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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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...

" />

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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Week 33: Pink Void, the Wall

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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…

Week 32: eBay City Rollers

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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…

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.