…

You’re thinking about an elephant, aren’t you?

This admittedly silly exercise is what the last three weeks have been like for me, because I have something on my mind that’s been looming rather large in there, but I haven’t been able to talk about it because…I make my own rules, and I told myself not to talk about it yet.

But now, the veil of silence, the cone of secrecy, and the gag order of reticence have all been lifted so I can reveal…

My gigantic project. Remember the project I wrote about a few weeks back, the one I blamed for my quitting NaNoWriMo a measly nine days in? Well, I’m finally ready to tell you what that project is.

It has webbed fingers and toes (that won’t be webbed for long), a teeny little tail (for a few more days, anyway), two hemispheres’ worth of brains, eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a strong heartbeat. It’s about the size of a gummy bear right now, but by July 11 it’ll be big enough to fill out newborn-sized pajamas quite nicely.

My project (or second baby, I guess he/she could be called) has been taking up most of my free time with resting and naps lately. The instant I got that positive pregnancy test, I knew I wasn’t going to finish my NaNo novel by the end of the month. I’ve been around the first trimester block before, I know exactly how exhausted I get when I’m hauling around a tiny little embryo.

This little person hasn’t disappointed, either. Even though this pregnancy has been pretty easy so far (as easy as the first trimester ever is) I’m still so tired most of the time I feel like I’m walking around with a mild concussion.

Aidan is, for his part, oblivious. I tried to explain that there was a little sibling in my tummy, but then he just lifted up his own shirt so he could poke his bellybutton and afterwards moved on to play with something else.

It’s so hard for me to write interesting posts when my mind is fixated on something I can’t talk about, so I’m pretty relieved to have my big news out in the open now.

My elephant, as it were, that I’m finally allowed to think about.

I suppose that leaves me seven months or so to write what I hope are interesting posts until I have a newborn and a toddler to wrangle and I wonder why I ever thought wrangling one child was a difficult task.

Yeah…Uh, me neither. But wouldn’t that be a pretty awful thing to do?

I’m excited about every single book cover design and, as such, have brought in my crew of intelligent, well-read blog readers to help me choose.

Without further ado, let’s get to the contenders!

Option 1, design by Daniel Held:

Option 2, design by Kira Lehman of Stellamari

Option 3, design by Isaiah Townsend

Option 4, design by Wes Mitchell

Cast your vote for your favorite cover!

25 was a fun age for me. I got a little more comfortable wearing my mom jeans (both figuratively and literally. Figuratively because I got a little more practice being a mom, literally because I wear jeans {thereby making them a mom’s jeans} and I lost weight so they’re looser and more comfortable), I wrote two novels, and had a blast existing. My life is a lot of fun. And laundry. But more fun.

I have high hopes for age 26. My first novel is getting published next month (June 20!!!), we have plans to try to add another tiny human to our family, I might just make it down to 170 lbs before said additional tiny human makes my weight shoot right back up again. I think this next year is going to be awesome.

In 26 years I’ve gone from this…To this…And I think that’s pretty cool.

I’ve had the stomach flu before, and it has been and always will be my most dreaded disease. I hate throwing up, so much so that I would writhe around in panicked nauseous terror rather than relent and just let it all come up. I hate hate hate vomiting.

2 AM on Tuesday morning found me waking up out of a very deep sleep, with a horrible grinding sensation in my stomach. Disoriented, I wondered what was up before remembering that someone I know recently had stomach flu. And so did her son. And her son played with my son and that means…OH NO NO NO.

At that exact same moment, Aidan woke up crying. I tried to pry myself off the floor of the bathroom to get him when I heard Wes say  from Aidan’s room, “I think we have a flu baby.”

Aidan and I proceeded to spend the next three hours painfully awake, alternating between throwing up and changing outfits. Every time I’d get him sleepy his stomach would up and ruin everything. Poor guy, he was miserable, I was miserable, he was upset watching me be miserable. It was awful.

I had what I think of as a quintessential mom moment, though, so there’s that. I was trying to change Aidan’s outfit when my stomach decided to execute the emergency evacuation plan. I grabbed a trash can to catch the result of said evacuation, keeping one hand on Aidan so he wouldn’t roll off the table and hurt himself.

He started crying, probably because his mommy was retching into a trash can. Between heaves, I reassured him that mommy was just fine, even working up a few smiles here and there. I think moms have a special super power that enables them to be awesome even when they’re abjectly miserable.

Honestly though, yesterday was the longest day of my life. That’s the drawback of being a stay at home mom, there are no sick days. My head swimming from a fever, sleep deprived, and unable to eat even Saltines without feeling sick, I still had to take care of Aidan. Not only that, but I had to run four loads of laundry just in case we needed more clothes to be sick on.

The only bright side of this whole thing is that this probably bodes well for my weigh-in on Saturday, huh?

My great grandmother and mother holding me when I was about six months old.

My great grandmother passed away last night.  I found out this morning, and I’ve been mulling over her life all day.  Her name was Eugenie and she was a beautiful woman.  Born in 1909, she grew up in Russia.  She moved to Shanghai with her family, and in 1934 she met and married her husband.

World War Two necessitated that she flee Shanghai with their two sons, and they ended up in Australia.  Her husband stayed behind and they lost touch during the war.  When the war was over, she and her sons moved again to San Francisco, where she lived until her death.

She was a great cook, a devoted volunteer with the Russian Orthodox Church, and a talented seamstress.  I have a cookbook of her recipes, and Wes and I enjoy preparing the recipes she perfected over the years.  I remember that she made really legendary pickles, and every time I’d call her she’d always respond to whatever I said with, “That’s wonderful, darling!”  I can hear her voice in my head even now.

She was over one hundred years old, and her passing eased years of suffering, but it’s always hard when someone you love, a part of your family, is gone.  I do look forward to seeing her again in Heaven someday though.

Anyway, if you’re into Russian food maybe have a bowl of borscht or dig into some pelmeni in my Great Grandmother’s honor, huh?

So I guess there’s this soccer game going on right now?  Between a bunch of teams?  And the whole world really cares and is all excited about it?

I don’t know.  I looked into it, and apparently the most common score in a World Cup Finals Match is 1-0, which gives me the impression that watching these matches must be frightfully dull.  They score once in how many hours?  And they’re not allowed to bare their chests because FIFA doesn’t allow them to anymore, so we red-blooded females don’t even get to ogle the muscley men dashing across the screens.

But, according to people who know things, the World Cup is a huge deal.  Because everywhere other than America regards soccer as a Very Big Deal.  Therefore, this is like a global Super Bowl.

Now, I’m a huge fan of the Super Bowl.  It’s like mini Thanksgiving for me, what with the gratuitous food and encouragement to constantly stuff your face while not moving.  The football game?  Meh.  Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s a snore, and sometimes it makes the people watching the game around me shriek in outrage while I snap my attention back to the game and try to figure out why everyone’s so angry.

From what I can tell, though, only America cares about the Super Bowl, because Americans are really the only ones who play football.  So essentially, we as a country decided to thumb our nose at the world’s favorite past-time and invented our own special game.

In the global playground, we scoffed at the kids playing Four Square and took our ball, squashed it flat by sitting on it, and then coaxed all the biggest kids to beat each other up trying to steal it from one another.  Which I suppose is better than if we’d had all the biggest kids beat up the Four Square kids first, before playing with our weirdo squashed ball.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this a post about the World Cup.  And about football.  And somehow it’s also an allegory on foreign policy, with the moral being that perhaps our politicians would do well to remember that the other kids can play Four Square all they want as long as they stay on their side of the playground.

See?  We can all learn so much from the World Cup.  And for that, we can thank my brother in law.

I have ultrasound pictures though!  And a healthy, dancing fetus!  And clean laundry that’s folded and put away!  So I guess even though I’ve been slacking as a blogger this week I’m not completely useless.  I’m getting a lot done at work, but that’s not nearly as cool as folded laundry.

Ugh, I’m too tired to even pretend to be coherent.  I promise I haven’t forgotten that I said I’d share my pictures.  I haven’t.  I even had my very gracious sister in law scan an old photo of me that really showcases the ginormous glasses I used to sport back in the dark days before contacts.

I’ll get to it.  I promise.  Sometime between now and next year, definitely.

Don’t you just wish you could come too?

The good news is, we’re all caught up to where I am in pregnancy so you won’t have to read through the updates every day.  This also means I’m actually going to have to start coming up with content every day again.  Heh.  I’ll ruminate on that all weekend.  I hope you all have a lovely time doing whatever it is you’re doing.  See you on the flip of the vacation!

(A special note to anyone thinking of robbing us while we’re gone…We have a savage, bloodthirsty dog loose on our property who will not hesitate to devour you where you stand.  Also, our neighbors are watching the house for us while we’re gone.  Because they’re awesome.  So, for your own good, stay away.  Please.)

Please excuse me while I quell my stomach butterflies of excitement with copious amounts of work.