Back to School

School began yesterday. Despite some nervousness and last minute syllabus copying, I had a really nice day!

I decided to drive to school so I could go to Babies-R-Us after class. The weather has been beautiful here lately, so I got to drive in with the windows down, listening to Morning Edition. It reminded me of the one thing I liked about my old Chapel Hill-to-Garner drives--it's kind of relaxing to drive to work with NPR. And I got to try out the parking situation. Instead of buying a regular parking permit, I got a "bundle pack," which consists of 10 1-day passes for $40. The faculty (yes, I am officially "faculty" now) can part in various overflow lots, some of which are literally miles from where I teach, but I found a lot within a 5-minute walk from my classroom! Good to know for when I return after the baby comes. I am saving the rest of the passes for then, since it takes so much more time to Metro than to drive to school, and I imagine I'll be on some sort of a breast pumping timeline.

I got to school a little early, so I went to the library and looked over my notes. I was nervous, even though I have taught the first day of English 101 8 other times, and I do almost exactly the same thing every time. It's just that so much of teaching is on the spot. You have to stand up and just go with it. I haven't been doing a lot of that this summer. But when I got to the first classroom and started the class, everything went very smoothly. It was fun!

My second classroom is directly across the hallway from the first, so in the 15-minute break I sat outside in the sun. The baby was very busy. It was nice because she was quite sluggish on Monday. I think she was excited to be teaching too. She did teach a whole semester last spring, but she was very young so she probably doesn't remember. I myself WAS remembering the first day of school last semester, which was the first day I actually believed the faint pink line on the pregnancy test.

The second class also went well. They were a particularly bright-eyed bunch, with most of them staying quite alert even through all the boring course policy information, which I have learned to go over aloud despite its dullness. The students just don't read it on their own.

The first part of the curriculum covers rhetoric, and this semester I am focusing on analyzing advertisements. As a unit project, the students will create their own advertisements in groups. After class, I went to the co-op for lunch, and as I ate I read the campus newspaper, The Diamondback. There was this front-page article that fits perfectly with the concepts I'm teaching, so after I ate I got 22 copies of the paper and took them to my office to use in class tomorrow.

Although I've been in Tawes, the English department's new home, all summer, yesterday was the first day I got to use it as a teacher. I used the fancy new copier/scanner to make copies for tomorrow, and then I went to my office. The offices are spacious and sunny, 4 desks to a room with a computer in each office! Compared to my old office, which had about 15 desks and a computer packed into a room not even twice as big as the new office, this is very luxurious. (And even more so for the TAs who had their desks in "the bullpen," a messy, noisy room in the old English building that was home to at least 30 desks, 1 computer, several filthy couches, and a refrigerator full of molded bagels.) The only thing that was slightly sad was that I was all alone in my office--there was something nice about always having a colleague to talk to, as was the case in the big shared space.

After I wrapped up all my teaching tasks, I made the thrilling trek to Babies-R-US through the College Park-to-Silver Spring suburban sprawl. As a pregnant person, I am not a great driver. Not only am I super paranoid that people are going to crash into me, I also feel oddly distracted, as though I can't focus. Plus I get terrible road rage. But I made it there, where I got to fulfill my dream of parking in one of the "Expectant Mother" parking spots right up front. (Dean wouldn't park there when we went together.) I took in Sophie's old car seat and got a new Graco Snug Ride, complete with silver buckle. It's blue and gray, which doesn't match Meg's stroller or mine, but the only choices were blue and gray or pink and brown. I figured blue and gray is more unisex for any future babies that might inherit the car seat.

Speaking of gender, all of the random strangers who have guessed the sex of the baby lately have thought it was a boy. They say things like, "When is the little man coming out?" They are always very surprised, somewhat skeptical, and slightly disapproving when I say she is a girl. I guess it's the way I'm carrying. I'm considering just going along with people and agreeing it's a boy, so I don't have to have such long conversations with people about it. I've realized that one of the things people who love being pregnant love about it is getting a lot of attention from strangers, but I don't really love that part. Sometimes it's nice, but other times... I'm just tired or in my own world. (And apparently extremely anti-social.) And then there are times when the encounter is just plain weird, as the other day when I was meeting Dean outside his office. A man, who was wearing black winter gloves for some reason, asked me if people wanted to touch my belly a lot.

"Sometimes," I replied, thinking fast about how I was going to reply when HE asked to touch it.

"Do you let them?" he asked.

"Sometimes," I replied again.

"Well, you shouldn't."

This was surprising. He proceeded to explain that every time someone touched my belly their spirit got into the baby and if they had a bad spirit, this harmed the baby. He told me how Mary, when pregnant with Jesus, kept it a secret for that reason. He said I should not even allow my family to touch my belly. I thanked him for his advice and sidled away as soon as I could, aided by some men wearing navy uniforms who stopped to talk to him.

Anyway, back to Babies-R-US--the car seat came in a HUGE box, which reminded me of Liz's recent experience with a car seat purchase. I loaded in the cart, car and house all by myself--don't worry, it wasn't really heavy, just big. After I picked out the car seat, I wandered around the store in the hope that I would spot any other item I might need so I would never have to go there again. In this way, I learned how very many baby products there are, and how "your baby's safety" is an important marketing technique in selling these. After resisting the urge to buy both a yellow "baby on board" bumper sticker and a digital kick counter that said it "reduced the likelihood of stillbirth," I paid for the car seat and left.

After that, we stopped for a healthy snack, a McDonald's hot fudge sundae, and I made my way home. When I got here, the Ergo carrier had arrived, so it was a big day for the baby in terms of new items. Tonight or tomorrow, we'll install the car seat, and then I'll get it inspected Friday. It'll be ready just under the "1 month before your due date" timeline!

To top off yesterday's pleasantness, I went to yoga, which is always nice. But it was extra nice because one of the women in the class, who I dislike because she invariably "feels really great" and does 10 REAL push-ups to every half-push up the teacher instructs us to do, had gotten all of her hair cut off! This proves that she has had at least ONE pregnancy symptom! (See The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy regarding the little known but common urge to cut ALL of your hair cut off during the third trimester. I have been resisting this myself.) Her hair looks fine, so it's not that I'm gloating that she looks bad. It was just satisfying that she showed SOME sign of being at all affected by her pregnancy.

All in all, a good day. And now I am off to a breast pump tutorial with Caroline and Lucy!