I guess what we have for the time being is a pregnancy blog. It won't be for much longer, though. Today I hit the 30-week mark. Morning sickness is ba-ack, but other than that, things are fine. I hope I have the good fortune to be entertained by this kind of stunning cuteness three years from now:

And now for some adventures in glucose tolerance...

I had that terrible 3-hour glucose test yesterday. It could have been worse -- for example, I could have thrown up the glucose drink and had to drink another one -- but it was still pretty bad. Worst parts:

1. Not being allowed to drink water for 12 hours. Oh, that was agony.

2. The crying jag. Let me explain: after they drew the first, baseline blood sample and I chugged that awful drink, I cried for about an hour and a half straight.

This was because Jonathan and I went up to the nursery viewing area and looked at the babies, who were all asleep except for one. I first teared up because they were so adorable, and then kept crying because I was noticing the subtle movements of their little knees and elbows through the receiving blankets they were all swaddled in and how they kind of resembled the little movements I see poking out of my stomach all the time. THEN, I cried even harder because the babies weren't with their mothers, and I was sympathizing with the mothers because I assumed they must have been miserable not having their babies with them. It was so embarrassing!

The lab nurse who took the second blood sample was great, though; she didn't make a big deal about my weepies and just explained that the mothers can have the babies in the rooms with them as much as they want, and the babies are only in the nursery about two hours a day, tops. And really, it does make sense to have them in the nursery some of the time, like when the father isn't there and the mother has to take a shower or sleep or something. She added that lots of women have crying jags during the 3-hour GTT and that she suspected it has something to do with body chemistry.

3. The needle sticks. Four sticks, all in the arm, none in the fingers. I should explain that the huge bruise from my last glucose screening test had just healed. The first three were in my left arm, but the nurse who took the last blood sample took a look at my already bruising up left arm and decided to do the right arm that time. I don't have much needle fear at all, but that was kind of a lot.

This has already been a pretty exhausting week, and I'm not even over the hump yet. Right after posting this, I'm going to curl up with this version of Pride and Prejudice and then go to sleep -- but not without entertaining you with my Top! Irrational! Fears! (all of which are fetus-centered, as that eclipses everything else for me right now)

1. Pre-term labor and delivery: still way up there, especially now that I'm having what Jonathan playfully calls Toni Braxton contractions.

2. Having to have a c-section: there are two reasons I might have to have one. 1.) he's breech; and 2.) I failed my glucose tolerance test, so I might have gestational diabetes, which can result in macrosomia, or high birth weight. If he's too big, a c-section might be necessary. Now I know that, first, he might flip on his own, and second, I might pass that three-hour glucose tolerance test on Thursday morning with no problems. Even if I don't pass and I do have GD, I am going to follow that diet to the letter, so macrosomia may not be a problem in any case. From what I understand, macrosomia becomes a risk only with poor management of GD.

Here's why I'm scared of a c-section, though. I realize that they don't take a hatchet and chop into my abdomen. They are careful to cut through the layers one at a time: skin, abdominal muscle, uterine muscle. BUT: what if they cut my little boy?! How do they keep from doing that?

3. The doctor or nurses' dropping FG as soon as he's out: no matter how he ends up coming out, this could happen. I'm sure they'll be careful with him, but what if they slip on a wet patch of floor?

4. FG's getting stuck in the birth canal and having a stroke: this happened to the daughter of a friend of mine from college. I believe she's okay now, but it took A LOT of physical therapy and other work.

5. Not being able to lactate: because there is just nothing anyone can do about that. I mentioned this to my doctor, and he said there is a drug they can give to accelerate prolactin production, but that it doesn't work all the time.

Fetus Goodwin and mom had a 28-week checkup today. I had to drink that revolting glucose beverage in under 5 minutes, which was okay at first sip, but I was having to choke that last one down. I hope I pass that test so I don't have to retake it.

We also got an ultrasound. Data retrieved:

• He's breech, just like his mom was. I don't know how common that is at 28.5 weeks, but it seems like he has plenty of time to flip if he wants to. Right now he's like this, in a frank breech presentation:

  

  If he doesn't, hey, that'll bring me one step closer to my dream birth, which is to fall into a peaceful, druggy sleep, then wake up and have my darling baby placed in my arms, all clean and snuggily blanketed. Sorry, fellow feminist mothers.

• He doesn't have a cleft palate.
• He has full, pillowy lips, which is a big change from his 18-week ultrasound.
• He has plenty of fluid in his little environment.
• He is, if I remember correctly, an estimated 3.3 pounds.
• He's in the 76th percentile of length/weight for his gestational age.
• He has filled out a lot since the 18-week ultrasound; his cheeks are nice and round, and he doesn't look so painfully skinny anymore. I am a big fan of his subcutaneous fat formation, and I hope it continues.

Now I just hope to go all the way to sometime between May 2 and May 9.

The song that's in my mind, and has been for nearly A WEEK, is Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life." Egad:

I guess I'll have to try that purging trick where you listen to it five times in a row. Also, I keep associating the song with a particular Casey Kasem's Top 40 experience. I don't listen to it every week, and I don't even know if CK is even deejaying it anymore, but anyway, sometimes, when CK is announcing the number one song, he does so in such a delighted manner, like he was SO PROUD of Third Eye Blind for going all the way to #1. He may do this no matter what song is #1; like I said, I don't listen to it that often. Other songs I've noticed he did this with include Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" and "Smooth" by Santana featuring Rob Thomas.

This morning I was going through some papers, and I found my copy of the film Remembering Composition, a documentary about multimedia rhetoric. I decided to watch it while I did a few other things. I may have more to say about it later -- perhaps I'll even do an audiovisual response -- but for now, just a few thoughts:

• I hadn't really thought about it until reading this article, but I now appreciate the "not the usual suspects" selection of interviewees. It's true that not everyone Bump Halbritter and Todd Taylor chose to interview is a big computers and composition person. It was interesting to get the perspectives of some of the comp people who aren't well known as techies. Administration was well represented, with Sidney Dobrin, Deborah Holdstein, Erika Lindemann, and Kathleen Blake Yancey (apologies if there are some I've forgotten). I especially liked the inclusion of students in the film; in fact, I wish they'd done even more with that.
• Throughout the film, there were these interludes inspired by Memento. I wasn't crazy about those; I don't know if it's due to the execution of the idea or the idea itself.
• Some of the interviewees' comments represented the biggest surface-level clichés about new media out there. It was kind of astonishing. I wondered if they made other, more specific and insightful comments that were edited out. It seemed like the remarks could have been preliminary warming up as the interviewees were getting over their nervousness and summoning their thoughts.
• There were some standouts, the most excellent of whom were Erin Sullivan (one of the students) and Gregory Ulmer. Sullivan provided a useful comparison based on an ethnographic study of a community. The scholar offers the community the product of his or her study; in one scenario, it's a research paper, and in the other, it's a documentary film. In the film, the community gets to see itself in their own images and hear itself in the words of its own members. I was thinking too that the documentary has a certain simultaneity; it can be experienced by many people all at once in a way that a research paper cannot. Ulmer set forth a smart analogy of academia to entertainment as the church to science in the Renaissance. I also appreciated Holdstein's comments toward the end about institutional context.

Overall, the film was pretty good, but I liked Take20 a little better. The concept is simple but elegant, and I like the fact that the Take20 questions are listed for us, and I like the snappy editing showing the commonalities of the interviewees' responses:

"If you had to pick only one essay for a writing teacher to read, what would it be?"

"Inventing the University."

"Inventing the University."

"Inventing the University."

"If you had to pick only one book for a writing teacher to read, what would it be?"

"Errors and Expectations."

"Errors and Expectations."

"Errors and Expectations."

Jonathan suggested that as I sit at the computer, I play FG (Fetus Goodwin) some music. Backstory: he was doing a lot of poking and prodding, and Jonathan thought he might want to dance to some music. Here's what I've picked and played so far.

1. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" -- Beach Boys
2. "Don't Rain on My Parade" -- Bobby Darin
3. "Untold Stories" -- Buju Banton
4. "Mr. Loverman" -- Chevelle Franklin and Shabba Ranks
5. "Marcus Garvey" -- Burning Spear
6. "Bloodletting" -- Concrete Blonde
7. "Goin' Back to Cali" -- LL Cool J
8. "La Jalouserie" -- Bruce Daigrepont

He didn't respond to Shabba quite like I'd hoped, but he seemed to like LL Cool J and Concrete Blonde, as I believe I felt some record-scratching and moshing, respectively.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the title of this post goes through my head all the time with regard to work. I have such an overwhelming amount of work to do, especially with administration but also research and teaching, that I work at a frantic pace every day. Part of this is probably my own fault; I'm doing more than the bare minimum, but I feel like the bare minimum is too risky to my career; plus, the minimum makes me feel like a gigantic loser.

Also, I feel like I'm in a race with my body. As I work on proposals, articles, administrative memos and other documents, teaching materials, etc., I can see, below the screen, in my peripheral vision, those little protrusions poking and shaking my abdomen. There's so much stuff I must knock out SOON, before the fetal boy gets here, even if the deadlines of these projects are a few months away. For example, tonight I'm revising a draft of a brief article that's due in mid-March. I intend to finish it tomorrow -- if it kills me. Then this weekend, I'll be working on two projects due in early April...and so on. I don't ever want to be that person who holds an entire project up.

I don't know anything about whitewater rafting, but I suspect it could be analogous. Isn't it true that sometimes your raft gets swept into currents, and you have to paddle like crazy to get out of the current immediately, because if you don't, it'll take you and hurl you over the edge of Niagara Falls?