The Red Wedding actually made me a bit annoyed at myself for being a book reader. The impact was devastating on the page, but I think it would have been even more visceral to experience it for the first time on the screen. I typically watch GoT with non-book reading friends, and I sometimes think that knowing the…

Fucking Jojen. When he died on the show, I was like "this is some fan service I can get behind!" If it's a spoiler, though, it's a pretty mild one, considering he spends the better part of the last book talking on and on about how his death is coming for him, anyway. Little Grandfather, indeed.

Or to the ion that moves across its channels to keep her heart beating. Just for instance. People are ridiculous.

Good to know... Since my first was born, my unofficial motto has been "this too shall pass" with regard to every gnarly phase and setback, and that's also true of any chaos #2 will bring!

Yeah, I mean, you don't have to tell them that the "medical complication" is that their meddling makes your uterus curl up and run away. That's nobody's business but yours!

While you're correct in terms of the very basic fact that each parent only contributes one chromosome (in an scenario where there are no abnormalities), this refers to the fertilization event only, and not to the totality of the process of carrying a child to term. Maternal health and nutrition, age, and other less…

How we decided: It's funny, because I just made a rather lengthy reply over on Jezebel about how I was super ambivalent about becoming a Mom, the first and the second time. However, my husband had always wanted to be a father, the same way a lot of women say they were "born to be Moms." So, before we got married, we…

Yeah, that's awful. I never realized what a personal, if not straight-up invasive question that is, until I watched a friend who was stuggling with her fertility get asked it over and over again. I was one of the few people she had told, and I just wanted to rip the tongue out of anyone who asked. When people ask me…

That sucks - we'd all be so much happier if we'd stop rubbernecking other people's reproductive choices. And yet, that's apparently never going to happen.

For sure, there's a tremendous amount of biochemistry involved in the "love-tide", and as a biochemist I was counting on it! Then when it didn't really happen, I was like "WTH, body!" I did start sweating profusely and shivering at the same time, though, so I guess that's something. And I do think that the…

"...um, no, PARENTING."

Preach. It's amazing. Our parents and step-parents are constantly in and our of our house, and it's awesome - for our son and for us. We've had to carefully carve out certain boundaries (stay out of the master suite, everybody), but for the most part, it works. My friends, even the ones who get along with their…

That would be a very interesting social studies project. Or seven. Probably when you remove the significant lifestyle and economic barriers to having children, you tip the scales for the people who are ambivalent for practical reasons like the exhorbitant cost to have a baby and the near-inevitable career…

I'm only about halfway through the season, but I'm glad to hear that there's a bit of a redemption arc for the "Jane Krakowski is Native American" subplot. I admit it gave me the white guilt squirmies when I saw the first episode with her parents, and my husband was muttering "oh, please no" the whole time. But I…

Exactly. As they say, "in vino STFU" right?

Internet hugs... this is a hard, and a big, decision. I wrote upthread about my own ambivalence before I had a child, and my own mixed feelings about the fact of that ambivalence. The conditions for baby-making could not have been more ideal (live a country with progressive maternity leave policies and social…

All of these are totally valid points. I have to say, though, I think "pregnancy ambivalence" is still a real thing independent of these factors. I say this as, possibly, the luckiest woman in the world. I live in the land of 1-year guaranteed mat leave and socialized medicine, in a major city with tremendous access…

My husband and I talked about this too, when our little guy came along. He would have loved to be a SAHD, and I definitely have the higher salary and future earning potential. However, somewhere along the line, I realized that although he would make an awesome stay at home dad, he would make a pretty terrible stay at…

Eva Mendes had a baby. She pushed a baby out of her body. She is lying out her ass about her sweatpants practices.

Ouch. That sounds like quite the "never the twain shall meet" situation. We had similar tensions between my husband's family (blue collar country Baptists, look down on fanciness or pretensions to same) and my parents (middle class city folk from humble beginnings, believe that a certain degree of fanciness is part of…