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And one more thing...

We *finally* bought a car.
I decided I wanted a white Ford Escape and ran a quick search for cars in Vegas that fit our budget and preference for tinted windows, etc. and...voila!
The decision to buy the car took about fifteen minutes, the paperwork took something like twenty years. Well worth the wait and we even got the dealer to drop the price by $500 when we told him we were pregnant. I guess all that haggling over rupees in India paid off.
Ten thousand dollars later...




(Can you believe this is my first car, at 34!? Not counting the massive blue Cadillac my dad bought me when I was 16. I refused to learn to drive at the time simply to avoid being the pilot of such an ugly beast.)

Hey...guess what!

I would just *love* to pop in here after all this time and wax eloquent on the most fabulous thing to happen for Hamid and I, ever, but I've been simultaneously celebrating and holding down the urge to lose whatever meager portions of food I've been able to eat the past few weeks.
Morning sickness is a myth. There's nothing 'morning' about it. It's all nausea, all the time. But, I've never been so thrilled to feel so crummy in all my life.

We're pregnant! We expect our little friend to join us sometime the first two weeks of August in '08. If you care to read through days and days worth of lists of what I could or couldn't manage to eat, punctuated by the random bump photo, accompanied by equally lengthy lists of what I'm reading or buying respectively - click here.

Bring it on

I had it again this morning - that just-beneath-the-surface kind of sick. Coupled with my exagerrated chest and a few other 'symptoms' we're really wondering...

I tell Hamid I feel it creeping on again this evening and he's thrilled. Over the moon excited that I might be pregnant, tells me he hopes I am and then gets real quiet for a second, looks down at his hands, back up at me with this face of absolute shame and says 'Sorry baby...' I ask him why on earth is he sorry? and he says 'Because it's like, oh you feel sick? That's great news!!'

Such a doll...

Future Perfect

I don't know if it's just the almost-ten pounds I've gained the past month and a half since we got here or if it's a prelude to what my friend Alana describes as "canteloupe" hard breasts (when the milk comes in), but my boobs really *hurt*. Alot. And they're really, really heavy.
It happens every once in a while during my cycle, usually right in the middle, and only for a few days. But it's been like this for about a week and I did have a twinge of nausea this morning - but that could just as easily have been that awful hunger-puke feeling that comes on in an early morning after eating too much the night before.

We don't know if we're pregnant, but we're hoping. Not any kind of 'I expect the universe to deliver on my command' kind of hoping, but hoping enough that we're having in-depth conversations about my personal feelings about our children being vegetarian (at lesat until they express a strong opinion in the matter) and whether or not we want to have a TV (which we don't now, and don't ever want, truthfully.) We're going down the list - deciding to homeschool, etc. I'm going to be a regular hippie mama...that's OK with me. Hippies can still be fashionably fabulous and have excellent taste in art and music, right?

Anyway, I've got a slew of books on the shelf - almost all of them started, many finished already. This is what I'm reading at the moment or have read:

"Ina May's Guide to Natural Childbirth" - *loved* it, read it in about three days and called immediately afterwards to see about being accepted for birthing at The Farm. (They said yes!) This book has so many gorgeous birth stories. Just reading it made me want to try more often. Hamid likes this book too for the same reason.

"Birthing From Within" - I haven't started this one yet, actually...

- I don't like this book so far. It's supposed to be catchy and modern but it ends up being kind of annoying and is mostly about things you shouldn't eat.

"Adventures in Natural Childbirth" - Full of great stories about women who chose their own birthing methods. I skipped to the end to read the chapter on unassisted birth (aside from the partner). Wow! I have daydreams... I need to go back and read this book from the beginning.

"Husband Coached Childbirth" - This book was mentioned in many other books and I wanted to see what it could offer us. So far it's a bit boring but any book that encourages and informs the family on how to have the father as immersed in the birth as possible is worth reading!

I'm also getting back into my serious-vegetarian, ultra-healthy mindframe. I have already read "Diet for a New America" years ago. It hurt my feelings so much at the time; to read in-depth about how deeply we are scarring this planet and how abused animals are; but completely bolstered my desire to remain veg. I ordered it at Hamid's request,actually - after we watched "Supersize Me". I can't say I'm working on him to be veg too because that's not fair, but what I do want is for it to be easier for him to support my decision to raise our children vegetarian/vegan.

I just recently ordered and received "Skinny Bitch", it's a girl's guide to getting skinny via vegetarianism and is essentially a condensed version of "Diet for a New America" with bad words and lots of punchy lines designed to shock lazy women out of their McDonald's reverie (and subsequently, their "fat asses".) It's a great book and tonight after Hamid insisted that "...you have to at least give them milk..." I opened "Skinny Bitch" to the chapter on dairy, read the whole thing aloud and by the time I was done (it's a relatively brief book overall, the entire chapter took about ten minutes) he was nodding his head in agreement.

But veg or non-veg, my boobs still hurt and no amount of reading is going to change that.