a-ha moment

Went in to see the psychic chiropractor today after suffering two days of headaches in this unholy heat. (I live in the Bay Area because I don’t like heat. I like brisk cold sunny days that hover around 60 degrees. I’ll take a blue sky over fog, but I’ll take fog over 80-degree weather any day of my life. Unless… unless I’m in that 80-degree or even 90-degree weather while lying by a pool next to a turquoise ocean and a nice young man is bringing me frosty smoothies with pineapple wedges on the rims every hour or so.)

She pronounced the headaches as caused by a sinus infection, rather than dehydration as I’d feared. Voice in head says: I never… ever… drink… enough… water…! But apparently, I do. So now I have to let that self-flagellation narrative go. Buh-bye.

She checks over the rest of my body and pronounces that I’m in good shape. That my exercise regime is working for me. All systems are GO. And as she’s working on me, she’s chatting about her daughter who has a one-year old and is pregnant with twins and is obsessing on how three high-chairs won’t fit in her kitchen, and suddenly I burst into a kind of laughing and crying fit.

What?

As I may have previously discussed, my chiropractor works holistically, meaning that the things that bother me mentally or emotionally contribute just as much to health problems as the things that bother me physically, like sinus infections. So when I have an a-ha moment during treatment, I tell her, and she knows what to do with that; i.e.: she does whatever she does (if I knew, I’d start seeing my own patients) and I get to feel better.

The A-ha Moment: I’ve been troubled for weeks now as to how we’re going to fit this baby in our house. I mean, clearly, it will go SOMEWHERE. But where? We have 1400 square feet to work with (people in Russia live three-generations to a one-room apartment — I know this, I’ve stayed with them in those apartments). This should not be a problem.

But right now, we sleep in one bedroom, my office is in the other bedroom, Scott’s office is in the sunroom off the kitchen, and that’s it. What’s left is dining room, living room, laundry room, and bath. Clearly one of us needs to give up an office for the wee-one (we both do work at home, though I am exclusively so, whereas he sometimes gets to go to a “real job”).

And before you ask… our basement is a mud swamp in the winter, so no dice there. Garage similarly damp and fecund. Oh — and we can’t share an office. He likes clutter, I like clean. We both need privacy when we work, and he prefers to have music or talk radio going while I need quiet.

Scott and I have had several conversations about different configurations. He takes my office, I move to the living room, baby gets the sunroom, or he takes the dining room, dining table moves to living room (we might as well, we NEVER eat at the dining table anyway, it’s mostly a repository for mail, as we dine á-la-TV), and again, baby takes sunroom. But, so far, none of these ideas have seemed satisfactory.

It’s this crazy puzzle that we can’t quite solve, as nothing FEELS right to me. And somehow the whole thing is really about how my life is going to change so much in a few months that I can’t even begin to fathom it, and I cry.

So M. considers the question, comes up with this solution: Scott in the dining room, dining table in the living room, baby in my office, and I move to the sunroom. Heck, this makes the most sense. My office IS a bedroom after all. It has a DOOR, for goodness sakes. (Scott had been worried that the big sliding door to the garden in the sunroom would be pretty ominous to a child at night.)

She checks it with the arm: Yes.

That’s it. I feel relieved. Can’t stop laughing. Houston, we have a plan.

Now if we can just get some friends with strong backs to come over and help move furniture…