Liver check!

I realized we hadn't posted here that Stephanie is in fact in possession of a very healthy liver. The itching is not the sign of a very serious disease, but rather, of the fact that she is getting a lot of stretch marks. This is just as we expected, so much that we totally forgot to post about the results from the bloodwork coming back, which happened very swiftly.

We threw the baby shower for our friends this weekend. Unfortunately, while we got lots of pictures of the cake, there are no pictures of the fetal cookies. And, the cookie cutter was given to our friends as a gift so we cannot whip up any more. Alas.

But, here's an internet picture for you:

Only you have to imagine them in gingerbread as well as sugar cookie for a more ethnically diverse tableau... and also, I didn't scorch my cookies so the legs weren't burnt like the above. Oh, and we opted against the eyes in the theory that this only made the overall effect more creepy than a plain silouette.

The shower was a big success, I think! People were disturbed and amused in alternation by the fetus cookies, but they ended up being consumed in near totality, so clearly, not a big obstacle. The cake also went very well - I spent a lot of time making Stephanie listen to my endless moaning about how it was hard for me to meet the white-chocolate-raspberry cake request because I find white chocolate really hard to work with (it is so sweet that in a baking context everything you add it to just becomes insanely super-sweet). (It should be noted that this is not really a very big dilemma to be bitching about, especially to someone who is 36.5 weeks pregnant and less than a week away from thesis defense. Sorry, cupcake!)

The cake we ended up making was the one on the back of the cake flour box. It ended up looking even nicer than the picture, because I made a 1.5x recipe and made it in two tiers. It had raspberry jam torted in the cut-apart cake layers which always looks extra fancy even though it's not very hard when you have the right equipment. The icing called for raspberry syrup, which I'm pretty sure refers to some premade concoction in the pancake aisle, but we cooked down raspberries, strained them, and added them to the icing. This made the whole thing very pink, far more so than the picture accompanying the recipe, but the raspberry puree was very tart so it ended up cutting the sweetness of the buttercream. That in turn made the white chocolate more palatable (we adhered shavings to the icing in between the layers and to the top of the cake).

Anyway, I always enjoy the opportunity to construct enormous multiple-tiered cakes, which I don't often get because I don't actually enjoy eating cake very much. (Which isn't to say I don't love dessert, just much more of a pie or mousse person.) Rather immodestly, I anticipate being genius at birthday cakes for our kids... who will probably respond to this by wanting ice cream cakes from the store instead. :) But I do hope that we eventually have a girl who wants a stereotypical princessy party or several, so I can do those big gaudy ballgown cakes where you impale a Barbie to the waist in a dome-shaped cake and then stick all of the tackiest most brightly colored candy you can find to the skirt and the bustier of icing.

The other thing that was really fun at the baby shower was that the kids really loved the craft table (to make pendants for a mobile). None of the grownups really ended up getting into it at all, instead hanging out and talking and eating, but man, toddlers love foamy and schoolglue and sequins. I love toddlers AND foamy/schoolglue/sequins, so the combo something that I don't easily tire of. Crafting with our child is probably the thing I'm most looking forward to about the post-baby stage (besides getting to share in the feeding of our child). I remember that the art and craft projects were always my absolute favorite part of school when I was little. I have to assemble the mobile still, but first, I've got to do the last of the paper-grading and finish up the quarter officially so summer can begin!

Oh, and the other regard in which this all relates to the title of Liver Check is that our baby bottles got their inaugural use this weekend loaned out for a baby shower game, "Who Sucks the Most". The beverage used was beer, so that's a somewhat unconventional first beverage for our bottles to have held, but it doesn't matter at all to us since glass is easily cleaned. Oddly enough, our upcoming baby shower will be the first baby shower that we attend that will not have alcohol... the last one we went to had a keg, not kidding! I think what this means is that our friends are much cooler than us. (We hadn't even seen a keg before coming to grad school, seriously.)

Otherwise, status updates...

Baby: still internal! Still rearranging from side-to-side, but obligingly staying head down!

Dissertation: about to be printed out!

Thesis talk: has been practiced in front of and critiqued by audience today!

SIFF movies: continue to be excellent! Patrik Age 1.5 ended up being truly exceptional, because it featured the winning combination of heartwarming expectant-parents, relationship drama, a punky rebellious teen, ongoing jokes about running, and a soundtrack with lots of CLASSIC COUNTRY MUSIC. (By that I do mean American country music, though the film is Swedish!) I cried at about three different instances throughout the movie, and also laughed a lot. It does in fact have a very happy ending and was just adorably sweet without being too much. Highly recommended for anyone even remotely interested in the gay parent genre, which is presumably most people reading this blog.

I also really enjoyed The Baby Formula, a movie about lesbians getting each other pregnant thanks to stem cell research. It's in a faux-documentary style and it really worked well, alternating enough humor with the serious bits to keep the plot moving along at a brisk pace. I would very much recommend it, though perhaps less broadly than Patrik.

Also, tonight I watched 500 Days of Summer, which was a non-parenting, non-gay movie that I thought was really truly excellent. It's not really quite a romantic comedy, but it feels like one, and is the best example of a relationship movie that I've seen in a while. It comes out in theaters July 16th, the announcement of which caused my brain to get stuck in a gleeful loop of "Oh my god, we are seriously going to have a baby before then! BABY! Eeeeee!"

Lastly, thanks everyone for the lovely comments on my last post. I will keep you posted on how things go in Ovarian Cyst-Land, but won't have more news for a while.