Future Running Mommy

Had a great appointment this afternoon, despite having to wait over an hour for the doctor. This is why I HATE PM appointments!

I am up 2 pounds since last week (which is clearly going straight to the baby -- he is getting so big!), my blood pressure looks good, and the baby sounds awesome. The best part? I am now 1 cm dilated! Woot woot! I never thought such a small number would bring me such excitement. Baby steps, right?!!

I am also GBS positive, which basically means I have bacteria inside of me that can be harmful to the baby as he rescues through the birth canal. So, when I go into labor, I will be administered an antibiotic (like Penicillin) to prevent any harm to the baby. Sounds simple, and j am hoping this will not prevent me from having the kind of natural birth I'm hoping for. Fingers crossed!!

No, I will not tell you what we are naming our son, but I thought this piece was really sweet!

Tuesday

Jun. 3, 2014




LISTEN

	Naming the Baby by Faith Shearin When you are dreaming of the name you are also dreaming of who they might be. They are invented in darkness — under cloak of skin — and, for the better part of a year, are a swelling or a set of symptoms. The name books are like a box of chocolates and when you open them you see how many kinds there really are. There are names of people you have known and disliked and names that make the wrong sounds and names that suggest your child will be like everyone else's. There are names that turn your child into a character in a novel and names that recall the time when your great grandmother was young. Naming the baby is a way of dreaming about a creature who is almost but not quite. It is a way of imagining the soul of a person you are making but have not made. The name is the first way you see the baby: their title, the syllables that conjure a shape from the lantern. "Naming the Baby" by Faith Shearin from The Empty House. © Word Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) Today is the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg (1926) (books by this author). He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Paterson. His father, Louis, was a poet and high school teacher; his mother, Naomi, was a communist and a paranoid schizophrenic. Naomi and Allen were very close; when she was in the grip of her delusions, he was the only one she trusted, and he often accompanied her to her therapy appointments. She spent much of his childhood institutionalized. Ginsberg spent eight months in a mental institution himself in the late 1940s, when he was arrested for harboring stolen goods; he chose to plead insanity. He went to Columbia University, first intending to study law, but during his freshman year he met Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. He later said, "I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs — when I was 17 — that I realized I was talking through an empty skull ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts." Ginsberg left Columbia in 1948, traveled, and worked some odd jobs, and in 1954, he moved to San Francisco. He met poet Peter Orlovsky there; they fell in love and were partners until Ginsberg's death. In October 1955, Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery. The next day, bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent him a telegram quoting Emerson's letter to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." "Howl," which was written to be read aloud, revived oral poetry. Ginsberg said that it, along with the rest of his work, was autobiographical, and that at its core was his pain at dealing with his mother's schizophrenia. His mother died in 1956; two days later, he received a letter from her in the mail, in which she had written, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window — I have the key — Get married Allen don't take drugs — the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window." He had wanted to have a kaddish — the Jewish mourners' prayer — recited at her funeral, but there weren't enough Jewish men present, so he wrote his poem "Kaddish" (1961) in reparation: Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream — what is this life? Toward the Key in the window — and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk — in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater — and the place of poverty you knew, and I know, but without caring now [...] He said, "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." Today is the birthday of the "founding mother of the historical romance genre": Kathleen Woodiwiss (1939) (books by this author), born Kathleen Erin Hogg in Alexandria, Louisiana. She met her future husband, Air Force Lieutenant Ross Woodiwiss, at a dance when she was 16, and they eloped. She worked part-time as a fashion model and saved her money to buy a typewriter, which she gave to her husband one Christmas. She told him it was for him to write his poetry on; she really bought it for herself, and she worked on her first novel, The Flame and the Flower, during his absences, afraid to tell him what she was up to. The hefty manuscript was turned down eight times, but then she sent it to some paperback publishers; an editor at Avon, raiding the slush pile for something to read on a rainy afternoon, was captivated, and the book sold 600,000 copies on its publication in 1972. Woodiwiss single-handedly remade the romance genre, setting the standard for nearly every bodice-ripper to follow. Previously, romance novels had been pretty thin, literally and figuratively. Her books were often 700 pages long, heavily plotted, and full of carefully researched historical detail and steamy sex scenes. Her heroines were strong and dynamic, considering the genre and the time period. Woodiwiss wrote 12 more books after The Flame and the Flower, taking her time on each one to get the historical details right. She died of cancer in 2007, and her last book, Everlasting, was published posthumously. It's the birthday of author Larry McMurtry (1936) (books by this author), born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and raised in nearby Archer City. His hometown is about 80 miles from the town of Thalia, which is the setting for several of McMurtry's novels, like his first, Horseman, Pass By (1961), as well as Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966) and its four sequels. He writes a lot about small-town life in Texas, and sometimes he writes historical novels about the frontier, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove (1985), although he strongly resists romanticizing the Old West and doesn't hold a very high opinion of cowboys in general. In the early 1960s, when he was at Stanford on a Wallace Stegner fellowship, he began working as a rare-book scout, haunting used-book stores in search of first editions and other valuable books, which he would buy on behalf of antiquarian booksellers. It was a great job for a bookish kid who liked to hang around and browse the shelves, and when he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1970, he opened his own store in Georgetown, called Booked Up. In 1988, he opened a second Booked Up in his hometown of Archer City, in four large buildings that once housed a car dealership. He bought up the stock of failing independent bookstores all over the country, and he filled the towering white shelves with hundreds of thousands of volumes. He doesn't see his current vocations — author and bookseller — as entirely different from his cattle-ranch roots. He told The New York Times: "The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters." He occasionally talks about giving up fiction, but he'll never give up the bookstores. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^® sponsor The Poetry Foundation National broadcasts of The Writer's Almanac are supported by The Poetry Foundation The Writer's Almanac is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.