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Reading Material:	101 Ways to Help Your Daughter Love Her Body by Brenda Lane Richardson and Elane Rehr
	+ asst. romance novels and children's books

Good stuff. I discovered that the stiffness in my hips that I get in late pregnancy has nothing to do with doing aerobics, but rather is completely the result of sleeping on my side on a futon mattress with roughly the give of an angry water buffalo. Alan was working late so Connor and I retired to the futon in the living room which is much, much softer. To my amazement, I didn't have to hobble the first few steps when I got up in the morning. Yay! This is very cool. Still no pictures, maybe today.

I've been ruminating (for the past 2.5 years or so) on the way parenting tests and changes relationships. For one thing it's a big job, and for many people it changes them a lot. People can deal with this in a couple of ways, but neither is without pitfalls.

Method 1 is for one partner, usually the woman, to take over pretty much the entire project. This saves a lot of contention over how and who is going to do the significant work in raising the munchkin, but it starts the couple off on very different roads, and I understand it can often end in them no longer being a couple.

Method 2 is for both partners to attempt to take a more or less equal hand in the business. Tremendous new areas of contention open before you. This means what can be a tremendous amount of work in reconciling the different parenting styles of each person into some reasonable whole, reconciling parenting goals, and expectations of who is going to do what and how much. Basically you become teammates in a very challenging endeavor. Some people probably find that the skills and qualities required to rub along as bosum companions are very different from those required of teammates that closely depend upon each other to get a shared job done. On the upside, you're in this together, so you grow and change together.

Before I had Connor, I read an article by a mother who compared her marriage with small children to the time when she and her spouse both worked in different cities for a while, to save up money for their common goals. I found this fairly intimidating at the time, and have since found it to contain more than a grain of truth for our own situation. After Connor was born, I often felt that I missed Alan even though he was no farther from me physically than before, he was just a lot more busy, and not with me. But my love and admiration for him grew tremendously as I watched him rise to the task of being an amazing father, and the time we made to be together became much more precious. On the other hand, I had to learn to grow a thicker skin, make dinner sometimes, try harder to see things from his point of view, and find more effective ways of expressing my wants and needs to him.

Aquarium plants are hanging in there! They have survived and vanquished the first wave of algae, but the fish have eaten a bunch of them I think. If I wasn't trying not to spend money, I would get more. We spent the day with Alan's grandma yesterday. I told her about the practice of many non-industrial cultures (and natural-living minded midwives) to encourage women to eat the placenta. She didn't think much of it. :) She showed Alan how she makes pasta sauce, and me how to make the vinegar and oil dressing I used to get at my favorite I-talian restaurant, and I ate too much fry bread with my mom's peach jam. All-and-all it was good.