Leery Polyp

You Guys Wanna See a Dead Body?

Too bad. But if you want to see my new blog, please to click:

The Modernity Ward

Which is where I shall be posting from this point on. Leery Polyp will remain (as a Memorial Wing, I guess), but all the new stuff is going to the Modernity Ward.

So check in, won't you?

How About "THE HOLY CRAP CHRONICLES" ?

Nah, I already have a name for the new blog. The plan is to get it up and running this weekend, since I don't have any homework to do or seeds to start or haybale of laundry to wash or children to watch or husbands to satisfy or cat feces odors to remove from chairs that are probably just going to end up on the street Monday morning, because is there any product that removes mystery shit smells when THERE IS NO VISIBLE SHIT to attack? Answer me that, dude.

Oh, and even before you go reading the rest of the post, go pay my sister a visit at her new blog. She's a better writer than I am, which sucks because I already quit piano when she got better than me and now there's really nothing left to quit.

But you probably -- and by "you" I mean the two remaining people who bother to check the old LP on a Friday after work hours, hi guys, howyadoin' -- would like to know the BIG SECRET to which I have been alluding for lo these, um, several days.

So here it is:

Giving It Up

As soon as I found out my sister was pregnant, I made the plan. "In March," I told her, "I am renting a minivan, packing it to the rearview with all our baby junk, and disgorging it into your apartment."

"Okay," she said, perhaps not realizing that for once, my statement was without hyperbole, and would actually come to pass unlike most of my poorly considered schemes. Hey, there's a lot at stake -- we live in a 2-bedroom apartment, and it would be awfully nice to be able to hang Sophia's current clothes in a closet heretofore occupied by a tower of Rubbermaid tubs filled with two years' worth of outgrown baby clothes and cloth diapers. Not to mention the precariously balanced Aquarium Wonders Molded Plastic-o-Rama and teetering Pack And/Or Play that threatened to behead unlucky passers-by with business in the grown-ups' closet.

I got to sorting and packing and going back over everything, oh my God, did she ever fit in that rainbow onesie? Look at those teeny socks! You know how it goes. And I got a little wistful, as I imagine just about everyone does, because it all seemed so fast, you know, and if I had it to do over I wouldn't be so jacked up and worried and hurried about everything. Here she is this fairly autonomous human being who is capable of visiting the potty on her own with no fanfare, of helping herself to a brimful bowl of yogurt (the quart container of which I later found on the sofa, surrounded by a Jackson Pollock design of its own contents), but this tiny soft-footed snowsuit is evidence that she once didn't need shoes because she couldn't walk anywhere! This kimono shirt proves that her head was once as big around as the whole rest of her body!

(The snowsuit also proved that, growns-up as she may be, she is still a trifle unrealistic in her expectations. I found her whining angrily in a hunched heap on her floor, feet jammed into the snowsuit, arms jammed into the closed-off mitts, and unable to zip the thing past her waist. It was a poofy pink straitjacket, but dammit, she wanted to wear it.)

So there was a little bit of maudlin mooning over the baby things, but off they went, and the swing and the bassinet and the million handknit wool covers and cloth diapers and tiny shoes with monkeys, off to the next little person.  The glider rocker we lived in for six months, now lovingly recovered in a rainbow stripe, gone to Massachusetts.

Now we have a lot more room in the apartment, which is wonderful, and my sister is a little more ready for the babe on the way, which is best of all.

Is there also more room in my head? I'm not sure. Whatever our reproductive future might hold, there just isn't room in my life for the kind of obsessing I did before, the constant thinking, the mourning. Of course we have Sophia now, so it's an entirely different game. But I'm -- mercifully -- not feeling the dull ache of secondary infertility. It's in there like a cyst or something, I guess, since Ye Olde Menstrual Cycle has been back about nine or ten months and nothing to show for it, but for now it remains asymptomatic.

Here's another thing: I've got school. A lot of school. I have six prerequisites to get through, nice fat ones like microbiology and organic chemistry and anatomy and physiology, and after that I have two very intense years of nursing school IF I can even get in -- IF I can keep my grades in the A's and B's and IF I can get a good score on the GREs. I've been meandering through one statistics class at a time, which is great, but I suspect I'm going to get my ass handed to me with a big letter D on it at some point during the next year. At any rate, we're talking several jampacked, very expensive years here. Not a good time to have a baby, right? Right. But we have this tiny window of the next, oh, three months, where it could kind of all work out. Which, if experience is any guide, means that it almost certainly won't.

I don't know. I don't like to think on it too hard, which, thankfully, I don't have to, because hey! If there's anything I've learned on my spin through Infertility Kingdom, it's that my reproductive destiny is entirely out of my hands!*  The baby stuff is gone. Sophia starts preschool in June. And I have some multivariate regressions to do.

*Put that in your feminist pipe and smoke it. Sigh. Planned Parenthood, I am seeking absolution by sending you half our tax refund. (The other half will go to Philabundance.)

Once Upon a Time

...I had free time, and big dreams, and, you know, a blog. We're just in one of those crazy busy patches, and I can't even tell you all my Awesome Stories (tm) because they involve The Thing Which Cannot Be Announced.

I'm sort of hoping to get knocked up, just so I'll have something to talk about with y'all.

Oh, and I went with the ballet flats with the rosettes. Only because they fit better. I might order the others in another size, though. Cute.

Concerns Sartorial

Man, I was so all done reading about the horrible things people do, and the horrible thing we've done collectively to the climate (do not google James Lovelock's latest prediction unless you have a bottle of really good wine and a krazy straw), so I went to Target to get me a piece of mass-market fashion.

The rapacious hordes beat me to it, evidently, and all I could find in my size (which is neither a 15 nor a 2, the only remaining options in the handful of pieces left) was this sweatshirt, which is not at all the kind of thing I usually buy, and which is insanely cute and flattering. I did find online this dress, which I tried on in-store in the wrong size and LOVED anyway, and also ordered these shoes and these shoes, one of which will remain here and one of which will go back. (I tried on 10s in-store to get a sense of fit.) They're useless for tromping through the ambient garbage of West Philly, but they'll be great at a wedding.

Sigh. I can't even link you to the other pieces I wanted to get, because they're off the website now too! Pretty flowy flowery things (that I tried on in size waytoobig), and a linen vest (that I tried on in tadtoosmall). I am irate and stalkerish and very, very cute.

What else: I was working on Coachella in this yarn, and then got to the try-on stage and...yick. My gauge was right in the swatch, so either it changes as I knit or there's something funky about the sizing. I knit the small, and the drape at the neck was obscene -- plus there was too much fabric in the front of the arms, and not enough in the back. I'm frogging it, but now I need ideas for a beautiful tank that I can wear a bra with, and which will only use three balls of that yarn. I'm thinking of designing my own, lessen you got any ideas.

Hahwell. It's hard to be too upset when a passel of your favorite people arrive home. And when there's the promise of more favorite people entering the 'hood in the near future.