In Gratitude

Right about this point in Iz's pregnancy is when I got put on bed rest. For ten fucking weeks. Due to pre-term labor.

I contest that I did not bring it on by flying to Atalanta and partying with Dee and Giddy for several days, but rather that it was brought on by the stress of getting slammed with several emergency writing projects at work right after I stepped off the plane. Of course, if I hadn't gone to GA the projects wouldn't have started stacking up and toppling over, but hey.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that stress and pregnancy are a bad mix for me. Hence this list:

Thank you to Jo and Manny, who took Leelo and Iz for a big chunk of yesterday so I could sit calmly and firmly on the couch, watching a middling movie and attending to some soothing, months-old mending.

Thank you in advance to Badger, who has offered to come and work with Iz on some homework this afternoon so that any Spanish knots can be untangled on the fly, rather than via jarring gaps as I desperately paw through a Spanish/English dictionary.

Thank you to Seymour, who took time he did not have to empty the litterbox this morning.

Thank you to Godfather M, who accompanied the kids and me to Doula A's salon so that A could actually attend to the hacking of my parti-color locks.

Thank you to Emsie, who had us three over to her jewel box of an apartment in SoMa, and pitched in amiably with the Leelo and Iz wrangling at the nearby park and Ferry Building.

Thanks to Babysitter Cece, who sat on Leelo so I could take Iz to a gymnastics party without having to wrestle our enthusiastic boy out of all the out-of-bounds areas the entire time.

And, finally, thank you to the invisible forces that influenced the mom hosting the gymnastics party, and made her tell Jo and me that we could drop our girls off, giving us almost two whole hours of complete freedom to go eat The World's Best Chinese Food.

I would not have survived Seymour's conference weekend without all this help. I'm still mostly holding on by my nails and teeth.

Semi-related somewhat distasteful postscript: If you're going to eat a large portion of chili-flake tofu for both lunch and dinner, remember that you did so before wiping yourself the next day and completely freaking out for a split second, thinking that you're seeing vaginal blood.