Armed with a gift card in my hand and Nordstrom love in my heart, I headed to the nearest Nordstrom Rack, in San Leandro, California, to do a little shopping.

The first thing I noticed is that Nordstrom Rack does not exactly provide the full Nordstrom Experience. I’ve been to Nordstrom proper many a time, and have had luck finding gorgeous clothes and fancy party dresses. Nordstrom also has impeccable customer service, making it a joy to shop there. Not so with Nordstrom Rack, which is more like shopping at a really really nice Ross Dress for Less. But of course, the prices are a lot lower, so that’s the tradeoff.

Whereas the selection at Ross is hit-or-miss (and mostly miss), the selection at Nordstrom Rack is amazing. (And they are expanding their plus size selection and adding plus to more stores starting September 15.) They have everything from Coach handbags to Bliss products to (of course) designer clothes, with a nice selection of plus sizes (I saw sizes up to 3XL and 26/28). My favorite thing about the Rack is actually the shoe section, as they have a great selection of shoes that go up to Women’s 13. My time was a little limited since I had a B-A-B-Y with me, but I found a lot of stuff to try on in an effort to put together a fall outfit. I was looking for something to wear when I go back to an office job in October, with “comfortable” being my main criteria.

The first thing I found was a pair of black Not Your Daughter’s Jeans. I’ve never heard of this brand before, but they are super comfortable. I was in love with this pair of pants the minute I put it on (original price $138). I paired it with an oversized striped Blu Seven top ($48) that says “fall” to me somehow. I’m also super into stripes! I added a Calvin Klein cropped shrug ($58) as a nod to the crisp San Francisco weather, and a super long, jet crystal necklace ($78) from the Nordstrom Crystal Collection. The original total cost was $322; my total before tax was $125.88 (pants $37.97, top $24.97, shrug $19.97, necklace $30.97). I saved almost $200! That’s almost enough for one of the purses I was drooling over!

fall outfit , a photo by mo pie on Flickr.

I also had picked out a pair of gold shoes (original price $78; my price $38.97) in size 11 1/2 to finish off the look. However, there was a slight customer service snafu, and I didn’t end up getting them. I didn’t get bad customer service, exactly, it just wasn’t particularly good. I should say that the dressing room attendant was very nice about accommodating me and the stroller that I had, and a woman restocking merchandise was very friendly, but the checkout experience wasn’t great.

I had picked out a shoe and had neglected to go to the “shoe mate” window because A) the baby had started crying, and B) I had no idea how the shoe mate window worked. I asked if I could pay for the shoes and then go pick up the second one; this is apparently against policy (which I understand) but I was told I had to go to the back of the store to get the second shoe, wait in the line again (which had gotten really long) and then pay for the shoes separately. Since the baby was fussy and hungry by that point, I simply had to put the shoe back. I think if I were at regular Nordstrom, someone might have been willing to either run back and get the shoe for me, or let me skip the giant register line that I’d already waited in once. But again, it was my mistake, and their policy makes sense.

Overall, if you’re a fan of Nordstrom and a fan of saving money on expensive Nordstrom merchandise, it’s definitely worth poking around Nordstrom Rack.

Want to try Nordstrom Rack out for yourself? One lucky winner will receive a $100 Nordstrom Rack gift card to create their perfect fall look! Simply leave a comment telling me what fabulous fall piece is a must-have in your wardrobe. Make sure to leave your email address! Sweepstakes runs 9/15-10/31. Visit the Promotions & Prizes section. Official Rules.

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This giveaway is open to U.S. Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected. Good luck!

I hadn’t seen the show, so I went and checked out some clips to get a feel for what it is like. There seems to be a range of fat experience here: some women have lost weight, some are dieting, some are very accepting of themselves. Many of them are matter-of-fact about their bodies, and have seemingly learned to blame the clothes, not themselves, if something doesn’t work. And of course, some are less confident, or apprehensive about the whole experience. Some hate trying clothes on; one woman admitted she hadn’t worn a dress in 20 years. The people helping them seem to be pretty positive and encouraging. (Although after watching a bunch of these videos, I still haven’t seem them find one dress that isn’t strapless, what is up with that.) (I also suddenly feel like getting married all over again in a giant white poofy strapless dress. Maybe I’ve watched too many clips in a row.)

So, have you ever seen the show? Do you have any advice for Laurie? Check out the clips below and let us know in the comments what you think. And good luck, Laurie! Let us know when the episode airs!

Wilhelmina Anne was born at 11:43 pm on May 17th. (She was born via C-section, 50 hours after my water broke in the parking lot of a movie theater after seeing Bridesmaids.) (Which totally reminds me to write about Melissa McCarthy’s character in Bridesmaids.) She weighed 6 pounds, 14 ounces, and was 20.87 inches long. She is, of course, perfect! And that’s where I’ve been. Thanks for your patience!

I have friends who have had home births and hypnobirths and sexytime births, none of which is super appealing. Although I would like a doula (fingers crossed that the one we’re talking to right now has a space for us) I also want to be in a hospital near medical equipment because I think that’s where I will feel safest. Also because I am “elderly” (36) and because I enjoy modern medicine. (I am hoping it’s modern enough to involve pain medication [if I need it] without the use of needles. They’ve invented that, right? Where the medicine is just licked on by kittens?)

I am also told labor is very physical and hard work and all that stuff. I’m worried about physically handling labor and childbirth, particularly since I’m fat. And right now, I can barely even breathe because my uterus is crammed up against my lungs. So I’m not exactly feeling at my peak fitness at the moment, which does not boost my confidence any.

Oh, and I would like a room with a jacuzzi tub. (These do exist at the hospital, by the way! My husband thinks the idea of a tub is crazy, and likes to joke that he’ll get in and start ordering cocktails while I’m having the baby. This is not actually a real representation of what he will do. But I do love water and I will take any kind of tub they have got going on.)

Any or all of these ideas may change as our childbirth class progresses and we learn more about our options, but that’s what I’ve got so far. In the meantime, if you have a good birth experience story, please share in the comments! Help me with my homework.

Gestational Diabetes

I had my one-hour glucose test a few weeks ago. (I am… wait, I can’t be 31 weeks today… can I? Well, it was at week 26.) In the days leading up to the test, I was convinced that I was likely to fail it. (A lot of people fail the one-hour test even if they don’t end up with gestational diabetes.) Why was I so convinced? I guess I assumed that since I’m fat, I would probably end up having gestational diabetes. I am also very thirsty all the time and drink water constantly, which is a normal pregnancy symptom, but again, I jumped to the diabetes conclusion. And finally, I’ve been eating way more sugar than usual since I’ve been pregnant. I crave carbs of all kinds: fruits, breads, chocolate, donuts, pop tarts.

[As an aside, I used to envision that I would be a beatific model of healthy eating when I was pregnant. But I'm here to tell you, physically speaking, pregnancy sucks, and you do what you have to do to get through it. I spent a lot of time so nauseous that only a specific, limited number of foods appealed to me at all. A lot of my healthy staples (notably turkey sandwiches and tuna fish) are on the Do Not Eat or Eat More Rarely list. And most importantly, it's a tossup as to what I can stomach at any given moment. It's actually been very liberating, because if someone sees me eating a donut or whatever, whereas I might have gotten slightly defensive about it in the past, these days it's like eff you, I'm pregnant, I can do what I want. It's been the key to helping me really let go of food guilt. I haven't felt guilty about food for months.]

Anyway, I’m sure you can see where this is going: I passed the one-hour glucose test, no problem. And then I felt really dumb for all my dumb assumptions. Of course, if I had developed gestational diabetes, would I have blamed genetics, or blamed myself? Clearly, I should have read this first. The bottom line is that there is an increased risk for gestational diabetes in obese mothers, but the overall risk is still fairly low.

Weight Loss In Pregnancy

The next pregnancy hurdle was my last OB appointment, where I discovered I’d lost 10 pounds between appointments. In fact, so far at seven+ months of pregnancy, I’m down 15 pounds from my pre-pregnancy weight. My doctor did some measurements and was very reassuring, but sent me for an ultrasound just to double check. At the ultrasound, we discovered that the baby is measuring right on schedule and is in fact in the 50th percentile for weight. Exactly, perfectly average and normal and lovely. So as long as I keep taking my prenatal vitamin and eating a varied diet (yes, I swear there are veggies and protein in there) things seem to be on the right track. Yay and yay!

Baby Bump Question

Even though I’m 31 (???!?) weeks pregnant, I don’t have an obvious baby bump. I mean I do have a bigger stomach and am waddling around, but the average person on the street is unlikely to assume that I’m pregnant, and certainly nobody has asked about or commented on it. I had to announce my pregnancy to my classes at the beginning of the semester, since I didn’t want them to awkwardly wonder all semester if I was pregnant. Many of my thinner friends have obvious little baby bumps; I just have a general westward expansion.

This has actually saved me from one thing, which is people touching my stomach. I wasn’t big on people touching my stomach before I got pregnant, and I’m certainly no more enthusiastic about it now. But this weekend I’m going to a couple of baby showers with people who know I’m pregnant and may want to touch my stomach. I really don’t want them to; in fact, I was up last night worrying about handsy relatives or my over-enthusiastic parents, and how to set appropriate boundaries with crazy Dutch people.

I’m guessing this isn’t just a fat person thing, but curious to know what you guys think: did you mind people touching your belly while you were pregnant? And if you did, how did you handle it?

First question: do I need and will I use a rocking chair or glider? If so, is there one that you recommend as being sturdy and comfortable? Or should I just go to the… rocking chair store…? Yeah, I have no idea.

Second question: baby carriers and slings. My friend Jen suggested going to Babies R’ Us or what have you and trying on various types, which I think is a good idea; the other thing I know is that different babies like different carriers, and we most likely won’t know what Wigburg likes until Wigburg is here to express her preference. But is there a particular style of carrier that works or doesn’t work for a larger body?

And final question: diaper bags. I tend to like a messenger bag with a long strap, but occasionally when I order messenger bags, the straps aren’t long enough. anyone have one you like that has a nice long strap?

If there’s anything else that you’ve found to be a baby essential, fat-related or not, let me know! It’s a little overwhelming to stare at 20 different subcategories of baby stuff and figure out where to begin. Thanks in advance for your input!

And here’s the thing: I got really really really really really really sick. I wish I could convey to you how incapacitated I was. I was so sick that I could barely function. Just to get to work and home again was all I could do, for many weeks. Looking at a computer screen made me nauseous, so I didn’t reply to emails (my inbox is still stuffed) or moderate comments or post to the blog. Other things that made me throw up included eating, not eating, thinking about eating, moving around, looking at things, and talking (which made lecturing fun, let me tell you). At one point I was driving to campus and in the middle of the faculty parking lot I had to slam on the brakes, open the door, and puke on the concrete. Then I had to go brush my teeth and give a lecture. That was a fun day.

I got so sick, in fact, that I’m actually still a little sick. (It’s supposed to go away at 16 weeks. This in my case was a terrible lie.) It’s just that when I got to the point where I couldn’t leave my bed and was in fact doing nothing but curling up in the fetal position while occasionally projectile vomiting, I finally got some Zofran, an anti-emetic that I probably should have asked for weeks before I did. But in the meantime I was busy trying every remedy under the sun, from Vitamin B6 and Unisom to special Sri Lankan ginger cookies procured by a friend. And I was busy puking! Let’s not forget the puking.

In the meantime, and in addition, we bought a house! (I know. Lots of news from these here parts.) It’s a fixer-upper, and we’ve been working on fixing it up. That’s also been taking a lot of time. Add in teaching and traveling for the holidays, and there you have it. Where I’ve been.

The thing is, I have a lot of stuff I want to post about. We never talked about important things like Huge being cancelled (nooooooo!!!) (still sad) or the Harry Potter Theme Park adding fat-people seats to their ride just in time for me not to be able to ride roller coasters. Plus, now there’s all this fat and pregnant stuff to talk about, such as the fact that I still don’t really look pregnant and what that means (in fact, so far I’ve lost 15 pounds, even though none of my pants fit), or the fact that Wigburg is a girl, and that I need advice from all of you about how to help her grow up feminist and confident and awesome. And also, the fact that none of my bras fit, because apparently no matter how big your boobs are, they can still get bigger. Scientific fact.

I’m not going to commit to posting every day quite yet, but I will commit to at least one post per week, and see how that goes. I will also try not to turn into a mommyblog. But you know. There might be more mommyblog-esque content here and there. Once again: it’s Wigburg’s fault.

Thanks to the snowball effect, I also haven’t been reading or answering my email as diligently as usual. If you’ve sent me something that requires a response, and it’s not too late for that response, it would be great if you would re-send it! It may take me a while to dig through my email and catch up, and I’d hate to miss anything urgent.

I also went through and screened something like 200 backlogged comments a couple of days ago. If you had a comment held in moderation, it should be up now. And if I deleted your comment by mistake, or approved something trolly or spammy, please let me know! I did speed through them pretty quickly. You can find the newest comments on the comments RSS feed.

I am also faced with the daunting task of catching up on everything I missed in the world of Fat News. I haven’t been reading the Fatosphere or anything like that, so if there is a Big Huge Topic that needs to be discussed, please assume I don’t know anything about it and shoot me a Tweet, an email, or a comment letting me know!

I was actually going to segue this into a real post, but this got longer than I thought it would. (That’s what she said.) I missed you, my blog friends! Look for more posts soon.

1. From Feed Me: Fat women are paid less than men in the workplace. So obviously, we should lose weight. Wait, what?

Fat women are paid less than women who aren’t fat; fat men, on average, earn comparable salaries to men who aren’t fat. So women are penalized by employers for being fat… All the young women who don’t identify as feminists because they don’t have to fly that flag anymore should take note of studies like this one. Gender discrimination is alive and well in 21st-century America.

But that’s not where the writer of this story went. No, her conclusion was quite different. She wrote, “It’s bad news, but maybe it will help fund better prevention strategies and new treatment methods for this growing scourge.”

Excuse me? Did I hear you right? The answer to discrimination is getting rid of the quality that’s being discriminated against?

2. From Already Pretty: the problem with “she shouldn’t wear that.”

[S]tylistic shoulds and shouldn’ts reinforce the idea that there are absolute rights and wrongs in clothing choices, tastes, and body shapes. Saying a woman “shouldn’t” wear something because of her figure supports the idea that there is one way to look good. And there isn’t. In fact, women who push social comfort levels with their stylistic choices may gradually force the observing public to accept that. Although some may prefer that women with cellulite conceal it, women with bony clavicles mask them, and women with zits apply cover-up, each woman is entitled to make her own choices.

3. The theme of the comp class I’m teaching this semester is feminism (actually, I told them it was unofficially called “F the Patriarchy”—it’s led to some terrific debate and discussion) and I shared this tidbit from Shakesville with them the other day. A headline reads “Man badly burned when girlfriend’s house set on fire” when, in actuality, he was her ex-boyfriend and stalker. And oh yeah, he set the fire.

[A]n amazing example of how violence against women is minimized in news reporting… the violent stalker is badly burned. His intended victims, who merely were doused with gasoline and terrorized, are OK.

4. From Womanist Musings: Gabourey Sidibe as “Mammy.”

There can be no denial that there are some people who will look at Gabourey and see mammy smiling back at them both consciously and unconsciously, yet that is not a function of her, but a function of Whiteness. When we use fat hatred to claim that her success is obscuring the talents of other Black women, we are only playing into the divisive strategy that Whiteness has long used to control people of colour. Even the Black women that some believe are deserving of greater accolades, are still perceived by Whiteness as fitting into either the jezebel or sapphire trope, and therefore; the way to divest ourselves of these horrible caricatures, is not to further demean another Black woman, but to defeat the idea that any of these labels are representative of Black womanhood. The entity that needs to disappear is mammy and not Gabourey.

5. Terrific satirical essay from Lesley about the importance of the “suffering ween.”

The sight of fat women is a heavy cross said men must bear every moment they step out into the public spaces where people congregate, be they city streets or shopping malls or public transportation or the dentist’s office. Their eyes burning as though filled with a raging fire, their inability to control their speech — the inescapable, uncontrollable need to instruct the offending woman on the pain she is selfishly causing them — this is hardly their fault! They must say something, in the hope that their words will drive the fat woman back into the shadows and thereby cause the unthinkable torture being imposed upon their enfeebled weens to finally relent. They cannot be responsible for the things they say and do while in such agony. We cannot rightly blame them when it is men, and the relative rigidity of their supremely important peckers, who are being attacked here, attacked by fat women who dare to allow themselves to be seen.

Pretty awesome collection of links, am I right? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Unless she is not confident, because those people are hideous even if they are supermodels! Or so I have been told by very many well-meaning people. (Sorry, that was a bit derailish. Venting from the time I tried to get someone to rephrase “confidence makes you 1000x more beautiful” to “confidence helps people see your beauty” so that I wouldn’t have to conclude that I am hopelessly ugly, and she was all, “NO! Confidence is vital to beauty!” So remember, kids, the thing to tell people who are insecure about their looks is that their insecurity makes them disgusting.)

I’ve advocated confidence myself, plenty of times. (Just check out the “related posts” links for evidence.) It feels like in my own life, confidence has been an asset to me. But this is such an interesting angle from which to look at the idea of confidence. What if you’re not confident? Does that make you a failure? Are we oppressing people by suggesting that they “should” become more confident?

Also, saying that “every woman is beautiful” made me think of Lesley’s recent piece on appearance-based privilege, wherein she suggests that perhaps we don’t need to feel beautiful or even believe we’re beautiful to have fulfilling lives:

[F]or me, there was tremendous freedom in surrendering the idea that subjectively feeling — if not objectively being — beautiful was a requirement of a happy and fulfilling life. This is not to suggest that people shouldn’t feel good about themselves, or even “pretty”, as the occasion warrants — my point is that this feeling should not be the necessity and the compulsion that it is, and that when it occurs, it should neither be underscored nor negated by the response of the majority, according to what masculine doctrine finds most valuable. Wanting to feel pretty, to appreciate and value oneself as a beautiful person, is a fine notion. Confronting, deconstructing, and redefining what counts as beauty is a valiant effort. But we should also be vigilant: is it personal gratification and self-love we’re after, or the advantages that being beautiful to others would afford us?

So, what do you guys think about confidence? Is it okay if we don’t have it?