Pregnancy Bird Dreams

Even though David and I had lots of conversations about how we really didn't need to do Easter baskets this year (I mean, we're getting old, and the fake pink grass gets everywhere, and it's always a disappointment to find out once more that chocolate Easter bunnies are hollow and don't even really taste good), but when we woke up Easter morning I realized that Mr. Sneakity-Sneak David-Face had put together an Easter basket behind my back!

It contained:
a new hair-brush (mine is about a decade old and is missing a good portion of its bristles)
new hair bands (I manage to lose all mine, despite the lengths David takes to collect them around the house and place them on my dresser)
Cadbury mini-eggs
a jar of nuts (for David, David said)
AND
a bird feeder!

We live on a busy street, away from any trees, and we're on a second-floor apartment. So basically, not a lot of birds are going to make their way to our little balcony for seeds. But David bought some special birdseed that grackles apparently hate (which is good, because although I have come to love grackles, they are too noisy to have on our balcony), so we set up our bird feeder and sat back to watch.

We got nothing. No birds. We scattered some seed on our balcony for good measure, but Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday passed with no feathered friends.

When I was at school on Wednesday, David sent me an email that said: "There's a bird on the balcony!" The little guy apparently ate some seeds and then chirped really loudly after every bite, sending out the word.

This morning we had a good handful of little sparrows strutting around our balcony, dunking their heads into the feeder, dropping seeds all OVER the place, and then jumping down to peck like chickens at what fell. They fluff out their feathers and cock their heads and hop on both feet--they do everything that is cute. They are just your run-of-the-mill sparrows....they look like this:

and this:

They are little House Sparrows primarily, but as soon as school gets out we're going to pull out our Sibley and see if any other types of sparrows are stopping by.

But what I'm really writing this post for is to talk about the incredibly vivid dreams these birds have been giving me. Birds wake early, and they chirp like wild on our balcony in the morning. I tend to have my craziest dreams in those last couple of hours of sleep in the morning, and the past two days in a row I have dreamed of incredibly beautiful, colorful birds. I see them in detail, and I get to hold a bird in my hands in each dream.

Two mornings ago, I dreamed that our bird feeder was filled with the tiniest white swallows with beaks like avocets. One flew onto my hand through an open window, and stuck it's long, thin beak in between my knuckles. They were beautiful.

My dream bird looked like a white swallow:

With the beak of an avocet (which we see in our backyard sometimes...such funny-looking, beautiful birds...):

And it was the size of a bee hummingbird (so cute!):


This morning, I dreamed of our old Idaho friend, the Western Tanager, only instead of black wings, they were as orange as his head. He could talk, and he could make the sticks get up and move like animals.

He let me hold him, and I could see all of his separate feathers as I ran my thumb down his back.

I love these dreams, and, once again, I think I owe them to Little Spooky. We got to hear his heartbeat today.

I just hope that once I can start feeling Spooky move around inside me at nighttime, he won't make me start to have nightmares about this:

Feeling for Two

My pregnancy books all talk about the "amped-up" PMS-like emotions that accompany pregnancy, but I've decided to think of it more as feeling for two. I've always been the type to tear up at the climaxes of good movies (or out-and-out bawl in select films such as and including Philadelphia, Love Story, Beaches, and Dancer in the Dark), but every since Little Spooky has started hanging around inside of me, things have started to become ridiculous.

The funny thing is, it feels really, really good to be this close to tears all the time. Not even just the tears necessarily, but feeling things more acutely than usual. Science says it's all hormones, but I like to think it's because I have this awesome E.T./Eliot connection with Little Spooky that is letting me feel life the way s/he would first experience it.

For example, the world smells either DELICIOUS or TERRIBLE. The burned floor of our oven: TERRIBLE. I have to sit on the balcony until it goes away. Also, we can't clean the oven because the cleaning fumes are bad for Spooky and David and I are always home at the same time (and also, our apartment is only a little bit larger than a roomy tin can. Ergo, even when I'm not in the kitchen, I'm basically still in the kitchen). However, springtime (even in Lubbock) smells INCREDIBLE. I could sniff the trees all day. They smell like magic.

Also, I can't stop watching birds bathe in puddles because it makes me giggle uncontrollably with glee. And when I say "birds," I mean big, ugly dirty grackles. And when I say "puddles," I mean big nasty pools of water that fill up on the crackly brown lawn of campus where the sprinklers are broken and the ground is uneven. I've never seen such cute sights in my life.

The point of this post, though, is to discuss the ridiculous things that make me cry these days. It's like I've never experienced emotions before until now, and I want to practice them on everything. Here is a random sampling of things that have made me cry in the past three months:

1. The Secret Garden (not just the climax, either. I'm talking the whole way through. Just thinking about Mary Lennox showing Colin that there really isn't a lump on his back is making my lip quiver and my eyes tear up even NOW. This isn't an exaggeration.)
2. The Parent Trap, Hayley Mills vers. (basically as soon as the grandpa steps into ANY scene, I start crying.)
3. random episodes of Bones (David has recently been hooked on old episodes of this show. There was a Christmas episode with Ryan O'Neal in prison. I broke down. Please note that this is a show about gross corpses and flesh stuck to bones. It still managed to break my heart.)
4. The Cosby Show
5. Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken (Way, way, way before she goes blind. I'm talking from the moment she refuses to leave the school building by wrapping her legs around her chair, I'm already crying.)
6. My Neighbor Totoro (when they grow trees by dancing in the middle of the night. Also, the cat bus, because it made me feel so safe and warm, I started to cry.)
7. Howl's Moving Castle
8. Paul McCartney's "Heaven on a Sunday" and "Calico Skies" (David gave me these songs when we were dating......they have ALWAYS made me cry. But being pregnant makes me cry WORSE.)
9. Paul Simon's "Heart and Bones"
10. Elton John's "My Father's Gun"
11. Billy Joel's "C'etait Toi (You Were the One)" (This is on a very endearing episode of Freaks and Geeks, and the episode made me cry when this song came on. Oh, Sam Weir. So adorable, I'm crying.)
12. Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker's "I Won't Back Down" (Can't explain this one. But I listened to it again this morning as a test, to see if it REALLY does make me cry. It REALLY does.)
13. David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World"
14. Select tracks from The Lion King soundtrack
15. John Lennon's "Watching the Wheels" (it made me cry when David bought me the record for Valentine's Day, and the music video is even worse. Thus, I have attached it below.)

Little Spooky, thank you for helping me feel so much, so often. *long, lovely, post-cry sigh*

It's a Halloween Baby!

The cat's out of the bag: a third Grover is officially in existence and spends all his/her time doing water aerobics in my belly. Little Spooky's due date is October 27th, and David and I are giddy about it. We've taken to practice-lecturing our future babies in our spare time, trying out different jokes and puns that will be sure to make our kids roll their eyes in disgust. I literally can't wait.

Aside from raised eyebrows from some people at school ("You're having a baby in the middle of your coursework? Really?"), most people, including my professors, have been very encouraging and congratulatory. I do worry that I won't be able to give my scholarship or Little Spooky my 100% all, but I'm sure going to do my darnedest to do my best. People are always going to have excuses about why they can't keep all their bases loaded. The trick is not to quit once you fall behind. I learned that from Aesop's Fables (I think....or maybe it an was old Care-Bears episode).

Anyway, I used my awesome computer/science skills to anticipate what Spooky is going to look like. I took some pictures of what David and I looked like as babies, and used a top-of-the-line program to take our basic bone structures and facial features to create a hypothetical photograph of what our baby will inherit from us. Isn't it great?

So I took this picture of David as a little guy:
And this picture of me as a little girl:

And this what came up:















............*drum roll*..............




















..............wait for it.............

















TA-DA!!!!!!!!


So cute! Obviously, Spooky will inherit all his baby hair from me.

Of course, even if Spooky isn't born with a mane like I was, according to the following exhibit, the crazy baby hair will arrive at least by the time s/he enters high school:

Exhibit A: Emily's Baby Hair

Exhibit B: David's High School Hair

*Scholarly note: Not only has David kept this hair long and strong, but he still sleeps with that blanket (that he made himself) every night. Adorable! I love my little family!