May 2010 – LaDonnaWitmer

Making Room

mood: excited | drinking: nope

rocker

I’m minutes from leaving on a jet plane, headed off to Illinois for a baby shower my Mom is throwing for me.

But before I go, here’s a little update… the latest poem in what’s becoming known as the “Fruits & Veggies series” because the title of each poem corresponds to the fruit or vegetable that most resembles the size of the little one.

This week’s veggie is an English hot-house cucumber, according to BabyCenter.com. I have no idea what an English hot-house cucumber looks like, actually, but I’m assuming it’s on the large side, as cucumbers go.

Last week’s vegetable was a Rutabaga, and here it is, in sevenling form:

Rutabaga

We are busy making room for you, redefining
our borders and relegating sharp objects
to the safety of high shelves and dark corners.

But it seems there is not enough room for my spleen,
and my gall bladder also has been displaced, small
squishy organs summarily relocated

by the push of my ever-expanding heart.

*****

-Lo, who has a boarding call.

Nesting Instinct

mood: busy | drinking: water

hippo1

On average, I’m not doing too well with all the old wive’s tales about pregnancy. I’m not garnishing my ice cream with pickles, I’m not excessively bitchy or weepy, and I haven’t yet noticed my fingernails growing at an alarmingly fast rate.

But this nesting thing? Yeah, I’ve got that hardcore.

Even when I’m exhausted, it’s hard to sit still. I’m constantly ticking off a mental list of things I need to get done. Last weekend I painted the nursery, with the help of a couple of friends. It’s now resplendent in shades of aquamarine. (I’m going for an ocean theme, since we do live just steps from the beach.)

Boy and I sat together in the soon-to-be-nursery on Sunday afternoon and plotted out where everything is going to go. Chiffarobe over here, crib over there, bookshelf on the wall up there. My nesting instinct has forced Boy into overdrive, too.

Our house was a two bedroom, and the second bedroom was an office. But baby and camera gear don’t make the best bedfellows, so Boy got busy carving out a niche in the garage for his new office. He’s very handy like that, and his new space turns out to have even more storage than the old one.

The weekend after we returned from our adventures abroad, Boy and two of his burly pals (yes, Mike & Chris, you’re burly) moved all the office paraphernalia downstairs. And now I have this wide open space that’s going to quickly fill up with a crib, board books and a large family of stuffed animals.

I find myself sitting at work making lists of things that I’d rather be doing at home. Safe to say that my brain is entirely elsewhere. But in my defense, having a tiny person kicking your navel out is a bit distracting.

I guess I hadn’t counted on that. When I first found out I was pregnant, I thought I would continue to be a well-balanced person, with lots of other things occupying my brain. I thought my blog posts wouldn’t center wholly around what was happening inside my belly. But I was wrong.

Becoming the carrier of a whole new person, it changes you in ways you can’t predict. I mean, I’m still me. But I’m also a mother now, as hard as that sometimes is for me to believe. And the larger my stomach grows, the smaller my focus gets.

I just want to shut out the world, everyone but me and Boy and Bean (and LeeLoo, too), and hunker down inside our little house to feather a fabulous nest.

But I can’t shut out the world completely, not yet. I have three more months of paychecks to earn, an epic cinepoem to finish (one more shoot and then we start editing!), and people who need my attention.

So I’ll make every attempt not to go into complete seclusion yet.

But if I sometimes get a far away look in my eye, you would be safe to assume that I’m trying to figure out how many mermaid bookends are just overkill in an ocean-themed nursery.

-Lo, who has only purchased one set of mermaid bookends… so far.

The Babymoon Tour

mood: rested | drinking: always

alpine

Boy and I have been away. Far, far away.

Which should explain the lack of updates here. I considered writing from Prague but really, it’s better to be out there seeing the sights than sitting indoors blogging about them.

We have always loved to travel, and we vacation well together. Which is to say that vacations have typically been a pretty blissful experience for us.

Since 2009 was a crazy year, full of upheaval, change, and a new house, we figured we’d probably stick close to said new house in 2010 and not really go anywhere exciting.

And then that plus sign showed up in January, and our world went a little topsy-turvy.

So we decided that we’d take one last big hurrah before the Bean arrives. One last solo world tour, just the two of us. When Bean’s old enough, of course, we want to take her touring with us, but we know that for the next few years at least, we’ll probably be lying low.

The itinerary wasn’t too hard to figure out. We wanted to visit some places neither of us have ever been, and Prague was at the top of my list. So we connected the dots from there.

We flew out of San Francisco on April 13, landed in Frankfurt, Germany, very early the next morning, and immediately hopped a train to Munich. From Munich, we continued south to Innsbruck, Austria, then from Innsbruck to Vienna, then on into the Czech Republic to Prague, and finally back to Frankfurt to fly home. We were gone for two weeks.

The Babymoon was amazing, not only because of all the beautiful places we visited, but because Boy and I got to just hang out with each other, exploring each day as a new adventure. Truth be told, though, this trip was quite a bit different from the other times we’ve traveled internationally. Usually we don’t check out strollers and buy baby clothes.

But our first day in Munich, Boy became enamoured with the cool-looking strollers. (Europe just does baby gear so much better than the US. Everything looks so mod.) And of course, we brought a boatload of goodies home for Bean–an adorable stuffed pony from Munich, the sweetest little dress from Vienna, and an amazing marionette from Prague.

One of my favorite memories will always be the picture above, our literal mountaintop experience. While in Innsbruck, we took a funicular and two gondolas up to an Alpine peak called Hafelekar. It was gorgeous up there in the clouds, and very hard to come down.

Boy will probably remember the giant steins of beer in Munich, and I was as giddy as a little kid to see the Lipizzaner stallions perform at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Prague was full of beauty, and that’s where we decided to take a few belly shots of my 5-month bump. belly

It was an amazing time, and we’re so glad we took the trip. But now it’s back to reality–which is itself pretty damn good.

As our friend Michael said, “If you have to come home, at least you get to come home to San Francisco.”

And speaking of coming home, we got lucky with the volcano from Iceland. It erupted while we were in Austria, and of course we were keeping close tabs on all the airport closures and whatnot. We met many fellow travelers who were stuck, and marveled at the way an ash cloud from Iceland could keep everyone in Europe on the ground.

But the airport in Frankfurt re-opened on a Thursday, and we flew on Sunday, so everything worked out.

As fun as it is to leave for adventures, I’m very happy to be back home, too. And now I’ve got my plate full with some new poems and shooting part 7 of our 8-part cinépoem, The Tyranny of the Mirror. Not to mention getting ready for Bean’s arrival. So I’m not going to be bored at all.

-Lo, with vacation afterglow.