Meet The Sprout

It's an alien!
Originally uploaded by Mistress B

It's finally official - Hairy Mountain Folk are brewing up a tiny pair of hairy mountain feet! After having our first ultrasound this Tuesday, we got our first glimpse of The Sprout, who kindly gave us a little wriggle on the screen just so we knew it was alive and kicking.
It's all rather exciting/surreal/freaky/wonderful ... I'm sure like all new parents, we're not going to know what's hit us, but for the moment we're enjoying blissful ignorance!
Phil has very nobly suffered through two months of me whingeing on a daily basis about how sick I feel and how I simply MUST have Indian food today and 'don't you dare come near me with those porcini mushrooms'. Yep, all-day hangover is about the kindest description I can come up with. Even more upsetting is I have gone off porridge and oranges - my previous desert-island-foods.
Haven't gone off chocolate though ... heh heh heh.
As a woman who likes to keep herself looking presentable (and that covers spending all day in a dressing gown and ugg boots), I was relieved to discover that 'maternity wear' does not mean 'muu-muu', and have actually managed to deck myself out in some decent stretch-waisted outfits. In fact, they're so comfortable I could quite happily see myself spending the rest of my life wearing stretch-waisted outfits.

Spring cleaning

A combination of warm weather, sunshine and a fervent desire to put off doing any serious work has led to The Spring Clean - long overdue and both fascinating and painful.
I have discovered old personal diaries from school days, whose contents have led me to believe I was psychotic for a large part of my teenage years.
I have discovered a collection of poems I wrote when I was an earnest, nerdy primary school student (and what's changed except age, I wonder?).
I also thoroughly enjoyed re-reading my impressive collection of job rejection letters, which reads like a Who's Who of science, medicine and publishing: The Age, the ABC (twice), New Scientist (twice), The Lancet, Australian Geographic, the CRC for Genes and Human Diseases, Current Medical Literature, Nature (twice), the World Health Organisation and Australian Doctor (for a job I subsequently got four years later).
It's the jobs Bianca gets rejected from that make Bianca the best (apologies to John West for mangling their tag line).