About two or three months or so ago, I was in bed on the phone with my laptop open in front of me, when I decided to get up, or maybe I rolled over, or maybe aliens possessed my body and I levitated for a minute, I can’t really remember. But the point is: the computer slid off the comforter and crashed straight to the floor, landing solidly on the narrowest portion of the side where all the hoosie-whatsits get plugged in. Since I was on the phone, I did not say any expletives (behold my mammoth restraint!) or even gasp audibly. I continued on with the conversation as if I hadn’t just numbskulled my way into a potentially budget- and job productivity-threatening situation.

After hanging up, I gingerly retrieved the unit from its sad, sprawled state and gave it a once over, and oh, it was not good. There were blue wires coming out of the back that had not been visible before, and the top no longer met the bottom in a nicely symmetrical way, but instead made my Mac look like it had a pronounced underbite. I was pretty sure everything was toast, but lo and behold when I opened it up and powered it on, I was met with the reassuring BONNNNNNNNNG of hardware life. Jubilation! Rejoicing! Fist pumping!

So, as a result, I began toting around the sorriest looking sad excuse for a laptop you have ever seen in all your days, out to coffee shops, to work, on trips, etc. And it kept chugging along with no apparent issues or malfunctions. So smug was I, with my still-working wonky workstation! Looks don’t matter to me! It’s what’s on the inside that counts! And other malarkey.

And though it has kept a stiff upper lip, held its head high, hung in there, etc. now it’s begun shutting down, ever-so-slowly, like rot setting in to a turkey sandwich left out in the sun. The power cord is iffy at best, only charging the computer when I hold my mouth right, and sometimes not even then. Currently, my routine is to work on the computer for as long as I can while the battery is holding strong, and then when I just can’t risk it anymore, I save all my work, shut down, unplug the unit, remove the battery (using a coin that I scrounged out of the couch), hold down the power button for five seconds, put the battery back in, turn it back on, and then insert the power cord. This is a method researched extensively by L on the internet on some magic Mac quick-fix voodoo website and works about two-thirds of the time. Sometimes I do it up to four times in one hour.

Next up, we try a chanting ritual with chicken bones, arranged in the shape of a once-bitten apple.

These maintenance methods will work indefinitely, I’m pretty sure. I should teach seminars.

Sayonara, ya ol’ Six Shirt

Of course. OF COURSE. It’s like tiny gremlins see you coming and scamper over to the cake aisle to hoard away all your kid’s birthday numbers just before you round the corner from the deli. Bastards!

Prepped for the birthday breakfast.

YES.

Ninja griddling.

Great card givers think alike.

Can you even. I mean, I can’t even.

Excuse me, but there seems to be a gigantic grown boy? On my teeny little Noah’s new birthday rug?

It’s the traditional birthday pot pie! (Traditional, first ever, whatever.)

Bubble bath WITH jets, because that’s how you roll on your birthday.

Goodnight my biggest boy, my super kid, my lucky number seven.

I am headed down I-75S towards Stockbridge, Georgia with my med school classmate Paolo, on our way to visit a housebound woman who was in a serious car accident some months before. It is an exercise for our Doctor-Patient small group, and I feel a little peeved that I am expected to drive 45 minutes away for my task when most everyone else in the class has been assigned someone at the local home for the elderly, or even people in the hospital right across the street. Paolo is driving, and has Sufjan Steven in the stereo: Illinoise. He has just been to see Sufjan in concert with several of our classmates, and I find myself wishing once again that I could be free enough to be a part of that scene—going to hear live music or grabbing a beer with my lab group after a particularly grueling anatomy dissection. But there is an 18-month old boy at home who sees far too little of me as it is, and any extra time I have is rightfully his.

Paolo and I talk for the first 20 minutes or so, but as the CD plays on we both become lost in our own thoughts, slightly nervous in our brand new and spotless student doctor coats, feeling a little like poseurs. What was this lady going to say to us? What will we say to her? I am grateful to Sufjan and his calm, unhurried voice as we pull up to her modest apartment complex. We weave around the parking lot, squinting at the numbers on the buildings until her door appears and we turn off the car, squaring our white-coated shoulders for the unknown inside.

Sufjan Stevens – Chicago by TAtunes

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Noah is still tiny enough to still be rocked to sleep, and L and I have searched out music that we can listen to night after night after night and not want to gouge our eardrums out with sporks. We’ve just purchased the soundtrack from the movie Garden State, and one of the songs is by Iron and Wine. We dig it. Their album Our Endless Numbered Days soon becomes every afternoon’s nap time playlist. It is peaceful and a little melancholy, but it fills the hours well as I move back and forth with the motion of the rocker, the weight of a small warm body nestled in the crook of my arm.

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There is coffee with a generous helping of store-bought vanilla creamer in the cupholder of my Subaru Forester, and I have on tights—a piece of clothing I haven’t worn or even owned in a long time. I’ve just been hired as an assistant editor at a national magazine, and it feels so unbelievable that I have to remind myself it’s really happening to me and not someone else. I haven’t had a full-time job in five years, but now I’m driving the surface streets of Atlanta at 7:30 in the morning, slowly inching my way toward the connector, radio cranked up to blast on my honest-to-god grown up commute. Guster has just come out with their Easy Wonderful album, and I’m pretty sure every song has been written directly and explicitly for me. I turn on to the entrance ramp and start to accelerate toward my new building and desk and title complete with business cards as the song sings my life out the windows and into the traffic-filled lanes of the freeway that points me toward my future.

So take a breath and step into the light. Everything will be all right. This could all be yours someday. This could all be yours someday.

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This is what music does. It keeps our memories and holds them, until the first few notes slip them seamlessly back into our mind and we live the experiences right out again, like we’re still there. Like we never even left in the first place.

Yesterday as I was swiping a finger across my laptop’s trackpad, the dashboard sticky notepad popped up on my screen with the list of girl names I had been keeping around for inspiration. None of the names were “the” choice, but they were names I’d heard that made me pause, so I wrote them down, in hopes that either they would become The One, or would prod The One to show itself front and center. I looked at the list for a minute, and then went to delete them. But I couldn’t do it.

You guys, I think I’m sad. It feels unexpected, this melancholy. I can say without hesitation that I felt absolutely neutral going in to the 12 week ultrasound about the gender of this kid. In fact, if anything, I probably leaned a little tiny bit toward boy, only because that was just always how I thought things would shake out. (When I was younger, I thought I would have only boys.) So when the ultrasonographer said “girl,” I didn’t have a “Yay!” moment, or a “No!” moment, just a “Oh!” moment. And then I started planning.

See, I think that’s where I ran into trouble. This is the way I work: Every morning when I wake up, I think of the thing I’m most looking forward to that day. It could be anything—coffee on the way to work, lunch with a friend, my bed at night (this happens the most during pregnancy, I think), whatever. It’s like the gas in my motor (uh, that’s how motors run, right?) or the spark for my fire. I think anticipation is really important to me—knowing something specific that’s on its way and conjuring up all the ways in which that thing will make me happy. So after that 12 week appointment, I got to conjuring. And boy howdy, did I conjure up a lot.

Rosie Mae has turned my feelings about being a mom to a girl right on their head. I had no idea what to expect when she came along, and frankly, I was terrified. I didn’t think I would be very good at it. It’s like I was afraid to have a girl. I mean, who knew anything about girls? Not me. Would I even like what girls liked? What if she wasn’t anything like me? What if she was exactly like me? I kind of freaked out, I’m not going to lie. There were tears on her ultrasound day, and man, if that won’t just ratchet up your mom guilt quotient a good thousand percent or so.

But then she came out, and was Rosie. Not just some girl, but the best girl. My girl.

Getting to know her has been one of the best things ever to happen in my life, and I think that has something to do with my excitement about another girl on the way. I’d get to do it all over again, but this time without so much of the fear and trepidation. Just pure excitement.

So when there was more to be seen (if you know what I mean) than we expected last Wednesday, my initial gut reaction was a little bit of a “Oh no!” like the feeling you get when you raise a glass to your lips expecting to sip some sweet tea and instead get a swig of orange juice. You like orange juice, it’s just not the taste you were expecting.

Understand: I am not disappointed that this baby is a boy. I just need time to shift my brain around a little, prod it around to THERE’S A BOY IN THERE and get those good juju vibes aconjurin’. I know they’ll come. Waiting for Noah was one of the best periods of my whole life. I couldn’t wait to meet my boy, and when I did, I loved him automatically and feverishly, like someone struck down with an incurable malady. (I guess I’ve never gotten over it, really.)

With Rosie, though, it was like a slow and steady fire. She was born, and I felt like I didn’t know her. But little by little she peeled away my fears until I was left bare and wholly hers. And now, of course, I join in all the cliched statements from soap operas and country songs across the nation: I can’t imagine this life without her.

So there you have it. I would have loved to have another girl in this family. Go figure. If I could have told myself of three and a half years ago how things would shake out, we would have had a good laugh together over a (non-alcoholic because we’re both pregnant) beer about it. And now, after I put away all the girls’ clothes and hats with pink bows (Remember this one? And the overalls! Gah!), I’ll move on to the boy section of the baby name books and start stockpiling the list of things I’m looking forward to about having a baby boy. I think there are going to be right many. For all of us.

When I hung it on the wall, I was thinking of the two girls who would read it. But now it seems righter than ever.

(… including a boy.)