Tuesday, January 27, 2015

[Honest] Diary of a Pregnant Woman

It's important in this age of filters and photoshop and cropping out the piles of laundry and lugging our salads to remote rooms in the house because it has the best lighting and backdrop options...

A photo posted by Hope Douglass (@hopelid) on

....even in that world it's important to be real about what life is actually like. Because it's not all "Aden" filters that obscure perceived imperfections. It's never all tidy kitchens and vacuumed floors. Life is messy. And imperfect. And it's supposed to be that way.

Today I had a brilliant, shiny, pretty picture in my head of how it was gonna go. I was gonna make some cute signs and walk my angelic dogs to the park and get some cute shots that would fit perfectly into an instagram photo and have my beautiful, wonderful baby gender announcement and life would be grand. Now, I'm not a moron, I had my inhibitions about walking the dogs by myself and how I would handle setting up the shots while we were there and maintaining awareness of any pedestrians or other animals wandering by the park. I packed a backpack with our stake and leash extenders and some doggie treats so I could anchor the dogs where I planned to have the shoot. The park in the middle of our neighborhood is so pretty right now with this beautiful weather and all the nice rain, a cute and lush clover patch has sprung up beneath a large, old tree that hangs over the grass and filters the sun gorgeously.
The walking part proved difficult, as was expected. Mor'du is awful about heeling and constantly lunging while on the leash. We have him in a self-tightening collar but after two minutes he's wheezing and choking himself and it takes a million years to get anywhere because we're stopping and starting over and over. So I was already frustrated by the time we were just arriving at the park...
To find the landscapers there trimming EVERY TREE AND BUSH. There was hardly any lawn left for all the piles of branches scattered. And with so many unsuspecting humans waiting to be barreled over and befriended, I knew there was not a single hope of getting any pictures taken there. So we just turned around and began our stunted march back home again.
I tripped over Mor'du multiple times on the way home and the leashes got tangled every five steps it seemed. By the time we tumbled through the side gate I was ready to put them both up for adoption. We went around to the back porch and I pulled out the signs from the backpack and promptly began sobbing because #hormones
So Mor'du chased his shadow in the fountain and Odin gawked awkwardly next to my chair waiting for me to pet him as I tried to cry as quietly as I could so as to not weird out the poor neighbors trying to enjoy their overcast afternoon.
Once I worked up the courage to start attempting our own home photo shoot, Mor'du was completely soaked and muddy, had apparently erased all memory of "sit" and "stay" from his memory, and insisted on kamikaze karate chopping me in the backside incessantly. Before I had even had a chance to snap a single shot he had already trampled over Odin's sign, wrinkling it and swiping muddy pawprints all over it, and given me a nice stinging scratch along my leg. And Odin kept up with his typical "if I just stand a little closer and get my head right in her face she'll pet me, I know it" moves.
Obviously, as evidenced in my instagram photo, we got the shots we needed, and I jimmy rigged a super fancy stack of lawn chairs and tables to get the shot of me with the last sign.


#shootmeintheface was the look I was going for.

Then I cried some more and ate some food and went over all the pretty things I finally got on our registry (thanks to the blessed help of Allie and Ali). And then I found a good deal on a swing+bouncer on craigslist, and then Mark got home and he took me for Taco Bell as a reward for not strangling our furbabes, so the day got markedly better. Plus I showed him the salad instagram and he asked, "where did you get that??" Like I went somewhere and just bought a salad. I MAED DIS.

What an adventure this life is, eh?

1 comment:

  1. YOU GOT A SWING?! GOOD JOB! Sorry, I just got REALLY excited hahahaha and that salad looks really yummy......and I'm a fatty over here eating a BLT on sourdough #allofthecarbsamdcalories #lowsodiumbaconthough #silverlining??

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