Steamed Puddings

And, because I must, here is my update on 16 weeks of pregnancy.

Thanks to everyone for your comments on my “coming out” post from (egads) four weeks ago. We did hear the heartbeat at the first visit with my midwife, and later that week at the nuchal scan. So far everything is going just fine. We are counting down to the anatomy scan in another four weeks, where we will get to find out the baby’s sex if we so desire. Be warned that we might not tell you even if we do find out.

I’m doing very well. I still haven’t been sick, and I have more energy now than I did a few weeks ago. I think my sister-in-law may be envious as she had two very difficult pregnancies where she was ill from start to finish. I have had a few blood tests, and my risks for complications or genetic problems are quite low. Basically we are just living life as usual around here. I still fit in all of my clothes for the moment, though new pants will be on the horizon within the next month. I’m not sure whether it’s the (very small) bump or my recent attitude of “I can eat as much chocolate as I want because I’m pregnant” which is responsible.

Yes, there is a bump. I have always been pudgy around the lower abdomen, so it will be months before the bump is distinguishable to outsiders as something other than a series of poor food choices. Kiwiman says he can tell - but he gets to see the bump in its most uncovered state, so that’s almost cheating.

We’re in the midst of planning a “babymoon”, our last holiday as a couple before this THING starts overthrowing our life plans. We have lots of frequent flyer miles to use, so we might jet away for a week sometime in the next couple of months. I shall not say more at this time, except that it has been damn cold here in the last few weeks, and we’ll certainly be going somewhere warmer.

Speaking of overthrowing plans, we’ve used the bedroom repurposing project (a.k.a. baby) as an excuse to divest ourselves of years of accumulated crap. Val will be organizing a garage sale in the next few months, maybe when the weather is warmer. It’ll be great fun. We can nearly see the floor in the baby’s room. We’ll fill the room very slowly as I feel like it’s too early to buy a lot of furniture.

I’ve tried to be less paranoid about food now that the second trimester has started. I had soft cheese and smoked salmon a couple of weeks ago, and I didn’t get sick at all. The majority of the baby’s sensitive development is done. I’m not worried about eating so-called “risky” foods when they come from reputable stores and are freshly bought. I am still steering away from dodgy leftovers and deli meats. Oh, and alcohol.

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to recreate the Shirley Temple mocktails of my youth. I used to get them when I went out with my parents for fancy dinners. Our grenadine isn’t quite right (it’s grenadine “flavored” syrup), and I’m never sure whether to use orange juice or not - some recipes include it and some omit it. The ginger ale here has a much stronger flavor than the Canada Dry in the US, so I’ve been making STs with lemonade (a.k.a. Sprite), but then they’re too sweet. Maybe Dr. Brazen Hussy can offer some virgin cocktail suggestions to keep me hydrated. Can I make a non-alcoholic martini somehow?

We’ve turned a corner from thinking about pregnancy to wondering what we’ll do with this helpless, crying, pooing thing once it comes out. Today I bought a book for first-time parents which is filled with pictures! Other books looked perhaps more informative, but I don’t think you can beat pictures for ease of understanding. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and I think a sleep-deprived parent is only capable of reading about twenty at a time. We’ll gravitate back towards pregnancy thoughts when the bump is bigger and I become more agitated about the thought of pushing a watermelon out of my nose.

I’ll leave you with that happy thought.

I avoided blogging while I was in early pregnancy because I didn’t want to let anything slip. Now that the secret is out, I find myself wanting to get back to blogging. Here are a couple of things that have caught my eye.

Anali and Kerry have both done a smashing job of tackling a meme on the top 106 books tagged as “unread” on LibraryThing. Here’s my take on the list:

Like the others, I have bolded the books I have read, underlined the titles I read for school, and italicized those I started but didn’t finish.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: A novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. A Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian : a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
65. Dune
66. The Prince
67. The Sound and the Fury
68. Angela’s Ashes: A memoir
69. The God of Small Things
70. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
71. Cryptonomicon
72. Neverwhere
73. A Confederacy of Dunces
74. A Short History of Nearly Everything
75. Dubliners
76. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
77. Beloved
78. Slaughterhouse-Five
79. The Scarlet Letter (shhh, don’t tell Mrs. Holland I never finished it)
80. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - I am a grammar stickler, but this book put me to sleep!
81. The Mists of Avalon
82. Oryx and Crake
83. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
84. Cloud Atlas
85. The Confusion
86. Lolita
87. Persuasion
88. Northanger Abbey
89. The Catcher in the Rye - meh.
90. On the Road
91. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
92. Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
93. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
94. The Aeneid
95. Watership Down
96. Gravity’s Rainbow
97. The Hobbit
98. In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
99. White Teeth
100. Treasure Island
101. David Copperfield

My conclusions: I’m not nearly as well-read as I should be, as there are some classics on this list I’ve never broached. (Austen, Dickens, I’m looking at you.) Most of what I had to read for school didn’t make it onto this list, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Camus’ The Stranger, and Ender’s Game (thanks, Mrs. Kepner’s science fiction lit class!).

And now for something completely different:

Katie from Minor Revisions has finally started her dream job - she’s moved from being a postdoc at a Southern university into an industry position in the Midwest. She blogged today to recap her first week in the new job, and her observations about doing science in industry ring true. If you’re an academic postdoc, and you want to know what “the dark side” is like, check out her entry. (Aside: One academic postdoc friend has the same attitude I did when I was in the US: PhD students are somehow given the idea that once you leave academia for industry, you “can’t go back” to academia. There are great counterexamples, of course, like my friend’s own PhD supervisor, but Katie’s entry helps to justify my retort: Why would you *want* to go back to academia? Industry is great!)

It’s finally time for me to tell you why I have been so silent for the past few months. Kiwiman and I are adding to our “flock” at christmas.   It’s possible that some of you have suspected this…but up until now I was unable to confirm anything publicly.

There’s a strange double standard at work with pregnancy. Women are encouraged to NOT talk about being pregnant when they are less than 3 months along, even though their eating and drinking habits sometimes change dramatically. If the worst should happen and pregnancy loss occurs within these first three months, I suppose women are expected to not share their grief and receive support from friends. Later in the pregnancy, when gestation becomes obvious, the impending child seems to be all everyone can talk about. I don’t always agree with the odd forces at work here.

I wanted to tell everyone earlier, but found myself in a difficult situation where most of my daily friends are coworkers, and I didn’t want the news to get around at work before the three month mark. Not telling the coworker friends was extremely difficult as they ALL noticed the changes in my habits - for example, I stopped coming along to Friday drinks after work as I felt weird just having water.

I hit the 12 week mark last weekend and so made sure to tell the boss’ boss yesterday. I think my upcoming thirtieth birthday this weekend forced the issue a bit. Kiwiman pointed out that friends would probably find it odd if I didn’t drink as part of birthday celebrations.

(The timing of celebrating my big life events with alcohol has always been against me. I graduated from college a month before I turned 21, so I couldn’t go out to bars to celebrate. I finished my PhD and was two months pregnant, so I chose not to go out drinking with friends…and even though I succeeded in getting my PhD before I turned 30, I can’t celebrate that milestone with a drink either. Alcohol is so well-accepted by my society that it was initially difficult to figure out what to do without it.)

Now that I have told YOU, I can get back to blogging about life in general without having to censor out a large portion of the latest events.

No doubt you will have some questions:

Q: When are you due?
A: Right now, December 28th. In reality this means things could happen anytime around the christmas-new year period.

Q: How are you feeling?
A: Pretty darned good! I haven’t had ANY morning sickness at all. I’m just as surprised by that as you are.

Q: Are you having a boy or a girl? (also) Do you want a boy or a girl?
A: I’m only 12 weeks along, so we can’t find out the baby’s sex for another six to eight weeks at least. I think that we’ll probably find out, but we may not tell anyone. Not quite sure yet how we’ll handle this.  Of course we are just focused on having a healthy human which resembles us more than an orangutan or an alien.

My father made this rocking horse for me when I was an infant. There is a famous picture in which a year old-ish me is riding the horse in footy pyjamas. My mother’s antique Pfaff sewing machine is visible in a corner of my parents’ Stuttgart quarters.

I think the horse was around the house when I was an older child, but was given to my aunt Kathleen when my cousins were born. They’re about 8-12 years younger than me. When Kiwiman and I were in the US for our wedding reception, I received a giant UPS box from Aunt Kathleen which turned out to contain the rocking horse. It was such a neat present to receive!

Kiwiman and I disassembled the horse for the first time in nearly 30 years and scattered the pieces within our luggage to bring it back to New Zealand with us. For a few years, the pieces were sitting in a cardboard box just waiting for some attention. This year, in a flurry of post-PhD house projects, I had intended to sand the horse so we could put it back together. I didn’t have a lot of time to do this, though, so Kiwiman took over the sanding and did a great job stripping off the original dark brown varnish. Hugo contributed, too, by helping to bolt the neck back to the body after we cracked it during the disassembly.

Finally, after priming, arguing about colors, painting, and soaking the original cracked leather pieces in linseed oil, the horse is now (nearly) complete and ready for a new generation of riders. I think Kiwiman has taken a lot of pride in his sanding and paintwork (as he should!) and I’m touched that he has added his own stamp onto this handcrafted hand-me-down from my side of the family.

My exam was today, and it went much better than I could have expected.

There are four possible outcomes for oral exams at my university:

• pass with no corrections required
• pass with minor corrections required
• revise and resubmit for another examination
• fail

95% of people I know pass with minor corrections required.  It is some kind of testament to my incredible perfectionism (bordering on OCD with this 250-page document, I swear) that I passed with no corrections required, a real rarity.  CSO even put my thesis forward as a nominee for the Best Doctoral Thesis award.  I had no idea I would do so well.  I hated the research, towards the end, and
I couldn’t see how anything positive could come of it.

The exam was…anticlimactic, really.  The chair was a female professor from the medical school who served to ensure the exam process was carried out as expected.  CSO was there as my supervisor (I enrolled in the old-school regulations which allow the supervisor to be an examiner; nowadays this isn’t permitted).  The oral examiner came over from Brisbane today and works in generally the same area as CSO.  It was his first oral exam, and I think he did a good job, though I had honestly expected to be grilled a bit more!  I was prepared for all sorts of nagging little questions about what the proteins I’d found actually meant, and we mostly stayed on the broad-strokes level (which was just fine with me as I’m a generalist, not a specialist).  And then it was all over!  I knew I would pass, but I didn’t have any clue that they thought it was SOOO good that I wouldn’t have to make any corrections at all.  I’m still astounded by that.

The path forward from here: tonight I’ll write the acknowledgements section, something I didn’t feel was necessary in the exam copies of the thesis.  (Honestly, if I had written it in February, I would have had some nasty things to say about supervisors, so it’s better that I write it now.)  Tomorrow I’ll fix a few typos in the thesis and start printing out the ~5 copies I’ll need to have hard-bound.  I’ll call around to some binders and get prices and estimated times.  I might even get to drop it off tomorrow.  Then comes the hardest decision: what color cover and printing should I get?  I kinda like the idea of red…

When I get the hard-bound copies back in less than a week, I can turn them in at the university’s Graduate Centre and get my letter stating that the PhD has been awarded.  I can trade this for some shiny gold rocks at my place of employment.

Graduation will be in September - and I have to get some papers out by then, if I want that Best Doctoral Thesis award.  Bring ‘em on!  Now that this is out of my life, I have time to work on papers again.