LizaWasHere

There’s really a little one in there, wiggling around! It isn’t just my imagination or weird special effects at the doctor’s office.

I now feel Smudge kicking and swimming every few hours. But the REAL excitement this weekend was that Jill got to feel him too!

We were relaxing with some brain candy on Friday night when he started kicking up a storm. I grabbed Jill’s hand and pressed it into my belly — after a couple of seconds, her eyes lit up, "I felt it! I felt something!"

And although this was exciting on a much more modest scale, it makes us VERY happy. On Saturday, the nice people from Storehouse.com delivered and installed 7 bookshelves, each with extensions to make them 96" tall. Our dining room wall is now a full wall of books, plus we have 3 more bookshelves in the living room.

I spent Saturday afternoon and early evening unpacking our ~25 boxes of books, and it now looks as if we have a dining room, rather than a storage facility at the front of our house. Well, a room anyway. The dining room table is still on the list of things we want.

Here’s the scary part: We still have two 4′ tall bookshelves upstairs, and there is no room for the books on those shelves to move downstairs. Except for the lowest shelves in the living room, which have doors on them, all of the shelf space on all 7 bookshelves is already occupied.

We are going to do a "phase 2" of this project, organizing the books and hopefully purging some. So various personal finance, management, and computer books can move to the office, while fiction, plays, essays, and children’s books can be separated into distinct categories downstairs.

Next up: An entertainment center. With our new beautiful bookshelves, our unfinished pine TV stand looks even more like dorm room furniture. Then dining room furniture and baby furniture.

1) My tooth-brushing honeymoon is over. I got sick again this morning when I brushed. I think it’s the act of brushing, not the toothpaste.

An acquaintance recommended sticking my tongue out when I brush, which apparently helps suppress the gag reflex. It can’t hurt.

2) Yesterday, I went back to Prenatal Yoga for the first time in a couple of weeks. It was a new instructor, and I noticed that my "internal noise level" shot up.

I find gyms and other physical fitness type places intimidating, and I always think I should know what I’m doing, but I feel like I don’t. So I get in this weird mental space of "I *can* do this/This is too hard" — which both drives me crazy and is probably very hard for the instructor to coach me through.

Fortunately, I noticed it while it was happening, was able to mentally say "Oh! I’m doing that thing I do!" without beating myself up too much for it. I’ve noticed that when I beat myself up over things like that, I’m a lot more likely to start doing it again 5 minutes later when I quit beating myself up.

If I’m a little more compassionate with myself and remember that it is OK that I don’t know what I’m doing, and that pretending I do probably isn’t going to help me and Smudge get the most out of Prenatal Yoga, I can simmer down and pay attention more easily.

3) I saw some very interesting graffiti in a wealthy neighborhood that I drive through on my way to work. It said, in spray paint on a brick retaining wall:

3/4 of the world is starving

My first thought was "I don’t think that’s true." I’m sure the number is horrifying, but I just don’t believe that 75% of the world is starving.

Without any intent to belittle hunger or people who are fighting to reduce starvation and malnutrition, like the awesome people at The Hunger Site, I think it hurts the cause to exaggerate the numbers.

A little googling turns up some interesting information:

An undated page in the ThinkQuest library says: The World Health
Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed,
one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you’ve entered this
site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will
die this year.

Bread for the World also quotes the World Health Organization, but suggests a slightly less severe impact than ThinkQuest suggested: Poor nutrition and calorie deficiencies cause nearly one in three people to die prematurely or have disabilities.

I couldn’t find hunger or starvation stats on the WHO site.

And in case anyone is worried, I am most definitely not starving. In fact, I am doing my "eating for two" with a vengeance*. Although Smudge weighed in at 11 oz, according to the ultrasound on Tuesday, I have gained approximately 13 lbs so far.

* Typepad’s spellchecker suggested "vegans" as a possible correct spelling for my original attempt to spell vengeance. I don’t think I could do my eating for two with vegans; I think 30-40% of my diet may be dairy.