Category Archives: Life Before Baby

Almost a month!

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 3 Comments

Almost a month without posting. Sheesh. So what have I been up to if not writing here? Among many other domestic tasks (!) I’m embarrassed to admit but I’ve been . . . wedding planning. Blech. And above all, I have been deeply involved with making our wedding website. Yes, really. A wedding website. Absurd.

As a child, I never imagined myself getting married. And I ESPECIALLY never imagined having a wedding. That is fodder for another post – how I never had many of the young girl fantasies of princesses and brides. And I am SO thankful for that and curious how it happened. While I’m sure some of that is inborn -I wonder how much of it was my parent’s influence. My mom says, “We just never had that princess stuff around the house.” I don’t think this was conscious on her part – but I thank my mom 1000 times over – THANK YOU for not filling our house with pink princesses. The result is a girl who spent her childhood examining bugs, debating her future career choices, and never once – not once! – imagined her wedding.

Anyways – like I said – fodder for another post.

So here we are – getting married and wedding planning. The theme is: “Some Sort of Wedding,” in the hopes that people will arrive for the event expecting something a little off kilter. This way we won’t dissapoint if their traditional wedding expectations are not met.

Here, I often neglect John – as he is pretty uncomfortable/disinterested with the let-me-tell-strangers-about-my-life phenomenon [which is a very reasonable reaction]. Not just on the blog, but in real life too, our relationship has probably fallen by the wayside as Elsa has stepped in and eclipsed everything with her impossibly ginormous shadow. Wwriting our history for the wedding website was a nice change of pace. Remembering our 10 years together – 8 years of which were spent totally without Elsa – without even a glimmer of Elsa . . . And it even made me feel a little tingly to see all our history laid out there in pictures. Tingly like we used to feel. Tingly to the point where I needed to text John how much I love him. So – here it is. A longwinded way to introduce a post about me and John . . . from the wedding website:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is John:

And this is Georgia:

Hi! My name is Georgia.

10 years ago, John saw Georgia sitting in the lifeguard chair at Camp Chase. He asked her, “Hey. You want a glass of water?” Georgia said, “Yeah.”

Way back then, 10 years ago, John and Georgia were still teenagers. They looked like this:

Summer. 2001


Summer. 2001



Saying "goodbye" after their first summer. Back to college.

After that first summer, they headed back to their respective colleges. Georgia to Gambier, Ohio. John to Storrs, Connecticut.

The two had many adventures over the next ten years.

NYC. 2001


Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. 2002


Barcelona. 2003


Cinque Terre, Italy. 2003


New Hampshire. 2003


Dominican Republic. 2004. John's head expertly wrapped with Georgia's first aid skills.


South Dakota. 2005. (The great Cross-Country Road Trip!)


Soon, John and Georgia started to grow up a bit. They moved to Queens, New York together. They went to school. They raised some guinea pigs. Georgia graduated nursing school. John kept going to school. Georgia started working in the ER. John kept going to school. The adventures continued. . .

New Years Eve. NYC. 2006-2007


Georgia with the aforementioned guinea pig. Queens, NY. 2007.




Seattle, Washington. 2008


Southampton, NY. 2008.


Then John asked Georgia, “Do you . . . Do you want to marry me?” She said, “Yeah.”





March, 15, 2009. That was a nice day.



Post-engagment. Southampton, NY. 2009


Before they could even blink an eye (or manage to get married), John and Georgia found themselves getting ready to be parents! Instead of getting married, it seemed like a good idea to get a dog first. Enter: Stella.


30 weeks pregnant. With dog. Bristol, CT. 2009.


John. With Dog. The Woods, CT. 2009




Soon after Stella joined Georgia and John, Elsa decided to join in too.

Elsa's first day. Waterbury, CT. 2010.


January, 29, 2010. That was also a very nice day.


So here we are. John and Georgia. And Elsa. And Stella.

John is now “Dr. ______” or “Dada.” Georgia is usually “Mama” these days. Elsa is now a walking, talking, sneaky, delightful, little stinker. Stella is still the dog. She is also a stinker.

Next stop: Some Sort of [awesome] wedding at Woolman Hill! We imagine that it will be a very nice day as well.

See you there!

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Posted in Life Before Baby, Parenting, Wedding Blah Blah

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Morning wander

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 3 Comments

Elsa is napping and I should 100% be doing my taxes, laundry, cleaning, budgeting, etc.

But my friend Meaghan sent me a link to a great article/interview she just wrote for Guernica Magazine about a really inspiring trans lawyer/activist (Read about Dean Spade here).

After reading that, I started to browse thru Guernica and found the following poem by Jacques J. Rancourt and I don’t have a whole lot to say besides ‘wow’ and ‘incredible.’

Stable

My house became a stable
when my wife gave birth to a horse.
Laid on her side, her legs scissored open,
when the nurse grabbed a hoof and pulled

my wife gave birth to a horse.
The sack fell away from his form
when the nurse grabbed a hoof and pulled.
The surprise of his snout

through the milky sack—
she held him like a child, his spindly legs bent over,
but I could only see his snout.
Slick and dark, he tremored on his cannons

and she held him like a child, his legs bent over.
When he ran, he was a graceful storm,
slick and dark, a cannon’s tremor.
I tried to understand

what sort of beast this was while he stormed
through the fields back to my house.
When I tried, I understood.
Wolves followed in the wake of his gallop

through the fields and back to my house,
flesh-sinking their teeth, eating
through his gallop. When the wolves came
it should have rained, but the sun

shone on their flesh-sunk teeth, eating
my stained breath. Furious light,
it should have rained, but in the sun
I held my horse by its neck. Memories

of light staining my breath,
his skin the color of insect wings,
holding each other like horses. In my memory
the trough refills, my boy walks back

through the cloud of insects unhatching,
through the field as some Lazarus.
Past the trough refilling, the boy who walked back
smelled of cracked flint, passing a tree

in the field like some Lazarus.
No longer laid on his side but his legs scissored open,
past a tree, smelling like cracked flint—
Son, I never told you my house is your stable.

A morning like this – with so much reading and brain-usage and inspiration- makes me want to be back in school. Oh how I wasted college! High school, even. Those small classrooms full of discussion and passion and caring about something. Brains smoking as they churned our thoughts.

I wasted my time. I wasted my teachers’ time. And I’m almost done regretting that and have moved on to ways I can make amends. I want to learn everything all at once now. I feel on the brink of some major transformations. . . It’s so dangerous to make such a statement! I take full responsibility for whatever future inertia I experience and for whatever transformations I fail to experience. But when I feel like this, I think it is good to mark down – To remember.

HA! It must be approaching spring. Now I realize what this is all about – my yearly spring awakening! Look: Deja vu! From April 30, 2008:

My Oprah Moments have been happening daily now that Spring is here. It’s becoming clearer each year that I should leave this climate. I don’t realize how truly miserable I am all winter until spring shows up and I feel like someone has taken a plastic bag off my head and I can suddenly breath again. If I lived in a wintery climate year-round, it’s possible I would have taken my own life by now. Spring shows up and all of a sudden I mysteriously start working out again, cutting calories, eating healthy, flossing my teeth, washing my face, reading, turning off the [godamn] tv, listening to more NPR, looking for ways to get involved in society, thinking about going back to school (mind you, i’ve been out of school for less than a year), wanting to have sex again, etc. etc. Life becomes FULL of Oprah Moments. DAMN YOU WINTER! I’m a shell of a person for five months every year and, each spring, I’m surprised to peak out of my crusty lizard suit and re-discover such an inviting world.

A blog is great to have, if for no other reason, than to keep track of your own emotional cycles.

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Posted in Life Before Baby, Life Education, Using Your Brain

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Must . . . . write . . . something

Posted on October 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sometimes this blog makes me feel like I’m army crawling through some sort of thick mud bog – slowly creeping forward. Desperately reaching forward, one hand at a time, clawing the earth, breathing heavily, the occasional desperate grunt. Must. . . . Write . . . Something.

My 10 year high school reunion has got me really worked up into a nostalgic frenzy these days. And I keep mulling over one particular memory.

As a freshman at my all-girls boarding school, I was somewhere near the bottom of the academic/motivation barrel. I frequently skipped class – very happy to lounge in one of the school’s many comfy armchairs or skipping class to go sneak through the local graveyard with my friends. By the end of the first academic quarter, I was rapidly heading towards failure.

The academic dean called me to his office with my parents and my academic advisor and I was put on a strict remediation program. I was given a blank daily calendar, on which I had to account for my activities every hour of the school day and afternoon. Multiple times each week, I had to meet with my advisor and his elderly corgi, and account for how I had spent my time that day: class, homework, sports. My arm chair lounging days were numbered.

This program lasted for at least the rest of my freshman year. I can’t remember, but it may have persisted into my sophomore year as well. Eventually, I got smarter about how to waste my time more off the radar. I have vivid memories of spending afternoons with a friend sitting on the floor of a mostly unused elevator in the sports building. There were only two floors in the building and we would climb in, close the doors, and travel up and down one flight while we aggressively wasted time. On my daily calendar, this was marked as “Working out,” – since I was technically in the athletic center.

Lately, I’ve been trying to adhere to my own “Keep Track of Georgia” program. I started to feel like I was wasting HOURS sitting in front of the computer and, at the end of the day, I couldn’t remember what on earth I had done all day. The dishes were done, the laundry was clean, Elsa was taken care of . . . but I felt like whatever free time I had that day (usually during Elsa’s nap time) had been totally wasted. How many times do I really need to check my email and facebook every day? How many times each week can we walk mindlessly around Target?

So I am trying to give myself some sort of schedule. A schedule of activities that don’t make me feel bad about myself (i.e. shopping for nonsense). We’re going to the YMCA three or four days a week. Going to the library. Taking walks outside. La Leche League meetings.

Not the most exciting post in the world . . . Must . . . Write . . . Something.

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Posted in Life Before Baby, Miscellany

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Unfinished Business

Posted on September 1, 2010 | 4 Comments

I’m in a constant state of remodeling the blog, which is funny because approximately 3 people actually see the blog. Mostly, I take solace in my lack of audience, knowing that my thoughts here are for my own memory’s sake. Occasionally though, I wish for thousands of readers and the chance to become a world famous writer. Doesn’t the world want to hear about the incredible magic of my child’s every minutia and how, one time, I held a crazy man’s scrotum!?

I just realized that I never finished that story. Sadly, it’s a “Chapter 1″ without any subsequent chapters. Just for some closure:

Unknown White Male made his way back to the ER quite a few more times and I was always his nurse. In fact, I started seeing him in the triage line and I would tell the triage nurse, “It’s OK. I’ll take him. We have a thing going.” One night, he was even filthier than usual. Filthier than any human I have ever encountered – and I have encountered filth unimaginable. Another first-year doctor had decided they wanted to “work him up” for whatever nonsense was on his differential diagnosis and they wanted me to draw blood and put in an IV. I couldn’t find his skin beneath the caked filth, let alone a vein, and since it was a slow night, I decided it would be funny/horrible/insane to try and give him a shower.

Elmhurst, being the awesome inner city hospital it is, has one patient shower located in a hall closet. No bathroom, no real ante-room for getting changed. Just a closet in the middle of a busy hallway in the MIDDLE of the ER. So if you come to the ER and you need a shower, you best be ready to expose your genitals to the greater Queens community. Unknown White Male was more than ready.

At this point in our relationship, he was generally cooperative for me and he happily stripped down. I can’t even begin to describe the things that dropped out of his clothes as he removed his many layers. I wrapped him in a bed sheet (again, inner city ER = no towels! Really? No towels!?) and we shuffled down the hallway to the shower – me holding the train to his bed sheet gown. I unraveled him from the sheet and coaxed him into the shower – at which point he enthusiastically turned on the water and started a constant stream of loud, aggressive garbling. I handed him a dixie cup full of antibacterial hand soap (no towels, no shampoo, no private shower. . . the list is endless) and I dumped another cup of soap over his head. He enthusiastically started scrubbing.

MS. CRAZY WANTS ME TO SHOWER! WASHING MY DICK! YOU WANT ME TO WASH MY DICK MY HAIR MY SCROTUM MY BALLS MY BALLS. MS. CRAZY? MS. CRAZY? FUCKING DOCTORS FROM MT. SINAI DONT FUCKING KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY . . . MORE SHAMPOO! MORE SHAMPOO. I’LL WASH MY BALLS MS. CRAZY! I’LL WASH MY BALLS! MY ANUS NEEDS WASHING! SHOULD I WASH MY ANUS? MS. CRAZY!?

So there I am, Ms. Crazy, standing at the door, holding up a sheet so that the rest of the ER can’t really see what is going on inside the shower closet. “Yes. Wash your balls. Yes. Wash your anus. Ok. Almost done . . . . ” He continued to cooperate and the conversation was magical, really. The sheet was filthy and soaked at this point, so I quickly had another nurse stand there to guard him while I ran to get a clean sheet. By the time I got back, he had bolted out of the shower closet and was ambling down the hallway, dragging the filthy sheet around his ankles. Though I wrangled him pretty quickly, the entire ER got a good look at his new sparkly clean balls and anus.

I’ll admit: I had a real thing for Unknown White Male. Beneath his frothy, irrational screaming, he was actually kind of sweet and cooperative. He couldn’t even remember his own name (hence the ‘Unknown White Male’), but he eventually started lighting up when he saw me and would happily exclaim, “Hey Ms. Crazy! It’s you! Ms. Crazy!” It was heartwarming. Eventually, he disappeared – moved on to another ER, another Burrough perhaps. I like to think his family found him and cleaned him up and put him on the right medication. Somewhere, he is well-dressed and clean-shaven – maybe he is back to practicing medicine . . . maybe he really was a doctor like he always screamed. I don’t doubt the depths to which a person can tumble, if given the right set of horrible circumstances.

I know the story is, in reality, a sad one – but so is every story I have from the ER. Had I not been able to find funny, heartwarming moments along the way, I would have had to be committed. I almost had to be committed anyway.

Also, when people ask me about how gross it must be to clean my daughter’s cloth diapers, I just smile and think back to the hundreds of old people diarrhea diapers I have wrestled with and the cruddy old man foreskins I have had to scrub clean. The fact that my daughter’s diapers are the dirtiest thing I encounter on a day to day basis is a miracle.

So, right. Slowly remodeling the blog. Crazy, filthy old man. Ball scrubbing. Dirty diapers. Back to the beginning: Someday I will learn how to make my own beautiful website. Someday. Once I have finished the 4,034 other things on my to-do list. And everything will get done in the one-hour a day I have while Elsa naps.

I have a pretty genius friend whose talents I covet over at his website: The Cook Blog. Someday I hope my blog will be that aesthetically pleasing. In any event, while I am still wallowing around using the pre-made wordpress templates, I will just do what I can – and today, that means rewriting my “About” page.

For posterity’s sake, I will save my old “About” page here. For the last time:

________________________________________________________________________

[UPDATE: March 2010]

I gave birth to a small human. Her name is Elsa. I’m her mom and John is her dad – forever. So far, so good.

Family portrait with yelling

{UPDATE: October 2009]

It’s been an awfully long time. A lot has changed, but an attempt will be made to resurrect the blog. I can’t believe that it has been almost two years. TWO YEARS! What’s different now?

IMG_3634

1. I left my job in the ER back in July so I could move to CT with the man and be near family.
2. The man got me all pregnant and stuff.
3. While I wait for this baby to make it’s debut (in February), I work random per diem nursing jobs. Mostly, I think about being pregnant and meeting this creature that the man and I made.

As I was once compelled to write about my ER adventures, I am now compelled to write about all this pregnancy/baby stuff. Same old infrequent posting.

IMG_1744
[UPDATE: January 2008]

Closing in on my six month anniversary as a nurse. Considering three of those months were spent in orientation, it feels almost absurd that I’ve only been practicing for two and a half months.

{UPDATE : August 2007}

I’m actually a nurse now and practicing all this new nursing stuff in the Emergency Department where I have worked for the past year. I managed to convince them to hire me, I guess. It’s been over a month and I’m still totally floored when I see “RN” after my name.

I’m here to write about why nursing is a damn hard job. Here to hopefully chronicle my ascent from the land of the bumbling new nurse to the ranks of the competent.

{Original Blog About}

I live in a fine outer borough with a very fine partner. A year ago, I would have ranted on about how much I hate the city. Now, I’m content. Not in love with the place, but content.

I have 5 more months until I graduate with my BSN. A great city hospital [we'll call it Big City Hospital] is paying for my last year of nursing school in return for 16 months of service when I graduate.

As for my non-nursing self:
I exaggerate – often.
I want to live on a farm someday and have a lot of animal friends.
I have a hard time seeing myself as an adult.
I love the state of Ohio.
I would like to drive across the United States at least 10 more times.
I did a triathlon once and would like to do another someday.
And I cannot tolerate spiders in any way. Ever.

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Posted in ER stories, Life Before Baby

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