Quarterly Update

It's been too long, but I've been so pregnant. Still am, though not much longer to go: two weeks or so. The baby boy in me is big, very big, so big the doctor put me on a diet to curb him from growing too big too fast. So I dieted using strict portion control, eating lots of fruits and raw vegetables. After a week on this diet, which is a diabetic diet, I felt better than I have in 10 years. Once the doctor told me the baby's growth had gone back to normal, I tripped a little off the diet. I'm still eating much better than I was before the diet; I'm gaining the perfect amount of weight each week, says my OB. Because sugar's the only drug left to a pregnant woman, it can be abused and have a deleterious effect on her nutritional input. It did on mine, PD (pre-diet).

As soon as I started feeling better, I got a new job, one that came to me through an acquaintance. I'm recruiting sales people for positions in my acquaintance’s company. A global corporation has recently bought his company. I'm recruiting sales people in many many cities to sell a "financial solutions" product. When I took the job, it sounded simpler than it's been in reality.

Today I'm not feeling so hot, actually. I've been nauseous and headachy and winded. The August heat and humidity are hard to begin with, but the heat and humidity coupled with my having a 17-month-old toddler and being 8.5 months pregnant, makes living harder than normal. Baby boy (still unnamed) moves around a lot and uses BIG movements, grand gestures. Sometimes it feels like he's tap-dancing on my bladder. Often it feels like he's tap-dancing on my bladder. I have to pee all the time. Maybe there is an hour's worth of minutes during the day when I don't have to go pee. My dad says that this condition, typical of pregnancy, resembles the condition men find themselves in when they get older.

My daughter Clara has entered the superest cutest stage: she's extremely verbal, but not coherent in Standard English. She toddles around discovering new things -- new sights, new, new sounds, new moods -- all day long. This past Sunday morning, she pulled a paperback copy of Romeo and Juliet from the bookcase and carried it around with her throughout the day. That evening, when we got to the book-reading part of our night time routine, she picked up Romeo and Juliet from the floor and handed it to me.

"You want me to read Romeo and Juliet to you?" I laughed.

"Yeah," she said. Yeah is her one perfectly pronounced word at this point.

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Yeah," she said.

"Okay....Let's see....what should I read?" I scanned the play, looking for a sonnet or a series of lines that I could pull out and read to satisfy her whim. Not finding one easily, I settled on starting from the beginning. "Act I, Scene I," I began.

I read three or four pages to her that night, finishing at the part where Capulet declares he's having a party and sends his illiterate servant off with a list of guests to invite. Periodically, while reading the play, I'd stop and ask her if she wanted me to read Goodnight Moon (a highly poetic board book, by the way). She scowled and growled loudly. "You want me to keep reading Romeo and Juliet?" I asked.


"Yeah." She smiled and went back to drinking her before-bed milk, snuggled up in my armpit, listening to and babbling along with Shakespeare.

The next night it was the same story: only Romeo and Juliet would do. Tonight, bedtime reading started out the same way, but when we started Act II, Scene I, she finally lost interest (just when I'd found my rhythm!), demanding Easter Egg Surprise instead.

She's at a stage in her development where she has strong relationships with her cow stuffed animal and her bunny stuffed animal. She protests, like any red-blooded child, going to bed each night, but if I ask her if she wants to read Cow and Bunny a story in her crib, she acquiesces and goes gently into bed. Then she spends the next twenty minutes "reading" to her animals. I hear her in her room, reading to her animal friends wbo share her crib, and at moments like this, I can't quite believe how beautiful life is.