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*