I registered this domain name when I was pregnant to document my journey through pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. What I can tell you so far about that journey is perhaps best summed up by pointing out that my baby is 20 weeks old today and I'm just now managing to write my first entry.
When I was pregnant, we called our gender neutral little fetal unit Seamonkey, hence the blog title. Seamonkey became very mildly Facebook famous and people sometimes ask if we ever call the baby Seamonkey now. Never. Not even once. From the moment the actual baby was born, Seamonkey ceased to exist. In retrospect, I think I mourned Seamonkey just a little bit. When you have a potential baby, particularly a potential baby of unknown gender, you spend a lot of months imagining all sorts of different babies you might have. Seamonkey was all of those babies at once. But when you have an actual baby, you just get the one. All of the little boys I imagined, or the little blond babies, or really fat babies, or babies who know how to ohmygodtakeanapforfuckssake, and so forth, were all Seamonkey. And they all ceased to exist the moment the one, singular real baby I actually had emerged fully from my vagina (yes, this is going to be that kind of blog).
Don't get me wrong, I don't regret that I had a dark-haired, long-and-lean baby girl who can't nap for shit (okay, maybe that last part). I wouldn't trade her for any of the other Seamonkey babies-that-weren't for anything. It was just a little bittersweet to say goodbye.
I'm going to keep the name, though, because there's something wacky about it that I think fits my experiences thus far. Fun and bizarre and sweet and a little hallucinogenic all at once. I don't know how frequently I'll manage to post here what with only occasionally having time to write even a short entry and being a person who tends toward the verbose, but I'm going to give it a shot. I'm not going to try to go back to my pregnancy and create a neat and tidy linear narrative here, but I'm sure that my experiences from pregnancy, birth, and early infancy will come up organically over time. Suffice it to say for the time being that I made a little person, and she is the sweetest, most beautiful little rage-inducing asshole and never-ending source of delighted awe that I've ever met, and that what I absolutely did get right about this blog title for the long run is "Adventure."
