Morning sickness aside, I do like pregnancy. I especially like the part where I’m big enough to show, but not yet big enough to be uncomfortable. Preferably after the full-time nausea has passed and before the sciatic nerve pain has kicked in. (That should give me a solid two weeks or so, somewhere around five and a half months. Don’t you think?)

And I like maternity clothes. I do. I tend to buy a little bit trendier than I normally would, because if they’re going to fall apart by the end of the pregnancy (and lots of them do), they might as well be fabulous right now.

However. What is up with the proliferation of fireball red and candy pink in maternity clothes this season? Red and pink aren’t ever my best colors. Maybe they’re yours. But even if they are, I’m thinking pregnancy might be the time to cut back, unless you’re aiming for the scorched-tomato or cotton-candy-on-legs look.

Also: maternity gauchos? Is this really advisable? I’ve never before thought, Gee, it would be great to balance out my rounding midsection with a proliferation of fabric around my knees. But what do I know? Clearly, I do not design maternity clothes. Or any clothes. Perhaps this is fashion genius. Or at least comfortable? Shall I pick up a pair on sale and find out?

And I love how Gap and Old Navy and, well, everywhere else, too, all list SHOES and HANDBAGS in their maternity sections. Oh, yes, that one’s definitely a MATERNITY PURSE. Nothing says “bun in the oven” like an espresso clutch tucked under the arm! With coordinating ballet flats! Though I wouldn’t recommend asking strangers if they’re pregnant based on their selection of footwear. I don’t know, listing accessories in the maternity section seems like a bit of wasted marketing strategy— I never forget to check out the shoes and whatnot when shopping for maternity clothes. Accessories are the only thing I can be sure will still fit when the UPS man brings the package in five to seven days. But maybe that’s just me.

I think we’re getting better now! I really do!

The kids are quite healthy. I’m exhausted and feel like I’m about to toss my cookies at any moment. Sounds about right, right? Sure. Maybe.

I am not great at this part of pregnancy. First trimester’s over. I think I should be full of energy! And hungry but not nauseous! And yet, I’m falling asleep on the couch at random intervals and barely able to keep down whole grain bread and a glass of water. Also, there’s no real bump at this stage. Which doesn’t stop my regular clothes from not fitting. Grrr.

Must go find some non-nauseating protein food. Maybe with salt. Wish me luck.

Oh my freaking goodness, the sickness, it will not go away. Despite my chocolate-eating escapades.

We went from fevers to congestion, at which point the kids started slowly improving. I, on the other hand, thought it would be really fun for the misery to settle itself down in my sinus cavities and cause a horrible, pressurized headache that has not left me for days. (So nice to find loyalty in a germ, you rarely see that nowadays.)

Especially delightful is the fact that I can take none of the chemically-derived relief to be found in my medicine cupboard due to the small person growing in my midsection. So while my family members all have the option of turning to anti-mucous-making and fever-reducing concoctions at bedtime, I am stuck with hot tea and a cool cloth on my forehead. Lucky me.

However! The lovely Kate has tagged me for the Real Moms meme, and as I do occasionally pretend to be a real mom, I thought I ought to, you know, respond. I don’t think I’ve ever done any meme before, ever. I must have unapproachable body language. Either that or you don’t typically want to know what my Eight Favorite Colors are or hear my Six Most Embarrassing Moments Ever. Whatever. I’m doing this one, even if only out of fear that Kate will never speak to me again if I don’t.

So here’s what this real mom did this week:

- Nursed the toddler around the clock for six days. Because she was sick. Also because she finally figured out how to use her “milk” sign to actually mean “I want me some milk,” and that’s just pretty darned cute. She also figured out how to physically climb into my shirt, which didn’t leave much room for argument. Regardless of the fact that I was also sick. Oh, and pregnant. Also pregnant.

- Turned the computer over to my six-year-old for an afternoon. The whole afternoon. No blog or email checking. Whole afternoon. She wisely spent her time writing an entry for this contest, which involved a lot of careful checking and counting of words. She was quite proud of herself, not at all sure she could trust me to email her entry on time, and thrilled to read her 42-word story to anyone who happened to telephone us that day. Her efforts resulted in this book coming to live at our house, and that, in turn, caused her to dance and chortle with glee.

- Lamented to anyone who would listen that 1) I really think I might feel better if I slept for the next six days straight; and 2) I suspect I wouldn’t be quite so miserable with this illness thing if I weren’t also trying not to throw up at all hours of the day.

- Changed my shirt six times in one day. The first one was too hot. The second one was too cold. The next one didn’t fit. Then there was the one with too much spaghetti sauce on the front. And the one with pen markings courtesy of the toddler child. Possibly I should have given up at shirt number three.

- Noticed that my chest continues to outpace my belly in terms of new growth. Because what I really needed was a more top-heavy look. (You can just take my word for that one, I’m not about to post a photo.)

- Also slept. Real moms do sleep. Occasionally. Like when everyone else is sick and sleeping too, or when someone else is watching all the sick kids, or at night. Sometimes even at night.

And now, on to everyone’s favorite part of any meme: tagging the poor souls lucky dears who get to go next! Seeing as this seems to be the meme everyone on earth has already done, though, I’m taking the easy way out. If you want to be tagged, you are! Yes, you! You there. Tell us: what goes on in the lives of real moms?

Me: The kids need fresh sheets for bed tonight. Why don’t you take Owen and Audrey and change the sheets…

Dane: You know, Audrey’s not especially helpful. How about I take Owen and you keep Audrey?

Me: But if you take them both, I can sit here and eat a Cadbury egg while you’re gone.

Dane: [Blink. Blink blink.]

Me: [Smile. Smile smile.]

Dane: [Sigh. Grin.] Come on, kids, let’s get new bedsheets! To the linen cupboard!

Hey, guess what? We’re all sick again! Owen and I have fevers; Audrey’s is getting better, but a nasty congestion thing has taken over. Dane and Abigail are resisting. However. I feel like every third post all winter has been about how we’re sick (sandwiched between two complaints about laundry, of course), so I’m going to just mention something else before downing a pint of ice cream and calling it a night. So there.

Audrey has perfected the art of climbing kitchen chairs. Which wouldn’t be a problem if she were three, or if, you know, she could climb back down again. But as it is, it’s a bit of a problem. I ended up shutting all the chairs in a bedroom for half the day yesterday, and I kind of like to sit. Why must toddlers’ skills outpace their ability to be reasoned with? Why?

That’s all. Goodnight.

Books we like, you say? For the under-six set? Okay, I’ll tell mine if you’ll tell yours. We’re always looking for good read-alouds (current listeners: ages 3 & 6) and read-alones (with not-too-mature content, as she’s only 6). Here’s a sampling from our bookshelf right now:

Socks – Socks the cat copes with a new baby in his owners’ family.
All About Sam (and Attaboy, Sam) – All about newborn (and growing) Sam Krupnik. Told from his own point of view, of course.
Ruby Lu, Brave and True – The best thing about Ruby Lu is everything. Kinda sums it up, don’t you think?
My Father’s Dragon (and sequels Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland, or all three together in one volume) – A boy sets out to free a captured baby dragon, and outwits animals who would deter him along the way.
Mr. Popper’s Penguins – The Popper family trains a troupe of penguins as a traveling stage show.
Sarah, Plain and Tall (and the rest of the series: Skylark, Caleb’s Story, More Perfect Than The Moon, Grandfather’s Dance) – A widowed prairie farmer places a newspaper ad for a bride, and Sarah responds.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – We love Roald Dahl.
Charlotte’s Web – Um, obviously.
Understood Betsy – Betsy’s intensive-parenting aunts have to go away, leaving her on a farm with guardians who take a more hands-off approach to childrearing.
Emily’s Runaway Imagination – Emily’s farm town doesn’t have a library, but her mother has a plan.
The Ramona Quimby books – Yes, Ramona is a spirited child.
The Year of Miss Agnes – Miss Agnes comes to teach in an Alaskan one-room schoolhouse where teachers never stay all year.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler – A brother-and-sister team run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and investigate a mysterious sculpture.
By the Great Horn Spoon – A boy and his butler stow away on a ship bound for San Francisco and the gold mines of 1849. My copy doesn’t have brawling men on the cover. My loss, I suppose.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Oooh. Part novel, part graphic novel—the story of orphaned Hugo Cabret, living in hiding in the train station of Paris and rebuilding an automaton his father first discovered. And that’s just the beginning.

We’re also big fans of histories and historical fiction, though the content does tend to be a bit more mature—books like Island of the Blue Dolphins, Twenty and Ten, The Birchbark House, Sing Down the Moon…

I’m sure I’m forgetting zillions of titles, but it’s your turn anyhow. What do you love to read with your kids?

You know what’s funny? Language. Don’t you think? (Stay with me, here.) Isn’t it funny how a word can mean one thing for a while, a long long long while even, and then through some mechanism I don’t fully understand, it comes to mean something else entirely in popular usage? Funny.

Do you know what word no one ever uses to mean “cat” anymore? I bet you do. But you know where it’s still used to mean “pet of the feline variety”? Not-recently-published children’s books. And so it is that my kids think it means cat. Just cat.

Which led to this afternoon’s what-do-I-do parenting moment, when the children were playing in the backyard and decided to round up a troupe of imaginary cats and herd them into an imaginary barn. We have the kind of backyard fences you can look over to say hello. I am okay with “hello,” but not so hot on “what the [bleep]’s going on over there,” so I thought probably I should put an end to the cat-corralling.

I thought that might be our only linguistically-induced mishap of the day, until I sat down to read The BFG out loud this evening. Perhaps you don’t quite remember the giants of The BFG. Their grammar is a little peculiar, but their vocabulary is scrumdiddlyumptious. Also sometimes cannybully and murderful (these are mostly human-eating giants, after all). They have their own special phraseology, one might say. For example, the word for a cave. A cave where a giant might live. A cave where a giant might be hiding his human friend. Another giant, suspecting him of harboring a tasty human, might accuse him of having “snitched a human bean and brought it back to your bunghole as a pet.” For example.

I may need to invest in books written in the last decade.

So, the party. It went just fine. We ended up partying for hours longer than anticipated, partly due to a couple of late arrivals and partly because there was still food left. Why leave when you can keep scarfing bagels?

We did the parachute thing for a while, much to Owen’s delight. His buddy Ella actually got the game started by rounding up the dads to do her bidding. (“I wanna pway pawachute. You hold this handle. Thank you.”) The kids ran underneath it, then came out and bounced the whiffle balls and some other bouncy balls we scrounged up. And then the grown men started trying to catapult the balls onto the roof of the house. What? Isn’t that how parties go at your house, too?

Oh, and I did not throw up, not even once. Though I did walk around repeating, “Thirteen. Thirteen weeks. What’s that? Oh, thirteen.” Because it’s not weird to have twenty people asking, “How many weeks are you?” one after the other.

Let’s see… the party ended, we took a nap, blah blah blah.

And then we changed the friggin’ clocks. I am seriously considering moving to the mountain time zone (it’s mountain that skips daylight savings, right?) or possibly to some blissful country where they wind their clocks only for maintenance purposes.

The time thing should not bother us here. Almost nothing has to happen at a certain time; there’s no school, no work for me, etc., etc. And yet. Every time we change the clocks, my kids morph into miserable little sleep-deprived… darlings. So that’s what we’ve been enjoying for the past couple of days.

Plus the clock in our kitchen decided to stop keeping time after being adjusted. It starts up every few hours and runs for maybe ten minutes before quitting again. Always good to realize you’re timing your pasta on a clock that stopped two days ago. (“How can the water have boiled off? I put the noodles in at 4:46 and it’s now… 4:46. Wait a minute…”)

And now it’s somehow 10:30. At night. The last kid just fell asleep, and I’m trying to decide if there’s any way I can avoid dealing with the dinner dishes before I go to bed. Hmmm…

A variety of interesting tidbits:

1. Muffins are baked and ready to go. I was aiming for two dozen banana, two dozen pumpkin, but I wound up with closer to three dozen of each. It is somewhat possible that an unsuspecting muffin eater will encounter one or more of the following: eggshell, a burnt bottom, or Abigail’s hair. Actually, I have no reason to believe there is hair of any sort in any muffin, I just needed a third thing. I guess I could have gone with walnuts, which I put in about a dozen muffins intentionally. (And whose bottom is burnt? I’ll let you figure that one out yourself.)

2. Saturday evening will also be daylight savings time! I’m not sure if it’s the beginning or the end of the savings part, but if you happen to live in an area that participates, spring forward for dark mornings and light evenings, resulting in later bedtimes! My kids will be thrilled.

3. Last but not least, let me put all rumors to rest: I am not bloated, pudgy, chunky, or otherwise eating too much ice cream—I am, in fact, pregnant! Baby is due at the end of September, which sounds like the middle of October to me. (What, weren’t there secret rumors flying? No? Eh, whatever.)

Enjoy your weekend. I’m going to get some sleep before the early-morning birthday bash. At which I fully intend not to throw up. Wish me luck.

We had one of those days where the kids all woke up cranky and conflicted for no apparent reason. They’re in bed for the night now (sigh of relief); we made it through with judicious use of naps (Audrey), videos (Owen), books (Abigail), and chocolate (ahem).

Dane is quite distressed that this comments section wasn’t chock-full of suggestions; he’s now hovering behind me brainstorming phrases like “my husband’s new balls” and “who has the balls around here.” (Hello, creepy Googlers! Sorry, this isn’t what you were looking for! Good-bye!) The balls will work just fine, by the way. Plus, they were on sale. Yippee.

I’m now dreading making muffins for the party. It’s pretty much just our parents, siblings, and their entourages, but even that adds up to over two dozen partygoers. How many muffins do two dozen people need? Some of them are babies… do you think people will feed their babies muffins? I never can tell about these things.

My goodness, this sounds like a lot of worry over a one-year-old’s birthday party. There aren’t even games or crafts or favors or anything. You see why I only throw one party for the other two? Any more party planning and I’d need a prescription sleep aid.