6710 Grand

My alarm went of at 3:00 in the morning. I jumped out of bed and smacked Tweety on the head to shut him up. I crawled to the bathroom and stepped on the scale. 152 pounds. Almost there. It was December 11, 2003. I had five days to loose those last two pounds. I was going on a cruise to Mexico with my boyfriend, Nick and his family for Christmas. I’d never been on a cruise or to Mexico and it would be my first Christmas that I wasn’t spending with my parents, but it had motivated me to get off my butt and into the gym. I was certainly not bikini ready in December. I’d gained about 30 pounds since college and had lost 28 of it in the last several months by prying myself out of bed at the butt crack of dawn and limiting myself to an insanely restrictive diet—but it was working. I ate 1000 calories a day and burned 1000 calories on the elliptical every morning. My apartment complex had a 24-hour gym and I usually had it to myself in the mornings. Sometimes I’d run into a Europ...

This is my favorite photo of Nick and me. His brother, Danny took it at the beach on Thanksgiving Day in 2001. I was living in Kansas then. I miss the West. I miss the beach and the smell of the ocean. My high school creative writing teacher would be laughing if he read this now. I once wrote a poem about how much I hated the ocean. I miss the palm trees and the seagulls (though we do have seagulls in Chicago). I miss the mountains and the dry dessert and the purple sunsets. There's a kind of romance about going West that I think only American's can feel (unless there's some other country out there with a frontier history like ours). Coming back to the Midwest feels like a step back--like tucking my tail between my legs and retreating. That's not what happened, of course, but that's how it feels--suffocating and heavy. I am not a Chicagolander. I am not a Midwesterner anymore. I may not be a Californian but I am definitely a Westerner.

Pregnancy requires a lot of tests. First one to find out if your pregnant. Then another to find out if the first one you took was accurate (sometimes a third to confirm the second). Next is a blood test to confirm the previous two or three you took. Yep, you're pregnant. Ok. Now the real testing begins. Vial after vial of blood is sucked out of your arm which will be tested for everything from anemia to HIV. A few weeks later, more blood to test for a barage of genetic tests--this one you have to agree to take. Finally, comes the fun part--the ultrasound. I was 13 weeks pregnant when I had my first. By this time, I was still looking like myself. I had a bit of a tummy, but not much. I had, however, experienced the frequent running to the bathroom every half a glass of water. I wasn't holding my liquids well. So, the doctor telling me to drink a litre of water within an hour of my ultrasound was a bit frightening. But, I managed it. The test itself was exciting. ...