one day past my due date. This means, I suppose, that the end is in sight. Also that I feel as though I should be offering up either profundities on The Experience, or at the very least, some sort of account, public but basically for myself, of this rather key transitional life moment. But my mind isn't quite up to profound, so random-assortment it is:

-There is no "ready." In some senses everything is flawlessly lined up, and I'm old-but-not-ancient (although I certainly feel ancient), and yes, have been with my husband a long time. I have zero qualms or ambivalences about the change that's to come. But I mean! I have never been a parent before! I have never given birth before! Yes, I took a childbirth class, but that was so abstract! I have no idea what any of this is like, really, having barely been around babies, just on a practical level. I know enough to know it isn't like first getting a puppy, but if we're talking personal experiences I can relate this to, that's all I've got.

-Had thought by this point we'd be living in a two-bedroom but we are not. I want to say that this feels like (to put it in millennial terms) an adulting fail, but then I think about how I'd feel if we'd just spent our every cent on a two-bedroom the same square footage as our 1br rental, and one in a less convenient spot, and am thinking staying put for the time being may have been the way to go.

-I have not batch-cooked anything. The freezer has, like, ice cream, gnocchi, and Korean rice cakes. The car seat... I mean there is a car seat, newly-purchased and Canadian safety standards approved, but it hasn't been installed because there's no car. (Am still not entirely sure I don't want to come home from the hospital via what is, after all, a door-to-door public bus route.) But there are bags with stuff in them from lists and that's a thing you're supposed to have done. I just have to keep reminding myself that the advice online is for people who don't live in urban downtowns.

-It's not so much 'getting my body back' I look forward to as being able to reach things in cabinets. I'd anticipated the not being able to bend over thing (and... you sort of still can, it's just awkward.) But if you're already short and then can't get as close as usual to countertops or the sink or whatever, your options in the getting a glass down department quickly become limited. And fine, I also miss wearing regular pants - even if these are going to be pants in a different dress size than before (as seems inevitable, at least for a while), if they're not sweatpants or leggings, that would be a plus. Along similar lines: I'd imagined no-alcohol for nine months would be at least a bit more noticeable than it was. Meanwhile I've been so much more fixated on what it will be like to again be able to eat absolutely whatever (except romaine lettuce, I suppose, which is off-limits to all), without wondering about pathogens. I don't even mean the usual list (sushi, etc.). I just mean the ability to eat whatever and not have to think about it. OK and I also mean a very specific bagel with lox and salmon roe, sold at an establishment not that far from my apartment.

-Was listening to a BBC Woman's Hour podcast about the immediate postpartum period, which some are now calling the "fourth trimester." The guest was explaining that it's actually not super helpful to tell new mothers that they look great-as-in-healthy, because it puts pressure on them to deny any struggles. Something similar is true, I think, of pregnancy itself. Without going overboard with haranguing acquaintances for innocuous/well-meaning small talk, I'd say that... yeah, it can be frustrating to hear that you look unwell (which if you're as baseline pale as I am, plus your iron levels are so-so, you will hear, often), and to hear from passersby that you're clearly doing well, when... you haven't slept through the night in months, and have had to stop work earlier than anticipated due to almost fainting while administering a midterm. There's a binary to how these things are discussed - an easy or difficult pregnancy - that I don't think quite covers how these actually go. And it is, for obvious reasons, the "easy" bit that's easier to publicly discuss. 

Excessive loyalty

I thought I'd organized my wallet and gone through stuff on the entryway table. Wrong I was. The loyalty card situation is out of control. Sharing partly to entertain the easily entertained, partly for my own "records", as I attempt to divide into NY and Princeton piles, and to prioritize each:

-One card to the new Viennese café in town, Café Vienna, indicating my one visit there thus far.
-One stamp card for Chelsea Thai.
-One for Bent Spoon, schmancy ice cream, and principle source of amusement in town.
-Two for Rojo's, a local coffee mini-chain.
-Surprisingly, only three for Small World, the default coffee shop in town.
-One for Joe, NY and Philadelphia (never been in the latter) coffee mini-chain.
-Three for Stumptown (one for beans, two for drinks.)
-I must have once bought underwear at frou-frou-in-a-good-way Journelle, because I have a stamp card indicating as much. Unlikely to do so the 11 additional times needed for free underwear.
-One Paris Baguette bread-specific stamp card. I do like their bread, and must keep this in mind for the next trip to Edison.
-Two cards for Murray's Cheese, indicating that I've bought cheese as well as grilled cheese there.
-A card with one stamp from Kaffe 1668, the very expensive but chic café near-ish to where I lived a while ago in Battery Park City. Chances I'd be in that area looking for coffee enough to merit this card are slim.
-Two from NYU-area favorite Third Rail. Miss that place!
-One from Commune, the fabulous and reasonably-priced Japanese salon in Williamsburg where I get my hair cut.

My raw facialist says hi

-Must find this book.

-I have combed the internet and found the best blog-comment of all time: "I like the idea of making yourself get dressed every morning and putting on makeup." It's in response to some (very sensible, if tough to follow) advice on working from home, but it has a certain out-of-context hilarity.

-ITG never ceases to amaze. It turns out there's such a thing as a "raw facialist." As someone who's in more of the 'should I get this spider bite confirmed by a dermatologist or just let it be?' persuasion, I don't think I'm the audience for it, but I'm also not entirely sure what it is. I'm not sure what it means (in the G-rated sense) when someone says they've gotten a facial, either. Are they normally cooked?

My journalistic niche: the obvious

There's a ground-breaking essay in the Guardian about how, if you live in a city with good public transportation, perhaps a car-sharing service as well, you don't need to own a car. An essay which it's revealed that one of the main reasons for having one is that if you don't, other, richer kids will tell your kids that your family is poor. (Welcome to my not-poor but car-less New York childhood!) I mean, yes, if you're in a big, dense city (and I get that London's spread out a bit differently than New York), a car starts to become an inconvenience and not worth the bother. But living in a city with a reasonable subway system and patting yourself on the back for not owning a car is not unlike living in a tropical climate and congratulating yourself for not owning a fur coat. When I lived in New York (or, for that matter, Chicago), no car. Here in the woods, where there's no public transportation to vaguely near where I live, not even a bus... car, finally, and thank goodness.

In other ground-breaking news, today I made the miraculous discovery that a pair of new (all-cotton! yet non-mom!) jeans that fit just right apart from gaping in the back did not need to be taken in, but rather to go through the dryer for the first time. For the best, given that this was the most I'd spent on jeans by such a long shot, even before the shipping and hemming. Also for the best that I didn't get this done when I got them hemmed - and I had been regretting this - as I now wouldn't be able to close them.