As I type this, it is noon on a Tuesday and Kate does not have a stitch of clothing on, having taken it all off in order to play "beach." Where this child got the idea that playing beach requires being in the nude, I don't know. She has never even been to a beach, so it's possible she picked this idea up from television, in which case I might want to pay a bit more attention during Sesame Street. But she's been naked for about an hour and now she's lying on the living room floor eating pretzels straight out of a plastic bag while (I admit it!) watching television. In addition to this squalor, there are dirty dishes in my kitchen and laundry that needs doing and all I want to do is go to bed and take a nap instead.

Welcome to a scene from the 32nd week of my pregnancy. I think it is safe to say I have hit the wall. I cannot believe there are eight weeks left, and at moments like this I have no idea how I'm going to survive them. I really was feeling a lot of momentum and energy until now. I actually had this list of projects around the house that need to get done before the baby comes, and I was getting them done. Which meant I could check them off my list, which I love more than anything. In addition to anemia, which was a problem for me in my last pregnancy and is back this time, I think the main difference is that I am getting into that territory where even under the best of circumstances I am not sleeping very well at night. I start out reasonably alert in the first part of the day, but by the afternoon I'm pretty much toast. I think I am alternating "good mom" days with "lazy mom" days on about a one-to-one ratio. Yesterday Kate and I spent the morning at Explora, the children's museum here in Albuquerque and then had a picnic lunch on their playground. The house was in decent shape and I cooked dinner. But today, after we got out for a regular Tuesday commitment we have, it was all I could do to get home, turn on the TV and hunker down until naptime. Dan is on a business trip, and if I had to bet I'd say Kate and I will be heading out to Chik-Fil-A for dinner tonight. Tomorrow's plans call for a trip to the zoo with friends, which I think qualifies as a good mom plan for the morning. (Exotic animals! Fresh air! Educational plaques!) But I get tired just thinking about it, and that is frustrating.

I recently read this advice about transitioning from one child to two posted on It's Almost Naptime, a blog I have started following and really find hysterical and wise. Being at this point in the pregnancy made her advice about dropping the supermom expectations hit home for me. These last few weeks might just be my opportunity to start working on that so that I don't go into total shock when Isaac gets here.

Update: Kate's changed into a Minnesota Vikings cheerleading outfit and a pink tutu. I am choosing to view this as an improvement. Hey, it's clothing. And it's also naptime, so I'm going to clean up the breakfast dishes, put on the one load of laundry we can't live without, email my editor the final touches of a freelance project I've been wrapping up and then go to sleep for an hour or so.

It's just eight weeks. It can't last forever.
And it's not like I'm going to get any sleep once the baby comes, right? Sigh.

Unrelated note: I started reading It's Almost Naptime because a friend linked to this post, "I don't want my children to be happy," which I loved and think worth sharing. You should head over there, since I'm not exactly keeping the blog lit up with new content these days. Thanks to Paula for the original link.

One afternoon last week, this was my sister Hannah's status update on Facebook:

Is anyone in Nashville free and able to help me change a flat? I should have learned this in high school, I know... I was too busy with show choir. Why don't I ever have an emergency in which I need to dance to "Superstition"?

I laughed so hard I started crying. Hannah has that effect on me a lot, and it kills me that I don't live closer to her. It also reminded me of a story that I meant to blog and didn't. So here it is.

One day week before last, Kate and I went to Burger King for lunch. This pretty much means it was a weird day to start with, because I can't remember the last time I went to a Burger King. But after a morning that featured several mini-crises, I had a starving kiddo on my hands, no real food in the house and Burger King was the only place I could think of in a two mile radius that would be fast and did not have a playground attached. At this point in my life "restaurant playground" is code for "half-hour of my life that WILL end in me climbing my giant pregnant self up a purple plastic tube to drag out my two-year-old." I have decided that I have to stop doing this, since I can see the headline now: "Fire Department Called to Dislodge Pregnant West Sider from Chik-Fil-A Slide. SUBHEAD: Hose deployed; playground flooded." And I just didn't have time for that on this particular day. So off to Burger King we went.

I mentioned recently that the pregnancy is starting to make me tired, but it's also making me stupider. By the minute. In the course of four days, I set off our smoke alarm twice while cooking. Kate had never heard it before, was totally traumatized and still occasionally points to it on the ceiling and says "No more youd! (loud) No more youd, OK Mommy?" The other day when Kate and I went to the museum, I lost my keys, a fact I failed to notice until I was leaving ... three hours later. Thank goodness lost and found had them. And I pretty much cannot be trusted to grocery shop these days, since every single time I try to leave the register without either the groceries or my wallet.

So on Burger King Day, Kate and I got some lunch and headed home about ten minutes before I was going to need to put her down for her nap. Shortly after we got on the road, we got to a four-way stop. Now I do not wish to make generalizations, but in seven years of living in New Mexico Dan and I have decided that the rules for four way stops must not be covered in whatever driver's education course is offered here. It's just a free-for-all. Maybe the other drivers know the rules. Maybe they don't. Thus, I usually pay pretty close attention when we get to a four-way. But I am willing to admit that Pregnancy Stupidity may even be affecting my driving, because I can't honestly say who was at fault in what happened next.

I pulled out into the intersection to make my left turn, truly under the impression that it was my turn to go, but all the sudden there was this giant truck RIGHT on my bumper and then pulling around me on the left while I was still getting out of the intersection and straightening out for the turn. I don't know if I pulled out in front of him or if he was just driving really aggressively. What I do know is that I did the one thing you should never do -- I looked away from the road, lost track of where I was in the turn, and as a result I ran into the curb. Actually I didn't run into the curb so much as I ran all up onto the curb and then came back down. One whole side of our car jumped up, and there was a terrible loud BANG. I got the car straightened out and driving in the right direction again quickly, but I could tell our tire was flat immediately because of the WHUMPA WHUMPA sound it was making over the sound of Kate screaming "Too YOUD mommy! Too YOUD!" from the backseat. Poor child is developing a fear of sudden loud noises and it's all my fault.

I pulled over into a residential neighborhood and got out just to visually confirm that the tire was flat. Then I called our roadside assistance number. We have been paying for this service through USAA, our insurer, for more than five years, but in that entire time I have never had so much as a fender bender. So it was with some sheepishness that I told the woman on the phone that why, yes I did have a flat tire, and yes it was because I ran into a curb. But that moment of humiliation was just the start, because after getting all the basic information on where we were so the assistance vehicle could find us, she threw this one at me:

Insurance lady: "Do you have a working spare tire?"
Blink. Blink. Dogs bark in the background. Birds chirp. Kate screeches about wanting to get out of the car.

Me: "Umm. I think so. I don't know for sure."
Her: "Well do you think you could check?"
Me: "OK. Stay on the line. I'll be right back."

I left Insurance Lady to enjoy the peaceful Muzak of Kate's whining and tried to think about where in the world a spare tire might be stowed on my car. I am not proud to say that it took me about ten minutes to find it, a fact I'm sure made it painfully obvious to Insurance Lady that she was dealing with a genuine idiot of a motorist. I imagined her typing notes into our customer file while the minutes ticked by: "Wife is obvious liberal arts major. Cannot be trusted. Clearly a liability."

For the record, the spare tire is under the floor in the trunk of our car. We haven't cleaned out our trunk since about 2006, a fact that did not help my search, so I had to conduct an archeological dig to find it. When I finally got the floor clean enough to lift it up and saw the spare tire, I wanted to high five someone, but Kate did not seem to be in the mood, and somehow I felt that Insurance Lady was not sufficiently impressed with my accomplishments. But she did send out the guys in the truck, and they fixed us right up. They only made a little bit of fun of me about running over the curb. They did say "Wow. This looks like a brand new tire," which it totally was. Dan had the tires on our car replaced not three weeks before this happened. He was really nice about it.

Not that I'm happy I blew out the tire, but really the whole thing wasn't that bad. Our roadside assistance service is clearly worth the money, and they had us fixed up in a matter of minutes. It turned out that the tire was under warranty, so the tire shop gave us a new one for no charge and it was fixed by the end of the day. Almost two weeks later, Kate has even stopped talking about how "Mommy broke the car! It YOUD!"

But I am sure the whole thing would have been much more fun if Hannah had been there to sing and dance to a Stevie Wonder song while we waited for the truck.

I started writing this post yesterday, got stuck, and stopped. This is more indicative of the sad state of my writing mojo these days than I would like to admit, but I did finish this up today and am posting it, even though it's a day late. So pretend it's yesterday.

Five years ago today, my brother Aaron survived an IED attack on the Humvee he was driving in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq, where he was serving with the Marines. That whole story is over here. Every March 18 is important for our family as a day to pause and be thankful again that Aaron's life was spared. Five years seems like a long time, but when I think about how many questions we had that day, I can relive the uncertainty and fear pretty completely. Our questions were so basic. Was Aaron conscious? How long would it take him to get to the States from Germany, where he had been airlifted for surgery? Did he know what had happened, or would someone need to tell him when he woke up?

There weren't a whole lot of good answers at first. It was terrifying.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have made much of a difference on March 18, 2005 if the Marines who brought that news to our various doorsteps could have said "Your brother, your son, your husband, has been hurt very badly. He's lost his leg. But in five years, he'll be a law student. He and Kelly will have a son named Clark and they'll own a home and Aaron will be obsessive about yard work.You will actually joke about his prosthetic leg sometimes, and this will all seem normal. Incredibly normal." I am not sure we would have been able to believe that even if they had said it. The future seemed irrelevant and unimaginable in light of the immediate crisis.

But life goes on in five years. A lot. And all those things that no one could tell us that day are true now. Aaron is in law school. He and Kelly have a home and a dog and the coolest baby boy ever. As I was reflecting on this anniversary in the last few weeks it occurred to me that Kate and Clark and Isaac and all our family's future children will have no direct memory of March 18. How strange. That in itself brings up all new questions. Will we need to explain to the kids exactly what happened to Aaron, or will they always just accept that he has a prosthetic leg? Aaron and I have talked about that, but Kate so far seems not to notice. When she does ask questions I'm going to follow Aaron's lead, since lots of kids have asked him what happened to his leg in the last five years and he has worked out a way of answering them. For that matter, he's handled adults very graciously, some of whom are even less tactful than small children. These are weird little skill sets that most people don't have to learn. But all around, I like the questions we have now more than the ones we had five years ago. More surprisingly, they no longer seem unusual to me. They are just part of life as the family of someone who survived. We thank God every March 18 for the mercy and the privilege of being that family.

We love you, Aaron, Kelly and Clark, and are thankful for you and everything you did.

Fabulous blogging news alert: My sister Hannah recently started her own blog, which I am looking forward to reading every day. No pressure, Hannah! She wrote about this here.

This photo and others by Daniel Meigs

Dear Kate,

Today you and I spent a morning at the park with friends. You are such a social kid that seeing friends is always high on your priority list, but usually if we're on a playground, you are content to hang around on one of the lower levels and chat with your buddies as they come flying off of various slides and ladders. You aren't a very physically aggressive child. You don't climb furniture or jump off of stairs, and you generally want to try new activities in short, controlled doses. That doesn't surprise me much, since I was a pretty cautious kid too, and between us your daddy and I played not one single sport in school. But I don't know where that child went, because today you were suddenly so brave. I could barely keep track of your bright pink jacket in the maze of the playground. You were climbing up ladders and squealing your way down slides you never would have touched even a few weeks ago. I have no idea what changed but it's great to see you have so much fun. And at the same time, like almost everything this spring, it makes me a little sad, because you're getting to be such a big girl, less and less of a baby every day. I knew that the change we would see in you between two and three would be pretty significant, but obviously I wasn't prepared enough. You're a totally different kid than you were even six months ago. Then you were two. Now you are two and a half. It is a big difference. My imagination fails me when I try to picture you at three.

Photo by Erika at My Little Garden

Frankly, I don't think you've been prepared for all the change either, and that has made the last three months or so an interesting study in how hard it really is to grow up. Your two most frequent verbal phrases these days best express to me the contradictory emotions I think you're feeling. Those phrases are "I do it myself!" and "I want mommy!" In the early part of this year, you went through a really clingy stage where you wanted to know where I was all the time, every minute of the day. It was really exhausting and surprising, since you are generally very independent. But you insisted that I be the one to bathe you, get you dressed, and comfort you at night during a two month period of night waking you went through after we did a lot of traveling in January. Traveling always messes up your sleep, and not to harp, but oh child, your sleep issues wear me out. When I talk to your soon-to-be-born little brother, I am promising him all KINDS of insane loot if he will just have some mercy on me and sleep. Just so you know what's up when I have to buy him a pony for his first birthday. Anyway.

You love your daddy, but for weeks and weeks, no one but me could do anything for you without you having a fit. At the same time, you were so difficult and so frustrated that you couldn't do everything yourself that our every interaction was a series of conflicts, or at least it started to feel that way to me after a while. I actually had a breakdown one night and told your dad I was pretty sure you hated me. Not being pregnant and irrational (and it's a good thing one of us isn't) he calmly pointed out to me that if you hated me, you probably wouldn't have such an intense need for my time and attention. Still, it was a rough month or so, and I'm thankful that in more recent weeks you seem to have grown past whatever you were struggling with. It's striking to me how often in parenting my job isn't really to do something to fix you when you're having a hard time as much as it is to be patient with you and love you through it. I never thought it was that way, and finding that it is makes me look at all the good parents I know as masters of some kind of higher level of patience I can only dream about. I hope I'm becoming more patient, but in the meantime I know I'm becoming better at apologizing. And you're getting good at forgiving me. So that's a start.

Photo by Daniel Meigs

Your love of the stage continues. Not that you have any official stages to get on, but you make them wherever you can. Dance class has become one of your favorite things in all the world, and if we're having a slow morning around the house, I've pretty much stopped even attempting to get you to put on real clothes, since I know you're just going to take them off, drag out your dress up box, and spend hours putting on different outfits. You have started raiding my closet to add grown-up items to your wardrobe, something I wasn't expecting until you were maybe 13 or so, and you are disturbingly good at walking around in a pair of jewel-encrusted high-heeled dress up shoes someone gave you as a gift. You have perfect balance. You don't even look at your feet when you walk in them. Kate, I have days when I can't pull that off, and I'm 30. You're making me look bad.

Your persistence is paying off, and you can do so many things by yourself. Some of them are really coming in handy. I was kind of annoyed when you started insisting on climbing into your car seat by yourself because it just took so long, but now that your brother is kneeing me in the kidneys on a daily basis I am thrilled that you can save me the trouble of bending over one more time. You can dress yourself, even if the process takes for-flipping-ever and results in the most unbelievable case of static hair the world has ever known. You routinely get shirts stuck over your head, but also preemptively decline assistance by screaming "I DO IT! I DO IT!" before I even offer to help you. Not that you are stubborn or anything. You brush your teeth really well, although this also goes down on the list of things you can make last for a small eternity. That's because there's a mirror involved, and to you all mirrors are an opportunity to .... practice singing and dancing. I just sit down on the edge of the tub and wait for your encore. On the upside, the dentist said you have remarkably clean teeth when we went in for your first checkup last month.

Perhaps not surprisingly, you are getting to be a great talker, and that is letting us hear more and more of your perspective on the world. You are currently fascinated with stop lights, and every time we get to one, you tell me if it's green, yellow or red, and what those colors mean. ("Green mean go, mommy. Go go! Red mean stop! Yellow slow DOWN!") I might have been about to forget those vital pieces of information, so it's extremely helpful of you to share them with me. At every stop light in the city of Albuquerque. Every time. Without fail. Green means go. Check.

Photo by Daniel Meigs

You really enjoy picking up new words and trying them out. It's one of the things that reassures me we might one day have some common interests. I love words too and when I was a kid I would collect new ones, the longer and fancier the better. On Sesame Street one recent morning the Word of the Day was "exquisite." When they do a new word on the show they say it a few times, use it in a sentence and then say "Say it with me!" You pronounce it "seskwizit" and you work it into conversations whenever you can. The other day I asked if your smoothie was good and you said. "Yes, it good. It seskwizit. Say it with me!" I kind of choked on my smoothie a little bit trying not to laugh at you, because you were so serious about teaching me this fabulous new word you discovered.

Now that your verbal skills are coming along so well I'm trying to get you to verbalize some danged manners. If you can say "exquisite" I know you can say "please," but knowing you are capable of doing something and getting you to do that thing are two separate affairs. Not that you are stubborn, I point out again. Sometimes I have dreams where I hear myself saying "Say please." This is because I say that phrase approximately 2,000 times a day in an effort to teach you that it is not appropriate to state all your desires as demands repeated incessantly, like "I want some cheese. I want some cheesesomecheesesomecheeeeeeeeeeeese!" Wait, what was it you wanted, because it's possible I misunderstood you. Something about cheese? Some days go better than others in this department, but just lately I am noticing that maybe one out of four times, you actually say please when you ask for something. Without being told to do so! You still basically expect whatever you are requesting to magically appear in your hands on the spot, but I figure this is a process. One thing at a time. Today, we say please. Tomorrow thank you. Maybe by the time you're 20 you will be fit for polite society. I know you'll have fabulous shoes when you get there, so I don't have to worry about that part.

Of course now that I am eight months pregnant, the $64,000 question is how are you feeling about the impending arrival of your new sibling? People ask me this all the time, and it's a hard question to answer. For a few months, you really didn't want to talk about him all that much. We'd bring baby Isaac up and you'd nod, but that was pretty much the end of the conversation. Since that phase coincided with your clingy, difficult couple of months, I really started to get worried that you were somehow upset about the baby. But recently, possibly because my stomach is so huge that it can no longer be ignored by your or anyone else, you talk about Isaac a lot and you seem excited. Just yesterday, out of the blue, you told me that when Isaac is here, you are going "show him Sesame Street and jumping." I have no idea what those two things have in common, but it's sweet to hear that you are thinking about the things you can teach him. I'm starting to get out our baby gear, and you think that is cool. You are really excited about giving the baby a bath in the kitchen sink, something you saw your Aunt Kelly and Gam do with Clark when we met him in January. These are little things, and they might not mean all that much. I'm still expecting it to be pretty difficult for you to adjust to having the baby around and sharing our attention, but I am feeling more optimistic these days that you will eventually get used to having a baby brother.

Interestingly, no one seems to ask the mom how she's feeling about having a second child. It probably seems like a silly question, and in casual conversation I doubt it would get many honest answers anyway. But I admit to feeling somewhat conflicted as the final weeks of this pregnancy come to a close. I am thrilled about your brother and am getting so insanely excited about meeting him that I frequently wish I could just skip this next month and see him already. Yet, at the same time it honestly makes me a little sad that these are the last days of our little family of three. The other night your dad and I went out on a nice date, probably the last one we'll be able to go on for a while after your little brother is born. One of the things I'm thankful to be able to say two years after the dawn of the child-having years of our marriage is that your daddy and I still have a great time together, especially when we find a rare moment to have adult conversations about issues and ideas and LOST and .... stuff that does not concern potty training. The magnitude of that accomplishment will not be evident to you until you have a marriage and kids, but believe me, it's a big deal. Still, even in our golden moments of grown up time we do talk about you, and the other night we were laughing so hard about something you had said that other patrons in the dimly-lit restaurant with white tablecloths and live piano music were turning around to look at us. We couldn't help ourselves though. We just think you're the funniest, most adorable and best kid ever. I gather from other parents that this is how you feel about each of your children, and I fully believe that this is exactly how I will feel about Isaac when we meet him. But you will always be our first child, the one who made us into parents, and that gives our memories of the last two and a half years with you a special place in our hearts forever. We love you so much and we can't wait to see you be a big sister. We know you will do it with all the flair, enthusiasm and fabulous glamour you bring to the rest of your life. Just please try to understand if Isaac doesn't want to wear a tutu every day. Boys are weird like that.

I love you,
Mommy

Photo by Daniel Meigs