Author: evancparker
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ultrasound 2: the revenge of baby sparklet
naturally, we didn’t find out that baby sparklet is a girl until yesterday morning during the ultrasound, but the dirty little secret of blogging is that i actually wrote the “it’s a girl” announcement post the night before the doctor’s appointment.
(otherwise, it never would have been posted by 10:15 am … it takes me hours to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite each post, so i would have had to skip work entirely on Friday and it still wouldn’t have been done until, you know, July.)
instead, i just wrote two posts. one if it was a boy, and one if it was a girl. considering that, as parents, we won’t pick out both a boy’s name and a girl’s name, maybe the first way to embarass baby sparklet is to share what the post would have been had she been a he.
my name would have been shannon, for the record.
so while yesterday’s post was first, i just made it look like it address the actually appointment. sadly, that was not the case, and fwiw i feel horrible about my deception.
my employers, however, feel much better about blogging during the work day … especially because they know how long it takes me to write anything.
so, sparklet was awake and lively through the whole sonogram, though not overwhelmingly cooperative. we got to hear the heartbeat again, and this time we got a much better recording.
about two minutes in, the sonogramologist (i make up words as i go along) asked if there was a bet about the gender. there wasn’t (we share the same checking account, so what’s the point) but before the doc could settle said non-existent bet, baby sparklet got shy and folded (her) legs right up.
the waiting, and the poking and the prodding seemed to go on forever — probably even more so for both mother and baby.
at one point, the doc called our beautiful-perfect-and-wonderfully-uncooperative baby “stubborn” to which i replied that she was obviously female, to which the lady sparkler replied that she was obviously our child.
true ‘dat.
so, while the doc kept it as suspenseful as she could, she let slip the female pronoun ten or twelve times before she finally managed to “motivate” baby sparklet into spreading them legs.
the rest, as they say, is history. the world is saved from baby Aesclaypius (although i did promise that Aesclaypiana would be on our short list).
now we just need to paint everything pink (kidding!) and come up with a wonderful, but anglo-friendly name.
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it’s (going to be) a girl!
well, 142 days into this thing, and we finally know the gender of our baby sparklet … she’s a girl. and frankly, after 20 weeks of discussions, i am just glad she’s a something.the lady sparkler announced about six weeks into the pregnancy that the baby was going to be a girl. (she never said how she knew it was a girl, but she just knew.)i assumed she was just playing the odds based off her ancestry … the lady sparkler is the eldest of three daughters, her mother is the eldest of three daughters, and both her grandmother and great-grandmother were the eldest of three daughters.
that 13 girls in 5 generations. her maternal line is obviously hostile environment for boy sperm.
anyway, things became unbearable after i let slip that an old-wives-tale predicted that baby-mamas with girls in the pouch craved fruit, while those with boys craved meat. within two days she had “developed” a craving for anything strawberry that she could get her hands on, and it’s still going strong.
of course, i “knew” that — in her fervency — she was dead wrong. she was so certain it would be a girl, that i knew God would rise up and smite her … if for no other reason than the comedic value.
in fact, she was so certain it would be a girl, that she promised lightingchickknits that if the baby turned out to be a boy, we would name him Aesculapius.
for what it’s worth, i’m guessing that why she’s a girl, because while God likes a bit of Karma … he knew the ramifications of a male heir were truly severe.
but, besides narrowly avoiding destroying the life of our child through name selection, today is a landmark for another reason — it is the launch of our pregnancy’s facebook and twitter strategies.
it seems rediculous, but we actually spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out when it was “appropriate” to social market our little baby sparklet, and few issues sparked as much controversy with our friends to boot.
I’m the end, we decided that it’s been 20 weeks now … which means that we are over halfway to having a real live baby sparklet to mortifyingly embarass. so why not practice?
with that in mind, here is the pregnancy so far:
- the clothes don’t make the (wo)man — the lady sparkler, and her battles with the maternity-clothing-industrial-complex.
- into the closet, pt 2 — the first true battle with our home renovation / nesting instincts.
- ultrasound — baby sparklet looks great, sounds great, and is already over achieving … and we’ve got proof.
- the longest twelve weeks — i realized early on that i had the potential do a lot of damage in the twelve weeks where i was supposed to avoid talking about the pregnancy.
- yup, we’re pregnant — and yes, we are going to find out the gender, and yes, we are going to pick a boring, anglo-friendly name.
- how i met your mother — the latest in a whole series of posts about how i met and married mama de baby sparklet … preserved for posterity, and mutual embarrassment each major holiday.
and now that we have a gender, i am going to head down to the pub and lift a pint to the fact that there will be no baby Aesculapius asking me what kind of drugs we were on when we picked names.
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the bolshoi’s “le corsaire” @ the kennedy center
as a Russian studies major — which included spending the summer of ’92 bouncing around the moscow and saint petersberg theater districts — i try and see the Russian ballet troupes whenever their quasi-permanent touring companies pass through D.C.this week, it’s the Bolshoi Ballet’s turn.
i won’t bother reviewing the show (there is no need, as Robert Greskovic of the wall street journal saw the exact same show) but it was both outstanding, and thoroughly un-Russian.
just as glasnost melted Soviet politics, it also melted the soul-crushing need for Russian conformity. in ballet, that means everything is a step less precise — likely because the off-stepping member of the corps is no longer shot on sight.
don’t get me wrong, the production was beautiful — awash in color, with incredible individualistic performances, filled with old world emotion — and nearly perfect by today’s standards.
it’s just not the mechanical, stunningly in-unison, and bombastic production that i grew to love back in the day.
… which puts me in a small circle of people (along with the military industrial complex) secretly wishing another cold war would breakout.
PHOTO: Le Corsaire, photo courtesy of Bolshoi Ballet. -
how I met your mother: engagement, part 2
(continued from part 1)this is the fifth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other. immediately after the lady sparkler’s crazy Texas friends started haranguing her into haranguing me into marrying her, I thought to myself “you know, I do love her, and want to spend the rest of my life with her…”
and so i decided to get a ring. that was December. I had the ring two weeks later.
we were already talking about going to new York for my birthday (April) and it seemed like (at the time) my beloved’s marital haranguing might actually die down by then, at least long enough for me to propose uninterrupted.
not so much.
by February, i was sufficiently badgered to explain to her (in no uncertain terms) that from now on, each time she brought up engagement, i would move the “hypothetical” proposal back another month.
by April, she had managed to add *fourteen* months to the engagement time line. so, while i hadn’t succeeded in her stifling the running of her mouth, i at least knew that a proposal was the farthest thing from her mind when we pulled into NYC’s Penn Station the second week of April.
the same, however, couldn’t be said for me…
I was a wreck, and constantly obsessed about the ring — where it was, and whether it had fallen out of the triple-bagged cocoon in which it was placed. to make matters worse, on the day i was going to propose (april 14th) it rained, and rained, and rained, and rained.
i had already decided I couldn’t propose to the lady sparkler inside some silly, human-built structure because whatever we were inside could be torn down, or worse, turned into a starbucks.
so, i decided i would do the deed in Central Park, which (obviously) wasn’t particularly rain-friendly, which meant that april 14th became april 15th, and engagement day became tax day.
that afternoon, i marched my beloved around central park for over an hour, mostly because i couldn’t find a place to propose. i know it’s crazy, but there are a *lot* of people in new york — who knew? — and every single one of them seemed to be lounging around central park.
before we left DC, i had asked my best friend from college (and future bridesmaid) if she had any suggestions about the whole engagement process. it turns out that her husband was such a mess when he proposed, that she was convinced (right up until she saw the ring) that he was dumping her.
her solution? pull the ring out first.
and, when we finally found a secluded spot, i did just that. the lady sparkler was resting for a moment on a mostly horizontal tree, when i pulled out the ring, and sat down beside her.
she didn’t hear a single thing that i said. she was like the crow from the secret of n.i.m.h., when he sees mrs. frisbee’s medallion and says: “ooooooooooo, SPARKLY!”
interestingly enough, to this day, she has no idea what *she* said either. (for the record, it was: “oh. my. god. are you, like, serious?”)
i have what i said written down somewhere, but it was exactly what you would expect: “love, blah, blah, blah, so happy, blah, blah, life together, blah blah.” she replied, “yes, yes. oh my god, yes.” which — i would surmise — is just about as good of a response as you can get.
speaking of which, on our way out of central park we ran into the back of another boy proposing to another girl, and it looked like he had arranged for a photographer and her parents to join in the festivities.
unfortunately, she looked abjectly horrified. yeeeesh. at least *we* lived happily ever after.
PHOTO: tulips, new york, new york. -
how I met your mother: engagement, Texas-style
dear sparklet,this is the fourth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other. there are some stories that get better with age … and then there are stories that start out really $&#% funny, and stay really $&@#% funny.
I hope this is the latter.
a few years into the relationship, we made the honest mistake of going to Texas. sure, the lady sparkler’s parents were great, and her sisters were awesome … but her friends? lunatics.
apparently, something in the water down there causes people to think that 18 months of dating is the maximum allowable before some kind of engagement is necessary, beit of the voluntary or shotgun variety.
the sparklers, being a bit past that “threshold” had apparently tripped some kind of Texas state-wide alert system, where friends hold waves of rolling interventions to make sure “everything’s alright” and that the boy doesn’t have any “problems” that needed to be addressed (likely by overwhelming displays of machismo, or belt buckles, or both).
by the end of the year, after a couple of months of interventions, the lady sparkler was in a tizzy … and her occasional, badly disguised, open-ended questions about an engagement timeline started getting more and more pointed (and more and more badly disguised).
each time she would tizzy, we would talk … and each time we’d agree that *we* needed to have a timeline that worked for *us,* even if it was at odds with the posse was forming along the Rio Grande.
I should pause.
sure, Texans are ten-gallon-hat-sized-crazy for thinking 18 months of dating is suitable for long-term mate selection (which leads to all sorts of redneck/missing teeth/social Darwinist jokes which I will forgo due to likely readership demographics) …
… but it is possible that my people (from the opposite side of the “war of northern aggression”) just might fall off the other end of the commitment scale. I have friends that dated for 8 years before the topic of marriage even came up, or (worse yet) were engaged for 5+ years before deciding whether they should actually tie the knot.
so, from my worldview, i thought that I was being carefree to the point of reckless abandonment by thinking of proposing to a woman I had been dating for *only* two years. yet, all the while, the great state of Texas was negotiating with Chuck Norris to come shift my worldview for me.
I digress …
by February, my beloved had become as subtle as a three year old in the aisle of a toy store … and I was started to dig in, solely as a matter on principle. by the 27th time the issue was raised in those three months, I sat my beloved down, and we talked. it went something like this:
me: “you know i love you. and i want you to know that you can propose to me anytime you like …”the lady sparkler: “ummmm.”
me: “no, seriously. I know how much you want to get engaged… so you are welcome to go ring shopping, pick out something nice for me, and then get down on one knee and propose. I promise I’ll wear the ring everyday.”
her: “uhhhhhh.”
me: “what’s wrong, sweetie?”
her: “I think I’d prefer if you proposed to me.”
me: “interesting. okay, here’s the deal. let’s say we have a date for the hypothetical engagement, let’s call it X.”
her: “is X soon?”
me: “well, interesting that you mentioned that … each time you ask when it is, or suggest that X should be coming sooner, the hypothtical engagement date becomes X + 1 month.”
her: “so, when is X then?”
me: “i’m not sure, but it’s now TWO months later than it was three minutes ago.”
of course, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had bought an engagement ring two months earlier and was just waiting for her to shut her yap about it, so it could be a surprise.
PHOTO: Statue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.
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![[Views of Old Town, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.]](https://theparkerfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/3491821719_84fafe6417.jpg)
![[Eiffel Tower, Paris, France.]](https://theparkerfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/3512095986_4781bef68c.jpg)
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needless to say, my happy little three hour ride turned into a six hour extravaganza … one from which my thighs (and butt) may never fully recover.