Our Baby Pictures!

 I finally found some baby pictures of me! I was quite adorable. :)

I also found out that I carry the red head gene on both my mothers and fathers side of the family, and because Kyle obviously does carry it, there is anywhere from an 8-25% chance of us having a ginger!

Pregnancy Brain

I'm glad I am not the only one, thing is though I have had it since before I realized I was pregnant, and its been really bad and getting worse. I never had the best memory to begin with but sometimes I can't remember the most basic things, and it is frustrated. I am scared to have conversations with people who don't know me very well because they have to be thinking of how stupid I am when I can't think of every other word, and I always am saying the first stupid thing to come into my head.

This made me feel better though.

http://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/emmas-pregnancy-brain.aspx

So Please, when I sound stupid at my wedding in a few weeks, don't judge me, and DO NOT ask me for a speech! Please!

First Kick

Okay, I know I am only 11.5 weeks, but I swear I felt a kick today, I have never felt anything like it before, and I know that is what it was, some kind of movement in there, and I got reallllly excited! The reality that I am carrying a child sunk in, and my body feels a bit alien to myself, in a good way. I feel almost powerful with the ability to carry and grow children.

Strange Pregnancy Dream

I had always been so terrified of the future.

In the direction we seem to be headed, it always seemed like a place so dead to reality, living as a virtual presence, an extension of one of sea of faces on the interweb, a Brave new world void of choices and freedoms, accidentally self sacrificed over many years of online surveillance.

There is something though that is very import. Something that I left out of that original equation.

The dream started suddenly, as they usually do. Many of them take me to dark places better left out of the imagination, and so fluently captured in the film industry. My physical pain seemed to become a alternate reality of mystical root causes. If I fell asleep to bones and my stomach happened to be hurting, I would be suffering as the infamous characters tortured me alive.

But this dream was different, and I revisited a world that I usually cannot remember upon waking,a world who’se amusements are endless, and built on a completely different set of priorities than the one we experience today, with a vortex of importance encircling excitement.

If 10 people were to make a bucket list in a research lab, I am willing to bet that each of them would have something on it involving travel, exploration, trying new things outside of our own realms of reality.

In my dream I had with me my father, and a faceless friend who I did not recognize, a blur of many perhaps. I felt as though I were surrounded by this person, and their face acted as many. My dad, is not the most adventurous person in the world. I fought him tooth and nail to go see Avatar when it came out, and he refused after a month of begging. “Too many people there” he would say. But in my dream, for the first time it seemed, I saw him open up to the idea of adventure. It was as though these two people had been aware that they were travelling with me, but unaware of our destination, they took my lead, as simply as anyone might in a dream, and I only aware that it was one. As soon as I saw that deep blue sky I remembered this place. I knew four distinct places within this world, and there was somewhere that I wanted to take them first.

The airway system is so beyond my simple comprehension, that I would fail at any attempt to explain it, but I felt as though I were simply riding a boat through the air at a lightning speed, so fast that I did not realize we were actually moving, and I could see the puffs of cloud and I guided us toward the line that I knew would lead to our destination.

We disembarked and we all including I looked around puzzled, and then when I saw what I was looking for, not knowing specifically, but I knew that I would know it when I saw it, as soon as I knew what it was, a cloudy slide seemed to open up beneath our feet and we were sliding toward it, and as we came closer, it was sundown and we could see lines of people in floating structures, all set up like a giant amusement park, and this place was simple one ride. The faceless friend asked me where we were.

Hawaii, I replied, not believing my own ears, but my body moved before I could react, and I was suddenly remembering my last visit to this place, in a another dream, all alone and lost I found it, and it was a safe haven from everything in the world, it was my happy place. How long has it been my happy place? I am not sure how many times I have been here, but as I climb the forested steps and wait my turn in line, with each step I remember a different experience here, and each with a different trusted person that I have brought here, and as we moved slowly forward up in the line, the face would change.

It felt like I was in line for an amusement park ride. The line was circular around a large patch of trees that seemed infinite but we moved quickly.

The faceless friend took the form of Alex who I had known in Milwaukee, and she said:

“I cannot go to Hawaii, I do not have the proper paper work and visa to go,”

and I replied, “Where do you think you are?”

Her face took a few more forms, as each face contemplated the surroundings, the world began to shift ever so slightly with the mood of the person, as though I were experiencing it all through the eyes of others. We reached the top, and we looked down and before we could think to react we were being swept up, on a giant roller coaster from a plane and soaring in circles around Hawaii from the heavens we lept, going round and round like a roller coaster, without the flipping of the stomach, and sickness, only the awe as we experienced the world in a new way. I looked back at my father who was smiling and delighting in the experience. The eminous joy was unending and the way down simply sped up when I became eager to reach the bottom. There was no landing. We were simply in a hotel of sorts as tall as the heavens, we had somehow travelled upward and we were suddenly in the true lap of luxury. Outside of one window I could see many other building just as sky high, and below, I could match each building to landmarks in my life of places I could have been, had gone, dreamed of and beyond. If I lept I could land in one of those placed in a moment, and I did. Only I lept without thinking, without bringing my companions with me, and I was in a place of dread. A place that I have dreamt about for years and feared, a place of darkness.

My description might not seem so dark to you, but in my dreams it is quite a crippling place. It is a tiny apartment building as large as a cubicle cut in half, with no windows. There is one door and a hallway that seems to never end, a labyrinth and each door leads to another similar room with people crammed inside, I smell drugs, and filth, as people lie in their quarter cubical unaware when I open their door right beside them, and each person has a device on their head connecting them to the internet. The device allows them to eat virtual food which tricks their bodies to believe that they receive nourishment but their bodies are merely shells. I find my cubicle and I am in it, also a shell, only I am dead, blood draining from my head from where I tried to rip off the device, it pulled large screws out of my temple, and I had yanked the couplet off my arm covered in different IV’s.

I started screaming and I was suddenly on the beach below the hotel like structure, having lept once more, and I wanted to find my companions once more when I saw a stream that I had taken before in another dream. But they seemed lost to their own devices so I continued alone, searching for the way into the stream. It was a river and I could choose my own means of transport, and I chose to swim, though I thought about sailing or riding it like a lazy river, but I felt the sudden urgency to swim. It was beautiful and almost made me forget my last jump, the water got in my ears,and my head started to spin for a moment so I climbed onto a beautiful raft built by the natives. I just floated by and the river opened up into the ocean where I was guided by the waves of where I wanted to go. Eventually I found another coast on what had to be the smallest island known to man. There was a market on the coast, and people were collecting sea shells and trading them for different items. These people were natives with dark skin, and an unusual build, with a lion like face, though still human. People talked to the vendors as though they were barmen, and they would speak in parables, and they spoke with the wisdom of God to people they had never seen before. It was the island of answers.

I waited in line listening to one vendor speaking to a woman in front of me and I was mesmerized by the truth in the mans words. He said that reality is what you make it, and your values are how you live in this world. The woman was clearly new to jumping as I was, he explained that you cannot choose your direct path here, you can only choose the things you value, the things that matter to you. For some it is their past and they find themselves trapped in one place. For others it is the thrill of excitement, or knowledge, though in such a realm of possibilities it is usually entertainment. What you seek you will find, but if you find all that you are looking for, why leave? There would no longer be a need to move, you would be stuck in place with everything your heart desires. If those things are not  fulfilling, you become one of the shells. Then he looked at myself and I could tell that he was killing two birds with one stone, answering my questions as well. The woman started crying when she realized that she might never find her family again, because they all valued so many different things.

I looked at the shell in my hand, placed it in the crate in front of the man and thanked him for his wisdom. He said something else to me and I was suddenly in a house surrounded with family. My aunts and uncles were there, and it was completely crowded. The house was a wreck, and I was tired as though I had lived this life for a long time with them. Words left my lips before I could speak, and there was nothing odd about my sudden appearance. There were no longer any adults left, and it seemed to be all of my little cousins. As they grew older, each one of them disappeared as their values changed. I realized that our love and need for family is innate, and its role in our life changed how we value it as we grow older. I became the only one left in the house, all alone for years just waiting. And then Kyle emerged, and we raised our children there. It was a little house on the side of a mountain covered in snow, and we had leveled out a yard and built up the house, making our own wonderful little village all by ourselves. We built tree houses with our children, and we raised our children there, and when they grew up they each made a house for themselves and their children. This cold place was the warmest place that my heart had ever known. After years of waiting for my own family to materialize back, I found my fathers house up the mountain.