“What’s wrong?”

“I just…I can’t find any socks to wear.”

“None?”

“No. And when I can’t find my socks in the morning, it totally sets me up to have a bad day.”

“You have a hard life. Let’s face it. You have a really hard life.”

This weekend we had some friends in town to celebrate J’s birthday. There were a few nice cameras among the group, and while we were taking a walk down by the water, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine, my friend Matt suggested it might be fun to throw Mina up in the air and get a few good pictures of her.

Which turned out to be one of the best ideas ever.

Thanks to Tom and Sam for taking these amazing shots.

It’s been a strange time.

I was unpacking some glasses the other day—a few of what seemed like the millions upon millions of pint glasses we’ve amassed over the years—and came across two glasses wrapped carefully in brown paper that I had to show J once I’d pulled them out and remembered where we’d gotten them. Printed on the sides was the name of a brewery in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where we’d spent an evening drinking beer with the locals on our road trip. After we’d each had a few and made friends with everyone at the bar, the staff kindly wrapped up a couple pint glasses and gave them to us to take home, so we’d remember the experience.

I thought I’d have some really insightful reflections after getting home from our cross country trip. That I’d be able to sit and write for hours about it, remembering each day in great detail. The plains of South Dakota. The enthusiastic young volunteer who helped us find some shore birds for J at the aquarium in Chicago. The fireside sofas and neverending supply of baked goods at our inn in Sante Fe, as well as the other travelers we met there and forged friendships with for a few, brief days. And of course, our night of revelry in Cannon Beach, then waking up the next morning to meander down to the water and take in Haystack Rock, one of the most impressive sights I’d seen during our travels, even after seeing so many incredibly impressive, unforgettable sights.

But I never sat down post-journey to analyze our adventure. We came home early because J’s dad was sick and in the hospital. We drove through endless Oklahoma in a rush, stopped briefly for rest in West Memphis, Tennessee, then woke up and continued on. One would drive while the other slept. I listened to the entire “The Diana Chronicles” by Tina Brown on CD over the course of one long night and early morning.

We got to Connecticut and moved into J’s old room in his family’s house – a little earlier than expected, although that’s what we’d always planned to do before we found a place of our own. We made frequent visits to the hospital, and slowly, J’s dad recovered. He’s now home and is doing great and that, of course, is wonderful news.

We drove around looking for a house to buy and J started work. I started writing letters to newspapers, telling them about my experience, and scanning the classifieds and web sites for communications jobs. I felt discouraged when I couldn’t find enough possibilities in New Haven and expanded my search to New York City. Everything seemed at once urgent, and easy. After all, we were living at home with family and being taken care of. But all our stuff was still in boxes in the garage. And we were well aware it couldn’t stay there forever.

There were a lot of things that were stressful for me during this time, things that I think register high for me personally on my own gauge of stressful things. Moving is always very stressful for me, so to be in a state of limbo, not knowing when we’d end up in a permanent location, was pretty hard. Finding meaningful work was obviously important, so searching the job openings endlessly without any hits made me feel discouraged, like I wasn’t trying hard enough. And J and I were living in rather cramped quarters, and I mean that almost more figuratively than literally. We were (and still are) sharing a car and we were also sharing a room where we’d put (dumped) a lot of our belongings. So even when we each had alone time, it was kind of hard to feel actually alone. You were kind of always at the mercy of the other person.

I don’t mean to make it sound like we were living the tough life or anything. Come on! J and I are as lucky as they come, and the thing is, we had a lot of fun, which I think was on account of the fact that our familes are always fun to be around, and always supportive, and also, when you get down to it, we can both complain to the high heavens when we feel like it, but we generally maintain a rather positive outlook on life.

Anyway, the point of this rambling discourse, which hopefully, maybe, you’ve stuck with up until now, is to say that I would have thought, with everything going on, that when I felt a little funny one morning in mid-January and decided I’d better take a pregnancy test, and sat in the bathroom waiting the required three minutes before peering over at the counter to glimpse that faint second line in the results window, that maybe in addition to feeling elated, I’d feel a little overwhelmed, because, you know, of all the things going on that meant our life was rather unsettled at the moment.

And babies, I’ve heard, don’t tend to make things more settled.

Instead though, I saw the decidedly positive result, then ran to the store to buy another test just to make sure (that one was positive too), and after a few shaky moments, I felt, for the first time in a while, calm. Then I felt like I was going to throw up. Then I felt calm again. And then very, very excited.

Since then we’ve moved into our house. We’ve slowly unpacked. I’ve found a job that I love and we’ve spent time with family and friends. It’s not like our life has become a model of serenity or anything—far from it—but we’re tripping over less boxes on our way out the door in the morning, and the other night, after it had been lying disassembled in the garage for over six months, we put together and slept in our bed.

Everything is coming along, including this very small someone I’m carrying around all day, who is getting bigger and making me bigger, little by little.

I mean, I don’t want to sound trite, but I can’t help it – it couldn’t really get any better than this. We are an amazingly happy couple, soon to become three.

We will get more and more settled, I know, as the weeks go on, as spring turns into summer.

But settled is no fun for too long.

The baby is due in late September. Just in time to turn it all upside down again.

I can’t wait.

It’s not much, but here are two pictures I proudly took of our new place. I’ll post more soon. Wouldn’t want to give it all away at once, would I?

The color we painted our bedroom is called “cumulus” (I almost wanted to pick this very similar color called “salty tear” simply because it was called “salty tear” but, hey, you can’t make every single decision by going with whatever is funniest):

The bookshelves in the living room:

I should mention that J did all of the above work - both the painting and the putting away of books. I, in the meantime, was organizing all our pots and pans and whatnot in the kitchen and, let’s face it, that just doesn’t make a good picture.

“Look! My business card collection.”

“Why did you have a business card collection? And don’t put that in the pile, we have no room for this stuff.”

“And my postcard collection.”

“Nice. Put put that back, we’re not bringing it. And let’s go. You can go through your closet another day.”

“My old James Madison phonebooks!”

“Oh my God. Please don’t bring those. Let’s go. PLEASE.”

Because the upstairs bathroom in our house features a very charming but slightly impractical old-fashioned clawfoot tub, J who is, let’s say, slightly taller than me, immediately ruled out ever trying to take a shower there. Luckily our finished basement also features a full bathroom, with a normal-person-sized shower, and he uses that.

I thought that the showering would be it. That he’d wake up and wander downstairs for a shower before coming back up, into the light, to finish getting ready.

Instead, he’s done his best to turn the downstairs bathroom into a fully-fledged Man Bathroom, with a geometrically-patterned shower curtain and blue bath mat and he totally loves it down there.

Meanwhile, I spent hours cleaning and sprucing up my bathroom, as I now refer to it, before doing anything else once we’d moved in. Because I really wanted it to be a nice place to hang out.

And now we talk about our bathrooms, and after living in a very tiny house in North Carolina, and sharing a very tiny bathroom, this is really new for us, and I don’t know how far it will go. This morning I discovered that J had taken the one bottle of saline solution we have from my bathroom and put it downstairs in his, and I found myself thinking, as I marched it back upstairs, “Who does he think he is? You can’t just steal from me like that. This is war.”

J and I have been sleeping in the new house, on a futon we’ve set up in the basement. We’ve got two pillows, one thin blanket and a TV and DVD player set up in the corner on a box, but somehow it’s a lot of fun.

Last night, after finishing work, I decided I wanted to take a quick walk down to the water and along the seawall, where an asphalt path runs parallel to the road. That’s one of the first things that drew us to the place, the fact that we’d be so close to the water, and not only that, there is a terrific network of walking trails and parks nearby. It’s nice, in this automobile-driven world, to be able to walk places, and from our house we can walk to both the water and to this awesome Italian deli – the kind you never would have found in North Carolina.

So, basically, we picked the perfect location.

Poor J has been really sick, but he opted to join me in this first jaunt around the new neighborhood. In the half block of sidewalk we covered while making our way to the water, we looked at the houses surrounding ours, the various shapes and sizes, and the materials used to build them. Some with old, wooden porches, and some with tiny balconies on the second floor, the kind where you’d imagine wives looking out for their seafaring husbands.

Down at the seawall, we breathed in the smell of salt water and the air felt damp. “There is just something about the water,” I said. I’ve said this a lot over the years, including at the beach with a cold drink in my hand when, yeah, obviously there is just something about the water, but I do sincerely mean it and it’s not a very original sentiment by any means. People tend to like the water, whether it’s a little cove on the edge of New Haven or the vast ocean, complete with crashing waves.

We walked, talking about the area, wondering if we could somehow get down to that little sandy beach in the distance, questioning the purpose of the stone steps placed at intervals along the path, leading straight into the murky depths, and how maybe that’s what you do when you’ve simply had enough – you just walk down that oddly-placed set of stairs and end it all.

From our new vantage point we checked out the houses facing the water. They looked so inviting with their tall windows and warmly lit interiors. Several were built with three levels, each one a little smaller than the one below so that the top level was just one room with, you’d imagine, a wonderful view. A great room for curling up and reading a book.

We came across a young couple, probably about our age, sitting on a bench having a Guinness, said a polite hello and as soon as we were safely out of hearing range, discussed how “totally cool” that was although, remarked J, technically illegal.

“I know,” I said. “But that is another reason why I love this neighborhood. I don’t think people here care too much about the rules – in a good way. Like, they won’t care if we have a party and it’s kind of noisy. They clearly don’t care if people paint their houses pink. They won’t care about Mina, for instance. ‘Your crazy little Chihuahua-like dog hates children? That’s ok with us.’”

The other day J and I were driving around running errands when we decided to stop at the cemetery where his grandfather is buried to pay our respects. Besides this being an obviously nice thing to do, it was also cool because I like to look around cemeteries. No, I’m not into ghosts or anything, but I like to look at the headstones and the pictures and words inscribed there. The family names. The ways people are remembered.

We were standing there, freezing cold by the way - the sky grey and severe wind whipping around our legs - when J heard a his favorite kind of noise and turned quickly on his heels to check out where it had come from. Before I knew what was going on or could tell him to “Calm down! We’re in a graveyard!” he had sprinted back to the car to retrieve the pair of binoculars he now constantly keeps under the front seat and had made his way back to the small patch of grass where he thought he’d seen a new bird, and was shouting over his shoulder to me that “Eitan says cemeteries are really good places to bird because there’s lots of well-maintained grass and not a lot of people.”

This was yet another of those charming times I learn something new about the world like the fact that birds love cemeteries, and that you can be having a perfectly serene afternoon checking out the headstones when a new species alights on a nearby twig and, suddenly, life is just way more exciting.

I’m 30. I’m living in the home my husband grew up in - in the very room he inhabited as a child, in fact - with his family, until we can find a place of our own. I have no job. I don’t really have any job prospects. Therefore, in order to avoid major catastrophe (which could involve multiple, daily trips to Dunkin’ Donuts among other atrocities) I’ve decided there have got to be some rules.

1. I will wake up at a normal time, “normal” defined as 8 a.m. or earlier. Just like people who work.

2. I will put on normal clothes every morning. Here “normal” could include the tracksuit I got for Christmas, but does not mean mismatched sweatpants and sweatshirts, or anything else that might prompt the words, “Um, are you going to go out in that,” from J.

3. Watching my new DVD of the first season of “The Hills” is ok during the lunch break I shall grant myself each day, but only during my lunch break.

4. My lunch break will not span two or three hours.

5. After searching for jobs for countless hours it is ok to play solitaire or write some emails to friends for a little break, but it is not ok to fall into a depressive slump and declare myself unfit for the world of employment, so maybe I should just eat this entire bag of Hershey’s Kisses…?

6. Nobody likes a whiner.

Yesterday was our second anniversary and although wedding anniversaries are normally a chance for a couple to ruminate on their love for one another, I think J and I are the kind of people who would really prefer to treat them as another birthday. So our day yesterday was punctuated by us saying things like, “Well, it’s my anniversary, so I’m going to eat whatever I want,” or “It’s my anniversary, I’m going to buy this even though I normally wouldn’t.”

I tried to get my parents in on the idea, too, like by telling my father Sunday night that I would really appreciate it if he would bring me coffee in bed the next morning because “it’s my anniversary.” This is something he tricks me into doing quite often. He lies in bed yelling at the top of his lungs, “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello,” until someone, usually me, yells back, “What?” and then he says, “Come talk to me, I’m lonely,” and then when you do that, he’s sitting there with the newspaper holding out a coffee cup. At this point he states that, “If you really loved me, you’d get me some coffee,” and inconceivably, this works every time.

J and I actually have dinner reservations in DC tonight since the place we wanted to go isn’t open Mondays, so we decided to spend our day yesterday hanging out together, getting lunch at a good deli and walking around Annapolis.

Before we left, however, we had to deal with some things.

It was after I’d finished cleaning up a pile of small-ish turds I’d found on my parents’ bedroom floor, left undoubtedly by Mina, and was proceeding to get ready for the day that I noticed Cecilia, our big pit-bull mix, was acting kind of funny.

Normally a happy-go-lucky, goofball type, she had retreated under the dining room table and was not engaging in her normal tongue kisses with the Labradoodle, and I had, literally, just said aloud, “Huh, I don’t think Cecilia feels good,” when I heard a bad, sick sound and turned around to discover she’d puked all over the carpet.

I know that some of you are going to say “just wait until you have kids,” but I’ve been around lots of babies and children and I’ve also been around lots of dogs, and I’ve got to tell you - dog puke really takes the cake. And this was seriously unreal. Cecilia has a sensitive stomach anyway and since we’ve been living here she’s been heading gleefully down to the water and eating her fair share of dead fish that wash ashore, and, I mean, you get the picture. I don’t want to trigger any gag reflexes or anything, just know that this was above and beyond.

I threw her outside and started calling wildly for J, who’d headed down the driveway to check the mail or look for a bird or something, “The dog threw up! The dog threw up! Cece threw up! I can’t believe it, it’s so much,” while I grabbed an entire roll and a half of paper towels, some soda water and starting cleaning with a speed and intensity I reserve for true emergencies.

In the meantime, she puked on the porch, and I started to really lose it. It was my anniversary, damnit! My day! What was wrong with her, didn’t she know?

It took some serious time to recuperate from the incident, but J helped talk me through it, helped me forget some of the more intimate details, and we proceeded to have a great afternoon. We both admitted we hadn’t gotten each other presents and so we picked out things in stores and “bought them for one another” using our joint checking account. We stopped on our way home and got food to grill out and a bottle of French wine for dinner.

And I did get coffee in bed that morning, although not from my father despite my lying there for a while yelling “Hello,” at the top of my lungs for an extended period until someone came to my rescue, which will definitely come into play the next time he claims he wants me to come talk to him, but really wants me to be his slave.

It was instead my darling husband who brought me a mug of coffee as I rested in bed, before getting up, before the chaotic events of the day unfolded, and when he placed it on the bedside table he told me that he’d “put a secret ingredient in there, see if you can taste it.”

I couldn’t - only tasted the coffee with milk, the way I like it - and so he explained that he’d put a little chocolate syrup in there, at which point I started laughing, and he said, yeah, yeah, he knew putting a little chocolate syrup in doesn’t make it a mocha or anything, but that it was sort of a mocha.

I thought about J’s special coffee the rest of the day. It got me through spraying Resolve carpet cleaner around the dining room in a maniacal manner and I smiled about it while walking around town.

It just may have been my favorite thing about our anniversary - the kind of gesture you can only give to someone you are comfortable enough with to know they will be pleasantly surprised, and not angry, when you add chocolate syrup to their regular coffee lineup. The kind of thing you do when you want to do something nice for somebody you love to make an everyday experience a little extraordinary. It’s both hilarious and heartwarming, and it’s why cleaning up seriously ridiculous amounts of puke on your two-year anniversary is only a minor pitfall on an otherwise wonderful day.