North Star Writers Group

When I first got pregnant a few years ago, I rushed to the library. Like many other hopeful and nervous first-time mothers, I needed to know what to expect when I was expecting. I had to have the week-by-week guide so I could memorize it on Sunday nights and proudly tell my husband, “The baby is the size of an avocado this week.”

Great fun!

But now, I’m pregnant for the second time, and kind of like updating your company’s web site with a new executive biography (yawn!), or reprinting a brochure because you’ve changed your prices (zzzz…), the books have become a little mundane other than the references to various foods for fetal sizes. Yet even that gets old toward the end when you feel like a watermelon is in there, but it’s really only a large pear.

So, I’ve decided that what’s really needed out in the marketplace of motherhood manuals is something for the second, third and other subsequent time-arounders.

Now that I know it’s perfectly OK to wake up in agonizing pain from a leg cramp, or to breathe heavy just walking to a conference room on the other side of the building, I need some more interesting pregnancy and child-rearing-questions answered.

I haven’t found these in any book yet, so I’m going to assume I’ve personally handled them the wrong way and that some expert will find me and set me straight.

First, the pregnancy experts need to tell me this: What is the best way to handle a 100-degree day when that watermelon is growing inside you? My husband wouldn’t let me take an ice-cube bath. I think he feared a trip to the emergency room with frostbitten parts he did not want to explain to the doctors. He’s also very frugal, and didn’t believe purchasing seven ice packs (one for each limb, plus my back, neck and stomach) was necessary.

Second, the early education experts must be called in before this one drives me crazy: When can I transition my child from a Sesame Street soundtrack to The Rolling Stones? In the car, he seems to like it, but at home, he still prefers “Rubber Ducky” to “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” I’d much rather play the latter. First, he doesn’t really know what that means. Second, isn’t securing his future as one of the few not-embarrassing dancers at high school proms and weddings getting important now?

Finally, I’m really looking for the interior designer to help me work the toy scene into feng shui.

Tickle Me Elmo does look sort of cute sitting on the high-back chair in front of my throw pillows, but I still can’t figure out what to do with The Little People. They – and their fire trucks and dinosaurs – don’t quite look right on the bookshelf. I tried the windowsill, but that was a bust. I also need to know if there’s a way to disguise kick balls, tennis balls, golf balls and baseballs as those designer ones that other people set in baskets on their coffee tables.

Once I have these three pressing parenthood problems answered, I’ll start looking for the career counselor to help me figure out a back-up wardrobe strategy for when the kids need clean pajamas more than I need a perfectly-pressed pair of pants. And to tell me how to send midday grocery lists to my husband more subtly so the cubicle neighbors and e-mail checkers of the corporate world don’t think I’m wasting that valuable two minutes of my day.

Four experts. One working mom. With those odds, I should be able to pull off having a second child and a career. But if we ever try for a third, I’m calling in the troops!

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This is Column # CD061. Request permission to publish here.