The Belly That Ate New York

I've long maintained that I wasn't going to be ready to actually have the baby until my belly reached the ridiculous stage. Sadly, I was unaware that one could progress from ridiculous to sublimely absurd, which is about where I am now. What I don't understand is why I have to be pregnant in my ass as well.

Steven and I are not large people, and yet I seem to be about to give birth to a linebacker. Which leads to all sorts of speculation about what kind of other genetic anomalies my future child could be sporting.

This kid is so big that when he moves around now my entire belly along with all of my internal organs shake, at which point I can't help but wonder what the hell he's still doing in utero. Clearly he is big enough to be on the outside so why doesn't he just get a move on already?

And even though I have had nine months to get used to the idea that in the near future there will be a third person living in this narrow Brooklyn apartment, it still seems utterly inconceivable. How can there possibly be a person where now there is air and an empty crib? And the permanence of it is terrifying - there is no sending the kid back once he gets here.

My hormones, and therefore my emotions, have been stampeding all over the map during the past few weeks, as I vacillate between excitement, terror and sheer exhaustion. Which means that quite frequently I will burst into tears or yell at Steven for something that only hours later seems completely absurd. A sampling of things I have gone completely batshit about in recent days:

• The fact that Steven insists on removing the hair trapping drain thingy from the shower whenever he takes a shower.
• The two large dust bunnies that sat in the hallway for a week until I accused Steven of not helping out at all and leaving all the cleaning up to me, and doesn't he understand that I am physically incapable at this point of bending over and picking things up from the floor? And what kind of dirty, disgusting dust-collecting household are we bringing this baby into anyway?
• When he said he wasn't interested in reading the opening chapters of What To Expect The First Year until after the baby came home I sobbed hysterically that he was clearly planning on having me doing all the childcare and leaving everything up to me and I can't do it all, and you tell me what you're supposed to do when the baby cries and how you know when to change his diaper and by the way did you NOT see the dust bunnies in the hall?
• And finally, my tearful breakdown over the fact that I was having a tearful breakdown over dust bunnies and therefore had clearly lost my mind.

Oh, I'm a joy alright.

But the thing about Steven is that when I begin to act like our marriage is over because of the dust bunnies, he doesn't say back to me, no, our marriage is over because you are a crazy lunatic. He says, I'll pick up the dust bunnies and I don't need to read What To Expect The First Year because I actually paid attention and took notes in our Newborn Care class and if it's really that important I won't move the shower drain hair trapping thingy.

And then he follows through. He cleans the hallway and makes me dinner and cleans the kitchen and fluffs the living room pillows. When I apologize a few hours or days or sometimes even weeks later he just laughs as though he's been patiently waiting for me to return to the land of normal and now that I have it's kind of cute and endearing. I don't know how he puts up with me. I would have told myself to fuck off long ago.

How Do You Think I Feel?

Last night when Steven came home he eyed me sitting on the couch, propped up by about a million pillows, and asked how I was feeling.

"Trapped," I said.

I'm guessing this is the first time I've ever described my state as trapped and meant it physically and not emotionally or spiritually.

"I honestly don't know if I can get myself off the couch."

I Love Fall

The Plan Goes Out The Window

The plan has always been as follows:

• My mother will arrive three days after the baby is born. She will stay for five days. This is the maximum amount of time that she and I can co-exist in the same county without killing each other.
• When she leaves Steven's parents will arrive. They will stay for a week.
• My father will arrive around the same time, but he will be working and will mostly stay out of the way. After my inlaws leave my father will stick around for another few weeks.

This has been my plan and Steven's plan and we have shared it with our parents, all of whom have been making noises recently that their plans are to completely ignore us.

Last night I mentioned to Steven that I was getting a vibe from my mother that she wanted to get on a plane, like, yesterday. "I don't think she's going to be able to control herself from driving to O'Hare the second I go into labor," I believe is what I said. This means that if I don't want my mother standing next to the OB in the hospital being hysterical about why the labor is taking so long or stressing out the anesthesiologist as he preps me for an epidural, I will have to not tell her when I go into labor.

This morning my mother called and informed me that she was having a hard time preventing herself from getting on a plane right this second. Let me point out, for the record, that my due date is still MORE THAN A WEEK AWAY.

Steven's parents, too, are beginning to lose control. Steven spoke to them on Sunday. When he said goodbye they said, "Maybe we'll see you later this week!" Did they not understand the plan?

And then my father called, bright and early, to inform me that his house had taken a direct hit from Hurricane Wilma. He's without power or, even worse, internet access. "I don't know what to do with myself," he complained. "I was thinking about driving to New York. Maybe by the time I get there you'll have had the baby."

Never, in the history of time, has there been this much media attention on the birth of a child. And oddly, I'm having a little bit of a hard time understanding it. I mean, yes, I'm excited. And yes, I understand that this is everyone's first grandchild and omigod how great!! But I personally am not a big one for babies. They're sort of boring, no? They cry, they poop, they eat .... am I missing something?

Yeah, yeah, I imagine that I will find my own child to be completely and utterly fascinating, and I am fully anticipating spending weeks doing nothing but watching him breathe and kvelling as he smiles for the first time. But our parents have all had this experience already. With their own children. So what's with the almost primal need to lay eyes on the baby the second he comes into the world?

And why is it that suddenly no one can understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? We have a plan. Why is no one listening? Aren't I the mother? Don't I get to do motherly things like ban people from seeing the baby until I'm ready for them to see him? My understanding was that people would want to do things to make my life easier, that this was the whole point of them offering to come stay and "help." Having four grandparents battling over who gets to hold the baby is not "help" as I understand the term. I would describe it more as "creating the perfect circumstances under which Hana might have a nervous breakdown."

And in the mean time, Baby Schank Shaklan shows no signs of exiting the womb any time soon, causing me to refer to him this morning, in a fit of total discomfort, as a "slow-assed chickenshit baby who is afraid of the world." Yes, I've progressed to berating a fetus. You be 39 weeks pregnant and see how well you do.

The Countdown Continues

It is no longer possible for either Steven or I to call our parents without having them answer the phone with an expectant, "Are you/is she in labor?"

On the other hand, I have found myself repeatedly flipping through all five of my pregnancy books, despite the fact that I know they do not contain the only piece of information I need at the moment: when will I, Hana Schank, have this baby. Seriously, what on earth were these authors thinking?

The March of Time As Seen From The NYC Tow Pound

This morning Steven went out to move a car that wasn't there. He was already frazzled, even before the car wasn't there, because he'd forgotten that it was Friday morning and that the car needed to be reparked until I reminded him, sending him wet-headed and groggy out of the shower and into the street.

"What do you mean it's not there?" I asked, heaving myself from one side of the bed to the other.

"Think, Hana. Where else might you have put it?"

I sat up in bed, suddenly panicked that I'd lost the car. I tried to mentally replay the last week of my life, but the entire week seemed sort of foggy. What on earth had I done all week? How long had it been since I'd last seen the car? I remembered taking it to Target sometime, but that could have been a month ago for all the clarity of the memory.

"Maybe it's on Third Street?" I managed.

I heard the front door slam as Steven raced out to Third Street. Two minutes later the phone rang.

"Any other ideas?" Steven asked.

"I have absolutely no idea," I said. This was clearly the nadir of pregnancy brain. I had lost the car.

By the time Steven came back in the apartment I'd come up with some other theories. Perhaps the car had been towed? Although, no, it hadn't been parked illegally. Stolen? I theorized. But who on earth would steal an 8 year old Acura?

"You know," I said. "I suppose it could have been towed. We did have those parking tickets..."

Ah, the parking tickets. About five months ago we'd gotten three tickets in the span of two days. Two were for an expired registration sticker. The same cop had come back twice in one day to ticket us for the offense, which had caused Steven to get red-faced and sputteringly angry at the injustice of it all. I'd suggested paying the tickets. Steven had insisted he was going to fight City Hall. Unfortunately he never got around to it. His desire to right humanity's wrongs had been usurped by his tremendous powers of procrastination.

The good news is that the city tow pound is now computerized and easily accessible on the web. The bad news is that our car has been towed to the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn and will now cost us over $600 to retrieve. As opposed to, say, the $120 it would have cost us to pay the parking tickets.

I've been to the city pound once before, although it was the one in Manhattan, it was 3 a.m. and I was drunk. Which was fine, because so were most of the other people at the pound. I remember being slightly hysterical about the fact that my brand new shiny car had been towed (back then I had a fancy schmancy Saab, the financial result of working a cushy corporate job while simultaneously living at home for a year) and I got into a fight with ... someone. I just remember there being yelling. I remember that my then-boyfriend had found the whole thing highly amusing and that he paid the fine for me in an effort to calm me down.

This afternoon I'm going to make another trip to the pound, this time nine months pregnant and with my husband in tow. The worst part? Last time I celebrated getting my car back by going out for a drink and having drunken raunchy sex. This time, when we get the car back, we're going to Babies 'R Us to exchange a Snap n' Go stroller frame for a Kick n' Play bouncy seat.

Whatever. The store is right near the tow pound, okay?

The Victoria's Secret Nursing Bra

I have managed to arrange my life such that I have almost nothing at all to do between now and my due date, thus ensuring that I can slowly drive myself insane a full two to four weeks before I become a mother. So every day I've been trying to have at least one activity that I plan: go to grocery store, go to drugstore, wait for dresser to be delivered - that sort of thing. Yesterday's big activity was Buy Nursing Bras.

I have long loathed bra shopping. Part of this is due to the fact that I am a slightly unusual size, so the selection isn't always great, and part of this is due to the fact that I just generally hate the fact that I have to wear a bra in the first place. My bra shopping experience is generally as follows:
1. I walk into the store and see several cute little lacy numbers. I determine that none of the cute little lacy numbers will even begin to cover my right breast, let alone both breasts.
2. Nonetheless, I find a cute little lacy number in my size and realize that it has been designed by someone who has never even seen a breast larger than a B cup; as a result there is no support and I am popping out of the cups in weird places, giving my breasts the look of an overripe acorn squash.
3. I ask the saleslady where I might find a bra in my size that has some support and she points me to the wall of hideously ugly granny bras that look like they have been designed with evil, heavily bosomed cartoon characters in mind.
4. I try on and purchase two hideously ugly granny bras, consoling myself with the fact that at least I will be comfortable, if not sexy.

This is the process I use for buying a regular bra. When buying a nursing bra, there are a whole host of other issues to contend with. The most important being that most nursing bras do not offer any underwire support, and as a result leave one's breasts (which, thanks to pregnancy, are now officially as big as my head) looking lumpy and schoolmarm-ish. My guess is that I will be so busy being a human refrigerator and trying to find a minute to sleep or brush my teeth that I will no longer care how lumpy and middle-aged my breasts look, but it would at least be nice to start off ahead of the game.

The other thing about nursing bras is that they are designed, of course, so that you can easily whip your breast out at a moment's notice. I think that the actual visual of what this would look like hadn't really dawned on me until I stood in the dressing room unsnapped the top part of the bra and watched my freed breast sway back and forth. And even though this particular nursing bra was black and vaguely lacy, let me assure you that there is absolutely nothing sexy about having one pendulous breast hanging in the breeze. The message it sends out is very clearly: lunch.

So I bought two nursing bras and thundered my way home through Park Slope, thundering being pretty much the only way I can get from one place to another these days. I stepped into the entrance vestibule, hideous nursing bras in hand, unlocked my mailbox, and out fell the Victoria's Secret catalog.

The truth is that I haven't ordered a bra from Victoria's Secret in probably years, although I have ordered other things from them: robes, yoga pants, the occasional sexy bustier when I feel like giving my husband a surprise treat. But at that moment, with the catalog splayed out on the floor opened to a page full of breasts and thongs and non-pregnant flesh, I felt a flash of desperation and longing. How long would it be before I could wear something sexy again? How long before I could look at the Victoria's Secret catalogue and ask myself, in all honesty, what I would like to order from their new spring line? How long before could wear a bra that didn't scream "Fresh Milk?"

I settled myself down on the couch later in the evening and flipped through the catalog, thinking about how old and pregnant it made me feel, wondering in a moment of weird confusion if perhaps they had started carrying nursing bras. And then the baby kicked. Hard. I tossed the catalog in the recycling bin. Not this year, I thought. Maybe next year.

Comments From My Parents Upon Hearing That My OB Says Not Much Is Going On Down There Yet

From my father: "I guess your kid is as lazy as you are."

A related aside. Several years ago I went to a spa. I was feeling bored and a bit, shall we say, stuffed up in assorted areas, so I got a colonic. The woman conducting the colonic informed me that I had almost no peristalsis going on in my colon. Which is to say, one's colon is supposed to contract and release and move things along involuntarily for you, and mine was mostly just hanging around being bored and not caring if it moved things along or not. When I told Steven about my colon (ahh, marriage) he said, "Wow, even your involuntary actions are lazy."

From my mother: "Oh well. Good for me, though because my money is on November 3." She then asked what i was going to be doing the next day.

"Not much," I said. "Just sitting around being frustrated with my cervix."

My cervix, a part of my body which I wasn't even aware existed until nine months ago, is now about to become the focal point of my daily life. I will wake up each morning wondering what's going on with it. Is it happy? Soft? Feeling like opening up and squeezing out a baby? If not, what would make it feeling like opening? A bath? Should I yell at it? Whisper reassuring sentiments? (You are a good cervix, yes you are. And I know that you can do it! You can!)

Since I already routinely talk to the cat and the in-utero baby, adding one more thing that doesn't talk back to my list doesn't seem all that far-fetched. As long as I stop talking to my cervix once the baby arrives. Because talking to a regular, non-pregnant cervix, now THAT would be weird.

The Selfish Dreamer

My dreams over the past three nights:

Friday Night
I dream I am no longer pregnant. I can lie on my stomach. This is the entire dream. There is no baby, no explanation of what might have happened to the baby, simply: I am no longer pregnant.

Saturday Night
I dream I am no longer pregnant and I have fabulous clothes.

Sunday Night
I dream I have given birth to the baby and he looks like a tiny W.C. Fields, complete with a black fedora. He gets off the delivery table and tells me he is going to get a drink at a bar. I spend the rest of the dream chasing him down the street.


Clearly the fact that I am more concerned with lying on my stomach and wearing fabulous clothes indicates that I am going to be a Very Bad Mother. Shouldn't I be dreaming about holding the baby and how cute he'll be and how he'll have that great new baby smell? As for the third dream, your guess is as a good as mine.

When Life is a Sitcom

"Sometimes, walking down the street, I feel like that woman from Will and Grace who's always pregnant," I said.

"Yeah," said Steven. "I guess being pregnant is kind of like spending nine months being the comic relief character."

Parenting

Steven and I are lying in bed listening to the rain thunk on the air conditioner. We have yet to take it out of the window even though it is now mid-October.
"No baby yet," I say.
"Nope," says Steven.
"It's good," I say. "I'm not sure I'm ready yet. I need a few more weeks."
"Well, nothing we can do it about it now," he says. "One way or another we're going to be parents."
He starts to laugh at the word parents.
"Parents," I say, and begin giggling.
"They really should give you a test," Steven says. "Or at least a quiz."
I heave myself into a sitting position, which requires first propping myself up on my elbows and then gathering enough momentum in my torso to push myself upright.
"Is it bad that we can't say 'parents' without laughing?" I ask.
Steven shrugs.
"Parents," he says.

Babies Suck in Two Ways

Last night Steven and I spent three hours learning about breastfeeding. A few months ago we signed up for a whole bunch of baby-related classes on things like how to give birth, what to do with the baby once it exists, and how to feed it and generally keep it alive. At the time the classes sounded like a great idea, since neither one of us knows the first thing about babies, and I've been having a recurring nightmare about dropping the baby head-first on the kitchen floor. Unfortunately I forgot that I'm really bad at school, so mostly I spend the time shifting around in my seat, being uncomfortable and comparing my belly size with the other women in the class. Meanwhile, Steven takes notes.

Steven is, allegedly, the person in our marriage who is good at school. He somehow manages to do things like graduate Phi Beta Kappa from top colleges and win the French prize in high school despite the fact that he doesn't really speak French. I once discovered he'd also won his high school math prize, to which I said, "You do math?"

So I was pretty surprised when I happened to skim through the baby-related notes in his notebook and came across a note from our newborn care class that read:

Hana: 4 weeks post-birth - soggy; Crying - SHIT! Maybe happy tears?

At which point I realized that Steven wasn't enjoying the classes that much either. Or at least, if he was enjoying them it was via his note-taking prowess.

As we took our seats last night for the breastfeeding class Steven cracked open his notebook and stared diligently at the instructor, a woman with an exaggerated pear-shaped body clad in skin tight lycra who, halfway through the class, announced that she couldn't wait to go home and breastfeed her baby.

I peered over Steven's shoulder as he began to take notes. The instructor was explaining that babies use two types of sucking to get milk out of the breast.

BABIES SUCK IN TWO WAYS, Steven wrote in big capital letters.

But mostly the instructor sucked in multiple ways. She handed out plastic baby dolls and had us bring them to our breasts. Since every single woman in the room, with the exception of the non-pregnant member of the lone lesbian couple in the back, was currently sporting a belly the size of a basketball, getting the plastic babies anywhere near our breasts proved more or less impossible.

"Now bring the baby's nose to your nipple," the instructor called out.

I attempted to maneuver my doll across the top of my belly and place his tiny plastic nose to where I thought my mipple might be. A funny thing about pregnant nipples is that they tend to stand at attention quite readily, but not last night. Last night my nipples were thinking they didn't want any part of this stupid breastfeeding class.

"The baby's mouth will open and in one swift movement you bring the baby's head to your breast. Don't bring the breast to the head."

I shoved the baby's head into my breast.

"That was perfect!" cried the instructor, who happened to be standing in front of me as I suckled my plastic doll.

I tried to stiffle a laugh. We then sat and looked all the various formats that baby poop can take.

Here's the thing. I really, really do want to learn how to breastfeed. I hear horror stories about torn up nipples and how frustrating it is when the milk won't come out or the baby won't latch on, or how much it really fucking hurts when the baby isn't on exactly right. And obviously I don't want to live through experiences like that if I can possibly avoid it.

And then, on the other side of the coin, I have my mother, the breastfeeding Nazi. Ask my mother about breastfeeding and she will launch into a five minute diatribe about how important it is and how much she loved it and how it was more or less the best thing that ever happened to her in her entire life. She never had any problems breastfeeding me, despite the fact that I was born early and way underweight, then kept in an incubator away from her for the first week of my life, all of which led the doctors to advise that I would never be able to breastfeed.

Did I mention that I was born in northern California in 1972? So to my mother breastfeeding was a political issue - something to be done vigilantly by women with long flowing hair and floral caftans. She doesn't understand that it's not so political anymore. Yes, there are still issues about breastfeeding in public. And yes, in the breastfeeding class we had to be subjected to the instructor's happy reminiscences about breastfeeding her son on assorted forms of public transportation. And maybe this is something that I will understand on a deeper level once I have lived through the trauma of whipping out a breast in the cereal aisle at the supermarket. But at the moment I don't want to have political debates about public breastfeeding. I just want to know how to get the baby milk. That's it. And that took up about six percent of the class time.

The rest of the class was devoted to discussions on how long frozen breast milk will last (does no one in the class have access to the Internet?), which breast pump was best (again, anyone familiar with the reviews area of Amazon?), and whether one really needed to get fitted for a nursing bra at the Upper Breast Side. Oh yes, the Upper Breast Side, New York's premier breastfeeding emporium. For some reason, having a baby means visiting places and owning objects with ridiculous names, a truth which is particularly the case when it comes to breastfeeding. Other examples: the choice in breastfeeding pillows is between the Boppy and the My Breast Friend. Why, God, why??? Why not call one the UltraFeeder2000 or Baby Meal or Creme Fraiche? Because why make something cool sounding when you can infantalize it, I guess.

When the class ended we went next door to McDonald's and I had a big vanilla milkshake. In my first trimester I was plagued by morning sickness, and vanilla milkshakes were one of the few things I could get down. Now, in the waning days of my third trimester, as the baby shoves my stomach out of his way to make room for silly things like brain growth and larger knees, I seem to be sliding back into my first trimester eating habits.

We climbed up to the second floor of the restaurant, food in hand, and as I began to slurp away at my milkshake I felt my usual post-class depression settle in. These classes just make everything seem so hard. In particular, they make the third day post-partum sound like the fourth ring of hell. On that day I will allegedly have a hormone crash which will cause me to begin crying uncontrollable, my milk will come in which will cause my breasts to feel like cement, we will be discharged from the hospital to the drama of attempting to care on our own for a newborn at home, and, if we time it right (fingers crossed!) my mother will arrive and begin asking me questions like do I think the baby looks cross-eyed and where is the drugstore and how come I chose socks in that pattern?

And then things get worse. I'll have to get up every two hours to feed the baby. He could take as long as an hour to finish nursing. (An hour?!) He will cry. I will be sleep-deprived. He will get scary rashes and make funny noises and I will quite possibly never sleep again for the rest of my life. I will be sore and leaking assorted bodily fluids from all orifices. This will go on for weeks. I will be lumpy and my hair will be coming out in clumps in the shower and none of my clothes will fit and this will go on for months.

And this is someone's idea of intelligent design?

"But you're going to be madly in love with your baby," people say. "And that will make it all worth it."

I hope so.

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.

Beached Whale

People frequently use the phrase "beached whale" to describe how they feel during the last month of pregnancy. Having now lived through about half of my last month, I can officially say that it's not entirely accurate. Mostly I just feel hugely, enormously fat. I feel like not only is my belly so big that i keep miscalculating its circumference and bumping into things, but my ass and thighs seem to be nine months pregnant as well. So whale-like, maybe. Beached, no.

I'm still able to get up and do things and take walks and can even, slowly, make my way up four flights of stairs when I take the subway. Bending over is hard, and to get out of bed I need to get a little bit of momentum going so I can rock myself upright, then swing my legs over the side of the bed. But mostly I imagine that this is how an obese person feels. A beached whale feels something entirely different - mostly oh my god I'm going to die because I'm a whale and I'm not in the ocean.

Three Weeks and Counting

Day two of my life as a blogger and I think i already broke the blogging program. I know just enough about technology to make me dangerous.

I am still recovering from the shock to my system that was Friday night's Childbirth Prep class. Last night I was thinking about the fact that these are my last few weeks with little Squirmy wriggling around inside my belly, and as annoying and painful and tiring as pregnancy is (people ask me how my pregnancy has been and I always say "Well, all things considered its better not being pregnant.") it does make for very convenient childcare. The baby is always nice and quiet. I don't have to feed him or bathe him. He rarely keeps me up at night, unless he's being especially squirmy. And all of that is about to become a lot harder.

That, and there is something unbelievably cool about having an actual living, breathing (well, technically not breathing, but he is oxygen-processing) person exisiting inside you. I like to imagine that I can sense his moods, and he seems to express certain preferences, like for the right side of my uterus (for some reason much cozier to him than the left) and good quality chocolate, which makes him shake what I think is his tushie. I feel like I know him already, more than I have ever known anyone, and it seems impossible that one day when he's a teenager I might say something to him like, "Who are you?" or "No, you cannot get a tattoo."

Which is part of the advantage of having him live inside me, where he can stay quiet, clean, and always perfect.

Brand New Blog

Okay, I have been at this blogging thing for five minutes and I'm already terrible at it. I just wrote a whole long post and then managed to send it off into oblivion. (In my defense I would like to point out that Blogger doesn't offer the greatest user interface, and I would be happy to tell them how to fix it if they would like to hire my IA company to do so.) Anyway, here we go again...

I've been putting off starting a blog because it's always seemed to me to be one of the more utterly self-absorbed, egotistical things you can do electronically (second only to Googling yourself fifteen times a day, which I've been known to do - so once I've done the first why not go ahead and do the second). But. I do read blogs. And I realize that I seem sort of blog-like, and that people are surprised to find out I don't have one, as though it makes me less of a writer or less of a person or less web-savvy.

And of course I write non-fiction, and am about to publish an entire book about me and the people I know, at which point writing a blog and informing people about what kind of toothpaste I use and how often I go to yoga seems somehow less self-absorbed. Or at least, the line has been crossed into complete and utter egotism, so what the hell ... why not start a blog.

Plus, as my father says, I am gestating multiple things right now. I am waiting for my book to come out and I am waiting for my baby to come out. (He doesn't get a hyperlink yet.) He's due in three weeks, over the course of which I will probably only mention his impending arrival about 4 billion times.

Fun, right?