Some Background

I know that no one is reading this at the moment (which makes writing it really liberating, if slightly sad), but on the off chance that someday someone does in fact read it I suppose I should give a little background on myself.

I'm married. My husband's name is Steven and he says he has the patience of a saint. This is why our marriage works. Which is to say, I'm not the easiest person. He's not so easy either, but in an entirely different way. I am the list maker, the planner, the financial analyst, the organizer. He is the one who says, everything is going to be okay. If we were the federal government I would be the IRS and the Department of Commerce. Steven would be Department of Homeland Security, the EPA (because he is in charge of taking out the garbage) and something warm and fuzzy like the Department of Wildlife and Conservation. Now that we're going to have a child clearly someone will also need to be the FBI and the Supreme Court. I wonder who that will be.

We got married on Labor Day weekend 2003. I wrote a book about the totally horrific experience of planning a wedding, and why the wedding industry is manipulative and evil and convinces women who could care less about weddings and tulle that they must coordinate their lipstick with their cocktails.

We live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which is where you are required by the State of New York to live once you get pregnant. We used to live in a slightlier edgier, less child-friendly neighborhood about 20 minutes away. I've lived in Brooklyn for almost 4 years now and although I love our nice big grownup apartment and the fact that we're half a block from the park, I still really miss living in Manhattan.

Sometimes I tell Steven he should go be a hedge fund manager for a year - just a year - so we can buy a nice big apartment by Central Park. He's getting a PhD in Russian Literature; he's not going to become a hedge fund manager. One day, after I'd said to him a bunch of times, "you'd only have to do it for a year," he finally said to me, "why don't you go be a hedge fund manager?"

"Because who wants to manage a hedge fund?" I laughed. I'd been waiting for him to ask me that.

I know that neither one of us is going to manage a hedge fund, but that's okay. We're still pretty happy.

Back in January we decided it was time to start trying to get me pregnant. Neither one of us was entirely sure that we were ready to have a baby, but I was about to turn 33 and I thought that it would probably take me forever to get pregnant, and so it would be better to find out sooner rather than later that I was the cold, barren woman I'd always known myself to be. Nine months later... and here I am, hugely inflated with child.

Which brings us more or less up to date.