And that reason is that, especially during times like the present, when I’ve been watching the Republican National Convention and much related coverage for the past week, if I chose to write about what I was feeling, it would just end up being a nonstop stream of obscenities and anger, and hey, you guys don’t need that.

So instead, I thought I’d post the best of what others are saying about the issues at hand when I feel the need to vent. Here’s the always wonderful Jon Stewart on Sarah Palin and her supporters.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used the beat up digital camera I stole from my parents a couple years ago. In fact, I don’t even know where it is. This is because I gave J a new camera for his birthday, and since he’s had it I figured taken pictures just isn’t my responsibility any more. I may never take one again. I wasn’t good at it, anyway.

This morning I finally uploaded a bunch of the picture’s J’s taken over the past few months and thought I’d post a few of my favorites here.

Like this one. My father yawning in front of a yellow VW Bug.

J holding a chicken at his Aunt Gilda’s house.

Me on a recent trip we took to Mystic, Connecticut, where we didn’t eat at Mystic Pizza, you know, from the movie, but we did see a lot of boats.

A double rainbow we caught while having dinner with our friend Eileen.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to miss being pregnant a little. But then I realize I won’t, because I’ll have a baby.”

“Yeah. And she’ll be so much fun.”

“I know! Playing with her, holding her.”

“I’m going to sing to her. Talk to her. And…when do babies walk? Like three months?”

“Um, no.”

“Yeah. I need to learn some things.”

I recently wrote my first post for the findingDulcinea blog, which honestly, you should be reading anyway, but just in case you aren’t, I thought I’d post a link to my first entry.

You can read it here.

It’s about…mountain climbing? Skydiving? Auto repair? Ok! You guessed it! It’s about pregnancy.

In other news from findingDulcinea this week, people - not teenagers who raid their little brother’s stash, mind you - but fully functioning adults, are taking drugs like Ritalin to outdo their competition in the workforce, Clark Rockefeller is even crazier than you thought and we’re profiling some of the speakers at this week’s Democratic National Convention, which, thank God, came just in time to replace our nightly viewing of the Olympics. I have no idea what we’re going to do when it’s over.

This afternoon, after deciding that if I was going to have vanilla frozen yogurt, for Christ’s sake, I at least deserved a few M&Ms on top, I opened the freezer to discover that the pound bag I’d bought a long time ago, way in the beginning of my pregnancy, was nearly empty, and so, with due ceremony, I finished them.

It’s official. I have been pregnant for 17 million years.

From: Kathleen Rotondaro
To: Cara McDonough
Date: Fri, Aug 22, 2008

One more thing about the rug–don’t get a white one. Your baby might lob a bottle of grape juice over the crib rails and on to the rug–like you did.

Love,
Mom

Last week I got sick. One minute I had a mildly sore throat and the next I was down for the count, lying in bed with a raging headache, severe congestion and general aches and pains. I ended up taking a sick day Friday, because even though I was scheduled to work from home that day, I couldn’t imagine keeping my head upright for enough hours to actually write a story on the computer. To actually write a sentence, one that would have made sense, anyway.

Luckily my cold was of the intense, but short, variety, and I pretty much recovered within three days, with only a few annoying symptoms–stuffy nose, the occasional cough–lingering this week.

The sick day was kind of nice, though, besides feeling horrible. I’ve been talking for the past few months about how I’d really enjoy getting up one morning, staying in bed, and just watching TV all day, I guess because that just seems like something I never have the time to do since there are always three million other things going on.

Of course, the thing about wanting to do things like stay in bed all day and watch TV, however, is that you always end up getting to do it in these not-so-great circumstances. Like you get to do it…but you use up an entire box of Kleenex while doing so because your nose is running that much. Whatever, I was willing to take what I could get and settled in for a marathon television/nap session that I honestly believe helped me recover more quickly.

The other great thing about being sick and therefore feeling no guilt about watching a ton of TV is that I’m sort of addicted to the Olympics and it meant extending my primetime viewing (J and I have been rushing home at night to make dinner and obsessively watch whatever Olympic competition is going on, even fighting falling asleep for the night when things get really exciting) to all-the-time viewing.

And when you get to watch the Olympics all the time, you get to watch stuff besides gymnastics and swimming and running, because let’s face it, that’s the good stuff and they save it for the biggest audience. You get to watch stuff that’s, you know, more ridiculous.

I mean, if you really think about it, a lot of Olympic sports are ridiculous. I know others share this view, because I’ve had this conversation many times. Like diving, for instance. Like jumping off a springboard and doing a few somersaults and a half-twist or whatever and then trying to enter the water splash-free. That’s weird. But we love it. And award good divers gold medals.

And water polo. Water polo. Competitors wear little helmets and play, like, some kind of soccer in the pool.

Anyway, I continued my TV watching into Saturday. I was feeling better, but didn’t want to push it, and so took a few opportunities to lie down on the couch and see what was going on over in Beijing. During one of these sessions I turned on the TV (permanently tuned to NBC) to discover an athlete jumping up and down on a trampoline, doing flips in the air. The trampolining competition. TRAMPOLINING. It’s one of those things where if someone had asked me to make up a funny, but not overly far-fetched, fake Olympic sport, this is what I might have come up with. “The competitors jump up and down on, like, your normal, backyard, trampoline, but are graded on the height of their jumps and the precision of their backflips!”

I know I shouldn’t make fun. There is no way I could perform Olympic level feats on a trampoline, I’d fall on my face, but I swear, in addition to the moments that make your heart race, when Michael Phelps is going for his eighth gold or Usain Bolt is totally kicking everyones asses, perhaps stumbling upon trampolining, an actual Olympic event, is another thing I love so much about the games. Finding perfection in the normally mundane. Realizing that, seriously, there really is something out there for everyone.

My father was talking with a woman the other day who had recently had a baby. He told her about J and I, and how we were still undecided about the name, to which she replied, “When they see the baby, they’ll just know.”

Apparently my father went home and told my mother about this conversation, who paused and then announced, loudly, “Pruneface.”

Last week I had a doctor’s appointment with a doctor I hadn’t seen yet, who happened to be the first doctor at my practice who has discussed how much weight I’ve gained so far. I’ve enjoyed the blissful ignorance up to now. Not really knowing, except for a rough estimate, how much weight I’ve gained, if what I’ve gained is normal or not, and if I should maybe start eating less. While I know some women are plagued with heartburn or feeling exceptionally “full” no matter how little they eat during the third trimester I seem to have the opposite problem which is that I can eat and eat, and still be hungry.

Finding out the amount of weight I’ve gained, however, turned out to be no problem, as I’m right on target (if I keep gaining at my current pace) to be within the guidelines for the recommended weight gain during pregnancy by the time I have the baby. This news was rather freeing, I must say. I hadn’t given any thought to how much I was eating up until a couple weeks ago. My eating habits have been healthy, definitely, more so than when I’m not pregnant, but not neurotic. I mean, if you read a guide on what to eat when you’re pregnant, you come away thinking kind of insane things, like “Jesus, I’m not getting enough kale” and I decided after the first month or so of pregnancy that common sense (like eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and protein) is probably just as good as any pregnancy diet guide.

Anyway, I’d been doing just fine, until a couple weeks ago, when I looked at my, you know, girth, and thought, “What if the baby is, like, 12 or 13 pounds?” J assured me this was a ridiculous concern, but I need not tell him (or you) that ridiculous or not, I’m rather good at dwelling on just this kind of fear, saying things like “If the baby is 12 pounds, it’s not going to come out,” over and over again. And explaining that if the baby is 12 or 13 pounds, I’ll know it’s because of all the ice cream I ate.

People have asked me if I have any cravings during pregnancy, and when I tell them ice cream, they tend to say things like “Well, yeah, I crave ice cream all the time so that doesn’t seem that strange,” and I’m like, “Haha, yeah, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.”

I’ve never been that much of a fan of sweet stuff. Of course I like it, love chocolate and cake and all of that, I’m not nuts, but I don’t go crazy over it. Until now. My desire for ice cream, which occurs at least a few times a week, might begin at, say, 10 a.m. and stays with me the entire day until I allow myself to have it, which, when I’m home, usually comes in the form of a modest, but satisfying, ice cream sundae with M&Ms and whipped cream on top. And when I say that it “stays with me” all day, what I mean is I think about the ice cream that I want so badly probably four out of every five minutes. See? That’s what I mean.

Needless to say, the completely irrational but still horrifying thought that I might be tipping the charts in the weight department and therefore growing a giant child inside my body was worrisome because, well, I didn’t want the doctors to yell at me, first of all, and I didn’t want to have to go through what would be an undeniably uncomfortable birthing process.

But I was also worried that I’d all of a sudden feel limited like I hadn’t yet in these many, long months.

So, the discovery that my weight gain is “just fine” is more to me than an indicator of my good general health. It’s like the doctor told me that what I believed was my worst habit is not only harmless, but maybe even good for me. Like just when I thought all the fun was over, someone tapped another keg and the party can go on.

“Sometimes I wonder, if I saw one of my old high school teachers, what would I call them? Like, would I call them Mr. or Mrs. whatever? Or by their first name?”

“I think you’d call them whatever you called them in high school. I think that’s normal.”

“I mean…if I saw one of my old coaches, I’d definitely call them ‘coach.’”

“Sure. Makes sense.”

“One of my coaches, Coach Jacobs, was also my teacher. But he didn’t want us to call him ‘Mr. Jacobs.’ He was like, ‘Call me Coach Jacobs. Or Coach. Or Jake.’”

“Was his first name Jake?”

“No, his last name was Jacobs. And Jake is a nickname for Jacobs.”

“Well, sort of. Except that it’s usually a nickname for Jacob when it’s somebody’s first name. What was his first name?”

“Tom.”