Yes, this year Auckland Anniversary day = Sam’s birthday, and he had to work. I, however, did not.

It’s become a tradition for me to make chili for Sam’s birthday, which usually involves making it the weekend before. It’s a special occasion meal cause it takes a billion ingredients and all day to cook. Completely not suited for summer, but unless we move to the Northern Hemisphere, what is one to do. Oh, and there has to be cornbread as well.

Bread o’ corn. Rustic cast iron skillet. Wooha.

I’d do the recipe thing, but iunno, I’ve got to the point where I make things up as I go along. Just biff ingredients in the crockpot (if it overflows you overdid it) and cook it all day. Et voila, chili! I’m not pretending it’s any kind of authentic, but it tastes not suck.

Contains any combination of:

• Beef stock (2c, give or take)
• Tinned tomatoes – I use Mexican spiced, cause of the Mexican spice. 1 or 2 cans, depending on your crockpot.
• Couple of cans of kidney beans
• Oregano, chili, coriander and cumin, or cheat and use a seasoning mix
• Some strong brewed coffee (about 1/4 c)
• About a tbsp of cocoa powder
• A can of (preferably dark) beer, or omit if you all you have is Summer Ale and you don’t want to waste it
• Couple chopped lil onions or a normal sized one
• Couple tbsp tomato paste – add more if you want really tomato-y. I don’t.
• A few tbsp of sugar or to taste. Definitely needs -some- for balance though – don’t leave it out.
• Salt if you need it. You won’t if you use a seasoning mix.
• About 300g of mince, fried off & drained but still clumpy, cause clumps are your friend
• About 3-400g of stewing beef, or pork, or whatever, chopped into various sized bits, browned and drained. I used gravy beef (the intarweb tells me this is cow shin). Don’t use topside, it’s too dry. Lesson learned.
• Thicken it if you like towards the end of cooking. I usually use cornflour, but the moths have nested in it again, so it was butter and flour this time around. Damned moths.

You want this.

Maximum clumpage = win.

Serve with rice if you like it (I don’t, Sam does). Sam had his with Summer Ale. I had a traditional chili-accompanying drink of blackcurrant and ginger with soda water. >.> It comes out differently every time, but is essentially meaty beany not too tomato-y slightly hot chili. No idea how much it makes. Lots. But not like, a week’s worth. Not the way Sam eats it!

The ‘cake’ will be a slab o’ Sam’s favourite chocolate pudding (Sara Lee, with the melty chocolate sauce topping mmm mmm), since we only bought it yesterday and if I’d baked we would have forgotten to eat it. If I remember I’ll jam a candle in it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAMMULS. <3

He’s suddenly turned into Clingy McMaowerson, and has learned a new trick – above and beyond his usual “MAKE WAY! I AM TO SIT ON YOU NOW HUMAN!” dealy (which he’s doing right now).

Let’s call it ’several times during the night, 7kg of orange fuzz will stand on your boob, settle on your stomach and purr til you pay attention to it. If you move it off to the side, it will jump away, only to come back and stand on your boob again.’

He just HAS to sleep on my stomach and will whine and complain til I roll over and let him do it. If I don’t help him by maneuvering him into a comfortable position for me, he will default to boob standage. Which hurt like the dickens even before the damned things were so sensitive.

Sometimes I think he’s smarter than we give him credit for. Fizzgig, meanwhile, continues fizzing.

‘coz I loves you all so much. >.>

54%

Part One, stuff happens.

Actually, this is cheating a bit. I first noticed something was going on at 16.5, but I’m not making a 16.5 post. It’s a little too “Captain’s Log, Stardate…” for me. I figure it’ll probably maybe happen more often from here, and I wasn’t sure sure til late last night, so we’ll call it 17. Besides, who knows if anything else exciting will actually happen this week. Last week had stretchy pants! Hard to top.

So, 16.5!

I was sitting at work trying to stay awake (3:30pm, I’m sad, I know) and started feeling these little twitchy sensations in the general alien-incubating region. “Odd”, thought I, but also “probably gas”. I discounted muscle spasm, on account of not having any in that area, but it was kind of like that. Or… you know when you get that random eyelid flickering thing. That thing. Only in your bits.

And since I’ve already experienced a wide and exciting range of incubation-related gaseous issues, that conclusion was a little dodgy too: it felt nothing like that. Always in that region, moving round a bit, sporadic over about half an hour. Kind of like little taps or flicks, but from the inside. I dutifully made note of it and continued my zombied afternoon.

Fast forward to 16.6, 8:30pm and I was on the couch watching The Lives of Others (slow, but recommended if you like a) foreign films b) the German language c) a decent… sloooowly unfolding… story). The twitching started again and I thought to myself “RIGHT!”. I was going to catch it in the act. I put my hand over the general region and waited.

And the lil fecker kicked me right on my palm.

Apparently it’s quite early to feel anything from the outside, but I most certainly did. Again, I must refer back to the me not having any notable muscular component to my abdominal region. And it may have felt like a little tap, but I know there was evil intent behind it. The future commander of the head-mounted-laser-wearing cat army does not like to be interfered with when venting its aggression. Apparently.

I like how the majority of people on the intarweb seem to describe their baby’s first movement as ‘like a butterfly’, ‘like fluttering’ or ‘like bubbles’, where I am forced to describe it as ‘like a very small annoyed person is inside you and kicking you for the pure hell of it, only it’s too little and pathetic for it to hurt yet.’ Not bubbly at all.

So quite cool. Now we’re officially at 17 and it revisited me over breakfast (I assume it approves of Muffin Break’s apple & cinnamon muffins, which do not contain sultanas, and are easier to eat if not as good for us as the bran-laden carrot and banana variety. Or it may have been the coffee.) And appeared again over lunch, which I completely blame on the chocolate milk I was quaffing, having craved it all morning.

Oh, and Sam missed the big event last night, cause the useless so&so fell asleep on the couch before 8, then moved into the bedroom and recommenced sleepage. AND he overslept this morning and had to ‘borrow’ money from me for a taxi to get to work on time. Boy’s livin’ on the edge I tells ya.

Man, I need more photos in these things. Here’s something completely unrelated til I get my ass in gear:

Ooo woodgy woodgy woodgy. Fizz is more pointy in the real worlds.

I have a pretty resilient gut (I have worked it well over the years). I’ve had food poisoning like twice in my entire life, and only projectile vomited food on account of it being bad once (watermelon, nice and pink). You need to know these things. Really, you do.

Because the indigestion has started. My cast iron constitution usually prevents anything I eat from troubling me too much, but APPARENTLY a certain alien entity is throwing everything into disarray. It’s doing a one of these <- I can tell. I’m all… what the hell? Food is now my enemy? Que?!

I’ve decided I don’t like indigestion or heartburn. It makes me unhappy and burpy. Never mind the fact I need to eat often so I don’t feel like I’m starving because I can’t eat much at once (even less than before this saga began, if you can believe it). Now I’m forcing food down on top of acid reflux, and it’s stinky.

Sam says this is all a natural and beautiful thing, but his throat isn’t burning and he’s not making squeaky little urpy noises constantly. Natural and beautiful my eye.

Sorry for the abundance of bitch whine moan. I don’t really buy into the romantic notion of pregnancy, so I’m not going to gush over it. It’s biology. Lemurs do it. Gnus do it. Orangutans do it. It’s pretty cool, but barring celestial visitations, it’s probably not ascribable to a miracle. (Sorry spawn-to-be, you’ll get used to the cynicism). I am discovering that many bits of this process are not fun, and that’s fine, but I’m not going to pretend it’s all awesome. At least antacids exist.

Stretchy pants segue.

After putting it off for as long as humanly possible, I invested in stretchy pants – and I may never go back. I know I am usually something of a style icon, but these things are damned comfortable. You can like, sit down and breathe AT THE SAME TIME. When it got to the point where I was playing footsy with my neighbour at work while trying to find a comfortable position to sit in all day, I finally decided waistbands are the enemy and made me some new friends.

Buying stretchy pants was doubly fun cause Sam has the weekend off so was forced to come with me. One of the greatest joys in my life is making that boy suffer, and taking him maternity pants shopping rates quite highly on my scale of torments. He mostly behaved but refuses to look at baby clothes til we know the gender. Like it matters, boys can wear dresses too (Eddie dresses prettier than I do. Incidentally, watch this).

16 weeks may be a little on the early side, but why fight the inevitable. Apparently bulge largitude is dependent on your ab muscle tone, which I hear other people have. Since I’ve spent most of my life rather flobbly, everything’s making a bid for freedom already. Especially after I’ve eaten, since the bulk of it would appear not to be gremlin, but dinner and disturbing levels of padding and bloat. Someday soon someone will don a wetsuit and throw a bucket of water on me.

No, you mayn’t see photos. Allow me a tiny smidgen of denial while I can still muster it. Well, OK, here’s a small and not too illustrative shot from the wedding (Sam took it, I’m not telling where I’ve hidden his body). There will be NO leggings photos, tartan or otherwise.

Oh, and work knows now, which is nice.