Haiku for our times

This is from Bao in the Oven:

Let’s make a baby!
Oh wait: we are lesbians
We’ll need some help here

Sums up the situation perfectly!

And Figboilers are just lovely too.

This one especially:

i find myself here
rooting for you even though
we've not yet met-

Curiouser and curiouser!

I've been having some strange dreams featuring a new character - halloumi. First one in which it was El Prima, rather than me who gave birth to halloumi, and she was a girl. I was trying to run a restaurant, and people kept coming in and demanding to be served, even though we had officially closed. The people wouldn't leave, so I called out for El Prima, who was in bed already (apparently we lived upstairs from the restaurant) and she came downstairs with halloumi in a baby-bjorn harness. She was just beautiful, and was breastfeeding while in the harness.

Second, in which I managed to give birth to halloumi without realising it, and when the midwife told me that I had a daughter, I asked where was she - I wanted to hold her and feed her. And the nurse said, "no, you can't". And I asked why, and she replied, "because you've got a cold". I think this is from reading horror stories of 1950s hospital births in a book I'm reading at the moment.

Third, I gave birth to halloumi, and she looked exactly like El Prima - ie with an adult head and the body of a baby. And I was feeding her but getting confused because she did also seem to be El Prima at the same time.

Funny that my subconscious clearly thinks halloumi is a girl - I've been thinking we might have a boy.

I've also been waking up at 5 or 6 am - with something that feels not quite like flutters, but as though there is activity going on, and it is not my own normal internal bodily activity. A bit like when you sense that there is someone busy in the next room, although you can't hear any defined sounds. Maybe our halloumi is a morning person?

Image is apparently from behindinfinity3 from here.

A Triumph of Bosomry Engineering

Sorry to go quiet for a while - it has been a bit of a non-specifically rough week chez sesame seed. But all is well on the halloumi front - in fact, *my* halloumi front does seem to be increasing - even when I try to suck it in. A colleague (and good friend, who has known about halloumi for a while) helpfully commented to me the other day, "you are starting to look a bit... hmm.. tubby." Which brings me to the other expanding territory... The mega-bosoms!



I could only delay the inevitable so long, and finally went maternity bra shopping with el prima on the weekend. And somehow, in the hands of a very capable and sensible seeming woman called Margaret in the brassiere section at M.yer, I ended up walking away with a bra that seriously looks like a 1950s nanna bra... In a D cup! For someone who ordinary just fills out a B cup, this was very very startling (and gratifying, though I do fear for what the poor girls might look like once the return to my ordinary size). Thankfully I also got a much slinkier black one, which will allow me to show off some of this newly-acquired cleavage.

I've now busted the news to all and sundry at work, and it is a relief not feeling like I have to be all secret squirrels about it any more. (please excuse dodgy grammar). I'm now considering a bit of a wider family & friends email, but as usual, have been putting it off, as these kinds of announcements make me very nervous.

And El Prima just made me blush, when she called her nephew (aged 22) into the room and said, "have you noticed anything about H?" and when he looked confused I blurted out "She got me pregnant!" and turned beetroot. Which in turn I think embarrassed him, but he was very sweet and congratulated us.

Shaking my little fist and weeping at the news (again!)

Gah - surely there is a pregnancy hormone specifically designed to make you weep at the news. Enough with the horror stories about poor Darlene Haynes (I can’t bring myself to put into words what was done to her at the moment - don't click on the link if you don't want to read a horrific story!)

Not quite in the same gory league, but still disturbing, is this story , about a woman who discovered she was pregnant when she was given an abdominal x-ray by Frankfurt customs officials who had caught her smuggling packages of cocaine, which she had swallowed in condoms.
I can’t believe this sanctimonious comment from the customs spokeperson :

"The young woman did not know that she was not just endangering her own life by carrying this risky cargo in her body,"

This is coming from an organisation which has just carried out an abdominal x-ray on a pregnant woman, exposing her embryo to radiation and risks of birth defects, without doing a basic 5-minute urine test first to see if she was pregnant.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend being a drug mule as an ideal occupation for anyone from a health and safety point of view, but who knows what choices this woman had, and what her story is. I couldn’t help but think of the film Maria Full of Grace – not a doco, but nonetheless a very human and real view of drug smuggling from the “mule’s” point of view – without being in the least sentimental. It is one of those films that stays with you for a long time.

Not so flat-front...

I don't know about you, but flat-front pants are the staple of my work wardrobe. They are the trusted reliables I can always count on if I can't deal with finding appropriate stockings etc. But, funnily enough, they don't work so well with my new not-so-flat front. It is not a "bump" as such, just a bit of a bulge. I'm telling el Prima it doesn't count as a belly unless it is actual uterus - and she keeps telling me not to keep sucking it in every time she tries to look.

Other news - looks like I have a UTI - or rather, had, as it is now clearing up. Since I've only got one kidney, and have already lost one partly because of recurrent UTIs as a child (combined with other things), I was onto it pretty quickly, and trotted off to the doctor first thing on Saturday morning for some antibiotics - which seem to be doing the trick. But had a slightly scary Friday night when I had blood in my urine. Managed to drink 1.5L of cranberry juice yesterday, and am now adding dried cranberries to my snacks.