While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Archives for February 2011

The pieces of my pregnancy

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PS. And yes, The Joe Spa is staffed by my husband. (See the prenatal massage punch card he made me for Christmas.) Without the pregnancy pillow, lying-down back massages would be impossible. We shape the pillow into a circle that way I can lie on my stomach without actually lying on my stomach. We copied the idea from Hand & Stone Massage. I had a membership there until my husband gave me a homemade punch card, thus rendering the company’s membership fee ridiculous. Remember last year’s Bardi Bonds? Yeah, my babydaddy is awesome.

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Western NY must sip: Winery of Ellicottville

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Over the summer, one of my nearest and dearest childhood friends opened a winery in Ellicottville, N.Y.

Psssst … Joe and I got married in Ellicottville in September 2009. Sam Sheehy and his father-in-law, Dominic Spicola, opened the Winery of Ellicottville on Monroe Street in the village just one year later.

Had it been open for our wedding, you can bet our bridesmaids and groomsmen would have enjoyed wetting their whistles here.

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A garden variety valentine from my Oma

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The sweetest Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever received came today in the form of my Oma, who pulled into my driveway this morning with her Ford Taurus stuffed with two dozen bags of red mulch and her trunk full of plants.

She was a German workhorse on a mission.

Basically, my front yard has looked like hell for a year.

Joe and I have been so busy and broke lately that the last thing on our minds is landscaping, not that we don’t curse our grass-less front yard and dead potted plants every time we walk from our cars to the front door.

The first year we lived in this house I lovingly tended to the plants and shrubs. Two years ago, my mom and I planted fuchsia petunias that flowered so big and brilliant the neighbors stopped to admire them.

Remember last year’s vegetable garden? The thing went bust midway through the spring. We ended up with a handful of cherry tomatoes, two deformed bell peppers and one cucumber. We’ve yet to plant another garden, or even one patch of marigolds (Joe’s favorite flower).

I’ve been slacking in the horticulture department. Big time.

Enter my Oma.

She’s a master gardener with two green thumbs, two green pinkies and two green toes.

She could grow a bed of orchids in a leaky bucket in the corner of a dungeon. That is if she had a dungeon.

The small yard surrounding her park model offers few landscape opportunities, which (I think) has made her stir crazy.

SO … today she arrived at my house with enough mulch to carpet the neighborhood and enough ferns and flowers to manicure a golf course.

I had several appointments and various phone interviews, so I was in and out of the house and otherwise occupied all day.

By the time I returned from my last appointment, she had filled all my empty pots with pansies, planted small sprouts of greenery where dead scraggly bushes once crept, laid more than a dozen bags of mulch and replaced the batteries on all my burned-out garden lights.

The funny thing is, I’m not even sure she knew it was Valentine’s Day.

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Bleeding heart photo by Simon Whitaker

Home on the strange

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Today I’m six months pregnant.

SIX MONTHS.

I’ve been pregnant for half a year. 180 days. Longer than My So-Called Life was on air.

Like my baby boy, this post has been incubating for some time.

My sentimental soon-to-be-brother-in-law recently asked me to write something emotional about pregnancy.

“I want to read your feelings on the subject,” he said.

I told him I’d get around to it.

So here goes:

Pregnancy is a strange and beautiful thing.

For eight bucks I purchased a stick at CVS. I peed on it and I took a bath.

I shaved my legs and I read an issue of Vogue. I let the stick sit for a while on the bathroom counter because I was too nervous to look at it.

When I emerged from the tub, I tiptoed past it as if it were already a sleeping baby and I closed my eyes because I was too nervous to look at it.

I walked into my bedroom and slipped into a pair of PJ pants. I headed for the living room and as I passed the bathroom, I turned my head away from the door because I was too nervous to look at it.

I sat on the couch beside my husband and thought about the work I had yet to do.

Pregnancy tests develop in three minutes. Yet I let mine sit for half an hour; long enough for Joe to watch The Daily Show because I was too nervous to look at it.

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From Gate C34

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Five things before I get on this plane to Buffalo:

1. Remember that 10.10.10 footage I shot of my father flying his Cessna for the One Day On Earth documentary film project?

It was accepted! I received an email from the organization earlier this week asking for the raw video files on a memory card. How awesome would it be if it actually made it into the film? My dad would be a star.

2. On a related note, I’ll board my dad’s puddle jumper any day over a commercial airliner.

I don’t care what your opinion is on the matter. Airport security is a racket. A circus. I don’t believe for a second that a fraction of the “precautions” and rules instituted by the Transportation Security Administration are in place to protect us. While standing in the security line this morning, the guy behind me accidentally slapped me in the face with his belt. I’ve never been slapped in the face with a belt before. It stung. He was mortified. I told him it was only a matter of time before I took a belt to the face at the airport. In no other place do hordes of strangers stand shoulder-to-shoulder and strip at a breakneck pace.

And then, after setting my bags on the scanner belt, I was pulled aside and lectured for having packed a small SEALED bottle of juice. I admit, I was pretty sure the bottle wouldn’t get past the TSA screeners, but as a nearly-six-months-pregnant lady, I require nourishment every few hours. A small fruit smoothie is a good way to get it. Plus, it was expensive. I blame my rabble-rouser husband, who when I expressed my concern over having the juice confiscated by airport security, said:  “To hell with airport security. If they take it from you, you tell ’em, ‘I dare you to steal a bottle of juice from a pregnant woman!'”

3. Thanks to the Snowpocalypse 2011, my flight yesterday was canceled.

I’m now minus a day with my family.

4. My mom is throwing me a baby shower this weekend.

I cannot wait to see my aunts, my cousins, their babies, my friends and Uncle Homer The Pug. To welcome our female guests, my mom and I are planning to build a pregnant snow woman in the front yard.

5. If you Google “boyfriend sleeping” The Lance is the 4th hit down!

I’ve not paid for this privilege, nor have I done anything to make my site SEO-friendly. This is simply thanks to you people. The way Google works is the more hits you get, the higher you climb on the Internet search food chain. As I’ve mentioned before, I have no idea how many hits I get. I stopped tracking traffic two years ago.

The words “boyfriend” and “sleeping” are pretty common, eh?

I’m flattered and grateful for your readership.

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PS. I took the photo inside my dad’s airplane hanger the summer of 2006.

The one about my sister’s fake toe nails

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lips.

This is a true story, as are all stories on The Lance.

It’s short, unsettling and involves my hapless sister PK and her flawless toe nails.

Over the summer, our favorite Bristol Palin lookalike began adhering fake toe nails to her piggies.

She was covert about her new weird beauty habit, choosing short white nails with french tips, which she refrained from revealing were artificial, until one day I said, “Jesus PK. Those nails looks so perfect they could almost be fake.”

She started giggling.

“That’s because they are fake. I got ’em from the Dollar Store,” she said.

“Well I’ll be damned,” I replied, half-disgusted and half-impressed with her ingenuity.

I’ve not seen her real toe nails since June. It would appear that the regime has (pardon the pun) stuck.

A couple weeks ago, she shared with me this story while we were heading to a chocolate festival in Tampa. (Yes, I said chocolate festival. I’m a pregnant chocoholic. My primal instincts kicked in.)

The story goes:

PK runs to the Dollar Store to pick up a new pack of falsies and a bottle of nail glue.

She returns to her apartment with the goods and begins her routine of replacing the old acrylics with the new acrylics.

She’s in a hurry.

To expedite the process, she decides to bite open the nail glue rather than fetch a pair of scissors.

With a firm grip on the cap, she begins to gnaw. At this point, she’s thinking it would have been easier to retrieve the scissors from the kitchen.

She gnaws too much.

She successfully loosens the plastic tip. In a matter of seconds, nail glue begins to ooze into her mouth. By the time she realizes the severity of the situation, it’s too late. Her lips are glued to the cap. Her tongue is glued to her teeth.

She lives alone so there’s no one around to a.) help her and b.) mock her.

“It tasted disgusting,” she said. “It took me like 30 minutes to pry my lips apart.”

“I hope it doesn’t interfere with the taste of the chocolate,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I’ve still got glue stuck to the back of my teeth.”

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PS. Photo by Anthony Kelly.