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Or, Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

If you scrutinized the Boardwalk videos as closely as I did, this may not come as much of a surprise, but I seriously doubt that anyone else shared my motivation to determine whether my pants were bulging, especially with Allison Clare's wow-ing dominating the foreground. If you did notice, however, let me say at last that it was not just the Mack & Manco's pizza, Johnson's (warm, gooey, yet crisp) caramel corn, Kohr Brothers' ice cream, and boardwalk fries I had just consumed; it was a little early second birthday present Sam and I have been cooking up for Allison Clare. A bun, if you will.

First, some explanation: As anyone who has ever seen Sam in (. . . s . . . l . . . o . . . w . . .) motion can attest, he never moves quickly. We can be way late, or crossing a parking lot in the midst of a downpour, or in the path of an oncoming semi, and Sam merely accelerates from a stroll to a mosey. If I attempt to proceed at a normal rate, I feel him reach out from behind me and put an arm around my shoulders in a way that might look like a caress, but is actually a restraint, a lot like the hook that used to come out to pull the vaudeville act offstage. We say that he goes at Kentucky speed, while I go at New Jersey speed.

Thus, it seems poignantly ironic that he would be the architect of what feels like an accelerated family planning schedule. We had Allison Clare nine months and three days after our wedding, and this baby will be born pretty much exactly nine months after I conceded that we could even begin considering the possibility of having another. But Sam gave me the old "I have fertility problems!" song and dance, and being somewhat overly planful myself, I figured that it could take a while, that I was not getting any younger either, that we might end up pursuing adoption this time around, etc., etc. And there you have it: conceding we could start thinking about it was apparently all it took.

My last post was certainly no advertisement for our parenting abilities, but nonetheless, we are very excited. I am deliriously thankful not to have experienced morning sickness as severe/constant as the first time around. We won't know for about six more weeks whether it is a boy or a girl, but I feel certain that it is a boy. So far my prediction rate has been 100%, but one is hardly a statistically significant sample, so who knows?