Jessica Alfieri

writes everything you see here.

• Gentle Tumble

  Feb 14, 2012 tagged as life

  

  This is so lovely.  I want to remember to enjoy the simple things I know well as much as the things that are new, different, and exciting.

  Yesterday as I was loading the dryers, [laundromat owner, Rose] came up to me and suggested I redistribute them. Towels with the sweatpants and all of the sheets alone in another. She described, with obvious rapture, the look of a properly loaded dryer. The gentle tumble, likes with likes, lots of movement and a perfect, slow spiral. She said it was a thing of beauty, a dryer loaded with care and I swear I could see a difference. A mesmerizing, hypnotizing difference.

  [...] Everyone has those little secret happinesses- the spin of a dryer or the droop of a dead stem.

  
  

• 84 Days

  Feb 14, 2012 tagged as baby, cupcakes, pregnant

  I don’t think I’ve counted days this far out since childhood Christmases.

  Anyway, here’s where we are: 10 new inches around my waist; about 14 new pounds there too.  It’s a little frightening to think how much I’ll add to those two columns in the remaining 2016 hours.

  Unrelated, Eric brought me this last night at almost 9:00, and I was all, that’s so dorky but awww, but it turns out that “baby” cupcake was intended for someone to buy for Valentine’s Day.  So now scratch the awww.  That’s so dorky.

  

  
  

• Dictionary

  Feb 2, 2012 tagged as baby, pregnant

  Today my baby-doctor asked me if I knew what a uterus was.  Which was very confusing because a) he was in the process of measuring mine, and b) What?  Who doesn’t know what a uterus is?  He followed that with, “What about womb?”

  “Uh, they’re interchangeable.” I said. “Womb’s the religious version.”

  I didn’t manage to ask him why he was asking me because I was still dizzy from the glucose solution I’d guzzled twenty minutes earlier, which basically tasted like thick, fruitish poison and made my body feel like surely the Mayans were right.

  I imagine he brought it up because one of his dumber patients asked him once, in a voice like Olive Oyl’s, “Hey Doc, what’s my lady business called?”

  
  

• Being Round

  Jan 31, 2012 tagged as baby, pregnant

  The defining characteristic of this pregnancy so far is today’s willingness to wear the socks with multiple holes in them, because I only realized how hole-ridden they are after putting on my pants.