I mentioned recently that Paul and I got so overwhelmed by choosing A Good Diamond, we skipped the engagement ring altogether–a decision I still regret, by the way. Today it is my job to research large freezers, and this reminds me of the diamond thing, and if you will just be patient I will say why.

We’d like to buy a big freezer because already we cram our refrigerator totally full after every grocery shopping trip, and we go through a surprising number of loaves of bread (which we like to freeze until we use them), and we like to stock up on meat when it goes on sale, and so it seems as if we are always on the verge of disaster. One day I came home with the groceries and there seriously wasn’t room to put them into the freezer, and we had to make some emergency dinner plans (menu theme: “Using as Much Stuff From the Freezer as Gastronomically Possible”) and also take all the ice cube trays out for a couple of days to make room. And this is only going to get worse as the four boys–four boys!–turn into teenagers and start eating a bag of groceries as a snack.

Another good reason to buy a big freezer is that every time I have a baby (and this happens surprisingly often, it seems), I think about how, when I come home from the hospital, my number one source of despair is food. I must eat, and yet there is nothing to eat. I want hot food, but am too tired and overwhelmed to make any. Good food improves my morale so enormously, it makes total sense to arrange for it ahead of time. So, as I say, every time I have a baby I think to myself, “You know what I should do, is before the baby is born I should make a whole bunch of single-serving containers of hearty, easy foods like chili and turkey-vegetable soup, plus a whole bunch of muffins and cookies.” But I can’t do that, because we don’t have enough freezer space.

I see I have now explained why we need a freezer, when what I meant to be explaining was what freezers had to do with engagement rings. The reason I am procrastinating on this freezer decision is that I feel like I’m going to make The Wrong Choice. I’m going to get the one that costs more money per month to run than it should, and I don’t know how many cubic feet we need and will probably get too many and that will be a waste of electricity and money, and I’ll buy a brand that isn’t the best brand to buy. And all these things cause me to hem and haw and stall on the freezer decision, just as we did on the diamond decision when we were worried we’d pay too much for a diamond that was too flawed or the wrong color or something. We worried that our ignorance (which was only compounded rather than relieved by our decision to purchase and read a book on choosing a diamond) would cause us to be suckered into a bad decision, and so we didn’t risk being suckered. And so I have no pretty-sparkly, and I don’t know how our decision could have been badder than that.

It is in these trying times that I depend on my friend Mel. I was in exactly this kind of stalling cycle when I was pregnant with twins and realized we seriously needed a minivan now, and we couldn’t really swing a new one but I was worried about buying a used one because what if we paid too much? and what if we chose the wrong make or model? and what if it turned out to have problems? and should we buy that optional warranty or is that for suckers? and are we supposed to try to talk them into coming down on the price? And I turned to my friend Mel, who said, “Listen, the reason you’re worried you’re going to get screwed is that you are going to get screwed to some extent, but you have to have a minivan, so just buy one and hope for the best.”

I can’t even say how unlikely I would have been to come up with that philosophy, and I am grateful to Mel for adding it to my Soothing Thoughts repertoire. As I understand her point of view, it’s that there are certain situations in which it is near impossible to eliminate all the bad things that could happen, but it doesn’t improve things if you wait around wringing your hands. You can go back to school for that double degree in automotive science and the art of negotiation, or you can buy the stupid used car and hope it’s not a crapmobile and that you only paid a little more than you should have.

In the case of the freezer, it helps me to realize that the things I’m worried about don’t really matter. Let’s say the one I choose costs more to run per month than the freezer I “should have” chosen. Will I even know that it does? And even if I did know, would that money make the difference between long-term happiness and long-term misery? Let’s say I choose a brand that should have been my second choice, and so the freezer doesn’t last as long as another brand’s freezer would have. I’m not going to know, and it’s not going to matter. If I get screwed a little bit on this purchase because I don’t happen to be a freezer expert, it is not a big deal. And there are millions of people all around the world who don’t give it any thought at all but instead just go into a store and choose the one they like best and don’t worry.

Oh, the sweet, sweet relief of things not mattering! I don’t have to make the perfect choice on every single point, I can just choose a freezer and move the hell on! But I still don’t know what cubic footage I need.

Our 10-year anniversary is this year, and Paul wants to buy me some jewelry. (Okay, fine, so I told him he had to. Let’s move on.) He’s asked me to give him some ideas, not as in “Choose from A, B, or C,” but more like, “Gold not silver, and please no heart-shaped pendant necklaces.” He said it would be helpful if I showed him some examples of items I liked, and some examples of items I didn’t.

I started out thinking this would be a fun project, but I’m overwhelmed already. There are too many choices, too many stores to look at, and too many of the available items all look the same to me but have wildly different prices. The whole diamond clarity/color issue is why we didn’t do an engagement ring and instead spent more on our wedding bands: we kept trying to figure out whether a this-grade diamond was worth this much or that much, and pretty soon we didn’t like diamonds anymore. Now I like diamonds again, but I still don’t like the feeling that I need to get a B.A. in Diamondology or else I’ll get totally suckered.

When we were looking for wedding bands, we looked at a bunch of department stores and jewelry stores, but eventually bought them from this little downtown jewelry store someone recommended to us, where they made all their own stuff right there in the back. Now I wish we still lived in that area, and could go back to the same store where we got our wedding bands and pick out something nice from there. But we’ve moved, and that store is far enough away that we’d have to get a flight, and they don’t have a web site, so forget it.

I wonder if we could find another little jewelry store like that one. But how would we know they weren’t selling us fake crap? Neither of us would have any idea if what we were buying was a diamond or a cubic zirconia. And now I’m thinking maybe instead of jewelry we should replace our couch, which has completely caved in on one side. I like the romance of jewelry, but I’m discouraged.

Last night I told Paul that we need to talk about two things: (1) what to name the baby, and (2) where to put it. He starting groaning and complaining immediately. He hates planning ahead.

I realize we don’t have to make rooming decisions right this second. The baby will sleep in a bassinet out in the living room for awhile, and there are plenty of temporary measures we can take after that. After the twins were born, we had all four children in one bedroom for awhile. It seemed ridiculous to even consider doing it that way, and yet it worked fine: when the two new bedrooms we added down in the basement were finished, we didn’t even rush to move anyone down there. (Now Rob and William have those two new rooms, and the twins share the upstairs room.)

I think there’s this feeling that each child should have his or her own room–and, failing that, there shouldn’t be more than two children in a room, clearly. But if you do it a different way it doesn’t actually end up being as big a deal as it seems like it will be. People would say, “So, did you put the twins in the same room or do they each have their own?,” and I’d say, “Oh, uh, actually all four children are in the same room,” and they’d react as if I’d said we had an outhouse. I can see it myself, because when we realized we needed to temporarily implement the one-room plan, I felt as if we might as well put the kids in large dog kennels in the hallway.

Anyway. I was saying that I know it isn’t as if when the new baby arrives we all have to be in our perfect shining places with everything the way it will be forever and ever; we’ll have time to change things around. It’s more that if I get to choose between packing up and moving rooms around now or in five months when I have a newborn, two toddlers, and two older kids out of school for the summer, I choose now.

I got him to do 10 seconds’ work on the name choice. I handed him the list of the seven names we’re considering so far (Alan, Charlie, Henry, Leo, Oliver, Elliot, Miles) and asked him to rank them 1-7. Then I modified it and said that if names were of the same rank, he could mark them together: 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, or whatever. Here’s how he ranked them:

1: Henry, Elliot, Miles
2: Leo, Oliver
3: Alan, Charlie

That’s not as bad as I was expecting. I was thinking we’d be exactly opposite, but we’re close. I would have ranked them like this (and feel free to rank them yourself in the comment section, if that seems fun):

1: Leo, Oliver
2: Henry, Elliot, Charlie
3: Alan, Miles

So he has one 1st-choice name that is in my “I’m not seriously considering these” slot, and that’s as bad as it gets. I’d worried that he still thought Leo wasn’t a possibility. I’m leaning more toward Oliver at this point (Oliver Henry, that’s kind of nice), but I don’t want to rule out Leo.

Incidentally, how would you spell Elliot? I would spell it “Elliot.” Paul would spell it “Eliot.” And there’s also “Elliott” to consider.

This morning Rob was clearing his breakfast dishes when he stopped short and said, almost gagging, “What’s all that red in the hallway?” Rob and William are both extra-sensitive about blood, so I’m accustomed to talking them down from, say, a red crayon drawing or a smudge of cinnamon toothpaste on the sink, and I was assuming it was something like that again–except, what would be red and in the hallway? So I went to investigate, and it was blood. Blood spread out in droplets across maybe six feet of hall, plus spattered on the walls.

I didn’t freak out, because all four children were in my sight and because there was a cat collar and a tuft of cat fur right in the middle of the mess, but I did wonder if we were going to have to deal with a very difficult cat-related situation, and here it was 5 minutes before we needed to be at the bus stop. The way the blood was so….sprayed looking, and the way the cat collar was snapped, made me wonder if we had a neck injury of some sort–but there wasn’t really enough blood for that. I mean, it was dramatic the way it was spread out, but when I cleaned it up later I only used four or five paper towels, so we’re not talking puddles here.

I found our cat Oliver almost right away (it was his collar and his fur, so I knew who I was looking for). I could see blood on his fur, around his mouth, on all his paws–but he looked basically okay. I’d been worried that a cat…well, I don’t know. Had been hit by a car and then had teleported to the hallway? I guess I wasn’t really thinking things through, but I was picturing finding a cat collapsed and breathing fast, not standing in front of the heating vent and looking at me with a “Yesss??” expression.

I couldn’t wait another minute to bring Rob to the bus stop, but I hurried back so I could take a longer look at Oliver. I still couldn’t find the exact problem, but it appeared to me that the blood on his paws was from walking in the blood on the floor, and the blood on his fur looked like it was a smear of it, not like it was coming out from under the fur. The bleeding seemed to be coming from his mouth, but if you have cats you know that most of them are not interested in opening up and saying “Ah” just because you ask them to. I did pry his mouth open and I got a brief look, and the blood seemed to be coming from his gums (that is, not from inside, which is the way you always know a movie character is dying).

My conclusion was that either (1) he lost a tooth, which has happened once before but wouldn’t explain the broken collar, or (2) another of the cats scratched him and happened to get a good swipe on his gums. Still, there was a lot of blood for that. Well, a Red Cross worker once pointed out to me (while I was donating blood and feeling a little woozy–nice timing) that blood always looks like a lot more than it is. “I mean, if this bag were to pop, you could cover the whole room,” he added helpfully, indicating the bag I’d been trying not to look at.

Oliver doesn’t like to be messed with, so I’ve been trying to leave him alone. He’s in his favorite spot (on top of the towels in the linen closet, which I keep covered with a spare towel for this very reason) and I keep peeking in on him nonchalantly–“Oh, I’m just getting a washcloth, don’t mind me.” He seems fine, crabby and normal. I wonder what happened.

I am so, so interested in pregnancies and new babies. When someone I know–even if I only barely know them–has a baby, my impulse is to go nuts bringing over muffins and casseroles in disposable containers, wee little outfits, cute baby toys, etc. It is a sad, sad thing to me that this is not a good idea, since people don’t like it when other people go nuts disproportionate to their actual relationship. I could go nuts like this with my best friend or with a sibling, but not with someone I know from waiting to pick up our older kids at kindergarten.

Which brings me to the problem of how nuts may I go? Every day when I’m dropping William off at kindergarten, I chat with Tracy about her pregnancy. Now that I’m pregnant, we often talk about mine as well–but she’s farther along, and I’m nosier, so we mostly talk about hers. She’s going to have a c-section tomorrow, and what I want to know is how many things can I give her without it seeming weird? I think I can drop off a batch of muffins and a card, but can I do more than that?

I think this particular situation is made much more complicated by my pregnancy. Anything nice I do for her, she might feel like she has to do the same things for me when my baby is born. And if this isn’t the kind of situation where she’d normally think it was necessary to exchange baby gifts, this may make her feel uncomfortable, and unpleasantly obligated. Not everyone likes to give presents, and in fact a lot of people don’t.

I have finally allowed myself to begin re-reading Catherine Newman’s Waiting For Birdy. I have been eyeing it on the shelf, putting off reading it the way you would put off eating the last Dove bar in the freezer, knowing that once it’s gone you won’t have it to look forward to anymore.

When I read it, I laugh until I cry. I don’t mean that I laugh until my eyes water, I mean I CRY: my lip heads up toward my nose, my nose scrunches up toward my eyes, my eyes squeeze to a squint and tears come pouring out, and I’m making a peculiar sob-laugh sound that reminds me of those old movies where someone needs to give the girl a good hard slap to help her get a hold of herself. Usually it ends with me coughing and gagging and needing to set the book down for a little while to recover, explaining to an alarmed Paul, “It’s just so funny” and weeping some more into my handkerchief.

I didn’t want to re-read it too early in the pregnancy, but pregnancy is the perfect time for reading it so I didn’t want to put it off too long and miss it, either. I thought I’d wait as long as I could, ideally until I was in the stretch where it feels like I’ve been pregnant for a million years and there are still a million years left to go. And here we are, right in that place.

I can’t help but oversell the book, even though I know that’s exactly the sort of thing that, when someone else does it to me, makes me read the book too critically, thinking, “Well, it’s good, but I don’t know why she made such a huge fuss about it.” It would have been better if you’d discovered it on your own, as I did. I don’t remember how I found the column “Bringing Up Ben & Birdy” on BabyCenter–maybe it was mentioned in one of the newsletters BabyCenter sends out, or maybe I was just browsing the site as I sometimes do obsessively when I’m pregnant. In any case, I found it. And within 24 hours I was tapping my foot impatiently, waiting for the book to be shipped to me from Amazon.com as I read through years of archived columns, taking breaks only to email everyone I knew to say “Have you read this?” It was like finding religion, and I was the intrusive new convert who couldn’t stop talking about her experience.

All right, that’s enough of a break. I’m going back to reading it now.

One day short of 2 weeks with no car, and I have the car back. To celebrate, we went to the mall, because what says “Oh my god, that stupid truck cost us $900” better than going out to spend more money? This is an outing I don’t usually attempt since William has to be back for kindergarten after lunch and the mall is 35 minutes away. But I had such a high cabin fever, this seemed like exactly the sort of emergency mega-outing that could bring that temperature down.

This plan makes the morning a little challenging, but I managed it: two children showered, four children dressed, four children breakfasted, one child to the bus stop, diaper bag packed, three children jacketed and in the car and on our way by 8:25. We were in sight of the driveway of the mall when I heard an urpy sound from the back seat. Elizabeth had thrown up all over her coat, her hat that fastens under her chin, and her car seat.

For a brief moment I thought maybe we could still go ahead with the outing. We were so close. I have a roll of paper towels in the minivan; I could clean her up and we could just go on. Then the smell hit me and brought me back to reality like the world’s most vile smelling salts. I did clean her up somewhat, but of course we had to turn around and go right back home. With the windows open.

So! Instead of spending the morning shopping for clearance stuff and having lunch out, I spent 1 hour and 10 minutes driving, with a 10-minute break in the middle to wipe up barf with paper towels. Then I spent half an hour washing barf off a car seat and spritzing Febreze everywhere, and although I’m grateful I noticed the barf had seeped way down into the inner workings of the car seat, I…have no end for this sentence. Then I spent half an hour bathing Elizabeth, letting her splash, bathing her again–remembering the last time she threw up, when the smell lingered in her many-times-shampooed hair for days. (Until I finally put Febreze on it. What?) Then I put Elizabeth’s coat and hat and clothing and also my coat into a washing machine of soap and hot water to soak for awhile, and berated myself for not buying the Febreze-laced fabric softener I saw a few weeks ago at the store. Oh, fine, so it was expensive, but just think how glad I’d be to have it right at this moment, with a washer-load of barf-scented clothing and the memory of previous times when the clothes had to be washed again and again and again before the smell was gone–and in fact one sleeper still emits its subtle cologne if it gets damp. (Barf-scent removal suggestions? Please comment.)

I will say this: it was a very, very good thing that I had the foresight to hide a bag of miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the closet.

I shouldn’t have said yesterday that I would be wearing each of these four maternity shirts 30 times before the baby was born. At the time, I was thinking about how that made the purchase a good value. This morning as I was putting on the blue one, I thought, “I will have to wear it 29 more times, and each of the other three shirts 30 times each, before this baby is born.” It sounded like forever.

I have been trying to enjoy this pregnancy and not hurry it along, but hurrying things along is in my nature. I am always impatient for the next upcoming event–and then, when the event is done, wishing I’d enjoyed the anticipation more. I’m only able to enjoy the anticipation after-the-fact: thinking later about how much fun it was to wait. I can’t enjoy the waiting itself.

I should be patting my tum and thinking about how great it is to feel like I’m always working on something important even if I’m lying on the bed reading a People magazine. I should be relishing the project of going through baby name books and choosing a name. I should be wanting this to go slowly, since after Paul’s reaction to this pregnancy, I’m lucky to have it at all. Instead I’m measuring, measuring: how many weeks are left, how many months are left, how many shirt-wearings are left.