I am officially a mommy. Madeline Terra Gasio was born on Friday, August 22, 2008 at 3:35pm PST. Details and photos galore to come soon, but for now, here’s some visual stimulation:

Madeline Terra Gasio, Age: 1.5 Days

It’s commonly believed that pregnant women tend to crave extraordinary combinations of food, such as pickles with ice cream or pizza topped with cherries. In the past 39-ish weeks that I’ve been pregnant, no strange desires of such food pairings ever hit me.

For the most part, I only craved beverages of the fruity variety. In particular was Hi-C fruit punch, loaded with 100 percent Vitamin C (*cue that infamous Graduation song*) and probably 110 percent sugar. My baby will probably have a sweet tooth, just like me.

That said, there’s no need for explanation about my huge craving for chocolate. My intake of chocolate got rather ridiculous, feeling the need to have at least one piece of chocolate on a daily basis, otherwise life as I knew it lost all purpose. Dramatic, yes. Thankfully my intake of chocolate over the past couple weeks has dwindled to eating a piece every other day.

I suppose the only odd combination of foods that I craved was bagels with cream cheese and hot dogs. Or tortillas with cream cheese and hot dogs. But that’s actually a combination I craved even before I became pregnant, and I never considered it a strange craving.

I go through various bouts of obsessions from collecting certain objects to listening to one particular song to eating a type of food. Here are a few recent obsessions of mine:

• scrabulous
  I have always had a love for word games, scrabble in particular and the online version scrabulous, is quite possibly what keeps me up at night sometimes (read: every other night). It has gotten to the point where I have even replaced all instances of ‘glamorous’ with ’scrabulous’ in Fergie’s song Glamorous. In all honesty, scrabulous rolls of the tongue a little bit better. If you’re an avid scrabulousist/scrabulousian/scrabulousite, feel free to find me in the Speedy Circuit or Sowpods Junction room. I go by the alias ‘dtothev’.
• … with no handlebars
  I am not a fan of the song by Flobots, but for some reason I have taken to tacking on the phrase ” … with no handlebars” at the end of nearly anything the BF says. It got old and decrepit even before I began this obsession.
• bokeh (read wikipedia’s defintion)
  Ever since acquiring a 50mm f/1.8 lens in May of this year, ninety percent of my photographs have a noticeable smattering of bokeh in them.