ultrasound images

Especially when they belong to the tiny human being growing in your belly! While the posts on this blog thus far have been genuine reflections on the little things that inspire feelings of baby lust, they've also been placeholders until the time I felt comfortable announcing, even anonymously, my impending parenthood. It seemed strange to me to blog about something I wasn't sharing with even my closest relatives and friends. Call me super-superstitious but it's a strange thing to blog about (something about it, however, is obviously compelling in that tell-all kind of way) and only now, 14 weeks and 4 days into this journey, do I feel a little more comfortable, even a little eager, to share some of the details of my pregnancy with the world wide web.

My first trimester was pretty uneventful and that is of course a wonderful thing. I had no real morning sickness, just a few days of queasiness off and on during the 7th week or so (but perhaps that coincided with a bout of cravings for spicy foods?). I have had my share of indigestion and well, there's no polite way of saying this: pregnancy gas. I've had cravings that aren't strange, per se, but odd for me: cheese, potato chips, McDonald's (what's that about?!), hot chocolate. Wait, hot chocolate's not unusual at all. I've had aversions to cooked veggies, mostly. But then the other day I had some very plain, steamed broccoli and it was downright delicious. Very strange. I tend to be craving junk food lately, but at the same time feel extra sensitive to what I put in my body. While the result will be much different, pregnancy so far - at least as it relates to food - reminds me of when I trained to run a marathon about seven years ago. It was like the not so healthy choices that would have made me feel just a little blah before threw a total wrench into my digestive system.

But mostly, my first trimester was marked by fatigue. I've never been so tired before or required so much sleep in my life, at least not as an adult. I'd get a good solid 8 or 9 hours at night but need a nap by 3 in the afternoon. That made some days working on my Master's thesis a little tricky, but I managed to get through it. I can't say I feel terribly energetic now that I'm officially in the second trimester, but I can get through more days without a nap, especially if I force myself to do yoga just when I think I'll fall asleep on the keyboard.

Anyway, I could go on, but I might as well save additional thoughts on exercise, doctor visits, and maternity clothes for later posts.

stripes

On babies, that is. Baby clothes - and it doesn't matter much where they're from or what baby they're on - can really bring on the baby lust. I've done a fair amount of new baby gift shopping over the last decade or so, for my niece and nephew and for one of my first friends to have a baby a little over a year ago, and I just love buying baby clothes. It didn't really make me want to have a baby when I shopped for my nephew, who was born when I was just 19 years old, but with the newer babies in my life, I'm guaranteed a long bout of baby lust every time I go on a baby clothes shopping spree.

Anyway, I guess I haven't been shopping much lately, because I'm just now thinking to write about this, but Gap's recent holiday classics advertising campaign did me in today when I received their catalog in the mail (they even boast a striped Vespa, which of course does little for the baby lust, but still). I mean, everyone knows how irresistible a bundled-up winter-time baby can be, but who knew babies in stripes could be so adorable? Striped sweaters and pants, little pointy hats with pom-poms at the end...Amanda Peet's baby, in particular, is just too much.

pregnancy on film

When you're trying to conceive, it seems like everything around you is suddenly about being pregnant and having babies. All of a sudden, you notice that almost every movie you watch features at least one pregnant woman. I recently watched Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, an oddly delightful and beautiful 1964 film about a young woman, played by Catherine Deneuve, who gets pregnant by her boyfriend right before he's drafted into military service. And in a much newer film, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, Peter's wife Alice is pregnant, although we see her only once toward the end of the film. One of my favorite cases of pregnancy on film is another film by Anderson that features a pregnant Cate Blanchett as Jane Winslett-Richardson in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Blanchett's pregnant belly is very convincing, of course, because it's real. But there's something about her overall performance, beyond the big belly - the attempt to swear less, the long braid, the tan and yellow outfits - that I find really endearing and evocative of baby lust.

Ikea

I think I mentioned in the first post something about how malls give me "baby lust", what with all the families, new moms, pregnant women, etc., strolling around with their pretzels and soft serve. In a similar way, Ikea does a pretty good job at inspiring "baby lust", albeit concentrated in a smaller space. On a recent visit, it seemed like everywhere I turned there were round bellies and babies, really tiny ones, too. Even their baby products will do it. I found myself gravitating longingly toward the cribs and changing tables...

others on baby lust

If you search for the term "baby lust," you'll get a handful of articles with that phrase for the title. Articles on Salon and New York Times, while their titles are similar, offer perspectives from two different sides of the coin. A mother of four occasionally wants a fifth baby, while the NYTimes writer begins her article with examples of things she did during the six years it took her to conceive baby number one. This second article, not surprisingly, touches on all the crazy things women do to try to conceive. What's interesting about the article is the historical thread; women doing wacky things to try and get knocked up is hardly new.

what gives you baby lust?

This blog started out as an anonymous (yet online and oddly public) personal journal of family planning. After just two posts, I realized I didn't like blogging about trying to conceive, but it's a great blog title so I thought I'd hang on to it for awhile.

So, just what is this thing we call "baby lust"? I only heard the term recently, listening to an NPR segment a couple of months ago about how the third and fourth children have become the latest way for the upper middle classes to "keep up with the Jones's," as they say. I thought, wow, that's fairly upsetting, but I really liked the term one of the women used. She used the term "baby lust" to refer to that feeling she got when her friends or neighbors had baby number 3 or 4. I get that feeling all the time lately. Once you start paying attention you realize that the things that cause "baby lust" are everywhere. Go to the mall. It's teeming with pregnant women, newborns, toddlers, and adorable clothes you can dress them in. Every movie I watch lately seems to be about pregnancy or babies. When we go out to dinner there's invariably a family with a baby sitting near us. So I thought I'd write - for awhile, at least - about the things that give me "baby lust," and, conversely, the odd moments in a particularly generative day when my overwhelming urge to (pro)create gets satisfied in other, less biological ways.