Fun With Play-Dough

It’s hard for a man to meet a pregnant woman, especially when she’s in her last trimester, and not talk about the obvious. Unfortunately, people forget: you may run in to her at the supermarket and talk with her for ten minutes, but she’s pregnant 24/7. That means she would probably love to talk about something else for a change. Imagine the pregnant woman at a party, where guest after guest asks her the same damn questions, over and over, until she is ready to break her water right then and there.  If you find yourself faced with her, and she suddenly runs for the bathroom, you might be tempted to think, Oh, small bladder.

Maybe you’re right, and she really does need to pee; maybe it’s just that your conversation skills suck. It’s helpful to learn how to avoid this; you don’t want to make a pregnant woman mad. Trust me, I have been a pregnant woman several times, I know. We get mad easily and we hold grudges.

To help pregnant women everywhere, and for the men that have to talk to them, here are some pointers.

• Don’t, under any circumstances, use the word “water melon”. It’s old, it’s tired; just don’t do it.
• Don’t ask when she’s due, whether she knows what it’s going to be (it’s going to be a baby, okay?) or whether she already has a name.  Saying a baby’s name out loud in public, before it’s born, is bad luck.
• Don’t talk about any nasty, horrible experiences your niece from Baltimore had when she gave birth to twins and was in labor for three weeks. Nobody who is about to go into labor herself wants to hear that.
• If there is no father in plain sight, don’t ask whether she’s married. It’s none of your business.
• Don’t start the abortion argument. Please, not now.
• Don’t say things like “You’re going to be fine, dear.” How do you know?
• Ask other things, that let her know she still has a brain and other people notice; talk about what you saw on the news, politics, a good television show you saw; anything.
• Don’t ask to touch her belly. Would you ask a non-pregnant woman if you could touch her belly? Well then. Get a grip, you pervert, and keep your hands to yourself.
• A neutral “How are you?” is okay.
• Don’t ask if she swings. It’s 2008, for god’s sake.
• Don’t ask her out on a date.
• Don’t stare at her boobs. She knows they’re big. She has a mirror. She’s pregnant, not stupid.
• If she wants to discuss her mucus plug, she gets to discuss her mucus plug.

If there are a lot of pregnant women at your place of work, it might be useful to learn these rules by heart. Otherwise, you can print and keep the list in your wallet. That way, if you run into one, you just hide in the bathroom, and give it a quick glance. Oh, and one last thing: unless you want to get punched, don’t call her Hot Mama.

“The Fighter”, Times Magazine boldly proclaims on its cover, next to a picture of a smiling Clinton.

Wait; this is news? Of course Hillary is a fighter; we’ve known that from day one.

The fact that she is tough as nails is the one thing everybody can agree on. Love her or hate her, you have to admit that she’s no fragile daisy that goes whichever way the political wind blows. Let’s not pretend surprise at her unwillingness to give up; it’s insulting.

What is even more insulting is the way she’s been portrayed as a bitch ever since Bill entered his first race. No other First Lady has stuck her neck out as much, no other First Lady has been attacked this much. She’s a smart woman, and apparently, smart women are still capable of making people very uncomfortable. It’s sexism, pure and simple.

Do we really want women in the political arena to be demure, soft-spoken, forever in the background; merely worrying about whether their damn pearls match their Chanel suit?

Everything that Hillary has been criticized for would be more than acceptable behavior in a male candidate. And if Obama can’t handle her attack ads, her rock-hard campaigning, and the fact that she will not give up without a fight, then he really isn’t ready to be President. If he thinks Hillary is mean, wait until the Republicans take the gloves off.

On another note, apparently there is a follow-up about the Times’ Square bombing. I can’t wait to hear more about that; guess the terror level needs to go back to orange with pink polka dots.  What is it with these idiots? What do they think, “I’m not happy, so I’ll throw a bomb at someone; then I’m going to play all coy and send weird letters, and whatever is wrong in my life will magically change?”

Mr. bomber, can’t you just take a Percocet and call it a day? 

I hate Wednesdays. My daughter Isabella gets out of school at 3:30 pm, and has to be delivered to her ballet class by 4:15. It’s in the same building, because her school is located at the local Jewish Community Center, so there’s that; however, there is no time to go home in the meantime, nor is there enough time to go home during her class. The result: I wake my son Mendel at 3, he protests vehemently, and I struggle to put him in his coat, hat, socks, and boots. By 3:20, we are on our way, we pick up my daughter, and we spend half an hour in the cafeteria trying to convince her to do her homework while waiting for her class to start.

Mendel tries to hide behind the vending machine; Isabella is busy with everything but homework, and complains about her snacks. They’re not good enough. Then, when it’s time to change, she puts her drink in her backpack without closing the lid. We now have a dripping backpack, soaked homework, and a little boy who is getting crankier by the minute. My daughter changes into her ballet suit while I try to wipe Gatorade off the bathroom floor; she tells me I need to “hurry up, you’re making us late.”

Excuse me? We have a little talk, and she concedes that it may, possibly, perhaps, be her fault for dumping the lemonade; still, she’s not entirely convinced and gives me one last nasty look.

Finally, it’s 4:15 and she can go dance. I take my son to the library, where he wants to read Where the Wild Things Are. They have a Hebrew copy, which I can’t read; however, I know the story by heart and simply read it from memory while he looks at the pictures. Unfortunately, it’s out; he looks on all the shelves before he accepts that it’s simply not there. To avoid meltdown, I tell him he can pick a DVD. The library has a player, and it might keep him from climbing the shelves.  He picks the most annoying one, and for the next half hour I am subjected to the Israeli version of the Hokey-Pokey.

By 5, I tell him to shut it off; we need to go get Isabella. When we get to the hallway where ballet class is located, the backpack has dripped a nasty puddle; shit, there was still Gatorade inside. We collect: backpack, ballet bag, my own purse, my daughter’s coat, shoes; I run to the bathroom to grab more towels and wipe the nastiness off the floor. Thank god it’s tile and not carpet, like in the rest of the building.

With Mendel under one arm, two bags and my daughter hanging on the other arm, we navigate the parking lot. When we get home, it’s 5:35, and we realize all the homework is lost; it’s dripping and has to be laid out to dry. The backpack goes in the washer, after I pluck out all the little bits and pieces that make their home in the bottom of a girl’s bag.

My son decides to take a mouth full of milk and spit it out in the fireplace, which, of course, is on; a smell of burning milk starts to spread through the room. I shut it off and try to clean it. It’s no use, it’ll just have to burn off, so I turn it back on after cleaning the screen as well as I can. I stick him in the bathtub while my daughter does homework on the computer; extra long, since she can’t do her written work. When he’s done, she needs her bath. I used to bathe them together, but I can’t do that anymore; they’ll kill each other and splash water all over the floor until it drips through the kitchen ceiling. While she’s in the bath, I try to put away five loads of laundry; Mendel runs downstairs and is very quiet. “What are you doing?” I yell down the stairs, and after repeating my question three more times, he finally answers: “Eating.”

Oh. I guess he’s hungry; he didn’t finish his dinner, after all. When I come downstairs he has opened three different yoghurts and eaten half of each. Then he asks for juice; while I pour him a cup he gets impatient, tries to grab it and the apple juice splashes all over the kitchen floor. By now I’m so exasperated, I can’t even get mad; still, he starts to cry. My son is very good at that, two big tears make their way down his chubby cheeks, “I’m sorry, mama,” he whispers.  It breaks your heart. I tell him it’s okay, and Isabella, who is by now out of the bath and dressed in her jammies, offers to clean the floor. While I explain to Mendel that no, he is NOT getting another bath, Isabella gets out the Swiffer stick and starts mopping. She does a terrible job, and the floor remains sticky in all the wrong places. Still, she made an effort, and I decide not to insult her by cleaning it again.

By now it is past 8:30, and really, finally, time for Isabella to go to bed. We go upstairs and read stories; my husband gets home from work and takes over. I take Mendel back downstairs; he won’t sleep this early and I am too exhausted to fight him. He takes out more yoghurt, leaves the fridge wide open, and climbs on the counter. I deflate in front of CNN and am grateful that AC 360 repeats itself, so I can catch at least half of the evening’s news. I wonder for the 1000^th time: how do single mothers keep their sanity?

Now, how is this Howard Dean’s fault?

They were told not to do it, they did it anyway, and now they’re crying foul.

What were they thinking? We’ll just do it anyway, and national headquarters will budge? Whichever candidate won our primaries will champion our cause? Guess again.

As always, it’s the voters that pay the price; every vote in America should count. They will need to vote again, especially since Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.

If Crist and Granholm could just swallow hard and apologize, they might have a chance to solve this. I’m afraid, in cases like this, egos always get in the way of common sense. I can’t help but ask myself, if Charlie Crist got caught speeding, would he expect the police officer that pulled him over to pay the ticket?

So what about that little IED in New York? Isn’t it a bit of a sad bomb? I mean; it didn’t even disrupt traffic for long. If that were the perpetrator’s goal, it would have been easier to throw a rock at a couple of streetlights, or start a fight with a taxi driver. No one got hurt, so it will be out of the news within hours, so what was the purpose? Attention? Is there a man somewhere, sitting at home right now, congratulating himself on…on what, exactly?  Apparently, there were similar signatures at two other events, the May 2005 explosion outside the British Consulate, and the October 2007 one outside the Mexican Consulate.  Is it the same guy? It’s like connecting the dots, without having all the dots.

It sounds like an episode of Numbers, doesn’t it? I think attackers like this (I refuse to believe that whoever did this rode away on a bike), when they finally get caught, should be publicly spanked. These kinds of people aren’t scary; they’re just annoying.

The other issue of the day: Will Huckabee get his own Television show? Does anybody care? We all know he’s just waiting for that phone call…