When Science And Life Collide

I came home from choir rehearsal last night to find the P-Dawg beside himself with glee.

"WE ARE NOT CHIMPANZEES!!!!" he announced as I knuckle-walked through the door.

I immediately put down my banana, stood upright, and joined him in the family room, where P-Dawg breathlessly informed me of the discovery of Ardipithecus Ramdus or "Ardi", the fossil that has usurped Lucy's claim to fame as mother of humankind. It's the sort of news that has many scientists drooling over their pocket protectors, and the P-Dawg even more so because one of the members of the research team that discovered Ardi just happens to be a former professor of his.

I immediately went online and read all about this long lost biped cousin. It turns out she stood about five feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and was in desperate need of a properly fitting bra.

In other words, she's me, only furrier.

Rimarama Recommends: The Outdoors

My kids are Outdoor Kids but I am an Indoor Mom, which can be problematic.

In grade school, one of the worst punishments you could impose upon me was to send me outdoors until dinnertime.  If Chrissy Long was not available to play Mary Lou Retton with, I'd just roller skate around and around the cul-de-sac, hoping for the salvation a wipeout could bring.  Once back in the comfort and safety of my bedroom lair, I could rejoin Ramona, Beezus, and Nancy Drew OR resume the work of molding Barbie-sized wedding cakes out of wads of wet toilet paper if I so desired, AND I DID.

But like I said, J-dog and V-meister?  Outdoor kids.  They love dirt and sunshine.  And back when I was pregnant for the first time and busy planning my stay-at-home-motherhood fantasy, frolicking outside was not accounted for in my short-sighted daily itinerary of: nurse baby and read books until dinnertime.  So it was kind of a shock when all of a sudden I had these two kids for whom I was expected to provide, you know . . . fresh air.

Well, I don't know what happened - maybe it's the fact that I actually like our new backyard, maybe it's old age - but I'm slowly coming around to this Spending Time Outdoors concept.  On more than one occasion last week I daresay I experienced an intense desire to go on a hike.  (Has anyone else had this happen to them?)

I even put on sneakers and packed a picnic lunch, for crying out loud.  And you know what?  It was lovely. There are some really nice things outdoors, readers.

And do you know what else?

Nothing beats meandering down a mossy trail on a cool summer's day with walking stick in hand and two wonderstruck little human beings tripping along beside you.

Mission

It was on the day the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated that I took the pregnancy test.

We had decided just a few weeks before that the time was as ripe as it ever would be for babymaking and I, with a green light from my psyche, the P-Dawg, and the ob/gyn, made it my personal mission to beat the estimated odds of conceiving in “six months to one year.”

P-Dawg’s input and DNA would be required, naturally, for implementation, but I took greedy ownership of the planning and strategy phases with the same singularity of purpose I had once dedicated to making the Dean’s List, getting the scholarship, scoring the interview, landing the job.

To this end, babymaking books were purchased and studied religiously. Google searches employing phrases like, “How to get pregnant super fast” were performed, and morning temperatures were charted. I was tuned into my body’s every twitch and secretion in the way that only a woman meticulously planning conception can be.

One afternoon just days after our first scheduled attempt, I was driving home from work when I noticed how uncomfortable the tug of the seat belt across my chest had become. My ta-tas, as it happened, were sore in a whole new way, and they heralded a light bulb moment the likes of which I hadn't experienced to date.

I began groping myself right there in the driver's seat of my blue Saturn sedan, cautiously at first, then with no holds barred. Does it hurt when I press here? Yes! What about here? Yes! If I mash them together? By, God, it does! And if I press myself full tilt into the steering wheel? I just might be pregnant.

It was too early to take a test, yet impossible, from that point on, to ignore the goings on: continued soreness, strange, cramplike twitches in the nether regions, and a sharp, stabbing pain that woke me up in the middle of one night to be followed by unmistakably rosier than usual cheeks the very next morning.

I endured the requisite number of days before an early pregnancy test could be taken. On the morning of that day, with the P-Dawg still on his overnight call shift at the hospital, I planned a deliberate trip to the drugstore. As I prepared to leave, the cable channels were playing and replaying the same few clips of space shuttle Columbia breaking up in blue skies over Texas.

And in the car on the way to the pharmacy, listening to a DJ announce news of the tragedy with thinly veiled excitement, before the pregnancy test had even been purchased or peed on, I knew with certainty that a catastrophic space mission would always be entwined in my memory with the day I learned that my first baby would come to be.

The test, of course, was positive: my dear little V-meister in her earliest iteration, as evidenced by a blurry pink line. Yet I was surprised at how closely my initial joy was followed by a pang of fear and the very first inkling of the buzzing, baseline anxiety that comes part and parcel with the act of bringing a child into this world.

And I've been living with the uneasy knowledge that ecstasy and despair are never more than a heartbeat away, one from the other, ever since that day when my fervent hope was confirmed as inky smoke trails, obvious evidence of human frailty and ultimate demise, arched across a Texas sky.

My Babylust is Fun Size

Do you know how cute a shoeless two-year old attempting a headstand looks?

Cute enough to cause a shriveled up 35 year-old mother of two who has sworn off having more children almost seriously reconsider her decision in a fit of babylust, that's what.

I've had minor ovarian twitches in the past, upon oogling other people's newborns and such, but never to the point where I was doing actual math in my head, like today during the little J-dog's Gymboree class. (July is a top-notch month, though, don't you think?)

Apparently, twenty adorable and exceptionally well-behaved two year olds toddling around barefoot and losing their shit for pure joy over a roomful of mechanically generated bubbles can totally do that to a person who may or may not be in the middle of her moon cycle, if you're picking up what I'm laying down.

But as strong as the urge was today, I know it is not a good idea for me to have more children. And I probably won't. Even though I'm pretty sure I could. I mean, I know how to do it, is what I'm saying.

I'm wondering, though: is there anyone out there reading who thought her family was complete and then decided to have a third child? Anyone, say, who had a VERY difficult time of it when her kids were babies and couldn't wait for the day when she finally had two hands free? And when that day was finally on the horizon, maybe found herself thinking that two hands aren't really all that and a bag of chips? Anyone out there who regrets a decision to have only two children? Found that the third time was the absolute charm? I await your wisdom.

Really, what I need is a mother of two teenagers, preferably one boy and one girl, to talk me off the ledge.

Rimarama, this is your Head Voice speaking. I can talk you off the ledge. How about: You're a b1tch on wheels when pregnant! And you're really not that good with teensie-weensie bobbly-headed wittle babies. You are prone to post-partum depression. And you have renegade boobies that routinely malfunction when called upon to act as vessels of infant nourishment. You should go back to work when the J-Dog starts school. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you'll have a mid-life crisis and you totally suck at scrapbooking. Was there anything else?

Rimarama: Well, there is the almost ten pounds of baby weight I finally wrested off.

Head Voice: Word.

So then I came home with an enormous hankering for smoked oysters. Which I ate for lunch, atop two slices of gag-a-licious weight watchers bread (not recommended). Afterwards, I absolutely had to have a Fun Size Snicker's bar, but found that there was not much "fun" about it until I chased it up with three or four more, at which point it became a veritable Festival of Fun. For about ten seconds, and then it turned into a Guilt Garden.

But, it helped get my mind off babies.

This pikchur was taken when I was eight months along with the V-Meister:

"Are You Freakin' Kidding Me, Rimarama?"


P.S. Don't anybody go reading anything into this post. I am absolutely, unequivocally, hands-down, NOT pregnant.

BooBees

I have a fear of bees.

You'll recognize me as the person who goes nuts at the picnic if a honeybee so much as ventures within a five mile radius of my plate. I'm the one who will flip the table over in my haste to flee, then ruin everyone's good time by hovering nervously and trying to shoo it away for the remainder of the outing.

I'm not even allergic, just skeert.

But bees were the furthest thing from my mind this morning as I tripped along a flower lined sidewalk at the local outdoor shopping plaza, on my way to purchase a birthday gift for the P-Dawg.

I was minding my own beeswax (HAR!), thinking merry thoughts and humming a Barry White tune in my head when I walked straight into a swarm of honeybees (and by "swarm," I mean, "one or two").

As luck would have it, one of those bees made a beeline (you don't see it, but I just fell off my chair and am ROTFL) for my shirt and disappeared therein.

I reacted the way any sane mellisophobe would do: by flailing hysterically, renting my garments, and dancing a little jig as confused eyewitnesses watched from the sidelines.

By some crazy miracle, I was not stung.

But what's even more amazing is that the kamikaze bee who flew down my shirt? Fell out onto the sidewalk, DEAD AS A DOORNAIL (or dazed and confused, at the very least).

I can only assume it was my boobees that struck him down.

(Incidentally, tobacco is supposed to be a good antidote for a bee sting. I got stung on a Girl Scout camping trip once and was carrying on about it until our scout leader stubbed out her Virgina Slims menthol, broke it in half, and smeared the tobacco combined with some spit on the affected area. Which totally shut me up. I hope somebody gave her a badge for that. "Bee prepared," is what I always say.)


OK, who threw that tomato?

I Dodged the Bullet

The V-meister and I were flipping through a family photo album earlier today when I was seized with a maniacal compulsion to point out one shot in particular where I was about six weeks along with the J-Dog.

Me: "I'm dying to tell you how babies are made!" "See this one here? J-dog was just a tiny speck in my belly then, waiting to be born!"

My Head Voice, clucking: "Bawk! Baaaawk! Say, 'uterus'! Baaawk!Chickensh1t!Baaawk."

V-Meister, peering at the photo: "But why was he in there?"

Head Voice, beeping urgently: "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Me: "Well, did you know that before we come to live here on Earth, we live in Heaven with God and we have, like, invisible bodies called 'souls'? When it's time for us to be born, we go from living with God to living inside our mamas for awhile, where we grow bodies around our souls until we're ready to come out into the world. Because, you see little V-meister, you need a body to live in the world!"

Head Voice: "Wow. That was deep, Sylvia Browne. What kind of superpowers do these invisible bodies have?"

V-Meister: "But how do the babies get out of the mamas' bellies?"

Head Voice: "Uh-oh . . . Say, it, b1tch!"

Me: "Through a little hole called uh . . . uh . . . a 'vuh-jay-jay' 'vagina.'"

V-Meister: "Oh."

Me: "Any more questions?"

Head Voice: "Are you retarded, Rimarama?"

V-Meister: "But. . . why do the babies have to come out of a hole? Why can't the mamas go up there and bring the babies back? Maybe God could put a little bit of glitter in His hand and rub it around and then say the magic formula so the babies could come down here. The babies shouldn't have to come out of a hole."

Me and Head Voice, in unison: "Ain't that the truth."

V-Meister: "What did you say, Mama?"

Me: "Well, there's no actual glitter involved, but the way it happens is kind of like magic. It's . . . a miracle!! The Miracle of Life!"

Head Voice, making choking noises: "Gag. me. with. a. spoon."

Me: "Hey! Let's go watch TV and eat candy!"


Fin.