Category: Knocked Up
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Two and a Half Weeks: Notes on Memory, Stasis, Change and a Rather New Baby
About 18 days ago, I had a baby. This one. Oscar was one week overcooked and propelled himself out of me in barely two hours, emerging with a full head of mod hair, complete with side burns and enough hair over the hypothetical collar to get him kicked out of several elite schools. He looks…
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Well, That Was Certainly Interesting: Brief Notes on Having Just Spawned a Baby
Last Wednesday, I did something I’d never done before, in a way that went in a totally different way to how I had roughly planned it. Kind of like blindly climbing Mt Bromo in Indonesia at dawn, with the thick sulphur mists obscuring everything until you’re right at the lip of the volcano, or maybe…
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Waiting For Godot (or a Baby): Notes on Identity, Change and Public Presentation
Any day now, I’m going to have a baby. Like, an actual baby that I get to keep indefinitely. Which is, admittedly, an awfully long time. I still haven’t wrapped my head completely around this concept, even though I’ve been quite pregnant for many wine-deprived and sushi-less months now. Little Thwacky McKickerson, currently 2…
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Things That Are Absurdly Easy in a Country Where You Speak the Language: Haircuts!
Welcome to the beginning of what will probably be an ongoing new series. I’ve been really, really bad at writing this season. Partly because I’ve been so busy setting up house in a whole ‘nother country (and buying the same freaking things from IKEA that I’d bought in 4 other countries before and left behind…
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Ch-ch-ch-changes: In Which I Attempt to Talk Coherently About This Past Year
I wrote a paltry 22 posts here in 2013, just under two per month. Some months far quieter than others. Most of them somehow ended up hovering around the thousand word mark, which I’ve been told is way more than people want to process when reading online. This was, however, a year that refused…
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I Want to be Sedated: Adventures in Getting my Act Together in Leicester
People, my mind is muddled like a big ball of muddled things all muddled together with a muddling pestle. I’ve been trying to get my act together to write all of the posts that this particular point in time deserves. Of these, there are many. Changes of all sorts are afoot. Interesting, strange, complex changes.…
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On Existential Migration, Home, Leaving, and Scaring Yourself Silly
One day, not so long ago, when we were still in the exhausting throes of impenetrable visa applications and living out of two battered China Post boxes, partly in my parents’ basement and partly in the little house in the big woods where I grew up (the one heated only by a cast iron wood…
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Why, Hello Leicestershire: Notes on Suddenly Moving to Middle England
People, I have moved to England. The seemingly interminable spouse visa application process suddenly terminated and within a week of getting our surprise approval we were safely ensconced in a ridiculously genteel, chocolate-box village just outside of Leicester. That’s the one pronounced Lester. The standard phonemic alphabet doesn’t necessarily apply here. There’s a…
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Let’s Just Leave the Country Again, Shall We?
Yesterday we went luggage shopping, for proper hard-shell wheelie bags, the kind that grown-ups buy. The kind that cost more than, say, free. It’s not that I don’t own any luggage. I do. I own all the bags and suitcases that people all over the world had already discarded and passed on to me in…
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The Gestation Will Not Be Televised: Notes on Not Writing About Being Pregnant
I have a pregnancy app on my phone. It tells me, week by week, which fruit my progeny most closely resembles (currently eggplant, in case you were wondering). It also blurts out daily tips on what I need to do (today I apparently need to buy a new bra). One of the daily nags…
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Killing Time in Familiar Places: Notes on Learning to Enjoy Enforced Stasis
It’s been raining for about three days now. The kind of rain that comes with leaden dark white skies, streams of water everywhere, and cacophony on metal roofs. Yesterday, near hurricane winds led to all ferries to and from the mainland being cancelled. A wheelbarrow in our yard blew over and crashed through a…
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Seriously, I Have No Idea What I’m Doing: Notes on Being Knocked Up Whilst in Transit
Back when we first found out I was pregnant, about a million years ago in Shanghai, we thought it utterly rational to carry on with our plan to pack up and leave our jobs, our flat, and China, embarking on a road trip down to Mexico where we would while away the autumn months…