Today's Wednesday Advice Smackdown will be even more particularly half-assed than previous installments. Why? Because I'm tired. Fatigued. Exhausted. Vaguely comatose. Etc. It is probably all the Babalah's fault, as I am getting approximately 19 hours of sleep a day, yet still. So. Damn. Tired. This is how tired I am: diohv ccoljuoi caljlllllllldijulj HAAAAAAAAAA. That's the funniest thing I've typed EVER. This is also how tired I am on a regular basis: On Easter Sunday, neither Jason nor my parents woke me up to go to CHURCH. On EASTER. And then they let me sleep through PANCAKES. Out of PITY for my tired, tired self. Anyway. Here are some questions, some answers and some typos that I will probably not fix. Dearest Amalah who I would recognize if i saw on the street and hug and then run before she called the police on the tiny girl she doesn't know, Very soon, I am graduating from college. I have always used (gasp) drugstore foundation. By always I mean the same kind since sixth grade. I actually spend more on things like eyeshadow, but for some strange reason, have never ventured past Maybelline for foundation (I ventured past it for... Read more →

I would love to update, y'all, but honestly, there's just nothing to talk about. Weekend: Went home to visit parents. Discovered doppler is fine family entertainment, provided you're okay with unbuttoning your pants in front of everyone and giving them a 10-minute listen to the symphony that is your gastrointestinal tract. Ate lots of ham. No, more than that. Ceiba peed in parents' house twice; refused to poop until the car ride home. Monday: Wore underwear that were too small. Spent entire day with persistent wedgie. High point of day was eating a 12-inch meatball sub for lunch. Fell asleep at 8 p.m., woke up at 11 p.m., ate hot dog, went back to bed. Today: Hit wall, clothing-wise. Three pairs of slobbish maternity pants from Old Navy and four tops from the Gap are not enough to cobble a week's worth of outfits from. Panty hose no longer fitting. Took 45 minutes to find something non-hideous to wear to work today. Wearing elastic-waistband skirt hiked up to chest and a maternity sweater I have worn about seventeen times in the past five days. Also cut big hole in control-top hose to accomodate pooching belly. No, seriously. Ate oatmeal, BLT,... Read more →

Last night I had another in a long series of pregnancy anxiety dreams. The baby is here, and we have nothing for him. (The baby is always a boy in my dreams, which probably signifies nothing more than the fact that little boys scare the crap out of me.) Last night's dream was nothing new. We had no name, we had no clothes, we had no furniture. (Which is...pretty much where we stand right now. We have a mobile my mom sent, a stuffed bunny Granola sent, and of course, a highly silly rattle. And that's it. I was planning to wait until we know the sex to start buying things so I can gender stereotype to my heart's content, but apparently, my brain DOES NOT LIKE THIS IDEA VERY MUCH.) (Oh, by the way, we did buy one piece of furniture after learning I was pregnant. It's a liquor cabinet. Go us!) We tried to buy a car seat at one point in my dream, and were asked to provide proof of our car insurance. I opened my wallet, which suddenly contained about a dozen State Farm insurance cards, none of which was valid. So they wouldn't let us... Read more →

I'm back in burritos, y'all! In what may be the clearest sign yet that the second trimester will be infinitely more bearable than the first, I am eating a Chipotle barbacoa burrito for lunch today. With MEAT. And HOT SALSA. and OTHER FOOD PRODUCTS THAT ARE NOT SALTINES. And yesterday, while working from home, I made about 45 bowls of delicious, delicious grits for myself, all of which required boiling water. Up until about three days ago, the smell of boiling water made me throw up. (And don't tell me boiling water doesn't have a smell. It DOES and it's HORRIFIC.) Anyway. This could be the beginning of the end of all the puking talk. But let's not jinx things. Instead, I would like to share with you some of the very stupid things pregnant women post on message boards. I get about a dozen pregnancy e-newsletters, all of which I signed up for the day after my positive test result, because I really needed 400 different sources reminding me that I was pregnant!pregnant!pregnant! on a daily basis. You know, in case I forgot. All of these newsletters are linked back to various pregnancy sites (iVillage, BabyCenter, WebMD, etc.) where... Read more →

(Advice Smackdown? What? Eh. Didn't feel like it, frankly. Better luck next week, suckahs.) I had to work from home today because Jason took my car keys. And his car keys. All the car keys. Well, we do have one extra set of keys, because we're not complete fools, but the extra set is only for the Subaru, not the Ford, because we hate the Ford and want it gone gone gone so why bother making an extra key for a car we'll be trading in any day now? Guess which car Jason drove to work today. Go on! You'll never guess. Fools. I called Jason to make sure he had both sets of keys, just in case pregnancy stupidity was causing me to overlook the keys that were like, in my hand or something. Amy: I think you took my keys. Jason: D'oh! Shit. Fuck damn bitch. (We are a household that watches a lot of Simpsons and HBO. Can you tell? But don't worry, we totally plan to buy The Incredibles DVD so the baby will have something wholesome to watch. And I already moved our Eminem CDs to a very high shelf, so we're cool.) After sending... Read more →

(Housekeeping note: Do I owe you an email? Damn straight I do. I owe the entire world an email at this point. I'm sorry. I'm very slow and I also very much suck.) (But wait, there's more: I also owe the world a well-written and totally-not-disgusting entry. This is not that entry.) My dog fell in the toilet last night. More accurately, my dog took a flying swan-dive leap into the toilet last night. Twice. A toilet that was, ahem, unflushed. Dirty. Befouled. Full of pee. I will not go to the bathroom in front of Jason, but I have no shame in front of my pets, who frequently follow me in because they know they'll have my undivided attention for 30 seconds or so. (Or longer, which then, you know, jackpot!) Max likes to sit on my lap and Ceiba likes to hop around and play some sort of game that involves me trying to touch her and her trying anything to not get touched. Unless I stop trying to touch her. Then she gets mad and attacks the toilet paper. (Hello Internet! Welcome to my bathroom! Would you like a magazine? Some quilted two-ply?) Last night Ceiba got... Read more →

So I finally got over my blushing flower of shyness self and asked someone at work to scan my ultrasound photos. This is the first one, at about seven weeks. (Click to embiggen.) In case you are confused, in spite of the label helpfully pointing out which smudge is the "BABY", here's a close-up of the little blob. If you tilt your head a certain way, I think it sort of looks like a lizard. In just four weeks, the baby made an impressive jump from blob to big giant alien head. (For those of you who have no clue what you're looking at, click here for the Ultrasounds For Dummies version.) The baby is only about two inches long right now, which...okay, I guess that's why I can still see my feet. Sort of. And since these were also on the camera, how about some photos of the original babies? Max would like to remind you that he is still here, and is still too beautiful to be adequately captured on film. Ceiba would like you to save her from the gross squishy belly that is totally cramping her lap space. She'd also like to tell Mom to just... Read more →

Full Disclosure: Do not underestimate the power of the Jingle That Ate Hootie. I am currently eating a Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Raa-aanch, which is indeed as large as Brooke Burke's head, and is also infuriatingly delicious. Oh my God. Okay, enough about my nightmarish eating habits. Let's talk about your problems. (Okay, we'll talk about your problems as soon as Gmail stops dicking around with me.) (We're all WAITING, Gmail. Please stop with the "oops...unable to process your request" errors.) (In fact, could you not ever say "oops" when giving me an error message? It's really not that clever and always makes me start singing that Britney Spears song.) (Oh FUCK. Now see what you've done? Quick, somebody start humming "Tiny Dancer.") dear amalah, i recently found your website and recently found out i was pregnant - your site came first, so maybe there's causation or perhaps just correlation. but here's my question - since getting pregnant (which was a trial in itself), i feel like i haven't been able to relax and enjoy at all. every twinge, every nebulous colored drop of "fluid" causes me to freak out and completely lose my cookies with fear (not to mention the... Read more →

Blah blah urinary tract infection blah vomiting blah blah tired. Aannndd...that's my entry, folks! Thanks for stopping by. Seriously, what else is there to talk about? There is puke, and there is pee, and there is general pissiness. Tomorrow I will be 12 weeks pregnant, which means I should be seeing the beginning of end of the morning (HA) sickness. (PRE-EMPTIVE ASSVICE SMACKDOWN: If one more person tells me one more story about one more woman who was sick for all 40 weeks I will track down your IP address and show up at your house to punch you in the face.) In the meantime, I'm still throwing up at completely random times. First thing Sunday morning. Last thing Monday night. Tuesday at tea time. Whenever the bile strikes. And magically, after hearing the words "You have a urinary tract infection," I became acutely aware that I have a urinary tract infection and it hurts like a motherfucker. So that's...been really fun, and whatever. HiveWatch 2005 began last night with my first dose of antibiotics, which means I started getting hysterically itchy and and twitchy within 20 minutes of taking the pill and spent most of the night yanking up... Read more →

It's a urinary tract infection. Or, to quote my nurse (whom I love so much I might make her a godparent), it's a "really nasty, really major urinary tract infection." So nasty, I'm lucky I wasn't pissing blood all weekend. So nasty, I have to go on antibiotics, which raises the alarm for two reasons. 1) I'm pregnant, and therefore trying to remain in a drug-free state of Zen-like purity lest I poison my fetus* with one too many Tylenol geltabs, and 2) I am allergic to just about every antibiotic known to man. *Yes, it's true. I am harboring a full-on fetus now and am feeling all nostalgic for the sweet embryonic days. They grow up so fast. The rest of the phone call with my nurse was a frustrating back-and-forth about the loooong list of antibiotics I cannot tolerate and cannot spell (I have them written phonetically in my wallet in case I get in a car accident and the EMTs want to give me "ah-rith-ra-my-a-sin" or "see-clore" or "a-mox-a-sill-an.") The only ones I know how to spell are "Cipro" (due to the anthrax scare of 2001...it's still in my wallet as "sip-row") and "Tetracycline". (No idea where... Read more →