Pregnancy is hard, yo

I'm trying to get used to this whole pregnancy thing. It's been pretty difficult this week. There are all of the usual pregnancy-related ailments--the poorly-named "morning sickness" ("morning"--ha!) being the most difficult to become accustomed to. Ross and I have been touring all of the bland Ann Arbor food options these past two days, and every meal is predicated by a thoughtful discussion with the goober, which would make sense if the goober actually knew what it wanted, or...well...had a brain capable of higher thought (Me: what do you want to eat? Goober: Mac and cheese! No, you fool! Not mac and cheese! I want toast! Not that toast! I said toast! Or maybe pretzels! Not pretzels, pretzels!) Fortunately, Ross has discovered the two magic bullets of morning sickness: saltines, and a small plastic baggie filled with vanilla. The former is pretty easy to explain--it is a well-known fact that saltines are the only food on earth consistently acceptable to the average embryo. I've been eating box after box them. (Me: can I stop eating saltines now? Goober: No! I will cut you! Me: Ok, ok, saltines it is, then.) The vanilla helps to placate my new, super-sense of smell, the power of which verges on sixth-sense (my current list of least-favorite smells: coffee, cooking tomatoes, anything sweet). I may look like some kind of bizarre drug addict--huffing from a brown-stained plastic baggie--but at least I'm not puking in my neighbor's espresso.

Between the bland food diet and the vanilla-huffing, I've more or less got the goober-induced illness under control. More difficult has been the non-goober induced results of going off of Provigil--my narcolepsy medication. Provigil is a class C drug--meaning that while there is no evidence that it does anything bad to developing goobers, there is no evidence that it doesn't, either. So, at least in the first trimester, I've decided to go off of Provigil and take my days au natural. Unfortunately, that means that I've had to rethink my relationship with the world. Previously, I had thought of myself as a person who worked for a living--producing research in exchange for a check from the national science foundation. Now, I'm forced to think of myself as someone who gestates. That is just about all I have the energy for. Last night, I slept from 11:30pm-7:30am. Ross got me out of bed at 8am, and I showered, dressed, and brushed my teeth. At 9am (or thereabouts), I laid back down, waking up only when Ross came home to find me at 11:45am. For those of you who are keeping track, that's ~11 hours so far today. Immediately after my lunch of buttered noodles, I wanted to take another nap, but bolstered by a few sips of (now largely prohibited) diet coke, went off to work where I "worked" (read: stared at a computer screen) for another 2 hours. I'm now seriously contemplating another nap.

I know that this will probably get better, as my mind re-learns the coping mechanisms that I used back in the dark days of 2007. But right now, I'm having a hard time doing anything other than sleeping--terribly inconvenient, considering that I'm scheduled to go on the job market in a few short months. Ross keeps reminding me that goober incubation is one of my most important jobs right now, and that sleeping the day away is now a sanctioned activity, but that is taking a bit of retooling in the ol' brain. Fortunately, I have a couple of cats to show me how it's done.