At yesterday's prenatal visit I found out I've gained another 10 pounds. Yikes! That brings the pregnancy total to 28 pounds. Apparently this baby just wants Mommy to be very well cushioned by the time he or she is born. Nothing too exciting to report, though. Heartbeat was strong and steady at 144. Next month I'll take the glucose tolerance test and then start with bi-weekly visits rather than monthly. Dr. M. asked how I felt about taking the test, and I said that was fine. I didn't with Cole since my midwife just checked for sugar and protein and all of that stuff in the urine sample, but I really don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other.

This morning at storytime Cole and I were sitting at a table putting together puzzles. A little ways over there were two mothers talking - one nursing a newborn - and eventually their conversation came around to breastfeeding and formula. The nursing mother was quick to say that she already was using formula, too, and that soon led to horror stories about breastfeeding making your child too dependent and taking up so much time and how formula wasn't that expensive, etc. Conversations like that are very common around here, so I wasn't surprised to hear any of that. What really got me was when the nursing mother started saying how she just wouldn't want to be confined to the baby like that, and the other mother readily agreed. How sad! I will never understand how a mother can talk about her child like that. Don't get me wrong. I understand and often feel the need for solitude and to have a little time without small bodies surrounding you and climbing all over you. It makes me so sad, though, for both the mother and the child when the mother feels like the baby is some burden that she now has and that she has to find ways to get away. Honestly, what is the point of having children if one of your first priorities is to find as many ways to make the child the least dependent on you as possible? I guess that's what happens in a society that holds such value on independence and has convinced generations of parents that it's unnatural for a baby or young child to be dependent and that this is actually healthy.

Sometimes I think about what my life would be like if I didn't have children or worked outside of the home. I was just thinking about this today because I was looking at this book, which has always been one of my big historical interests. I can't remember now if I read her diary first or saw a play about her first. During my first two years of college, history had been my minor with print journalism as my major. Cory and I married the summer before my junior year, and I transferred to a university where there wasn't a print journalism major. There was just a general mass communication major that included radio, television, etc. - things I had no interest in spending my time or tuition money on. So I flipped around my major and my minor and had an absolute blast those last two years. If I hadn't gotten pregnant when I did (Accalia was planned), I would have gone on to get my master's in history. I had and still have no desire to teach, which is what many students who get master's in history do. I've always had some ideas going around in my head about what I would like to do, and perhaps one day I will.

History and writing have always been the two areas of greatest interest for me, where I really got it and wanted to continue with them whether or not it was for a grade. I had/have a particular interest in women's history, and I remember the BIG paper I had to write for one class (around 20 pages). Margaret Sanger was the subject I had picked, but I can't remember my exact thesis without looking at the paper. What I do remember is how frightened of that professor I was, but how after I completed my paper and turned it in to him, he told me, "I don't agree with your conclusion at all, but this is exactly how you write an historical paper."

I could probably sit here and type away memories all day at this point, but now I have a girl who wants help putting her pictures in her photo album and a boy who wants Spiderman books read to him.