I feel like I finally have my mind back again these past couple of weeks. I’m working on a new story, revising old ones. I’m slowly starting to write in this blog again. This is the happy period of pregnancy they tell me, the second trimester. It seems to have showed up about 6 weeks late, but it’s here.

I’m enjoying going out in the daylight again. I’ve been asleep for the last four months, or in bed trying to sleep, or in bed trying not to vomit. Though I’m not supposed to have too much coffee, I like going to Panera Bread or Starbucks. Me with my pen and loose leaf paper, Jim with his laptop. I haven’t had coffee in so long it almost makes me feel drunk now. I can’t even imagine what it will be like to have a real drink again after this is all over.

It’s so clichÈ, isn’t it? The writer in the coffee shop? Stephen King is a wise and successful man, and in his book On Writing he writes that to take yourself seriously as a writer, you should have your own private place to work. It sounds like a good idea, but it’s never worked for me. I have a perfectly good office in my home that I can’t seem to use. There are too many distractions here. (Just wait until there’s a baby too, you say!) But away from here, in some coffee shop, the voices of people blend into soothing background noise. There are no TVs, no dishes or laundry to do, nothing to do except what I went there for - drink coffee, think, write.

Do what works, right? Or am I just kidding myself?

I have this little goal. I want to be published before the baby is born. Any story, anywhere, for money or not. I want to see my name in print so that when I’m up to my elbows in dirty diapers and goobering baby talk, I won’t forget that in my previous life I had a direction set for myself. The two lives can coexist, I’m sure of it.

I remember when I used to be a blogger. A blog implies something regularly updated. Reliable. Because people lose interest when nothing is new. I don’t blame them. I would lose interest too.

As you can see, I’ve disappeared a little. I guess I’ve been working on a project of sorts. Not a writing project but something equally as monumental. A much needed surprise. Something to maybe create reliability in me when nothing else ever could.

I don’t expect this to become a mommy blog, or a pregnancy blog (not that there isn’t a place for such things), but there is one thing I’d like to note straight off. Pregnancy is not the glowing and beautiful thing it is glamorized to be. Pregnancy is bodily functions amplified a thousand times. It is quite gross actually. Sure, my skin is clearer, glowing even. But everything else (and if you don’t know the details I mean, you probably don’t want to know) tends to be left out.

This is week 16 in baby land. Baby is the size of an avacado. He is learning to swallow and breathe his amniotic fluid in preparation for breathing and digestion at birth. He has also learned to urinate, and does so into his amniotic fluid every 40-45 minutes. The fluid is completely cleaned and replaced every three hours, so that the baby’s environment remains fresh. That math doesn’t add up. Eeew, Baby, that’s kinda nasty!

However nasty, we still love him. (I say “him” though we don’t actually know the baby’s sex yet - I just can’t bring myself to call my baby “it”)

Baby is due, by the way, June 25, 2006.