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Week 32: The Great Big Cosmic Coin Toss

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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…

Week 32: Home Economics

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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…

Prison Break

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George Ryan decided to forgo doing his time at one of Forbes magazine’s “Best Places to Go to Prison” and reported to a prison closer to his family. Here, a look at the differences between the two facilities

The Transformers

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Our Chicagoans of the Year for 2007 are a champion of the disabled, an African American publisher, a world-renowned chef, a mother who turned loss into hope, a lifesaving animal lover, a kid helping other kids, and a longtime advocate of tolerance and diversity.

Week 31: Squatter’s Rights

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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…