You should try soft pretzels with ranch dressing. Yum.

So, I disappeared for another month. This is starting to become a bit of a habit. Maybe I should just change the by-line of the website to, "Now with monthly updates!" Then we will all know what to expect.

Speaking of expecting, Auggie is doing well. She (and yes, I am using the feminine pronoun in a gender-uncertain context; I blame going to law school in Canada for that tendency) has become extraordinarily active in the past month. She remains almost completely quiet the entire time I am at work, and then as soon as I am at rest, she likes to disturb my rest with pokes and prods and kicks and jabs that cause me no end of amusement. Except when I am trying to sleep. Then they are less amusing.

I learned an important lesson this Sunday in church: Don't wear shirts that are skin-tight across your six-month pregnant belly if you want to be able to pay attention to the sermon. Auggie loves music, and whenever I sit down after singing or drumming, she decides to keep the beat going for a while. This week, "for a while" lasted throughout the entire service. I kept laughing, because you could actually see my belly bounce up every time she kicked it. And, of course, the other people in my row kept looking at me to see why I was laughing, and then they would see the little kicks, and laugh, too. I really hope the pastor was trying to be funny, because an entire section of the church was suppressing giggles for the entire sermon.

My mom turned sixty this year, and I turned thirty, so we decided that we should do something special to celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime "I am half your age and both our ages end in zero" event. So, we went to see a Broadway show with my sister and her mother-in-law. Believe it or not, this was my first Broadway show. I saw "Phantom of the Opera" in Toronto when I was 11, but this was my first New York City Broadway with a Capital 'B' Broadway show. It was awesome. We had coal oven baked pizza for lunch, and saw a matinee so that my sister could get back in time to feed her baby before bedtime. I snuck my baby into the show without buying her a ticket (shhhh....) but I'm glad I did, because I think I have a Broadway baby. Easily the most active Auggie has ever been was during the big choral numbers of the show. I wonder how young is too young to start your child in tap lessons?

The show was Curtains, with David Hyde Pierce (and a couple of other people from "Frasier," too), and it was amazing. But then again, I am no Broadway critic. I probably would have been starstruck and impressed by anything.

My sister sent me a picture of the four of us outside after the show. I'm the fat one in the purple shirt.



So, let's see, what else has been going on in my life in the past month or so? I spent most of the month of April quite sick. I even went to my doctor because I thought I had something serious like mono (and, if you know me at all, you'll know that it takes a lot to get me to believe that I am sick enough to go to the doctor). Fortunately, I did not have mono. Unfortunately, I did not have anything treatable, so I just had to stick it out until the pollens changed and my allergies died down a bit. Yeah, allergies. I spent a whole month sick from allergies, and there is not a single blooming drug that you can take for allergies while you're pregnant. I've never had allergies like this before though, so I can only hope that it was just some kind of fluke combination of a bad pollen season and being pregnant and having no immune system, and that I won't ever get them like this again.

Meanwhile, I have still been working full-time at the store, which has left me completely drained. Eight hour days on your feet the entire time is pretty exhausting when you're simultaneously building a human being. The paperwork hasn't gone through yet, but hopefully, by the end of the month, I will be down to part-time hours. Then I might just maybe have time to blog more than once a month again. And get that daily nap that I was supposed to stop needing about 13 weeks ago when I entered the second trimester.

Oh yeah, and we also moved. See? This is what happens when I only blog once a month. I forget to mention big things like moving all the way back to the opposite side of the city, to a lovely townhouse that we have yet to move all of our crap into, so it still looks nice. Or at least, it still looks new and empty, which is nice in its own right.

This just proves to me that I need to blog more often. I still don't think I wrote about my trip to Florida in March. I definitely didn't get to write about the lovely day I spent in Princeton with Katie and Mike and Isla (and Squidgy), who were down from Canada for a conference. Nor did I write about the fantastic weekend, albeit cold, that I spent in a Virginia forest with a bunch of story-gamers playing all sorts of fun games. Jeremy even learned how to make boffer weapons out of PVC and duct tape.



But, when you're always either working or sleeping, and you manage to squeeze in a day (or even a weekend) to do something fun for yourself, you pay for it afterwards with extra working and sleeping. Hence the infrequent blog posts. I've been told that now is the time to do things for myself, to go on trips and have fun, because it's the last chance I'll have to do those things without having to figure out how to include or make alternate arrangements for the baby. I'm not 100% convinced by this argument, because I'm truly looking forward to sharing camping trips and, one day down the road, games and Broadway shows, with Auggie. But I do understand that, in just a few short months, my life will be changed irrevocably, and if there is something I really want to do now, I should do it now, before my life and priorities are turned completely upside down.

That said, I am making it my goal to thoroughly enjoy my third trimester. And yes, all of you mothers out there, I heard that snigger you just made. But really, I have been so tired and overworked for the first two trimesters, I have had very little chance to enjoy myself and my pregnancy. But I'll be dropping to part-time hours, I have several trips planned, and, always subject to providence throwing me a curve ball, I want to make the most of this. I might even (wait for it...) blog more often! I have a few ideas for the third trimester, including a weight/date pool and featured guest belly artists. Wow, I don't think I've ever done a "coming attractions" thing on this blog before. I guess I'm stuck with it, now!

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