Sea Monkey

Dear friends, family, and all finned frolickers of the seas,

C & Me are expecting a sea monkey.  

This was not in the plans.  Actually the plan was to have a big fat sailing adventure before having a family.  Ha!  Plaaaans.  Amiright?  So our adventure accidentally got way more adventure-y.  

Q:  What are we going to do?

A:  We have no idea.

Q:  When is the monkey due?

A:  Mid-August.

We found out in Northwest Washington while visiting my family for the holidays.  My period is about as reliable as a rope made from saltwater taffy.  Call us oblivious, but we were, well…oblivious.  We knew there was a chance, but that chance was statistically slimmer than a dolphin humping our dinghy.  I thought I merely had the world’s worst bout of indigestion, until Santa brought me nausea on Christmas weekend (apparently I was very naughty last year).  

As we gazed out over icy Bellingham Bay the morning after Christmas Day, while the stick of plastic I’d just peed on in the public bathroom determined our fate, dread silently descended upon our vision of the future: Selling Drakka, moving into my parents’ basement, C getting a job milking mechanical cows, me numbly nursing around the clock in front of Gilmore Girls reruns in the never-ending Pacific Northwesterly gloom.  We didn’t say anything for a while.  We merely shivered and strolled through Boulevard Park.  

The slime ebbed and we started to formulate a different vision.  One where our lives still mirrored our dreams.  We believe in adventure.  We believe in not-too-many-plans.  We believe in being closely entwined with nature.  We believe in being kind and open-hearted global citizens.  What kind of parents would we be if we denied our own values?  How can the monkey respect us if we don’t respect ourselves?

Q:  Are we scared?

A:  O God yes.

We also believe in not-being-totally-broke, which makes this whole prospect challenging. Buying our sea dragon Drakka cost $7,000 dollars.  That's half the cost of my friend's recent hospital birth.  We saved money to live off of this year, but we anticipated more of a pirate hobo lifestyle:  90% nudity, fishing, drinking collected rainwater, and then launching into a luxurious lifestyle of philanthropy and environmental saviour-ism when this blog (obviously) gets bought for a guhzillion buckers to be turned into a blockbuster staring Ryan Goosling and Natalie Sportman.

Anyway, we returned to Drakka in January and drifted through the first trimester, me dozing off like a drunken sailor while C pretty much did everything.  Our pace has been sea-cucumberly, due to my gluttonous sleeping, which is also why we’ve stayed on the Intracoastal Waterway so far.  Overall this fleshy vessel I inhabit has been a trooper!  Among friends I am infamous for constipation and tummy troubles (anyone want to chat about parasites?  O friends, email me!), yet pregnancy has bestowed a heretofore unknown health upon my rosy innards!  Seasickness is far worse than my morning sickness.  Morning sickness is a warm, yeasty, steady churning of peptobismally fermentation.  Seasickness is an oily, putrid wave that rises and falls like a sea of sour brown avocado sludge.  Yummers.

So here we are in Charleston, SC, bobbing about on our spritely boat with a fifteen-week-old mini monkey in my burgeoning belly, with no idea where to be by mid-August.

Q:  Are we excited?

A:  Flying fish have nothing on our soaring hearts right now!

C is gonna be the best Daddy-O on the planet.  He's got a kid-tuned antenna, a spunk, a goofball curiosity that kids are drawn to like mosquitos to my ankles.  He's in the zone.  His hands on are round-the-clock belly-rubbing shifts.  He's in awe of my pendulously plump miraculous melon boobs.  Heck, so am I.  They're galactic.  We're in a perpetual state of ponderous marvel, like stoned starfish that just got sucked into the Gulf Stream.   

Here are some possible outcomes:

1. Live like savages in the Bahamas on conch & coconut, give birth in a saltwater lagoon, and name the baby after the hurricane which will certainly be churning overhead.
2. Never leave Charleston.  Me, I’ll paint names on the backs of big yachts while C grows heirloom rice varietals, and we name the baby Arabellum Cobblestone Genteely-Pants.
3. Hide out in the Florida Keys.  C will serve warm beers out of a tiki shack while I give prison-style tattoos of busty mermaids in the back, and we’ll name the baby Margaritaville.
4. Sell Drakka and move to Washington state.  Live in my parents’ basement while C grows marijuana and I wallow in seasonal depression, and name the baby Eagle Raincloud.
5. Have Drakka trucked over to California where C can manage one of a zillion hippie farms.  I’ll paint vineyards all day and sell them to retirees in RV's, and we’ll name the baby Redwood Sunshine.
6. Sail back to New York City over my dead body where C will not only be forced to dispose of my corpse mafia-style by throwing it off the Brooklyn Bridge, but will also be subjected to a rent-ravaged and lonely life of single fatherhood.   Name the baby Hole In My Heart.
7. Ignore all logic and consequence, continue heading south, end up giving birth somewhere in the middle of the Panama Canal, and name the baby Oops (or Epa, which is Spanish for oops).
8. Open to suggestions.  Anyone looking for two charming vagabonds to caretake their coastal farm somewhere in the world? 

P.S.  Here is an actual photo of us.  We are real people.