You know what's the weirdest thing about not being pregnant anymore?

(I mean, other than the fact that there's an itty bitty person crawling around who was the first thing I've ever produced with my body that I wanted to keep & love forever. Toenail clippings; not so much.)

It's that every once in awhile my intestines will rumble or gurgle or whatever and I'll feel the twitch...and immediately, before common sense can intervene, I think, "the Sprout just kicked me." What's weird is that I seem to be unable to remember on a deep-tissue level exactly what it feels like to have my body to myself. And I really truly wouldn't have it any other way. It's just a tiny bit of magic left over from last year, one last pinch of fairy dust that wasn't swept out when the Sprout crossed the threshold of my flesh & became Blake.

I'm thinking about pregnancy because this weekend our beloved Monstre told the world that her "honeymoon was a true one" and she & Loftwyr'll be welcoming a miniMonstre next year. And apparently she told me, too, 'cept I'm too dumb to take a hint. Or, as I prefer to tell people, I'm so good at keeping a secret that I can keep one from myself as well.

I think I feel extra-joyful about this because my friendship with the two of them is founded on my labour & birth. I'm sure that in the normal course of things we would've become friends eventually. But the circumstances surrounding Blake's birth accelerated & intensified the usual social ties. The debt I owe them is so deep that it can only really be repaid with many acts of kindness toward themselves & their babe. So I'm superglad that it's come to this. Yay!

The pool-b-que at which we learned this news also made me superglad. There weren't very many people there, which made me feel a bit less self-conscious arriving with my infant & huge bag of infant accessories. Blake was in and out of the pool all afternoon, eschewing his nap completely. Oh, there was hell to pay later, I can assure you. But we all had way too much fun trolling him around the surface of the pool. Even people I barely knew delighted in him, which always makes my party.

"I forgot the towel. I'll have to kiss that yam off you!!"

- the kind of statement you can only get away with if you're talking to a baby

Stacy & I had a good chat in the middle of eating, all about stress & equipment malfunctions & my sudden desire to move far, far away. She shared her theory that it's important to spread out nervous breakdowns among a group of friends so that no one person knows how neurotic you truly are. "But if they ever get together to compare notes, you're fucked!" I laughed.

Loftwyr threw me into the pool about halfway through. When I was 15, I truly aspired to be a girl who is thrown in the pool a lot. Later I realized that what I really wanted was a boyfriend, and once I got one I was satisfied with life on the deck. But there's always been a tiny part of me that remembers the giddy rush & wants to be thrown in the pool. Having experienced it a dozen years, 20 pounds and a baby later, I can now tell that little part to shut up. It was cold. And sudden.

But kind of fun nonetheless.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 7/20/2004 11:23:00 p.m.