At Edward and Elizabeth’s 15-month check-up, the pediatrician was concerned about Elizabeth’s speech: she was saying “da” for “clap” and “da-da” for both Daddy and Mommy, and that was about it. He said that if she didn’t make dramatic improvements by her 18-month check, he was going to refer her for speech therapy. (Edward’s speech is at exactly the same point, but apparently it’s normal for girls to be significantly ahead of boys in speech development, so while Edward is still within normal range, Elizabeth is well behind what the doctor would expect.)

My oldest son had speech therapy from age 2-1/2 until age 5, for an articulation delay. Here is what I noticed: one, that it was a hassle to have to bring him to therapy each week; two, that it made no discernable improvement in his speech; three, that once we were in the system, it was hard to get out. I am glad to have that system in place if Elizabeth really does need it, but I see her making steady–if slow–progress, and I don’t see any reason to worry about her speech: some kids speak earlier than others, that’s all. Practically everyone has a family story about some child who didn’t speak until age 3, and then spoke in complete sentences. Elizabeth isn’t going to be like that, but what I mean is that I think she’s just slow to speak, and not in need of intervention at this point.

So in the two months since the 15-month check-up, I have been plotting to mislead the pediatrician. When he says, at the 18-month check, “So, is she talking?,” my plan is to say, “Oh, YES. She says ‘shoe’ and ‘sock’ and ‘yes’ and ‘hair’ and ‘eye’ and ‘cat’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘here you go’ and ‘Maisy’ and ‘book.'” I won’t spell out that she says about half of those as “da” or “da-da,” and the others as “szs” and “heh” and “ah.” I’ll just let the pediatrician assume that I mean she says the words clearly. Not LYING, you see, just misleading.

The problem is that I have a hard time misleading this doctor. He asks a question, and I answer it, and then he continues to listen even after I’ve stopped talking: he looks at me and waits, thinking about what I’ve said and also seeing if I have anything else to say. This approach flusters me. I think I’m more than half likely to blurt out into the silence, “Of course, half of those are ‘da’ or ‘da-da’!,” and then laugh nervously. Sigh.

I am a person who enjoys a bargain. My favorite place—my heaven, let’s call it—is the clearance section of Target, where perfectly good stuff is invitingly priced at 75 or even 90% off. Things I wanted at the beginning of the season are already available to me for mere peanuts! Why, it would be a crime against nature to leave them behind! I have been known to consider purchasing a replacement carafe for a coffee maker I do not own, just because it is 90% off and it seems like at that price I ought to buy it.

I particularly enjoy seasonal clearances. This year I bought four fluffy frilly glittery costumes for Elizabeth to wear when she’s older, maybe for Halloween or maybe for dress-up, or maybe not to wear at all if it turns out she’s the sort of little girl who won’t have anything to do with that sort of thing, but anyway I bought them, and they were 75% off, and I rejoiced. Am I going to spend $19.99 for a few scraps of fabric calling themselves a fairy costume? No, I am going to spend $4.94!

I also bought a snuggly little tiger costume, really more like a hooded sleeper, for the new baby to wear. William and I saw a baby wearing this very costume a few days before Halloween, and we both nearly blew a cuteness gasket.

Here is the point, though, of this discussion. There was one time when I saved a great deal of money, and it was the stupidest money-saving decision I ever made. It was when we moved across the country with our 10-month-old baby (Robert, our only child at the time, which seems so hard to believe now), and Paul drove the moving truck and I took a flight with the baby, and I held him on my lap instead of paying the $250 so he could have his own seat. When I was booking the tickets, it seemed ludicrous to pay that much money for an infant who could ride for free if he sat on my lap. Five minutes into the first flight, I had completely changed my mind. Seven years later, I still regret it. It was miserable for me, miserable for Robert, and miserable for the poor, poor woman in the center seat next to us. Why didn’t I buy him a seat? He could have been strapped down in his car seat, maybe even sleeping. Instead he was twisting and fussing in my lap, wanting to GET DOWN. Instead he kept dropping his toy on the floor at the feet of the woman next to us.

There is saving money, and then there is saving money. Better to spend it on that airplane seat, and then make up for it ever after with the 75% off Halloween costumes.

I am feeling gross today: nauseated and listless. It should be a good day: Paul has the day off of work, so there are two adults here. But Robert and William have the day off from school, too, and also the house is infused with that special kind of hyper child energy that comes from unusual circumstances and Daddy home all day.

I made muffins this morning, a recipe containing pumpkin (vitamin A!), walnuts (omega-3s!), and ginger (reduced barfing! I hope!), and also flour and sugar (morale!). But I ate two and I still don’t feel better. Perhaps a Burger King Spicy Tendercrisp? Mmmmmmmmmm.

I just passed the halfway point in my NaNoWriMo novel: 25,000 words plus a few more. It’s still crappy, but at least it’s getting done. I was hoping to succeed at this: it’s nice to set a goal and achieve it, even if the goal is, in the end, a pointless one.

Back to the front, I suppose. I hear Paul starting to raise his voice.

Last night I was putting on the XXL faded-pigment-dyed black men’s t-shirt I wear as a nightshirt, and I was thinking about how no one is ever happy with what they have. There are probably times that Paul wishes he’d married the kind of woman who wears slinky little nothings as pajamas. And there is probably a man out there, married to a woman who wears slinky little nothings, and he’s wishing he were married to the kind of cutie who sleeps in one of his t-shirts, all charmingly oversized on her, plus a pair of socks. I mean, probably, right? There’s got to be at least ONE guy who doesn’t want the fancy wrappings, right?

It’s the same with hair and make-up. I’m not much for it. And I assume there are times when Paul’s eye is caught by some chick all styled up. And probably that woman is married to a guy who wishes it didn’t take her two hours to get ready in the morning, and that she wasn’t always screeching about her hair getting messed up. (Look how quickly we turn on our own: all a woman has to do is have different grooming habits from me, and suddenly I’m using a verb like “screeching” to describe her.)

It’s too bad, but we only get ONE choice. Well, or two or three or four, or you could even keep going but that starts to get expensive in terms of lawyers and alimony and child support and taking crappy offers on the house just to get the sale over with and so on. Let’s call it one at a time, then, because probably there are men who go from a high-maintenance wife to a low-maintenance wife, and with the former he’s wishing for low, and with the latter he’s wishing for high. And let’s not take into account the branch of Mormons that would let a guy experience both at the same time, because that’s getting too complicated and beyond the scope of this column, which was supposed to just be about how Paul can wear a teddy himself if he thinks they’re so great.

Since I’ve already talked about politics today, why not move on to religion?

Having no particular religious affiliation myself, I am flexible when it comes to how other people wish to express their religious beliefs during the holiday season, as long as those beliefs are not actively batting me in the face while I’m trying to eat my Lindt chocolate Santa in peace. Nativity scene? Star of David? Santa Claus? Santa actually attending the nativity scene? None of these bother me.

But this? This seems wrong:

It’s a nativity made of s’mores. S’mores. The Baby Jesus is a mini marshmallow, and he is resting on a bed of chocolate and graham cracker. This can be purchased for $19.99, and you can display it in your home during the season of love and joy. And then, presumably, when the holidays are over and it’s time to put away the lights and the tree, you can eat Him.

I voted, and I brought three children with me, and I was queasy, and there was very little parking and I had to parallel park, and as far as I’m concerned this makes me some sort of American hero. I was all set in case a newspaper reporter wanted to interview me about my brave struggle to vote: “Voting is a responsibility,” I’d say. “We’re all ‘busy,’ but that’s no excuse.” Then I’d smile blindingly for my photo, hoping there wasn’t shredded wheat in my teeth and that none of my children had a finger in his or her nose.

It’s harder to get excited about non-presidential elections. I admit it was only this morning that I went online to research the candidates. I couldn’t find anything that didn’t make all the candidates sound all the same (either all lying dirtbags or all “pro-education! pro-people! pro-love!”), so finally I went with my usual voting technique when there aren’t clear differences: I voted for Democrats for policy positions, Republicans for positions budgeting the money or handcuffing criminals or filing paperwork, and girls over boys because there should be more girls in office. There. *Briskly whisking my hands together* I did my part for the country.

Evaluating my voting technique put down in black-and-white like that, I’m glad that each individual vote doesn’t make much of a difference, and that it’s the big clumps of votes that count. I wouldn’t actually want to be in charge of choosing who wins, I only want to add my driplet of water to the barrel and hope that any dumb-ass decisions I make get canceled out by someone else’s driplet.

I have written 17,000 words of my 50,000-word NaNoWriMo novel, and holy crap is it ever boring. I think I mentioned that, as I usually write non-fiction, I would dip into fiction writing by making it as close to non-fiction as possible: I made it about a woman with four children, and she’s pregnant again. This idea sucks so, so bad. I start getting drowsy every time I try to work on it. Have you ever played that computer game The Sims, where you control little people? And if you don’t give them enough to do, they’ll stand their tapping their virtual little feet and looking at their virtual little watches? That is what the characters in my book are doing.

My main character is sitting around pregnant, wondering when the hell I’m going to let some action happen. I’m trying to follow the rule about “plowing through it” (not getting stalled when you have nothing to say, but just continuing to write anyway), but it’s hard to keep writing about the groceries and the sitting around waiting for something to happen. Finally out of desperation I let her be someone who came to the rescue in an accident involving screaming and blood, and the book STILL won’t wake up. It may be hopeless.

In the meantime, I am so tired of the queasiness. I can’t believe how it suffuses everything I do. All day long I am thinking about what to eat to reduce the queasiness, or what I can eat despite the queasiness. I am like a newborn, needing to eat every 2-3 hours or I start whining and crying. But a colicky, fussy newborn, who cries harder when you try to feed it.

I love tuna, and I have been wanting it, but I’m worried about the mercury. I ate a whole can of it tonight (the chunk light, which I don’t like as much as the chunk white but it’s supposed to be lower in mercury), feeling furtive and dangerous. Low-fat, high-protein fish! I’m such a maverick.

I don’t want to imply that I ate it plain right out of the can, as if I am a highly healthy person. No, I mixed it with Miracle Whip and salt, and I ate it on potato rolls. So when I say “low fat,” what I mean is “before I added fat to it.”

I highly recommend this NaNoWriMo thing, if you’re still teetering on the edge. It’s not too late to catch up. The daily writing task is about two single-spaced pages, which is not as much as I’d thought it would be. Considering your only goal is to fill those pages with writing (not to fill them with quality writing), you can natter on and not worry about what you come up with. And you feel like you’re being all creative/expressive, which is happy for those of us who usually express our creativity via our choice of children’s outfits. I am not particularly inclined toward fiction writing, and so I am writing a story about a stay-at-home mom. With four children. And she’s pregnant. Instant brilliance!

Paul and I went out for dinner last night, and so I wore clothes I don’t usually wear. And they…looked funny. It’s not that things don’t fit–although that’s thanks in part to two pairs of “fat pants” that are ALSO stretchy denim–it’s that they don’t fit right. A shirt stretched kind of funny, and made me look lumpy. Well, okay, I DO look a little lumpy, and the shirt showcased it. I don’t look pregnant, I just look lumpy.

I noticed as we were walking around that for the first time I started to feel my pregnant body emerging. Before now, I’ve only felt sick, or tired, or maybe a little loose-jointed, but basically my body has felt the same as usual. Last night I felt the first indications of the pregnancy. My stomach seemed to curve out more, and it made my back remember how painful that would be later on. I felt tired just walking around. Here it comes.

Next month I’m participating in NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel (that’s the size of a thin paperback) during November: you can’t start until November 1st, and you have to stop after November 30th. Expectations are very, very low: quantity is valued much more highly than quality, and loopholes and serious plot problems are assumed. It’s low pressure, it sounded like fun, and I’m hoping it will distract me from my pregnancy queasiness.

This means I might not be blogging much during the month of November, unless I fink out or unless I’m looking for things to do other than work on my low-quality novel.

If you’d like to do NaNoWriMo, too, we can use the comments section of this post as a place to meet up! Meet back here to moan about how bad your book is!

Go to www.NaNoWriMo.org to sign up, or to see more about what it’s like.

My husband smells like hair oil. Stale salsa. Meat. Even the smell of his toothpastey breath is nauseating, and if it’s not toothpastey? Oh my dear Til-death-do-us-part, I can’t sleep unless you turn the other direction. The kids smell like dried sweaty hair, like sheets that need to be changed, like too-strong fabric softener. What on earth possessed me to buy such an intense fabric softener? When I wasn’t pregnant, it smelled so nice, a faint lingering smell of freshness long after the clothes were washed. Now that I’m pregnant, those air molecules are too big to fit in my nose. I can’t breath that in, it’s so strong and chemical.

It’s the same with my shampoo, and the leave-in stuff I usually put in my hair afterwards, and our hand soap: it’s so strong, it slaps me across the face. I’ve switched to my usual pregnancy shampoo: Suave clarifying, a cheapie that for some reason doesn’t bother me with its smell, and which also helps with the hormonal oily hair problem.

In the few days after learning I was pregnant, I was super-charged with adrenaline. Remembering earlier pregnancies, I took advantage of that energy. I concentrated especially on the bathroom, particularly the toilet, over which I knew I would be leaning in no time. (The only thing worse than barfing is barfing and then breathing in the smell of old pee drips.) A week later, the smell of the bleachy cleaner I’d used, which should have been long dissipated, started bothering me. Now the shower curtain and the edges fastening the pieces of shower wall have come down with one of their cases of Sudden Mold, and I can’t deal with it: the only way to banish it is bleachy cleaner, and I can’t stand the smell; but leaving it there makes me feel like throwing up every time I see it.

I understand that this crazy affliction is helping to keep the baby safe. I’m avoiding strong cleaning supply chemicals, and there is no way I’d eat meat that’s even slightly off, I can guarantee you that. The problem is, it’s taking things too far: sometimes there’s no way I’ll eat any meat at all, because of that “meat warming to cooking temperature” smell. Sometimes I can’t drink milk, because of that strong…milk flavor. The stench of cooked eggs lingers for days. Vegetables? Oh god, the smell of the steam while they’re cooking, it is going to send me running for that nice clean toilet.