It was cold outside, so I put on my new earmuffs. Noah stopped dead in his tracks. "What are those?" he asked, staring at me with rapidly darkening eyes. "Earmuffs," I explained. "They're kind of like a hat. They keep my ears warm." I watched his body tense up, his rigid little internal alarm sounding the different! new! unfamiliar! alert as he tried to make sense of the funny-looking circles on my head. Was it a costume? Was I playing dress-up? Did it bother him? How much did it bother him? "May you take them off please?" he asked, in his usual pained attempt to politely frame a demand as a request. "I think I'm going to leave them on, buddy. It's cold outside." As I said this, it was my turn to rapidly attempt to gauge the danger level of the situation, to try to figure out our odds of making it to the car without a meltdown, whether this was a don't budge power through teaching moment or one of those times to just give in for the sake of everybody involved. "It's okay, really. Just think of them like a funny-looking hat, but just for my ears."... Read more →

BIRTHDAY UPDATE: I did get out of bed, eventually. We got burritos for lunch, and then Jason offered to go wrangle the boys while I went shopping by myself. I bought a pair of maternity pants, some mittens and a pair of stupid-looking but ridiculously warm earmuffs. Jason was all, "What the hell? I figured you'd want like, shoes or something." But I was all, "Shut up, my ears were cold. This is the best birthday ever!" Then we went out for dinner and ordered dessert even though neither of us wanted dessert, because it was only 8:15 and if we left then we'd get home before the kids were even in bed and that's just a total waste of a babysitter, dammit, so we stayed at our table for an extra-long time having a very drawn-out discussion about how much we like our new coffeemaker. Also: He gave me a lovely set of birthstone rings, which I've never had before, other than one I wore as a purity ring in high school, OH YES I DID, but then I stopped wearing it, JUST I DUNNO BECAUSE, and I think I have it hidden in a box somewhere, because I... Read more →

Today is my birthday. I'm 33, and I just had to do math to figure that out for sure. My gift to myself is a shameless whore-out post with little or no point other than to rack up a lot of comments from people telling me happy birthday. It occurred to me last night that I've never actually been pregnant on my birthday. In fact, the occasion has usually marked the end of a long year of fruitless trying. I know I've made getting pregnant my official birthday wish at least three or four times, with two of those wishes coming true in just a matter of weeks. This time, I thought it would be nice to maybe start LOOKING pregnant by my birthday, if that wouldn't be too much trouble for the Fates or Birthday Candle Goblins or whoever is in charge of that sort of thing. Everything else is going so well, with the no-longer-feeling-like-a-walking-migraine-of-hork and feeling the honest-to-God kicking and OH, I DON'T KNOW, the whole fetus-remaining-alive thing and stuff. So I didn't want to press my luck. I swear I woke up this morning looking like I swallowed an entire tin of Christmas cookies. Which may... Read more →

This morning Ezra decided to pull a stocking off the mantel, nailing himself directly in the face with one of those damn metal Pottery Barn stocking holders. He now has a big lump on his forehead and skinned and bloody nose. (And this is all of two days after he fell backwards off a stepstool, yet somehow managed to split the FRONT of his upper gums wide open. Toddler physics make no sense, other than the They Will Always Visibly Injure Themselves Right Before You Need To Take Their Picture Certainty Principle.) Also this morning, Noah was filling me in on all the juicy preschool gossip, including one classmate's slow-moving progress towards potty-training. NOAH: And if she doesn't get to the potty on time, she'll have an accident! AMY: Yes, So-And-So is still learning how to use the potty, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes awhile and... NOAH: So-and-So needs to learn the TRUE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS! AMY: Which...is? NOAH: (thinks for a bit) Listening. And using the potty. Read more →

AMY: Hey! Who wants to hear all the boring nitty-gritty details of a routine obstetrician visit? VAGUELY MUTED VOICE: ME! ME! I DO! I DO! AMY: Great! Okay, so... YOU: Hey, wait a second, that was you, answering your own question, with your teeth clenched like a ventriloquist or something. AMY: No it wasn't. YOU: I saw your lips move when you made the "M" sound. AMY: No you didn't. YOU: This is stupid. I wish Cake Wrecks updated more than once a day. Anyway! Okay, so... Sixteen-week OB appointment this morning. Results of the genetic screening from the last appointment reveal that my risk of Down syndrome is about the same of a 28-year-old pregnant woman. I am...not 28 years old. Nor am I 16 years old, which was where the risk of Trisomy 18 fell. These are apparently very GOOD numbers, so I am going to remain content with that and refrain from Googling so if I'm at all misrepresenting the SCIENCE behind these Very Important Blood Tests I apologize to the medical community. I simply wanted to tell the world about my spry and quite-young-for-its-age uterus. Even though I'm guessing that isn't specifically what the results were... Read more →

'Cause we're ready for some Christmas. Noah helped decorate the tree -- one of about a bajillion different firsts for him this year. We finally figured out that he's okay with having a tree in the house, he just doesn't want to see or even hear about it riding home on top of our car. Because...trees don't belong on cars? Because it might fall off? Because it's a flagrant violation of proper seat-belt usage laws? I DON'T KNOW WHY. I DON'T MAKE HIS RULES. All I know is that this year we skipped the whole picking-out-a-tree-as-a-family bit and didn't tell Noah anything about it until the tree was off the car roof and in our living room. This, he was fine with. More than fine, actually. Excited, even, to get going with hanging up the orbbamints. So our tree has a LOT of orbbamints on that one side, towards the bottom. I am more than fine with this too. Ezra supervised the garland placement. I waited until he was in bed to begin the untangling and cursing of said garland, and only barely managed to finish sometime before breakfast. The magic of Christmas! I used to pretend our holiday garland... Read more →

It was on this exact day in history when I realized that I needed to make a change. That the working-outside-the-home thing and I were not a good fit. That my poor already-meager brainpower reserves were overextended to the breaking point, making each and every venture into the outside world fraught with danger and the potential to snowball into a comedy of errors, or at least a story that could only be told with at least a dozen "...AND THEN!" transitions into the next circle of absent-minded hell. That being required to walk out the door remembering my keys AND my lunch AND the daycare bag AND the work I'd brought home the night before AND my shoes AND where I'd parked the car AND the baby, omg the baby was just too much. Something had to give. Five years and a whole extra kid-and-a-half later, this remains probably one of the most self-aware things I have ever realized about myself. Five years later, and it still holds true that the simple decision to "get out of my pajamas" is usually the exact point where my day goes completely haywire. For the record, I am only required to Leave The... Read more →

Ladies, let's talk about feminine dryness. Sponsored by... Oh, I'm kidding. Let's talk me being pregnant some more. Someone asked me how I was feeling yesterday, stomach flu aside, and I was happy to inform them that I'm feeling really pretty good, now that I've hit 14 weeks. And then it occurred to me that hmmm, I think I've been saying "14 weeks" for more than a week now. And then I completely blanked on how far along I actually am, and had to go off and re-consult an online pregnancy due date calculator thing. I'm 15 weeks. And a half. If I were my first-time pregnant self reading that, I would call my third-time pregnant self an asshole. A terribly callous, disinterested asshole. Man, just thinking about the self-righteous, paranoid sermon my first-time pregnant self would've lathered herself into makes me tired. Bitch needs to back the truck up and calm the cluck down, if you know what I mean. Could you tell her that for me? I can't even deal with her. She's so screechy about everything. Instead, this pregnancy seems...so quietly marvelous, so mysteriously separate from me and yet so very simply ALL MINE. I can feel... Read more →

I don't talk about my in-laws that much. I mean, do I? I don't think I do. FUN FACT: I have probably deleted all of about...three or four blog entries, tops, ever, since I started this site (counts on fingers...oh my GOD) seven years ago. But I still remember the very entry I deleted. It was about visiting my in-laws, and despite sound incredibly tame and ridiculously nice compared with the kind of screeds you saw flying across the average anonymous Blogspot blog back in those Wild West days, I deleted it at Jason's request. So I've been good, right? Other than occasionally holding them up as a case study for the Advice Smackdown, I feel like I've barely mentioned them. So I'm due! I can talk about my in-laws for just a little bit. It's my Christmas wish. DISCLOSURE: This post is brought to you by XFINITY from Comcast. Watch all your favorite shows from anywhere with XFINITY TV. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Comcast or its partners. (Hey, so. I know. Two sponsored-content-type posts in a row. This usually never happens, and really wasn't supposed... Read more →

As much as I would LOVE to write an incredibly detailed post about our weekend of non-stop stomach-flu illness (and as much as I'm sure y'all would LOVE to read about it), the fact is I previously committed today's posting spot to the American Cancer Society. They asked me to participate, once again, in their More Birthdays campaign, and contribute a monthly-ish post to help raise awareness of their research and programs and website. Today's post, according to my official editorial calendar (translation: an email from a few weeks ago that I have miraculously NOT LOST) is supposed to be an introductory sort of thing -- explaining why I chose to participate in the campaign in the first place. Which, to put it eloquently, would be something along the lines of: Well, DU-U-UH. Last night, Jason's phone rang at exactly 2:32 a.m. I was deep in the middle of a stress dream involving being late for high school (after being awkwardly felt up and then promptly dumped by Michael Cera, that JERK) when I heard it ringing. It stopped soon after I fully woke up, but of course I lay there staring at the ceiling for awhile, panicking. Was that... Read more →