Current Events

1. THE TALKING

Will is pointing to things and trying to say them. He has a good approximation of DOOR ("doh"), BALL, ("bah"), WINDOW ("do-do"), CAR ("cah" or more likely "go-go-cah!") and HI...he also broke out the NIGHT-NIGHT yesterday at bedtime, which came out as "Nigh-niaahhh" or some bizarre vowel sound trailing off at the end, but it was accompanied by him waving as I said "Night-night, paintings!" making the meaning somewhat clearer.

(I'm under no illusions that Will is going to bee adding more and more words until he is a Shakespeare in diapers; often he conquers a skill and then drops it for weeks. Which brings me to...)

2. THE WALKING

Will took his first steps on Monday morning. One step was from walker to standing, and the next was a fully independent step...until his confidence (and knees) failed him and he sank to the floor after a ten-second pose. Although this doesn't exactly add up to walking, it is definitely a milestone that elicited a revelatory "Ohhhhhh" from me. Suddenly, the sleep disruption I had been blaming on teething for the last month or so made a bit more sense. I mean, it probably had something to do with teething as well, and certainly the whole coughing-on-drool-until-he-spits-up routine was all about the aching gums, but as the Genius Mother of the Century I apparently missed the signs of a developmental touchpoint. The completely textbook signs. Bravo, me!

3. THE GESTATING

How am I feeling? Pretty fabulous, actually. I'm not sure if the ugliness of the first trimester this time around makes the second feel like a heavenly oasis of physical functionality or if this pregnancy simply continues to be different from the last. While pregnant with Will, I basically exploded between weeks 20 and 24 and became quite abruptly uncomfortable--things mellowed again in the third trimester. With this baby, I suffered some "typical" nausea and fatigue early on and now am enjoying the "typical" second-trimester respite--I'm over the icky symptoms and not yet to the point of enormity.

Also, I'm exercising regularly and drinking a bit of coffee (caffeinated!) every day. That helps.

4. THE READING

Dave had a million airline miles left on Delta, but somehow not enough to actually HELP US FLY ANYWHERE. (Um, isn't that the point of miles?) So we ended up having to order some free magazine subscriptions just to get them to stop mailing us warning letters about how time was running out. Annoying.

Anyway, that means we have a plethora of magazine options around here, but no good books. I keep seeing a recommendation here or there and then forgetting all about it, so could people please tell me what you've been reading? I want a list so long it lasts through the newborn days with Baby Boy, so please throw anything good my way. (Yes, I'm a member of Goodreads thanks to Maria, but most of YOU are not.)

5. THE DRESS

I bought a gorgeous dress at a Gap Baby outlet a while back, before Bee had her baby and when neither Aimee nor I knew what we were having. "Of the three of us, SOMEONE will have a girl," I thought as I made my purchase. Here's what happened next:

End of July: Bee had her son, Connor.
Early August: Aimee found out she was having a boy in December.
Present day: I discover that this dress, or any dress for that matter, would be an inappropriate item in which to dress our baby as well, for the obvious gender-identification-related reasons.

The dress is definitely for a NEW baby girl, so I can't give it to any little ones who already exist in my orbit.

So the moral of this story is that somebody close to me needs to conceive a girl, ASAP. Otherwise I will be, as I lamented to Dave, "that sad old lady with ten boys who hangs on to a dress hoping that one day she'll have a girl to give it to."

To which he replied: "TEN boys?" Not the point of my story, Dave. Not the point.