The saddest and funniest story ever.

The young male bruin had been wandering around the Frazee area prior to and during the town’s weekend Turkey Days celebration, spending six days with the large plastic jar stuck on its head before police decided to shoot it. They did not have a tranquilizer gun available at the time, despite having been tracking the bear for days.

Last week was our first childbirth class through Yale. We go to one two-hour class a week for five weeks total and learn all about breathing and c-sections and epidurals, as well as tour the hospital. I was excited when I signed up for the class months ago. Pregnancy was newer then, and I couldn’t wait to learn all about pushing a baby out of my body, but last week, when it was time to attend that first class after a long Wednesday of working, what I really wanted to do was stay at home and watch an episode or two of “Law and Order: SVU” in the air-conditioned bedroom before going to sleep nice and early.

Luckily, once I got to the class and saw all the other pregnant women and met the retired nurse who’d be teaching us, I got excited again. It was fun to be with other people just as clueless as me and somehow, strangely fun to learn all about what our bodies were going through and what will happen as we get closer to delivering these babies.

One of the best things we did during class was practice relaxation techniques. Anyone who’s ever been to a yoga class will know the kind of thing I’m talking about, where you consciously relax every part of your body, from the top of your head to your toes, and then maybe do a little visualizing, imagining yourself somewhere nice and calm before gently waking up. It’s nice, really nice, and J just so happens to LOVE this kind of exercise. He says he’s “really good at it,” whatever that means.

So earlier this week we decided to practice the relaxation techniques we’d learned, as we’d been prompted to do. J decided to take the lead, since he’s so good at it and all. “I’ve been doing this since the eighth grade, and it never fails to make me completely relaxed,” he told me. “The eighth grade?” I said. I’d always assumed he’d learned relaxation exercises during some “Let’s All Get to Know One Another” party thrown by the resident advisors his freshman year in college, or from a Web site or something. But he explained that he’d learned the technique from his CCD teacher as he was preparing for confirmation when he was in eighth grade.

Well, whatever. J told me to get comfortable, so I did, lying on my side facing away from him as he lay next to me. He told me to start relaxing the various part of my body, just like I’d done every other time I’d performed this particular exercise, and I started to get really good and into it when he said “Now, breathe in and out, slowly. If you want, you can say a little mantra as you breathe. I like to say ‘Jesus, my Lord.’ ‘Jesus’ when I inhale, and ‘my Lord’ when I exhale. You can use that too, or you can make up your own. Now keep going-”

“Wait a second. What?”

“What?”

“WHY do you say ‘Jesus, my Lord?” I was beyond relaxation at this point. I could not stop laughing. “Because,” J said. “I told you. I learned this in confirmation class. That’s what the teacher told us to do.”

“But…that’s so ridiculous. So ridiculous.”

J, who found this little episode funny-how could you not?-but not as funny as I did, was trying to get back into the breathing, but I couldn’t let it go.

“‘JESUS MY LORD???’ Are you serious???”

“I TOLD YOU. I LEARNED THE RELAXATION EXERCISE IN MY CONFIRMATION CLASS.”

“What are you doing? Looking for bats?”

“No, it’s too late for bats.”

“Oh is it?”

“It’s not too late for owls, though.”

From: Fred Rotondaro
To: Cara McDonough
Date: Thu, Jul 17, 2008

Remember. It is ok to worry. Worry is the essence of man.
The belief that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong.
That, child, is wisdom
And you are wise.

I’m 30 weeks pregnant this week, which, to put the number in perspective, is out of 40, total. I’m having a new feeling as of late, and it’s not exactly bad, and it’s not physical - except for the occasional backache and feeling tired on busier days and, oh, you know, feeling a little bit like whale sometimes, I feel good.

The new feeling is kind of more like, “Oh my God, pregnancy lasts a long time” which is tough to admit, now, when I’ve still got ten weeks left. I know, I know, they’ll fly and I’ll find myself pacing the nursery (read: third bedroom upstairs with tons of boxes on the ground and all the clothes that used to fit me stuffed in the closet) in a frenzy because we don’t have enough time left, but right now, I’m getting pretty excited about meeting this baby. What does she look like? What does she like to do, besides hanging out up under my ribs?

I’m almost afraid to admit thoughts like these as of late. I guess I’m worried that someone will say something like “If you’re saying that now then JUST WAIT until the last month…” even though I’m not saying I feel bad or annoyed or sick of all this, not at all, just that I feel, well, that it’s been a pretty long haul and I’m kind of shocked when I realize I still have a couple months to go. Maybe it’s one of those things best uttered in retrospect, kind of like when I tell people how much I loved high school, a truth better to admit after the fact.

And anyway, when I get down to it, I know how little this slight impatience matters overall because I realize two things, really. One, is that despite “the end” being a period lasting weeks and weeks, I am in the final stretch, technically speaking. I mean, there are only three trimesters, and I’ve covered one and two.

The second thing, of course, is that I’ve got to enjoy this last part as much as is possible because as exciting as meeting this baby is going to be - ridiculously exciting - I won’t be pregnant anymore once that happens (um, obviously). And the stuff like having people ask me how I’m feeling all the time, and genuinely meaning it, which is so nice, and sleeping on the new pregnancy pillow my father sent me (which might be, I’m barely exaggerating here, the best invention in the world), will be things of the past. Not that I’m going to care, at that point, but for now, I seem to be allowed all these indulgences, and when I think about how my unstifled love affair with ice cream is only going to last ten more weeks, well, that’s quite a different story.

My new Sigg water bottle.

Seltzer water. With lime.

The French Kicks. Even though I haven’t really listened to one of their albums in full yet, every time I hear a song I like, it seems to be by this band. It’s the beginning of my relationship with them, and I’m having a good time.

I decided to forgo my occasional stop at Starbucks on the way to the office the other day and went, instead, to this coffee place in Grand Central for my decaf latte, where the cashier told me that I looked “great, by the way,” and that he’d “always been a sucker for pregnant women.” Good move, my friend, because you’ve got a customer for life.

Ice cream. Obviously.

The prospect of sleeping in until like 4 or 5 p.m. this coming Saturday, the first Saturday in forever where we have nothing planned. I mean, let’s face it, I’m going to wake up at 7 a.m. no matter how hard I try to convince my body otherwise, but I’m sure I can find plenty of reasons to stay in bed. Like the really good mystery I’m reading. Or the fact that, you know, it feels AWESOME to lie around in bed.

Verbal and physical quarreling, Elf Net smear campaigns and warring with rival Claus organizations have wracked a leading Santa group.

Read the full story on findingDulcinea. You know you can’t resist.

I’m 29 weeks pregnant this week. When people ask me how I’m feeling, I reply that “I’m still feeling really good,” as though I am well aware that give it a couple weeks, a month, whatever, I may not be feeling so good. Because I’ve heard. I know the complaints that arise at pregnancy’s end. The heartburn. The fatigue. The ready-for-it-to-be-over feeling.

I’m not there yet. I mean it when I say I feel really good. I do, at least for the most part. What I mean by that vague “good” is that, when I wake up in the morning, as opposed to in my non-pregnant past, I feel absolutely healthy every single day. I don’t wake up with a stomachache, say, or a headache. I don’t wake up with sinus pressure or a random feeling that I might be getting the flu or a cold even if I’m not, that, you know, you sometimes identify a few mornings every couple of months when you wake up. I feel constantly, assuredly, like my immune system is working at 150 percent. And it’s a good feeling.

I’m really happy, too,— again, for the most part…there is the occasional crying episode, where the tears flow down my face like a river, out of nowhere, maybe because my ankles are really swollen that day (see below) or during a moving scene on some medical TV drama, and then, just like that, they’re gone—although I’m not crazy, like Halle Barry and a whole host of other celebrities who I’ve seen quoted as saying they’d like to be “pregnant forever.” Let’s not get ridiculous. I like it a lot, but not forever. Come on.

Despite all the positive stuff, I will admit that in the last couple of weeks things have changed somewhat. First of all, I got really big all of a sudden, or at least feel like I am really big. My once cute, five-month bump turned into a large, unruly, seven-month belly, with a half-protruding belly button. Sometimes, particularly the days I ride the train to New York, my back hurts. Sometimes when I’m walking the ten blocks to my office from the train station, my laptop and purse and water bottle, etc. in tow, my feet and calves strain, as though to say, “Seriously, we’re not rated for this”

And then there are my ankles and feet, which in the humidity of July, tend to get noticeably bigger at times, particularly after a day working at home, where we don’t have air conditioning.

I was sitting last night on our couch, my feet up on the ottoman, looking at my sausage feet and for the first time, ever, during this pregnancy, I just didn’t feel up for it. I wasn’t up for my normally petite feet looking like that. I wasn’t up for dealing with another couple months of not drinking really good white wine on particularly hot days.

To make matters worse, we just got back from a trip to Maine. All my best friends from high school came into town and for four days we played games and took walks, ate lobster and swam and reminisced. We watched fireworks from across the bay on the Fourth. They threw me my very first baby shower. We decorated onesies with fabric markers. It was, in a word, wonderful, and all of my pregnancy symptoms went completely away in that relaxed state. My ankles stood out proudly. My little feet supported my big body, no problem.

So sitting there looking at my fat toes suddenly set me off. My good friends, my incredibly fortunate life, my healthy pregnancy, my supportive husband, my amazing family – no matter. My feet! They were big and I couldn’t fit into anything but my flip flops and I started crying.

J, always attentive and comforting. who met me at the train station the day before with San Pellegrino orange soda and cheese and crackers because he knew I’d be hungry, immediately asked me what was wrong. I told him it was my feet, yes, “that was all,” and that I needed to take a shower. I turned the water on cool, but not freezing, got in, and began to calm down. Something about the peppermint soap and my Burt’s Bees pomegranate shampoo and the cool, flowing water did the trick. I took my time. I put things into perspective, and emerged happy again, thinking not about being pregnant, but about the baby, who, in a short time (even when it feels like forever) we will get to meet.

When I got to the bedroom, the door was closed, and I opened it to discover that J had installed a window air conditioning unit we got a few weeks ago but hadn’t found the time to put in yet. The room got colder as we watched the final half of an episode of “What Not To Wear,” and then we slept, the dogs curled up on their beds instead of lying on their sides panting, and me and J under the covers for the first time since the New England winter yielded to this unrelenting, but now so very bearable, season.