It was a lovely weekend. We did family stuff instead of work and schoolwork. Ian and I even managed to go on a date.

Saturday morning we met Kelly and Ambrosia and Kelly’s mom, Anna, down in Old Sac to ride the Christmas Train. Santa was on board and each kid got to visit with him for a moment or two. Lucas told Santa his top-two wished for Christmas gifts: a two-wheeled bike (with training wheels) and a box of costumes (firefighter, doctor, cop, race-car driver, etc.), which he saw in a catalog. As Lucas watched Santa approaching down the center aisle of the train, his eyes lit up with glee and anticipation. I guess four and a half is probably the ideal Santa Claus age.

After the train ride, we finally did a tiny bit of shopping, then went to my parents. They gave us two tickets to see Throwing Parties at the B Street Theatre and provided babysitting, too. Ian and I joyfully drove back downtown in the pouring rain to see the show. Unfortunately it pretty-much sucked. I’ve seen original Buck Busfield Xmas plays before and they’ve been good in the past. Alas, this one missed the mark completely.

However, the play made for enjoyable and snarky dinner conversation while we dined at the Tower Café afterward. It’s so nice to be (1) out on the town, (2) with my main squeeze, (3) without our 4-year-old Napoleon trying manfully to order us around and prevent us from speaking to each other. Having four whole (waking) hours together without interruptions was postitively blissful.

Sunday morning’s break in the rain prompted us to venture out to get our Chrsitmas tree. We drove to Davis Ranch just beyond Sloughouse Inn on Jackson Highway to choose and cut a tree. It’s a very flat and muddy tree farm. In biting mist, we tromped through the muck to find the right tree. I placed my normal, rather-perfectionist notions about Christmas trees on the back burner this year. At Davis Ranch, trees are only $35 for any size or type. I figured if it was green and $35, it would be just fine, no matter what it looked like. We were pleased to find an attractive, large tree. Lucas amused himself by slopping through the mud and splashing in puddles. He got both feet stuck in a particularly sticky, gloopy mud puddle and couldn’t get out. I went to rescue him. We got Lucas out, but not the boot. He put his sock into the mud, then stood on one foot leaning up against me. I was crouched down, leaning over to reach his stuck boot. I don’t know how I avoided landing on my ass in the mud: I’m not exactly nimble anymore.

Anyway, I always feel kinda funny about buying a Christmas tree. It’s my guilty nature, I suppose. I wouldn’t dream of having Christmas at home without one, and yet … what is ethically better?

1. Cut your own tree from a farm where you know (a) it was grown to be a Christmas tree and this is it’s destiny, and (b) it will be replanted
OR
2. Buy a tree that’s already been cut so that it does it’s job and doesn’t go to waste in the shredder (but probably comes all the way from Oregon and therefore isn’t exactly a locally grown item)

This year, we opted for cheap, local, fresh, and the “teachable moment.” Trees grow in the ground. They are alive. If you cut it down, it dies. Replanting the tree completes the cycle.

Of course, we spent the rest of Sunday decorating the house and making gifts. It was good to spend so much unstressed time together.

New Emergency Contraceptive available with and sometimes without a prescription (in CA and a few other states).
http://www.go2planb.com/ForConsumers/AboutPlanB/WhatisPlanB.aspx

“Things do not always go as planned. You might have forgotten to take your pill, or another birth control method you used might have failed, like your condom broke. Now you have a second chance to prevent pregnancy with Plan B®.

“Plan B® is an emergency contraceptive that can still prevent a pregnancy after contraceptive failure, unprotected sex, or sexual assault.

“Plan B® should be taken within 3 days (72 hours) of unprotected sex and can reduce the risk of pregnancy by 89%. But the sooner you take it the more effective it will be.

“Plan B® is not RU-486 (the abortion pill); it will not work if you are already pregnant.

“Plan B® is not a substitute for routine birth control. It’s important to remember that Plan B® does not protect you from HIV infection (the virus that causes AIDS) or any other sexually transmitted disease (STD).

“If it is taken within 3 days (72 hours) after unprotected sex, it will decrease the chance that you will get pregnant by 89%. That means 7 out of every 8 women who would have gotten pregnant will not get pregnant. And Plan B® works even better if you take it within the first 24 hours after unprotected sex.1 Unprotected sex might happen when your healthcare professional’s office may be closed, such as over a weekend. Getting a prescription for Plan B® in advance means that it will be there for you — in time — if you ever need it.”

It’s Adopt-a-Gemini Week. That means it would be a favorable time for you to divorce your real parents and hook up with some new, better ones. If you like your original mother and father OK but still want some additional nurturing, think about looking for a mentor. Strike up a dialogue with a potential sugar daddy or sugar mama. See if you can track down your very own spin doctor, grant-writer, or stuntperson. In short, my lovable and cuddly friend, ask the universe to send you guardian angels who understand you at least as well as you understand yourself.

We have a few different varieties of lantana growing in our front yard. Lantana has tiny blossoms clustered together to make up what appears to be a big blossom; I think the botanical term used to describe this type of flower is umbelliferous. The cool thing about them is that you can have a single cluster that features several different colors (yellow, orange, fuchsia). I love them because they bloom all summer long and the butterflies visit them.

Lucas recently picked some lantana flowers off the bush and dismantled the clusters into their tiny flowers parts. Then he left them in a dish of water outside so that the water fairies could enjoy them.

Lucas told me all about fairies during this process. I learned a ton of stuff I didn’t know before. I’ll sum it up for you here:

* water faires like gifts of flowers
* water fairies are in charge of keeping all the water fresh and clean; they also make the morning dew
* there are many varieties of fairies, including dust fairies, crystal fairies, grass fairies, flower fairies, light fairies, air fairies, fire fairies, rainbow fairies
* “There are many, many dust fairies at Burning Man, Mom.”
* the fairies work to keep the world healthy, safe, and happy
* the fairies work in conjunction with gnomes who help the roots of plants grow into the earth, mine for minerals and crystals, and generally keep our earthy foundations strong

Being pregnant has certain weird effects on one’s brain. A common complaint among pregnant people is that pregnancy makes you forgetful.

In my case, this forgetfulness most often occurs in the kitchen. I have a particular knack for ruining pots and pans. When I was pregnant with Lucas and shortly after his birth, I ruined no less than three pots on the stove. I’d start cooking, walk away, and completely forget about the culinary project of the moment. And I mean ruined. Like, we threw them away after that, crusty charred food and all.

This time around, I have only ruined one pot. However, I’ve burned the shit out of at least three meals/pots and pans. Fortunately, the pans were salvageable with a lot of vigorous steel-wool scrubbing (and teasing) on Ian’s part.

Another goobery thing I do now is ruin clothes. This is pretty sucky since I don’t have tons of garments that fit me at present. Know how when you eat, you put your napkin in your lap? Know how that’s supposed to protect your clothes from stains in case food falls while you’re eating? Well, my tummy extends out over my lap and intercepts any dropped morsels. I have stains on many of my maternity shirts now—right on the front of my belly, where everyone’s eyes are naturally drawn anyway.

So, not only am I round, I’m slobby and low on cooking pans to boot.

I just love it when I go to sleep on Sunday night thinking, I hope I land a new project this week, and then at 11:00 a.m. on Monday morning a new client calls and offers me one. The icing on the cake? No test to take! The power of positive thinking? Fantastic!

“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

I recently landed my second job editing fiction. It’s a book of “flash” fiction (very short stories) written by an interesting man with a disability. I hope, hope, hope it goes well! Determining the level of editing is really tricky on this stuff. Rules about grammar and punctuation are laughably bendable. Personal writing style is paramount. Egos are involved to a far greater degree than in a nonfiction book. I am delighted to find that the stories written by this author are pretty damned good, which makes me feel better about taking money from a guy with a disability who wrote some stuff and wants to be published.

Working for individuals has not been my preferred means of earning a living thus far. There’s a lot more risk involved, a lot more client hand-holding and education, contracts to draw up, expectations to make crystal clear, etc. And then there’s the possibility of getting stiffed and not collecting my fee. Fortunately, I can now accept payment via PayPal—as long as I manage to build in PayPal’s fee into my own.

The editing network I joined recently looks like it might become a fairly lucrative deal. I get several job notices per week and can bid on the ones I like. So far, I’ve only landed the above fiction job via the network, but I’m in negotiations on several other projects. The drawback is that these are all individuals, so the above-mentioned hassles all apply. And I have to pay the network’s commission for connecting me to the client. But the network does all kinds of marketing in a kind of Web dragnet fashion. I’m not sure how valuable these network jobs will be in terms of providing impressive résumé material: After all, who’s heard of Joe Blow’s unpublished memoire, and more importantly, who cares if I edited it?

This morning I had my fifth and sixth vials of blood drawn for this pregnancy. This time it was for the blood glucose test.

The typical way this is handled is for the pregnant woman to arrive at the lab, drink a glass of completely vile Glucola syrup, which is pure sugar, and then wait an hour in the lobby. Then two vials of blood are drawn and later tested to see how the body reacts to the sugar influx. Before the techs will give you the Glucola, they require that you fast for 12 hours.

That’s the allopathic way. Although I tried to convince her that she shouldn’t make me take the test, my midwife insisted, but gave me an alternate method: Rise early. Eat eggs. Drink 1 and 3/4 cups pure apple juice. Arrive at the lab 40 minutes after drinking the juice, 20 minutes before the blood should be drawn. Tell the lab that (1) I’ve been fasting, and (2) that I drank Glucola 40 minutes ago. If one doesn’t answer the med techs’ questions properly, they’ll refuse to draw the blood, even though this is one of the few blood tests that doesn’t require fasting; apparently exceptions to the rule will not be tolerated.

So, I went the alternative route this time. My blood has been drawn. I feel crappy because there’s pure apple juice pumping through my veins right now, but I know I’d be feeling worse if it were Glucola in combination with an empty stomach.

It’s just fairly ridiculous to me that all these tests are necessary even when I’ve opted for (just about) the least medicalized prenatal care/birth option there is (for middle-class white women) in this country.

Bah! Coffee’s a better rush.

Yesterday, after I brought Lucas home from school, he calmly announced that he had a friend coming over to play. “He’s a coworker, mom.” (You see, Lucas has a part-time job driving Thomas the Tank Engine.) “He flies Harold the helicopter on the Island of Sodor,” he explained.

Oh. I was relieved that there wouldn’t be a surprise visit from one of Lucas’s classmates and a mommy who would see the disaster that is my house.

Lucas bounded to the front door and opened it just in time for us to see a big helicopter landing on our front lawn. With great joy, he invited his pilot friend into the house and then politely introduced us. “Mom, this is Charle.”

Charle wasn’t here long before he and Lucas started arguing about something. I wish I could remember exactly what it was, but I don’t. Lucas came to me, very upset because Charle (“Not Charles, Mom! CHAR-ul!”) was disagreeing with him on some important point.

Now I’m mediating an argument between Lucas and his imaginary friend.

“Well, Charle and Lucas. You two need to get along while Charle is visiting. We’ll have to share and treat each other with respect and use only kind words. If you keep arguing, we’ll be forced to ask Charle to leave.”

Lucas looked at his buddy.

“Well, guys? Do you think you can get along nicely?” I asked.

Lucas nodded. Presumably, Charle nodded, too, because a big smile spread over Lucas’s face. “Come on!” he said. “I’ll show you my room.”

The two boys scampered off to play.