Expecting a Book to Deliver

(Ha! See what I did there in the title?!)

About three years ago, when my cousin Paulie's wife was pregnant with their daughter, I went to Barnes and Noble to buy them a cute pregnancy book. While there, I found that Jenny McCarthy had written several books -- on pregnancy and the birth of her first baby -- and told Bill that I would need them as soon as I got pregnant so that I would know what to expect.

I'm not a big fan of girls, and Jenny McCarthy is one of the worst kind: blond and gorgeous. I mean, she's a former Playmate! But she's also honest and raunchy as hell, and I knew that I could trust her to give me the skinny (or not-so-skinny) on what to expect when I was expecting.

Bill promised to buy me the first one -- Belly Laughs -- once we got a positive test, however many years down the line that was.

Well, this November we got our positive test. And by Christmastime, our whole family and our close friends knew about it. In January, I hit the second trimester and we told the rest of the world. On St. Patty's Day, we're going for the count-the-fingers-and-toes (and find out the sex if you want, which we don't) ultrasound.

And I still didn't have the book.

I'd mentioned it to Bill many times, and he always said the same thing: "Don't worry, I got it under control." Valentine's Day passed without the book, and then it got close to the anniversary of my brain surgery (which I still "celebrate" 19 years later) and I thought maybe it would be a little gift. I got flowers -- three huge bouquets of beautiful flowers from my wonderful, thoughtful husband -- but no book.

I got a coupon for 30% off at Border's yesterday and gave it to Bill and he claimed his plan was "totally" to buy it last night. Yeah, right. Later, I cried in the kitchen because I had to ask him to buy me a present. He went out and returned with the book.

This morning after he left for the Deli and I got up to feed the dog (whose reaction to the pregnancy has reverted her to peeing in her crate like an f-ing PUPPY, but I'll talk more about that in another post), I made a plan to get back into bed and read the Jenny McCarthy book. I took a little nap there toward the end (hey, I'm pregnant and I was lying in bed after being up late and getting up early), but I finished the whole book in a couple of hours.

I wasn't impressed. Maybe it's because I've already read a bunch of other books (while waiting for this one to be delivered to me), namely The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy. That's a really good book. I read it about a month and a half into being preggo, and it gives a pretty honest account of what it's like. Then there's babycenter.com, which features hundreds (or maybe thousands -- I'm terrible with gauging things like that) of pregnant women and veteran mommies telling you everything you'd ever want to know, and some things you never would (always prefaced by "sorry ... TMI!"), about their pregnancies. After all that, what Jenny McCarthy has to say isn't as shocking as you might expect.

With any of these books or advice blogs, you have to take as much of it as you leave. Everyone's body is different, and everyone's pregnancy is different, and everyone's pregnancies are different. You hear stories about people who had no morning sickness at all with one kid, and were sick the entire 10 months with another. That's just how the human body works.

I was going to segue this into my most important pregnancy rant to date, but this one is long enough, so look for that in another blog.