Five Thousand More of These and I Can Make a Jacket

I like to peel the skin off my feet. I used to peel from my big toes, as well as that fleshy underpart on the outer side of each foot, as well as sometime right in the centre of that front pad area. These were the areas I would sometimes get hard callousy skin that eventually got kind of itchy and bothered me. Instead of going to a pedicurist and having these areas sloughed off with professional tools, I would sit down with the spiky fold-out part of a nail clipper, create a starting cut, and start peeling.

My goal would be to peel off the largest single piece of skin possible without causing bleeding. Oftentimes, I would get carried away and end up bleeding anyway, and then my feet would hurt, and it would be difficult to walk, and I would have to wear bandaids for a few days. Like a perverse tribute to my ancestors who had their feet bound for reasons of perceived beauty.

Anyway, I have gradually phased out the peeling of foot skin in the past several years so that now, it's pretty much strictly toeskin peeling. Only the hard skin on the outer-under edge of each big toe. I had decided that peeling from the other parts and making them bloody was too painful, and so now I only peel the big toe, and only on occasions where the skin has gotten way too thick and hard for any sort of comfort, and only when Eric isn't looking.

Eric HATES when I do this. It grosses him out more than any other thing that I do. This includes popping all forms of pus-filled growth on either my own or his body/face, picking all forms of scabs on either my own or his body/face, and farting everywhere due to pregnancy. It's possible that the main reason he hates this particular habit is because I like to save the large pieces of toeskin as triumphant trophies, and I leave them lying about the condo. They sit and dry with each passing hour, turning into hard scratchy pieces of skin-sheet-rock. I leave them on the coffee table, on my nightstand and if he's really lucky, on his nightstand as a token of my love and esteem. He will get angry and loud, and gather up the toeskin sheets and flush them down the toilet, while I scrabble after him trying to pry them from his fingers, begging to be allowed to keep them for just one more week.

He has been so strict in the flushing of my toeskin, that I have taken to saving them in my pockets. Not any pocket in particular, just any pocket of what I happen to be wearing. This usually means the pockets of pyjama pants, pyjama tops, jeans, or the pockets bathrobes. And then I forget about them.

When Eric does my laundry, the pieces of toeskin will reconstitute in the washing machine, rehydrating into soft supple sheets of what could be the soft virgin skin from an innocent child. It's really quite lovely. Unfortunately, when Eric finds these large, soft, rehydrated sheets of skin, he gets ESPECIALLY grossed out and throws an otherwise even bigger fit than if it had just been on his nightstand.

Earlier today, I did a load of red and purple clothes. As I pulled them from the washing machine, out tumbled one of these pieces of reanimated toeskin. And not only had it been given new life, it had been DYED PURPLE!! It was one of the coolest things ever!!

Since Eric didn't sleep all last night and stayed up working, I've left them on his nightstand as a special present, to show him how much I love him. I think he's going to like them.

He shoots, he scores!

After copious amounts of the sexy sex, one of Eric's sperm have made it to my fallopian tubes where it invaded a brand new ovum, breaking down its barriers, thrusting its way inside, thereby creating life!! LIFE!!!

I'm pregnant!!

We're both extremely excited, and it's one of the reasons I was unable to perform on the blog for the past two months - every time I tried to sit down and write about anything, all I could think of were pregnancy-related tales. My friend Jennifer got married to my friend Christopher, and there were hilarious things that went down at that wedding, and I still couldn't bring myself to concentrate. But hopefully, this is the start of a new chapter...maybe once I get all this pregnancy gold out of my system, I'll be able to blog properly again. And so begins The Pregnancy: More Than You Need To Know.

Where Do Babies Come From?
Let's start at the very beginning; a very good place to start. This was a planned pregnancy. Eric and I had decided that we wanted to aim for an early-in-the-year baby so that it would have an edge at school in beating out the other kids. Even before conception, we were setting this child up for a life of high expectations and enormous pressure, resulting inevitably in disappointment and low self-worth. So in May, a week after my last menstrual period, which started on Sunday May 13, we started humping like animals twice a day.

For those of you who recall my last two blog posts, you will remember that I came down with a very nasty UTI just after this time period. That was a direct result of the aforementioned humping a la animals. I didn't look it up beforehand, so after sex, I would stuff tissues between my legs to keep the good stuff in, and then fall asleep like the lazy whore wife that I am. If it was the nighttime round of babymaking hump, I would sleep all night. If it was the morning/afternoon round of babymaking hump, I would sleep for an hour or two. This lack of peeing after sex twice a day for a week apparently caused my vagina to marinate in enough unsavoury juices to bestow upon me a mighty mighty UTI. I have subsequently learned that when attempting to get pregnant, one should lie down in a sperm-filled state for 10-15 minutes at most, and then get up and pee like any normal vagina-respecting woman.

After the many bouts of fever and sweating out in bed, and soaking my sheets like I had peed them up, I was convinced that even had there been a little fetus in my womb, it would have baked to death. Here's a nugget of help for you people who may require the use of disposable pregnancy tests: First Response stinks like a cheesedick! (not literally) You know the one? It has a commercial with a pretty healthy looking brunette who says "There is such a thing as being a little bit pregnant". That's total crap! First Response is supposed to detect the pregnancy hormone up to 3 days before your expected period or some crap like that. I took it the NIGHT BEFORE my expected period, mere hours really, and it told me negative. It looked me right in the face and showed me one pink line instead of two. So I assumed I wasn't pregnant, and I went to the pub and had me some sweet sweet alkyhall. The next day, I missed my period.

And the rest my friends, is history.

Morning Sickness
Zero, zip, nada! Our friends Lindsey and Jordan are two months more pregnant than we are, and from the sounds of it, Lindsey has been puking her innards out for months. She's experiencing aversions to various meats on a rotating basis, and barfs almost daily. I know nothing of Lindsey's pain, because my baby will eat anything. Just like mommy! Baby is a food slut.

Anal Sickness
Here is where the first trimester kicked me in the anus, literally. I was so constipated, I thought I would never poo normally again. I have never ever, in my entire life, experienced this kind of constipation before. My bowels seized up and simply decided to stop moving. Upon reflection, I'm not sure I can decide whether I would have wanted to trade in the constipation for the morning sickness. Pooing is one of the most joyous parts of my day, and while the universe handed me the most precious gift of all in the form of a child growing in my belly, it seems it took away something nearly equally close to my heart.

I noticed it just a couple days after I took a non-retarded pregnancy test (ClearBlue). I wasn't pooing! So when I went to see my family doctor, I mentioned it to her, and she said that it was a typical pregnancy thing. I was horrified. Most laxatives were out of the question, in case they induced labour and flushed out the baby. I went and stocked up on prunes and oranges and Benefibre. The prunes worked best, but I had to be careful; 3-4 prunes would bring out a non-stellar but passable poo. 6 prunes would give me farty farty diarrhea. The farty farty diarrhea would spray the inside of the toilet bowl with such force that it took a couple of flushes to clear it out.

Even so, the prunes were not the life line I had been hoping for. While it did cause me to poo, I noticed that my poo was about two days backed up. I like to purposely put markers in my poo. For example, I will intermittently eat things that will be identifiable in poo form, such as corn, or spicy food, or lots of spinach. This is so I can observe the turnover time for food to become poo in my system. From past experience, I know that the corn eaten at noon on Monday should appear by bedtime the same day, or worst case scenario, Tuesday morning. What I noticed was that the corn eaten on Monday would not appear until AT LEAST Wednesday, and only with the help of prunes. Without prunes, it wouldn't come out at all. While this was disturbing and frustrating, the worst part of this situation was that my poo became the STINKIEST POO EVER MADE!

I think that it makes sense that the longer poo has to fester in your intestines, the more it will break down and decompose, and the more it will get stinky. But SWEET LORD, the smells that came out of my body as the prune-induced poo exited my godforsaken anus were pure evil! Gone were the days when I could sit on the toilet with a book or magazine or supermarket flyer and slowly, leisurely enjoy my poo. Now I had to quickly sit and expel my gas and nasty unsatisfying little logs of poo, and then hold my breath, depriving my little one of any oxygen whatsoever while I wiped up my Bumhole of Satan, and flushed that accursed poo down. I would have thought that once the lid was down and the Poo of the Damned were riding their way down to Lake Ontario, I would be able to breath. But as I would exhale and start breathing normally while washing my hands, the smell would linger in the air, thick as smoke, assaulting my nostrils, causing me to literally choke and gag and dryheave as I soaped up and rinsed. One time, I even made a poo that smelled like farm animals.

I'm currently 13 weeks pregnant, and I'm relieved (get it? Relieved? Haha...) to report that the constipation has dissipated. In fact, the drippy little plinky poos of yestermonth have been replaced by some of the largest poos I have EVER made! Earlier this week, I think it was Monday, I made an enormous poo, and I mean ENORMOUS. It was thick and luscious, but not too wet, and it came out easily with what appeared to be a force of its own. It wiped up clean, and it smelled like NOTHING!!

Farty McFartfart
I'm only just entering my second trimester right now, and this is my first pregnancy. As a result, I shouldn't be "showing" very much yet. My in laws seem to be looking forward to physical signs of my pregnancy, and are definitely on the lookout. More than once, I've had this conversation with my mom-in-law.

MIL: "Ooh! Is that a little bump I see?!"

Carol: "No, it's just gas."

I have so much gas, that usually by mid-afternoon, I look very very pregnant. My belly sits high and proud, giving all and sundry the distinct impression that I am great with child. In actuality, I am great with gas. Much much gas. My child is only just the size of a jumbo shrimp this week. It's no reason for me to look like there is a large balloon in my shirt.

In the past, I drew a strict line with passing gas. While Eric would liberally fart in bed and at mealtimes, I personally never felt comfortable tooting in his direct non-toilet related presence. If we were watching tv, and I felt some gas coming on, I would retire to a bathroom to release said gas. Eric came to believe that I was physically unable to fart unless I was on a toilet with my pants pulled down.

I am now so bloated that all bets are off, and if I can feel a fart, I will do it anywhere. I do it on the couch while watching tv. I do it on the couch while watching tv and eating. I do it in bed. I've lost all censorship abilities with my gas. I feel that if the gas is sufficient to make me look 7 months pregnant, then I really owe it to my body to just let it out whenever I can.

Two days ago, I cleaned out the cupboard under our ensuite sink. We had lots of bottles of stuff we don't use anymore, and the bandaid drawer needed organizing...stuff like that. Well, I sat down on the bathroom scale to tend to this chore, and sometime near the end of my cleaning, I stood up to get a plastic bag. When I came back, instead of sitting back down on the bathroom scale, I chose instead to squat down in front of the cupboard as my buttcheeks were feeling a little sore. As I settled into my squat, the longest, loudest, most obscenely sustained fart RIPPED out from between my buttcheeks. I squatted there, frozen in utter horrified curiosity, as this mighty mighty fart echoed against the bathroom walls and tiles. The force of this fart cannot be overestimated. I was wearing full bum underwear and pants. And as the fart continued to liberate itself from my bowels, I could feel the warmth of the forced air as it whooshed past my ankles. I could feel my fart on my ankles! And the best part? This fart smelled like nothing!! You could have pressed your face against my butt and wedged your nose between my cheeks and let this fart travel straight into your nasal passage, and I don't think you would have smelt anything except the Dove bodywash I used that morning.

In fact, none of my many many farts smell. I swear to god. If you don't believe me, come over and I will fart on you.

Hmm. In conclusion, I never really intended for this to become a poo post. But it seems it became a poo post of its own accord. Ah, this blog is like my child; it may not turn out the way I expect or intend, but it's perfect just the way it is and I love it. Poo on, my blog child. Poo on.