Matt and I recently arrived back in Los Angeles after a year in New York, with some pretty big news. I thought the best way to break it would be via a meme, since they're good enough for LOLcats.
Let me spell this out more clearly for those who aren't familiar with Park Slope and/or LOLcats.
Matt and I spent this past year paying too much to live in Park Slope, an over-gentrified part of Brooklyn that boasts close proximity to Prospect Park, organic kale smoothies, Sunday brunches, and -- last but not least -- strollers. LOADS of strollers. All shapes and sizes, though mainly of the above-$500 kind, all too often impeding movement in the tiny aisles of the organic-only grocery store, or trucking down the sidewalk three wide.
Well, this August we found out that, after a year of stroller-dodging, we're going to have our own baby. This confirmed what we already suspected, namely that pregnancy is highly contagious in Park Slope.
We had all the normal reactions, obviously (happiness, worry, etc). But we also wondered: could this be our chance to one-up all the Park Slope parents with our very own stroller? We don't have a lot of money, certainly not enough for a $500 spaceship of our own, so the idea was to fashion a stroller out of a rolling office chair and a home-sewn harness, or maybe even just some duct tape. Something like this:
Maybe it isn't that safe, and you'd need a lot of duct tape to hold the baby in. Also, at the very least, you'd have to tape an umbrella to the top for sun protection (especially if the baby gets Matt's skin). But it would be worth it to see the parents' faces as we rolled gloriously down the street and parked our "stroller" for brunch... the horror, the pity, the shock.
(I realized just now that you could probably pull this off with a wagon or wheelbarrow, too. But I don't know if wagons are very maneuverable, for example whether they have a good turning radius.)
Before we left, I scheduled a prenatal visit through a website called ZocDoc, because you can book it without actually talking to anybody on the phone, and also because I was randomly really paranoid that my uterus would explode while driving through Kansas, where I assumed no doctor would ever want to live. So I accidentally scheduled the appointment with a doctor at an abortion clinic across from a fish market. This was doubly annoying, because not only is it extremely weird to go to an abortion clinic for a prenatal appointment when you aren't getting an abortion, but I literally can think of nothing more disgusting to someone with morning sickness than a fish market. Luckily, we found out that everything was fine, I was 6 weeks along, and the mean Russian sonogram lady gave us a picture of the baby, which concerned me because it looked somewhat more like a tumor than a baby.
Two days later, we left to drive across the country. I'd post more pictures of our drive here, though I didn't take very many because I spent so much time curled in fetal position wanting to vomit. But here are some highlights:
- Brisket and bourbon, Louisville. Even the thought of beef is a little too much for me right now, but it seemed enjoyable for Matt.
- Prairie Dog Town, adjacent to a gas station, Kansas.
- Driving through the Rockies in the rain, Colorado
- Red rocks and Mormons, Utah
We did make our Youtube video on our cat-crating technique, but it kind of tanked. Even though it took us eons to figure out how to get the cats into a crate without them clawing our eyeballs out, by the second day of the trip their spirits were so defeated that they had no fight left in them, and our demonstration was less than convincing.
When we got back, we went to a real doctor, and we got a picture of the baby at around 9 weeks. It looked more baby-like, and it even was moving its arms a little -- success!
Allow me to take you from a moment of joy to the depths of misery. Shortly after our doctor's appointment, we discovered bedbugs in our West Hollywood sublet (our buttface of a subleaser is from New York, which explains it all and makes me suddenly hate New York with a murderous, fiery passion). Matt and I react really poorly to bed bug bites, meaning that our bites swell up to welt sizes and bruise, and we look like lepers. So, we have all but lit ourselves on fire trying to get rid of these fuckers.
If you've never had bed bugs and been pregnant at the same time, you're really missing out. Mainly because it's a true character building exercise to need to sleep all the time, but to only have access to a bed as appealing as a garbage dumpster. After getting 60+ bites in one night, I started sleeping in full length impenetrable bed bug armor, including socks on my hands. I'm not sure why I thought this was a good idea. With nothing to cover my head, the bugs bit me all over my face, jaw and neck.
A few days later, we welcomed a darling new addition into our home: a beautiful new steam cleaner baby, which I may or may not have cradled to sleep that night.
When equipped with a steam cleaner, you can blast bed bugs into oblivion. It's like dropping a nuclear bomb on their stupid faces. We spent all day today dismantling the bedroom and blasting boiling steam into every crevasse we could find. It's hard to put into words how exhilarating it is to exact revenge on a population of insects that just ruined your face - we were like giddy children on Christmas when we started finding bug bodies. However, we were also utterly exhausted and frankly, mentally unprepared to deal with the possibility of getting bitten again.
Result: 3 new bites, thoughts of suicide.
Luckily, we did what any normal person would do next, which is to GTFO of the bug dungeon. We found an apartment in Miracle Mile and moved in a week ago. My face is slowly healing.
Today we had our 12 week check-up, where we unnecessarily spent $250 on a genetic counseling session only to find out we are not really at risk for anything, and to get a half-hearted description of autosomal recessive traits that mainly involved pointing to pictures of blue stick figures.
Then we had another ultrasound, where we saw the baby leap like a frog and get the hiccups. The doctor gave us a DVD which I'd try to post here, but (a) it's really long, and mostly kind of boring thanks to our lazy baby (clearly, genetically related to me), (b) it focuses way too heavily on my overly full bladder, and I'd rather not share that with the public, and (c) they must be trying to keep our baby top secret, because the DVD seems to be encrypted with no actual accessible files on it.
