Sometime in the middle of last night, I woke up with acid burning a path to my mouth. Oh Christ, this is it, I thought murkily, staggering up from the floor futon and stumbling into the bathroom. The pain was so bad that I became utterly convinced of the idea that I would start vomiting and be unable to stop until the Sprout entered the world.

I didn't. The pain subsided and I went back to my uneasy sleep. The good news is that I'm still batting 1000 in the old nausea championships: almost 9 months of pregnancy and I have yet to toss my cookies. The bad news is that I have lost my sense of what will make my insides boil with the heat of a thousand suns - it used to be fried food, then grease, then certain spices... It appears that last night's attack might've been set off by a roast beef dinner, followed by birthday cake and ice cream.

I might as well just give up on trying to predict anything, and resume shovelling french fries into my food hole.

Yesterday was a very weird day. It was extremely quiet, for one thing - no pulse of music, no teevee to speak of, very little conversation. After we finished the first part of the move on Saturday, I moved everything off my giant, underused wooden desk into the empty dining room so that the Boy could have a place to set up his work area. It was a bold & exciting restructuring of our space, and essentially it took an entire day to make sense of it.

Let me start out by saying that my study doesn't work very well. The whole idea of my giant underused desk (or my GUD) was that I needed 2 desks: a place to set up my computer AND a place to mark papers. It was a fine theory, and only somewhat devalued by the fact that I do most of my marking at school when my back is against the wall. The GUD was put to good use (or gud use, if you will) during essay season, when the work overflowed and I needed to spend hour upon hour circling sentence fragments and incorrect uses of the possessive form. Other than that, it was more or less a horizontal plane at a convenient height holding a whole bunch of old bills that needed to be opened at some vague future time.

My computer set up was less than ideal as well. It seemed like a good idea to have a long, shallow desk hold all my hardware, but it was a bad idea to get a conventional receptionist's desk. Since we were loath to drill holes in the back, I have to use a horrible metal tray for the keyboard & all of my stuff is strung out to the right in an awkward chain. What I really need is some vertical storage, but my ideal desk will have to languish in an IKEA storehouse until the worst baby bills get paid.

And then there's the fact that all of the Boy's recording equipment has been gathering dust behind me since we moved in. The dead space behind my computer chair, with its clutter of wires, tapes, old speakers and dirt, has always dragged me down a little. Essentially, we took a medium-sized bedroom and made it into a virtually unused office/music recording space.

All of this changed on Saturday, when we took away the dinette set. The Boy had set up his stuff in the dining room as a temporary measure, but as we'd never figured out a better way to use our space, the room soon became a snakepit of loose papers & wires & books & bunny ears & pens in various states of inkiness. On Saturday morning I proposed moving all of this stuff to the GUD, as he's still doing "real" work and I'm safely ensconced in mat leave. The result was oddly gratifying: there are books all along the back wall, space for his in/out tray & office supplies, and an official, this-is-not-temporary air to the whole set up.

Now we have to learn to work in the same space. This wouldn't be a problem if we were both "working" - we'd be too fricking busy to distract one another. But when he's working on a biology paper and I'm trying to design a virtual birth announcement page for the Sprout, there's obviously an imbalance in goals. I found myself humming snatches of songs under my breath, muttering words of praise when saving files, and generally being distracting. What's worse is that whenever I design something, I tend to lean on him as my second brain and constantly ask for feedback. Not doing this took so much effort that I was exhausted by mid-afternoon.

Most of the evening was taken up by a "surprise" birthday party for my mom. I can set off surprise in that way because I told her that it was happening. Yep. Just so you know not to entrust me with secrets - I made a point of telling my mom about her surprise 50th birthday party. Look, I know my mom. I know that she, like me, oscillates wildly between introverted and extroverted. I know that no one who's seen her in the extro phase could possibly believe the depth of her shyness, or the bouts of self-doubt that constantly assail her. One of her most common comments on herself is, "I have no friends." The 50 or so people at the party might disagree about this, but at some level that's how she feels...and I know from experience that surprise parties tend to bring out the worst embarrassment of the hopeless introvert.

Anyway. She knew, and I'm not sorry.

The Boy & I got there on time, which is to say, early, and we were the youngest people at the party by a good 20 years. My brother didn't show up (I have nothing to say about this). Everybody wanted to know about my due date and I soon fled to the kitchen, where I wouldn't have tell anyone else about the baby. It was there that I spilled pineapple juice on my gold blouse, thereby discovering that the material held watermarks with the persistence of grim death. I was in the bathroom, soaking the entire right side of the blouse in a desperate attempt to hide the edges of the stain, when my mom arrived.

I don't think I ever recovered from that particular low. I had actually looked good when I left the house, even if terribly pregnant: in addition to the gold blouse, I had spent some time on my hair and blended two shades of lipstick. One drip of pineapple juice changed everything - suddenly my lips seemed dry, my shiny blouse soiled and my hair brittle. Sigh.

The main part of the party was extremely entertaining: after we ate a terrific roast beef dinner, all of the women sat in a circle and told stories about my mother. As I found more than half of the faces completely unfamiliar, this was extraordinarily helpful to me. It was also nice to hear about life as a young mother, with rounds of fitness, sports, hobbies, church and nursery school providing lasting friendships. I'd like to think that the impending arrival of the Sprout will not serve to sharply divide my life into "friends before" and "friends after" categories - but it very well might. Ulp.

Booty Call: Day 255 - Head down, no sign of leaving. I have to spend 15 minutes a day on my hands & knees so that the Sprout turns in the right direction. It's surprisingly exhausting.