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.

I felt a little dizzy yesterday, but if you think I’m going to Google “pregnancy” and “dizzy” you should Google “crazy” and “you must be.” I am still jumpy from the time I looked up “pregnancy” and “headache.”

We have a minivan and a truck, and Paul normally drives the truck to work. The truck’s “check engine” light came on the week before last, and so he is driving the minivan and I am stuck with no vehicle. I was thinking it would only be for a few days, but now we are well into Week Two and I am trying to suppress hallucinations of caterpillars covering the walls. Last night I took the truck to the repair place (we are procrastinators even when desperate, and then we had to wait a bit for an appointment), and this morning they called. It was this kind of call: “Well, the ‘check engine’ light came on because of an exhaust leak, which we can fix for $370. And while we were in there…” and I tune out until the end of the sentence, which is, “…and all that would come to an additional $1100 or so.”

I hate this kind of thing, where people are telling me about things that will cost money, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to believe them or not. Maybe they’re sitting around on the other end of the line taking bets on whether the sucker is going to do the 100,000-mile replacements at 75,000 miles just because they used the “concerned” tone of voice. Or maybe the “belts” and “pumps” (or whatever it was I wasn’t listening to) really are going south, and I’ll be sorry when something snaps at 70 mph and Paul is killed in the resulting pile-up and inferno, all because I thought I was being so savvy.

Well, we’re fixing the exhaust leak. And then we’re going to do the 60,000-mile check/replace thingie we inadvertently blew off 15,000 miles ago because we can’t seem to keep track of these things. And maybe we can get them to fix the quirk where the “door ajar” light beeps at us alarmingly every 15 seconds even though the doors are firmly shut. But I’m not replacing the belts 25,000 miles earlier than the maintenance schedule says to. See what they’ve driven me to? I’m checking maintenance schedules. This is not how I want to live my life.

I am 21 weeks pregnant, and it seems like all of a sudden the tum is getting bigger. It surprises me every single time, how long it takes for the tum to be of Public Recognition size. It seems weird to spend half the pregnancy looking “kind of fat.” But now, finally, I am starting to look pregnant. I was crabby when I went to a social thing the other night and no one guessed I was pregnant, and everyone acted surprised when I announced it. Considering I was wearing a snug top, I had thought it would be instantly obvious to everyone. Instead, they evidently assumed I’m just normally this bulky shape. Paul tried to reassure me by saying that everyone probably did guess that I was pregnant, but no one wanted to be the one to say it and have me respond that I wasn’t. It’s true that I myself often don’t comment on an unknown tum unless it is covered with a t-shirt that says “Baby!” with a down-pointing arrow.

Speaking of t-shirts, I’m so glad I bought those four maternity shirts the other day. I spent about a week putting them in an online shopping cart and taking them out again, thinking, “Am I really going to spend nearly $50 on four shirts I’m only going to wear for four months?” But as soon as I started wearing them, I wondered why I hadn’t spent the money earlier to improve the amortization. Even so, I’ll wear each shirt about 30 times. I should be good and sick of them by May.

I’m feeling more tired, more inclined to sit or lie down, more inclined to nap in the afternoons, more inclined to go to bed a little early, more inclined to stay in bed until someone’s really crying. I’m eating all the time, or else thinking about what I am about to eat.

I get little rushes of energy, which a recent post about not-cleaning accidentally inspired me to start using for cleaning. The other day I moved the loveseat and removed four thousand toys and crayons and game pieces from underneath, then vacuumed up two dustbusters’ full of dust and dirt. Paul said, “Would you like me to take all those dustbunnies and help you build a nest with them?”

I get a frequent, unpleasant “can’t breathe” sensation. Sometimes it helps to walk around a little, if I’ve been sitting. Sometimes it helps to sit, if I’ve been moving around. I’ve had this with all my pregnancies, and nothing cures it except childbirth. One of the happiest feelings after the baby is born is “I can breathe!!” Oh, yes, and “The baby is born!,” of course.

There are lots of baby movements now. Some of them are general “moving around” feelings, and some are distinct little bappy kicks: bap! bap! bap! BAP! If you have not yet experienced pregnancy, these feelings are just as mesmerizing and gross and thrilling as you might imagine. I get this combined feeling of wonder and ick: “There’s a real live BABY in there! My baby!” and “Oh my god, something alive is INSIDE MY BODY.”

We are still stuck on boy names. Nothing emerges from the pack as a name for Our New Boy.

We will need to buy a car seat–we got rid of the ones we used for the twins, thinking we were Done. And now there’s that whole Consumer Reports thing, where their recent car seat test needs to be redone. Probably I’ll go ahead and buy a Graco, since that’s what we used for the twins, and since that’s a seat Consumer Reports has liked in previous tests. I usually spend about a third of the pregnancy agitating about which car seat to buy: different stores often carry the car seat in a different fabric, and the fabric choice seems like The Most Important Decision In The World while I am pregnant. (Afterwards, when the car seat cover is really only a difficult-to-wash cloth backdrop for the baby to yack milk and have astonishing blow-out diapers on, it seems less important.)

It seems as if this pregnancy is going very quickly. I’m already looking forward to the food at the hospital, which is truly excellent. Big huge chickeny caesar wraps, and still-warm brownies. Fresh-fruit cups, which you are allowed to order more than one of. Cinnamon french toast with butter and a little cup of warmed syrup. Turkey sandwiches piled so high with turkey you almost want to take a little of it out, with pickle wedges on the side. Most important: someone else making it, and bringing it to me after I pick up the phone by my bed and ask them to. It’s almost worth the entire pregnancy and recovery, just for that food. I always cry when I go home and the food part is over. See? I told you I was always either eating or thinking about eating. Right now I’m doing both, since I am also eating a bowl of ice cream with hot fudge sauce.

It is 1:10 in the morning, and I am still up because one or the other of the twins has been crying since my bedtime more than two hours ago. Sometimes both of them have been crying at the same time, and what I would like to know is, Why am I dealing with this by myself? How is it possible for Paul to be a good human being and still sleep through this? I don’t recall him sleeping through the creation of these children, and yet he is actually snoring as Elizabeth cries in her crib on the other side of the wall.

I’m not sure why they’re crying. It reminds me of how lucky we are that usually they don’t–usually we put them to bed and they sleep until morning. But what is their deal tonight? First Edward cried, and when I went in to soothe him it woke up Elizabeth, who hates having anyone in her room when she’s sleeping. So I settled Edward, but then Elizabeth was all riled. And then I got her back to sleep, right before Edward woke up again, which of course woke her back up. And up. And up. And up. And two hours later I have put her in her crib again, mostly because I am out of ideas. She thinks some good ideas would be to let her roam around and maybe do a little coloring, perhaps have a little snack. I think there is only one good idea, and that is for her to go to sleep. To this end I have tried: (1) having her cry it out; (2) having her come into our bed; (3) having her cry it out; (4) rocking her in the recliner out in the living room; (5) letting her sit on my lap in the recliner while I bitched to my journal; (6) having her cry it out. We are on that last one now.

To be honest, there is a hidden item between numbers 5 and 6: “giving her a dose of Benadryl.” I know it’s not a good idea to dose a kid up with medicine for my convenience. At 12:30 in the morning, I don’t know it as much.

…Suddenly I am picturing someone dosing up a child thrice daily and saying, “But Swistle does it!” I am picturing law suits, liability, my own personal feelings of guilt and responsibility. This is what happens in my mind at this time of night: everything turns into a court case. So let me rush to say that I do this hardly ever. And that you should definitely consult your child’s pediatrician before giving any medication for any reason.

And then I will say, just a teeny whisper into your ear and nothing that could be caught on hidden recording device, that Benadryl really does seem to do the trick in these situations. Well, for some kids: I’ve heard of unlucky mothers who finally resorted to it, only to find that their own personal children reacted to Benadryl as to a shot of espresso. That’s the sort of thing that could make a mother seriously consider ordering that single one-way plane ticket to another country. There are red-eye flights, and you’re up already anyway.

In case you have not yet had a chance to develop Hot Fudge Tasting rules for your household, I offer ours for your use:

1) You are allowed to dip a finger into the cooling hot fudge sauce, though you would be advised to check first to make sure it is not still molten.

2) You may dip that finger only one time.

3) Your finger must be clean to begin with.

4) If you are going back for another taste, you must use a new finger.

5) Be careful to leave at least one finger clean, for turning on the faucet afterward. A thumb is good for this purpose, since it is not very good for dipping anyway.

I don’t like to say that my house is disgusting and that I only clean it when I start seeing creepy faces in the patterns of mold on the shower curtain. What I like to say instead is that I live a life of the mind. Nice, huh? I worked pretty hard on that. I like how it communicates a certain superiority, as if the reason I don’t clean is that I am preoccupied with higher things, as opposed to that I don’t like to.

Floors are my biggest struggle. Vacuuming enrages me, the way I always have to be yanking the canister behind me, or finding another outlet because I’m out of cord. Then the nozzle thingie doesn’t fit under the furniture, or it does fit but I can’t put it under there because there are so many little toys and marbles and so on that will get sucked up into the vacuum cleaner, but now I have to move the furniture and clean up all the little toys first, and oh forget it. And mopping! You’re supposed to vacuum first, then mop. But by the time I’ve done any vacuuming at all, my face is red and I feel like I’m about to start throwing chairs across the room, so I’m not getting out the bucket and the mop and perhaps moving the heavy pine table and chairs because otherwise I’ll slop the mop all over them and surely that’s not good for the finish, and oh forget it.

The method I use for cleaning my house is this: Ignore it until I freak out. I go on cleaning binges that leave corpses in my wake, and then neglect everything for another year. The cleaning binges tend to coincide with visits from my mother-in-law, who still remembers a time 30 years ago when an acquaintance implied that her house was not kept as well as it could be. She gets red in the face and her voice gets loud as she tells me the story for the hundredth time since I met her.

Paul, I know, would prefer the house to be a little cleaner. But his mother did him a grave disservice when she taught him that sparkling cleanliness is the only right way to live but also that his personal efforts need never enter into it, and I don’t see it as part of my wifely duties to keep him in the style to which his mother foolishly accustomed him. I have had to remind him of this periodically over the twelve years we’ve been together: if he would like the kitchen floor washed, I see no reason in the world that he can’t wash it. The floor is not bothering me.

I have also tried to be sure to teach my own children in a way that will not make them a curse on their future partners: that certain levels of cleanliness are pleasant but not necessary to sustain life; that there are things I would rather do than clean and that that is a fine choice for a person to make; and that men and women are equally able to clean. I worry, though, that example is more important to a child’s learning than lecture. Paul is certainly capable of cleaning, but he learned from his parents that women clean and men never do, and a dozen years of me carefully explaining otherwise hasn’t changed him. If I teach the kids that cleaning duties are not assigned based on genitals, but they see me doing all the cleaning that gets done, it’s hard to see how we’re not just repeating the training that has given me some of the worst fights of my marriage.