kdiddy.org

Did you ever have a really annoyingly close call with fate? Yesterday was a rather beautiful summer day here in Pittsburgh…not a cloud in the sky, very sunny, very hot…at least 92 degrees outside. I was considering taking a walk down to the Leslie Park pool with the baby, but decided not to simply due to the sheer volume of sunscreen that we would have needed. But apparently there was a shooting there yesterday right around the time that we would have been there. hrmmm. There wasn't anything in the newspaper about it today so this is all hearsay from my family's grapevine. We shall see.
Why this sucks:
guns are ass
a couple of kids had a problem and felt that there was no other way to solve it except for murder
the furthering of Lawrenceville's undeserved reputation as “the ghetto” (a reason why this is bullshit: there have been, I think, three shootings here this year and because this area is mostly low-income everyone's getting freaked out about it. but there were about a dozen shootings by crazy rich people and upper middle class teenagers hopped up on goofballs in Mt. Lebanon last year. But since that area has maintained its ritziness no one's too worried about it.)
there will probably be all kinds of draconian safety measures taken at that pool since, you know, young black kids are basically terrorists.
that's the only pool in walking distance for me…I think…

Argh, my son keeps crawling all over me and trying to push me out of my chair.

A gal in just spelled orgasm as “orgasism.” hee! It got me to thinking, if Snoop Dogg were to say orgasm, how would he modify it? Orgizzleasm? Orgasmizzle? Orizzlegasm? I think I like the last one the best.

Crazy things that happened in the last 24 hours or so:
-I'm real close to getting a writing assignment with the Post-Gazette. Yesterday, my contact, Nate, gave me the number of some other guy to call. I rang his bell, he asked me, very nicely, if I would call him back in a few minutes because he was *this* close to a deadline. It worked out well because the baby had just risen from his nap and was fiending for some Pedialyte. It was just like that scene in Boyz N the Hood when Ricky was meeting with the college scout and his little boy came running in the room. Everyone giggled and the scout said, “Is that your little brother?” and Ricky said, “No, that's my son.” Then there was an uncomfortable silence. It was just like that…only different.
Anyway. My mom came home from work just in time so I called the guy back and gave him my shpiel and he said that what they usually do with free-lancers who haven't written for them before is have them basically write the article and then they decide if they want to publish it or not. Pretty understandable. Then he told me that I should email him my resume and some writing samples “to see if it would even be worthwhile for you to write anything.” Thanks for the vote of confidence, chief. I told the boyfriend all this and he said, “Well, it's not like you're some sucker.” Aww…not a sucker…he makes me feel like such a lady.
;-p
I sent the guy my stuff today but still haven't heard back. I. Hate. That. But, he's got one of those “job” things so he's probably pretty busy…working or whatever they do.

My dad came over last night to visit. He's a little mopey because he thinks it's about time for his mother to go into a nursing home. I guess that's hard for anyone to admit about their parents. She's in her 90s or something crazy. I, personally, would be uncomfortable having her anywhere else. But… He's having trouble getting help (financially and otherwise) from his brothers. And his sister, who lives in Florida, has her hands full…although not with money. Apparently they're broke and the daughter has a really bad case of schizophrenia that they're trying to treat holistically. I don't even want to get into it. But apparently most of the people on my dad's side of the family are crazier than shithouse rats. This frightens me since that's my gene pool we're pissing in. *bites shoulder*

The boyfriend just told me about some product that his mom is testing for some company. It's supposed to help you sleep by sending low doses of electricity into your inner ears. The boyfriend tried it out and said it made him feel drunk.

I've lost my train of thought. Sorry.

This is mainly for 's benefit, as she is due to give birth very soon and I offered to share my story with her. Since this may or may not be of any interest to the rest of you I shall put it behind a cut.
I should probably start at my weekly checkup. My due date had come and gone and I was entering my 42nd (eep!) week of pregnancy. I was becoming the slightest bit miserable due to physical discomfort but was kind of glad since I was almost done with my fall semester of college. So, Monday, my usual day at the doctor's, I went in for a non-stress test and to check my amniotic fluid and all of these other things that they do when you haven't delivered on time. My doctor wanted to do a quick ultrasound just to check and make sure that everything looked good. He started at the bottom and said, “Um, I don't see a head.” My first thought was Oh, great, the kid has just disappeared! But after further scanning we realized that he was situated right to left in my belly. His head was poking my right side and his feet were poking my left side…definitely not the ideal position for delivery. My doctor said that he would try to turn him but if he wouldn't cooperate we would have to do a C-section…maybe even that day! I did not want to have surgery so I told him to go ahead and turn him. My doctor poked around with the scanner a bit more and the little sucker slipped back into the head-down position with hardly any trouble. All present were surprised.

“Well, that was easy,” chuckled my doctor. The only thing was that they wanted to monitor him for a little while to make sure he didn't get all freaked out by the movement. So they sent me upstairs and hooked me up to the fetal monitors. I sat there for probably two hours while the boyfriend got increasingly irritated with the slowness of everything. He had to leave to go to class and I gladly saw him off.
At the end of the monitoring session my doctor came in and told me that he had scheduled me to be induced on Wednesday night at midnight. He was concerned that since the baby showed an interest in turning combined with my “unproven” pelvis, my size, and my overdue state would give me a very difficult time trying to deliver vaginally. I said that that would work out fine since my finals were Wednesday afternoon.
They unhooked me, I went to class.
Tuesday went by with no incident…classes, homework, finishing up a paper and studying for an exam. During the night I felt the baby moving around a lot, but didn't think anything of it.
Wednesday I got up, went to school, turned in my paper and went to take my exam. Just like that, I had completed a semester of college and was off to have a baby that evening. No problem. Got on the bus, came home and trekked up the hill to my house. I can remember that it was a gorgeous day, very unusual for early December, and a lot of people were standing outside of their shops enjoying the sunshine. One woman, a massage therapist, told me that she did pregnancy massage. I groaned and told her that I was going to be all done tomorrow, but maybe next time (snicker).
Once at home I just sort of sat around, ate a light dinner, watched TV and finished packing.
My mom came over after work and helped me fix my hair, as I was determined to look as stunning as possible in all of the pictures that were going to be taken of me grunting and pushing.
The boyfriend got home from work around 11:30 p.m. and insisted on showering. When he was finally done we drove to hospital and parked in the wrong parking lot. We could not get into the hospital at that entrance and had to walk all the way around the block to the main entrance. This was a bit of a strain on me.
When we finally got in, we registered with the nurses, got settled into my Labor/Delivery/Recovery Room, filled out a bunch of forms, peed, got changed into the fabulous hospital gown, and prepared for the journey ahead.
Two nurses attended to me, one hooked me up to a blood pressure machine and the other got started on my IV. She messed up the first time, and I tried not to wince at the teaspoon of blood that came out of my arm. Finally, IV success. She started the Pitocin, announced, “You are now in labor,” and encouraged me to relax. The boyfriend and my mother settled in on the couch and dozed off. I turned on the TV and started watching the Discovery Channel.
After a few minutes I felt some twinges in my uterus and got all excited and thought, “Oh my god, this is really it! I'm really going to have a baby!” I kept my eye on the clock, figuring I might as well time them in case the nurses wanted to know if I had felt anything. They were about the same level of discomfort as the Braxton-Hicks contractions that I had had before…nothing too intense.
After about an hour my nurse came in and said that she wanted to check to see if I had dilated at all. Cervical exams are not too fun. I huffed and puffed and she finally came out and said, “You're one centimeter dilated!” Cheers all around. That was easy. I didn't even really do anything. “However,” uh oh, “I don't feel the baby's head…I think I felt a foot.”

You have got to be kidding me. I started to think back to Tuesday night and all of the twisting and turning that the baby did. So that was what he was up to.
The nurse went to get an ultrasound machine and confirmed that the baby had indeed turned into a breech position. She went off to call my doctor who told her to turn off the Pitocin, let me get some rest, and that he would be there at 6 a.m. to discuss my options.
So, almost as quickly as it had started, labor was over and I was left to sit in my room and fret. The boyfriend and my mother fell back to sleep and I returned to the Discovery Channel.
I nodded off eventually for a few minutes, but I was much too keyed up to get any real rest. That combined with the fact that every half hour a nurse would come in to check on me and my blood pressure.
A few hours and a documentary about seagulls later, my grandmother showed up bearing coffee and danish. I wanted to stab her since I was starving and wasn't allowed to eat anything.
Not long after that my doctor showed up (also with coffee…grr) with a student doctor of his and a team of nurses.
I have to pause for a moment and say that my doctor is one of my most favorite people in the world. He's seriously one of the nicest people I've ever met.
He grinned at me and said, “So what exactly is this kid of yours doing?” I shrugged and said that he must be trying to jump out. He explained to me that there was pretty much no way I could vaginally deliver him as he was. If I wanted to, they would try to turn him (an external version, it's called). Otherwise, I would have to have a C-section. I again told him to go ahead and turn him, as 8 weeks of Lamaze classes floated in front of my vision.
The ultrasound machine was once again brought in to check on his position. My doctor told me they would turn him a little bit and then check on the baby's heart, since some of them don't respond to the external version with total glee.
My doctor and his student took their positions on either side of me, the nurses stood back and the room got pretty quiet. My doctor squirted this lube all over my belly so that their hands could move over it. He put his hands at the bottom where my kids feet were and his student put her hands at the top where his head was. They started pushing and pulling very slowly.
This hurt pretty bad. I started actually utilizing some of my Lamaze breathing, although I was doing a lot of clenching of the teeth and of the bed. After a minute or two they stopped and put the ultrasound machine on my belly.
“His heart isn't beating.” My doctor's face turned white and the floor opened up and swallowed me. “We're going to have to do a C-section right now, Kelly. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” I stammered.”
All of a sudden there was a flurry of activity. Nurses unhooked me from machines and the doctors rushed out of the room to get ready. As they pushed my bed out of the room my grandmother called, “See you later, alligator.” What a cheeseball.
Once we got out into the hall the nurses started to run toward the operating room. This really freaked me out and I started crying. I had never had any kind of emergency before and this was not exactly how I wanted to be introduced to them.
We got into the operating room and I kept telling the staff that I wanted the boyfriend with me. They assured me that he would be there and asked me to scooch onto the operating table which was about two feet wide. I had visions of myself toppling off in the middle of surgery, but did what they said.
Things get kind of blurry from this point on. But I remember getting the catheter inserted (yeeeowch!) and being sat up so that I could get the spinal injection. (Note: the spinal injection is different from the epidural. There's no constant flow of medication as with the epidural, just one big dose of strong drugs.) Getting a needle in the back wasn't exactly my idea of a good time, so when they injected me with the local anesthetic I involuntarily yelped and jumped a little bit. A nurse standing next to me encouraged me to clutch his hand and to keep breathing through it. He kept whispering into my ear to stay calm and that everything would be fine. His kindness was so needed at that point and I started crying all over again.
As they laid me back down, I could feel the numbness start to take over my lower body. It was a very strange sensation. I also started to feel extremely high and guessed that they must have topped off the spinal injection with some kind of sedative to keep me chilled out. It worked, but I was still a good bit worried.
At that point they took off my glasses which was kind of annoying because I couldn't tell all of the be-scrubbed people in the room apart and kept asking people next to me if they were my boyfriend. That got a chuckle or two.
I had to sign a consent form, which was pretty funny since I couldn't read it and the pen was out of ink. They assured me that the impression of my signature would do and I said something along the lines of, “Okay, whatever, I won't sue.”
My doctor appeared at my side and stroked my forehead. “Everything's going to be fine, Kelly. Don't worry.” That got the waterworks flowing again and I asked one more time where my boyfriend was.
I looked over to my right and there he was. My arms had been strapped down to keep me from getting freaked out and messing up my IVs, but he grabbed my hand and put his other hand on my forehead. I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life. I asked him if he was mad at me and he just gave me a confused look. The anesthesiologist was sitting at the top of my head, keeping an eye on my vital signs and continuing to tell me in his soothing voice that everything was going great. My boyfriend kept his eyes on mine and told me that I shouldn't cry. I told him that I was scared. What if we had gone through all of this and the baby died. He told me not to even worry about that. “We're only a few minutes away from having a cute little baby!” he said. I nodded and said that I felt very strange. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, which I guess scared the boyfriend and he told me to just keep looking at him.
My doctor announced that at 8 a.m. on the dot the initial incision was made. I looked at the boyfriend and cried some more, but he decided to tell me jokes. I started laughing through my tears and realized that there was no one else in the world who I wanted by my side more than him.
At 8:07 a.m. they announced that our son, Kingston Delaney Cox, was born. I couldn't see anything, but figured that they had taken him over to the warming bed to dry him off. I looked at the boyfriend and asked him why the baby wasn't crying. He told me to wait a second.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, I heard, “wwaaaaahhhh!” Our son was okay! I looked at the boyfriend, raised my eyebrows and said, “He's here!” and started laughing and crying.
The mood in the room lightened considerably and the boyfriend and I started laughing. I heard the doctors counting the sponges and stuff that they had used during the surgery to make sure that they hadn't left anything inside me. “Ten…eleven…twelve…thirteen…” I managed to joke, “I hope they aren't counting his toes.”

The drugs were still doing their job and I don't remember much at this point either. The boyfriend left to go tell my family that everything was okay. My doctor came over to congratulate me and tell me what a great job I had done. I thanked him about a million times and told him that I really hadn't done much.
Suddenly a nurse appeared at my side with a little baby all wrapped up in blankets. I stared at him for a seconds and then said, “Is that mine?” She giggled and said yes and that he was doing just great. I didn't know what to do. I touched his little face for the first time with my finger and gasped at how gorgeous he was. “He looks like my dad!” I said. I don't know if it was the drugs or the post-birth euphoria but I felt extremely high and giggly at that point. I don't remember ever being happier in my entire life.
The next thing I knew my son was in my arms and I was being wheeled back into my room where my family was waiting for us. As soon as I crossed the doorway I yelled, “He's so cute!” Everyone got all gooey and happy and started rushing around making phone calls. The baby was taken over to the warming bed and various things were done to him…clamping his cord, injection of Vitamin K, APGAR tests, whatnot. I just sort of laid in my bed and giggled. My mom, my grandmother, my boyfriend, his mother and my best friend all came over and kissed me.
A nurse handed me my son and said, “Do you want to try breastfeeding now?” He latched on with no problem and started nursing away. I giggled at the feeling and at how hungry he was.
When I thought that he was done, I handed him over to various family members to let them hold him. Another nurse came in with a big thing of morphine for me, which I was very pleased about.
The rest of the day was filled with visitors and flowers and gifts. I drifted in and out of conversations as me and my new buddy morphine got through the post-surgery pain together.
Finally, everyone left and it was just me and the baby. We sat in the dark hospital room and stared at each other. I smothered him with kisses and stayed up most of the night just looking at him and letting him wrap his little fingers around mine. It was the best.

, hopefully you won't have to have a C-section, but you know it's always a possibility. I'm sure you'll be splendid at childbirth!

I really like it when the Internet plays dumb. www.livejournal.com…Oh, can't find it, sorry. www.google.com….wha? never heard of it but feel free to refresh or try again later.

I just cracked my knee off of the corner of my desk.

I was pretty productive. I looked through the want ads and circled some stuff. There weren't a ton of promising jobs in there but it's a start. Tomorrow I'm going to do some work on my resume, perhaps go to the shady-looking printing place up the street to print out a few copies. I'm really not trying to take the bus all the way into Oakland just to go to Kinko's. Besides, I get all crazy around nicely displayed office supplies. I'd probably spend too much money.
I also gathered up my nerve and emailed my contact from the Post-Gazette. I gushed apologies about not getting in touch with him sooner. I cited my hectic college schedule. Granted, I only had one class but, hey, I have a kid. It's still tough. That's partly true but the real reason is that I get so insecure about calling people in any kind of business capacity. Anyway, he didn't seem at all annoyed and was very supportive of my story idea. I'm supposed to call him tomorrow to see what the deal is.
Ugh, now I'm nervous just thinking about it and have convinced myself that he was just yanking my chain….why do you people even talk to me? I'm a total wreck, even I can't stand it.
hargh.
Not going to worry about it. Not going to worry about it.
Other stuff…
Took a nice long walk on a beautiful day that couldn't have been mistaken for anything but summer. I, of course, managed to get sunburned. I can't believe I forgot to put on sunscreen. I've had this skin for what, 24 years now? Does it always burn at the slightest mention of sun? Yes. Why my subconcious thought that today would be any different is beyond me.
I went to WW with my mom and I've now lost almost 20 pounds. Ahhh…feels good. I want to just go ahead and say that I'm not some dieting freak. I just have been retaining some baby weight. After being pregnant for basically 10 months and breastfeeding for 14 months I was pretty well settled into the “I'm-eating-for-two” habit. Also, I can't afford to buy new clothes.
My kid said so many new words just today. I couldn't believe it. He said “shoe,” “cheese,” “hand,” “hat,” and “elbow.” Five new words just in one day! He's also a total pro at pointing out body parts. He can identify his nose, eyes, mouth, elbows, knees and toes. He can also point out his socks and shoes. Today when we were getting ready to go out and I said, “Where are Mommy's shoes?” He walked over to the door and brought me my shoes…just like a little puppy! Now I just need to teach him how to fetch the newspaper. ;-p Since he's apparently on a roll language-wise, I've also been telling him the French and Spanish words for all of his vocabulary. push push push. Kidding.
Sorry if the last paragraph was excruciatingly boring and cutesy for those of you who are child-free. It's just so cool sometimes to realize that you have this little person who's learning all of these interesting things from you everyday. And I just can't believe that he's 18 months! That's so wild!

ergh, some moron is bugging me on Soulseek.

It took me about an hour to get through my friends page. At least 2/3 of the entries were catfights from those crazy girls at . I think my time on that community might be limited. Bunch of girls + Internet anonymity + girly show = really irritating overuse of the words “retard” “bitch” and “you, like, suck.”

Last night: after putting the baby to bed we went to Pittsburgh Deli Company to chill with Matt one last time before he goes back to San Francisco. He has a gift for storytelling. I like him even more now because he sided with me on the mysterious argument that the boyfriend and I had on Saturday night.
I watched those two suck at pool. That was entertaining…although I really shouldn't talk because I can't play pool at all.
Pittsburgh Deli Company has some amazing food but the clientele is usually very annoying and there's always always always some jam band playing on the jukebox. ugh.

I went to the last day of the Three Rivers Arts Festival with Stacey and the baby. It was pretty nice. We mostly just walked around and cursed the fact that we didn't have any money. Some of the art was rather cheap. There were a few pieces that I would have liked to have. We stayed longer than we planned to. Stacey let me drive from Lawrenceville to Downtown which was pretty exciting. Driving through a spiralling parking garage was not so easy, however.

Alright, enough. I really have some stuff to do today.

Last night ended up being not that fun at all. The boyfriend had to stay late at work so we missed the Wilco concert (it was a shitty night, weather-wise, too, so…). We also missed the shows because we couldn't get our act together. The boyfriend was lying on the kitchen floor (I don't remember how he ended up down there but I'm fairly certain there wasn't any substance abuse involved) for about 30 minutes groaning about how he needed to take a shower. I kept telling him to go take one so that I could give the baby a bath. This went on for so long.
fart.
A friend (Matt) of the boyfriend's was in town from San Francisco and wanted to hang out, but we weren't sure what to do. After I got the baby in bed we picked up Matt and headed over to the Strip to pick up Kelly Downlow at Milk Records. That was the first time I had been in their new space and it's really very nice. I so want to have some gorgeous loft apartment in that old schoolhouse building.
We stayed there for way too long, though. By the time we were getting ready to actually go out somewhere I was already really tired and not my usual perky self (ha). There was some discussion about where to go…I wasn't really listening but apparently Matt wanted to go to Dee's on the South Side.
Now, Dee's is this bar that's been around forever. Over the past couple of years it's become the hot spot for a good portion of the hipsters in Pittsburgh…although I think the clientele has become somewhat diluted with frat brothers and sorostitutes. There's nothing very special about it except for its size. It's pretty huge, at least it seems so to me. The second floor is where all of the punks hang out and say dumb shit like, “Capitalism sucks,” without really understanding what the hell they're talking about. Basically, dim college kids who wear POW-MIA tshirts because they look cool and declare themselves Proletarian even though they have no idea what that means. I'm sure in less then ten years 90% of them will be getting their Hammer and Sickle tattoos removed. yeah.
(On a personal note, I think people who consider themselves socially-aware punks and still smoke cigarettes are really confused)
Anyway, we got there and met up with a few friends and just sort of sat around for a few minutes. Then the boyfriend started getting really uncomfortable, like panicky, and said that he really wanted to leave. We couldn't figure out what the problem was. So I said, “That's fine. But if we want to go somewhere else we had better do it now since it's after 1 already.”

So I left. But when I got to the door I realized that I was alone. I went back to the table and everyone was arguing about the virtues of Dee's vs. any other place in the city. I was getting really irritated by this point for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that all 200 people who were there were smoking heavily. I could barely breathe and my contacts were almost completely dry.
Well, long story short, the boyfriend and I ended up getting into some kind of argument, the roots of which neither of us could pin down. We left Dee's and took Matt to Aiello's to get some pizza.
The argument faded by the time we got home but it's too bad that this is the image Matt now has of our couplehood.
I'm pretty tired today and am more than a little annoyed that I have to do laundry all over again due to the smoke stench that is saturating all of my clothes. Perhaps it's hypocritical for me to be so disgusted with smoking now since I used to be a pretty heavy smoker. But I think it would be really nice to go out one night and not have cancer when I come home.
…This entry made no sense. Sorry.

The folks on are kinda strange.
I'm not sayin' anything…I'm just sayin'…

My computer, for no apparent reason, started making these really weird noises. I couldn't tell where it was coming from. Must have been a malfuncitioning pop up ad or something. I recorded a few seconds of it in case I get abducted by aliens or murdered. If you don't hear from me in a couple of days, take the tape from the tape recorder to the left of the keyboard to the authorities.

Where was I? The rest of the night started to take some weird turns when this drunk hipster who was sporting a faux-hawk did a split on the bar. No one was quite sure what to say until he started swinging his cardigan around and knocked out a panel from the dropped ceiling. Curt Jackson took action (ooh! a poem!) and pulled him off of the bar. I gave him a dirty look. (That'll show him.) There was some further inappropriate behavior on his part with . I'm still not clear as to what exactly happened, but girls got upset and guys wanted to punch the Faux-hawk. I just sort of stood off to the side and said, “Huh?” I did shoot the Faux-hawk some more dirty looks. You'll never wieze in this town again, jackass.
Seriously, though, acting like an idiot I think is okay if you're at a private affair and among friends who know you well enough to dismiss any stupidity. But acting like that in public, especially when you're well over the legal age to be consuming alcohol, is just unacceptable. Also, molestation is never acceptable. Simply put, if three or four Miller High Lifes are going to turn you into Courtney Love, stay the fuck at home…and keep your grimy “I-don't-shower-cause-I-listen-to-the-Strokes” ass off the bar.
Rilly.
Besides that, there's a bunch of stuff going on tonight and the weather, as per her usual, is being an arse. I'm mostly concerned about the free outdoor Wilco concert tonight. I want to go but waaahhh, I might get wet..or struck by lightning. I already missed the free Maceo Parker concert last night…although, that was mostly due to my inability to keep dates straight in my head.
Local darlings the are playing two events today. Hopefully I'll be able to make it to at least one of them…You know I'm reading back over the last couple of sentences and realizing that people who complain about how there's nothing to do in Pittsburgh are absolute morons. Granted, this is an exceptionally busy time of year but if you can't find at least one interesting thing to do this weekend of all weekends then you're just an exceptional bore and should probably consider offing yourself.
So there.
I still haven't done any of the housework I mentioned in the last entry. I did, however, sprinkly Holy Water on my CPU*, eat some cold Lipton noodles, eat a peach, and flipped through this crappy, no-substance dance magazine that I picked up at PBT today after my Pilates lesson. I should go write for them. It looks pretty easy. The cover story was about 800 words long. I guess ballet dancers are stupid. The magazine is mostly pretty pictures anyway. I guess the real money there would be in photography…okay I'm getting off on a tangent.
My kid's probably awake.

*Not really, I don't have any Holy Water. Fuck that.