Already with the tantrums

Unlike most parents-to-be, Ben and I were lucky enough to get an in-utero photograph of our baby apparently screaming in anguish.* This is not what we expected at my 20-week checkup yesterday, but we also got a handful of tranquil, less terrifying images of her (that's right, WE'RE HAVING A GIRL!). I'll post those below so that you don't have to have nightmares about our baby looking like an Edvard Munch painting.

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* Or, as the technician put it, "yawning."

Pregnant, in a cute apron

In just a few days, Ben and I will find out the sex of our baby! We're dying to know, not so that we can paint the nursery or buy a bunch of dumb gender-specific onesies or whatever, but because there's just so little to be known about this little creature right now! We want to know whatever can be told to us! It will be fun to start calling her by her name* -- or to get busy coming up with a name for him.**

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* Although we are keeping the names a surprise for everyone else until The Big Day.
** Why are boys' names so difficult to come up with? Everyone seems to think so. I'd love to have a son, but what on earth are we going to call him? (I can tell you what we're not going to call him.)

Tripping through whatever kind of flower this is

I've never seen so many flowers in all my life! Our Minneapolis neighborhood is covered in them this spring and [early] summer! I really don't think its just the wide-eyed wonderment speaking, either; there really are more flowers than you can shake a garden hose at.

To satisfy my desire to document this amazing display, I'm making ink out of flower petals this week. I've been wanting to photograph (done!) and illustrate some of this fabulous flora for a while now, and painting them with petal-ink is the sweetest way I can think of to allow content to inspire form. The only problem so far is that it's virtually impossible to make green ink from green plant materials, although it is very easy to make smelly, unusable, yellow-brown ink from green plant materials.

19 weeks

I've already moved on to the babydoll-style tank tops phase. God help us!

Love in a wormhole

In between taking some intense summer classes, buying a house, preparing to have an actual career, and being pregnant, I intend to read an ungodly number of time travel romance novels this summer. You heard me, time travel romance novels. (It helps me to think of them as "literary" romance novels, but with some of these there's quite a fine line between literary and trashy, let's just be frank.) If this is a side of me you've never seen, well, what can I say? I've been enchanted by the time travel novel (okay, it doesn't have to be romantic -- but it helps!) for many years. One of my favorites is the YA novel Charlotte Sometimes -- have you read it? Another is, of course, Madeleine L'Engle's series about the Murray family (Wrinkle in Time and its companion novels). I must have read Wrinkle twenty times between the ages of 10 and 12... and a few more times since then.

Some of these books are quick reads, and in the last couple of weeks I've polished off two time travel romance novels that have been on my list for a while: Portrait of Jennie, which I loved and actually is rather literary, and the wonderfully lower-brow Summersea. The latter is set in the mid-seventies and is so fabulously descriptive of that time period that I found myself reflecting on the always-amazing fact that reading a good historical novel is in itself a form of time travel.

Right now I'm reading the public library's copy of Jack Finney's Time and Again, which so far is more science-fictiony than romantic, but the story is so captivating* that I don't mind. Earlier this month, I tried on Daphne Dumaurier's House on the Strand but got a bit bored (plus I desperately wanted to start Summersea!) and set it aside -- which is too bad, because I love Dumaurier and her unrivaled merging of the literary and the trashy.**

Today I actually spent the entire day working ahead in my classes so that I could spend the entirety of tomorrow morning with the Finney novel. It is going to be wonderful. Until next time!

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* intrigue! secret government experiments! time travel training centers disguised as ramshackle extra-urban warehouse buildings!
** imagine my exhilaration upon learning that she'd written a time travel romance novel!