A few weeks ago, when I mentioned I was exhausted by how fast the baby seemed to be growing, which resulted in my ribs expanding and general crankiness, the husband gave the following pep talk:

“Dear Baby, I haven’t met you yet, but I think I know you.  I think you are like your parents.  When you are good at something, you keep on doing it, but Baby, it is ok to get a C in growth.  You don’t have to get an A.  You can be average.  That’s ok.  Let your mom rest.”

The next morning, when I woke up resembling someone run over by a pack of Alsatians or just your average pregnant lady, he added this:

“Dear Baby, you have disobeyed.  You are grounded now.  No going out, no talking with friends, and no laptop for at least five months.”

Yesterday, as he left for work, the spouse told me, “You are my favorite thing.”  Then he paused and talked to the baby.  ”Dear Baby, your mother is my favorite thing.  You are also my favorite thing.  But your mother is my favorite thing.”  Then he looked at me and said, “I think it is important that he knows the difference.”

Today:  ”Dear Baby, don’t zig when you should zag.”

Have I mentioned that I can’t wait to raise a baby with this man?

The Cherokee traveled by chariot on the Trail of Tears.

The Pink Panthers were a militant group from the 1960s.

Jacob Riis was one of the ‘founding fathers of flash photography.’

We’ve had more presidents than we realized and some of our actual presidents did more than they thought:  Henry Clay finally achieved his presidential dreams by winning an election, Hairy Truman ended World War II, Thomas Jefferson founded the Confederacy, and Richard Nixon enacted sweeping civil rights reform (or was that his plumbers?) and somehow didn’t illegally wiretap himself while doing so.

Reconstruction led to the Civil War (the South told you so, you just didn’t listen).

Sometimes, during the Civil War, Mary Chesnut listened in on her husband’s phone conversations.  She was also an abolitionist (wherever did she find the time between snooping on James’ convos and organizing those tea parties?).

Franklin Douglass wrote an important book about slavery.

And after a particularly ugly day in the classroom, I also learned I do have, on the whole, the best students ever, even if they think I should name the baby either Opechancanough or Tecumseh.

News I could have used a decade or so ago is all I’m saying.

Then I got pregnant.  So far, I can divide the first twelve weeks of pregnancy into four or so stages.

Stage One:  Ginger Ale, saltines, and weeping.

Stage Two:  Saltines, breakfast macaroni and cheese, lunch macaroni and cheese, and dinner macaroni and cheese.  Intermittent weeping and intolerance for petty student complaints.

Stage Three:  Fast food hell and veggie sausage patties.  Three trips to Taco Bell, a place I frequent maybe once a year, in less than a week.  As I pulled into the drive through on the first trip, I thought to myself, “How could I have forgotten about the CHALUPA?”  And when I asked the nice guy taking my order what the “Supreme” topping was and he said “sour cream,” I said, “YES!”  By Tuesday, I’d transitioned to the seven-layer burrito, with all seven layers for the first time since high school.  Also on Tuesday, I left the husband out in the cold because I could not wait for him to come home for dinner before I, hobbit-like, ate first dinner.  When he did come home, I reminisced about the glories of Taco Bell (a place he hates) and announced “I love sour cream” while sipping my drink.  This caused him to believe I was drinking sour cream straight out of a glass.  I wish he’d been more worried.  Minimal crying: no spare time between plotting trips to Taco Bell and Foster’s Freeze.

Stage Four:  Nothing sounds good, not my mac and cheese, not my Taco Bell, not any of those pastries I so loved before getting pregnant, not mochas in the red Christmas cup from Starbucks, not a damn thing.  The chocolate shake from Foster’s Freeze did work some magic, but it took me an hour of hard thinking to decide between it and mashed potatoes.  In that hour of food strategery, I did come up with one thing I could eat:  my grandfather’s grits, made with horrendous amounts of cheese, Paula Deen portions of butter, and bordering on the heavenly.  This conclusion–combined with the realization that I cannot have my grandfather’s grits and that he will not meet and horribly spoil our baby–led me back around to the crying.  

Or what I called that until the Great Wagon Debate of 2011 replaced it.  And I don’t mean a wagon that a toddler pulls across our suddenly small back patio.  I mean the sort that you drive, the sort that confirms your pseudo-yuppie street cred without fully admitting that you are a resident of the Bay Area and you need the sort of vehicle you can drive to a protest without being protested yourself.  One that has enough room to slap a KQED sticker on the back window.  That sort of swagger wagon.  The kind that you can out-liberal the liberals with by using biodiesel instead of just plain diesel.

There have been a few notable glitches in the Great Wagon Search so far.  First, I have two tendencies within me.  One, inherited from my father, is what I believe he calls the cheap Dutchman (he is Dutch, so he can call himself this).  I want a deal, and deals are to be found in used cars (sometimes) or good financing (sometimes).  The last time I got a car, I nearly shouted “no” to all the add-on options.  But first I said, “How much?”  As in, how much is that sunroof?  And then, I DON’T THINK SO.   How much are those floor mats?  I DON’T THINK SO.  The other tendency is embarrassingly shallow.  I like bold jewelry and high-end cars.  I live in a valley surrounded by Bentleys, Aston Martins, Maseratis, Ferraris, Audi R8s, and the too-infrequent GTR (my idea of a family car).  I can identify them.  The poor man’s car here is the 3-series BMW.  If it is red, too expensive, and prone to being driven by folks who make quintuple what I make and have the plastic surgery to prove it, then I probably want to own it.  This second category does not come as a deal.  It comes under the category “requires premium gasoline;” or “costs $65,000 and the price of your soul over the course of its lifetime;” or “you can go ahead and buy that car, but then your friends will know how shallow you really are and judge you accordingly.”

This debate all started because we bought a dog; then we bought a house for the dog (a patio! a river walk! all for the high-energy lab!); and now, in our quest to make him the most expensive dog ever (dog day care! dog day camp! three crates and counting! one couch eaten! zillions of humiliating trips to the vet!), we’re purchasing a wagon so he can’t sit next to the baby and swap drool, but can have his very own safe space in the very back.  Don’t tell him.  The cat doesn’t travel, so no one cares where she rides in this hypothetical wagon.

You’d think it would be simple.  Have the husband use his organizational and spread-sheet genius to simply research, categorize, compare and contrast wagons and then, like magic, go out and buy one.  Except I am unreasonably emotional about this.  And those two tendencies move me across a used car lot like a crazy person, veering from the $6000 2001 Passat Wagon (we could buy it right now!) to the 2007 Limited Edition Toyota 4Runner (a V8 and red!) to the 2009 Passat to the Volvo V50 (no longer made in the US, but wouldn’t you just know that the nice dealer has one with a sports package being shipped in from Europe as we speak?) to the Volvo V70 to the Volvo XC70.  In notable restraint, I gave up on my Audi A4 Avant dream, and our collective BMW 328 wagon dream just got flushed down the toilet by cargo space that resembles the size of our master bathroom, which is to say is not cargo space at all.

I finally said to the husband, “I suppose the Jetta Sportwagen TDI matches our ethics.”  And he said, “I wish I could replay your tone of voice, because you sound so annoyed by our ethics.”  But then he added, “Our only lifeline away from Volkswagen seems to be a Volvo.”  Can you tell we already own one Volkswagen?

So round and round we go.  Try to act surprised when we embrace our status as young rural professionals (yurpies), buy the all-too-predictable Volvo (an academic in a Volvo? No way!), and immediately slap a KQED sticker on it, despite my cheap refusal to actually donate to public radio, if only because I hope either Alec Baldwin or Ira Glass will personally call me up to goad me into doing what I know I ought to do.

“I guess our family just sticks to ‘A Christmas Story,’” said another student. And since I couldn’t resist, I added, “BUMPUS HOUNDS.”

“I did,” he said. “Twice.”

I refused to believe him. He promises it was true, and that each time I woke up, I was very sympathetic and concerned. So concerned that I did nothing and didn’t remember it in the morning.

He also said I told him this: “Shut it. I’ve felt sick to my stomach and tired for at least eight weeks.”

I think he made that last part up.

Him:  ”The radio says we should all live 20 minutes from the city.”

Me:  ”What radio?”

Him:  ”The one in my head.”

Leonard Mosley’s 1966 Hirohito:  Emperor of Japan.

Fosco Maraini’s 1956 Meeting with Japan.

C. Vann Woodward’s (a brief pause for our first historical crush) Origins of the New South, 1877-1913

Garry Wills’ Reagan’s America:  Innocents at Home (all I’m sayin’ is Casper Weinberger best not be on the ‘innocents’ list)

Margaret Truman’s Harry S. Truman (now I can stop taking it from the library)

Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover:  The Man and the Secrets (cue the melodramatic soundtrack, no doubt)

Eisenhower’s At Ease:  Stories I Tell to Friends (which should have the subtitle “but not to Stephen Ambrose, ’cause I didn’t really meet with him all those times that he said I did”)

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time:  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:  The Home Front in World War II

Martin Gilbert’s A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 3 (all 1072 pages of it)

Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945

Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life:  Survivors of Hiroshima (I might already have this, but it was only $1)

Robert S. McNamara’s In Retrospect:  The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (or, “sorry ’bout that war I told ya’ll we’d win”)

G. Edward White’s Earl Warren:  A Public Life

William Manchester’s American Caesar:  Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake:  The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

John Toland’s 1970 The Rising Sun:  The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945

William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary:  The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941

Not too hard to figure out what I study, is it?  After typing this list, I see why making small talk has become increasingly difficult for me.  It is just so hard to work the atomic bomb and World War II into casual conversations.  Consider yourselves warned:  if I actually read these books, I’ll probably torment you with their minutia.