01/08/08
Now that my wife's organs have the population density of Hong Kong, the kicking in there has begun to feel less like kicking and more like small jabs from elbows and knees. That's good. Some women get totally freaked out by what they consider a lack of movement inside of them, and rely on something called "fetal kick counts"—or FKC to the pros. What they do is pick a time of day when the kid is most active, take a piece of paper, and make a hash mark every time they feel a movement in there. Hiccups don't count. According to experts, the fetus should move about ten times in four hours...
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01/04/08
As the belly broadens, so does the complaining. She's itchy. She's tired. She's hungry. She's sick. She's all of the above, or some combination thereof. I'm trying my best to empathize with every single complaint, but it's hard when they're coming one on top of the other. I was working on my laptop last night when Sarah started mumbling something about how these hiccups were driving her crazy.
I didn't see why it was such a big deal. "You've got the hiccups?"
"No," she said firmly. "Babu has the hiccups...
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12/21/07
Sarah and I are in Napa Valley, celebrating Thanksgiving with the extended Ruby family. Heaven. The annual tradition goes something like this: We stuff ourselves at Carol and Tony's gorgeous home in the Berkeley hills, then the whole family drives up to Napa where we spend the next 48 hours at a schmancy Yountville resort, digesting the meal. It's a pretty decadent—if fleeting—ritual, and it all takes place a block from the French Laundry. Thank God someone else foots the bill. Our room has its own fireplace and whirlpool, and you better believe we're using every last towel and conditioner and clam-shaped soap and white terrycloth robe. There are winery tours during the day, cheese tastings by the lobby fireplace at night. Yesterday we ate gourmet chocolate chip cookies from Bouchon and saw Dennis Franz scowling throughout a street festival just outside our door...
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12/18/07
In three weeks, Sarah quits her job to become a future stay-at-home mother. This may not sound terribly earth shattering; there are more than 5.4 million stay-at-home moms in America, according to the 2004 U.S. Census Bureau. (There were about 100,000 stay-at-home dads.) But Sarah is a middle school principal at a public school she built up from nothing. She went door-to-door in the toughest housing project in Chicago to recruit students—undeterred by gunfire, crack addicts, and skeptical parents...
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12/14/07
Was a time that doctors thought that any kind of motion in the pregnant woman could hurt the fetus. They prescribed rest and lots of it, which equated with women just sitting around for nine months, waiting. This must have seemed strange to the proverbial Chinese women who worked the fields throughout their pregnancies, pushed the baby out into a soybean plant, then went back to work. And there are 1.3 billion people in China. They're obviously not having problems giving birth. Nowadays, Western doctors agree that exercise during pregnancy isn't dangerous; it's beneficial. Some say it makes labor shorter, eases back pain, reduces fatigue, and makes the post-natal recovery easier. The only exercise Sarah has done so far is the easiest: kegel exercises...
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12/11/07
The cramps are gone, but now Sarah's entire body has begun molting. Everywhere she goes, layers of skin fall off, leaving little anthills of white stuff behind. Our couch looks like the Canadian Rockies. And she's always itchy, scratching until her skin is red and splotchy. She's got me scratching those impossible-to-reach spots on her back ("HARDER! HARDER!"), and she isn't satisfied unless I practically break the skin. I'm thinking of keeping a pair of spaghetti tongs on the bedside table...
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12/07/07
Epidural. In the Childbirth Universe, no four syllables have more power as an argument-starter. The word provokes defensiveness in some and smugness in others. There's hand-wringing. Rationalizing. Pontificating. Innocently ask a new mother, "Did you get an epidural?" and you're likely to get a complicated answer, like: "I didn't want to, but I was pushing for 17 hours and the hospital has a policy..." or "My cervix was fully dilated and they were threatening to give me an episiotomy..."
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12/04/07
Quiet days on the pregnancy front. Not much is happening. Mostly there is just a lot of complaining about leg cramps, which Sarah says are getting worse. When my mom, Lois, asked me to go to New York for two days, I jumped at the chance. A respected author of young adult fiction including the mega-successful novel Steal Away Home, she had been asked to chair the National Book Awards committee that picked the top young adult book of the year. The awards ceremony, a black-tie event hosted by Garrison Keillor, was in Times Square. My dad isn't a big New York fan, so Mom asked me. Most guys would think twice before leaving their pregnant wife to go off gallivanting with their mother in another time zone...
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11/30/07
We've been discussing the big questions about child-rearing. Will we spank our child? Will we leave him or her in daycare? How will we raise the kid, ideologically speaking? When you've got a mixed marriage, that last one is a minefield. What set of beliefs do we instill in our child when we grew up with entirely different belief systems, different histories, different everything? Does one of us convert? Do we make a choice for the child? When? Does the child choose? When? The questions go on and on. Sarah and I are both Jewish, so that's good, but we've got bigger problems to worry about. She's a Cubs fan, and I'm a White Sox guy...
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11/27/07
It's time to start shopping for the baby's room, and I see a trip to IKEA in my near future. Like most men, I'm not wild about trips to IKEA. Every time I get dragged there, we get lost on the way to Schaumburg, then spend hours wandering around the store, avoiding the thousands of others wandering around the store, get in a drag-down argument, spend way more than we planned, and walk out with a bunch of boxes full of hernia-heavy pieces of wood that I have to figure out how to put together when we get home.
When Sarah brought up IKEA yesterday, my mom perked up. "IKEA? I've always wanted to go to IKEA. The nearest one to us is all the way in Santa Fe." ...
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