Say in a Homer Simpson voice: Mmmm, lasagna.

Yesterday was a weird day. I got up and took Emma to the bus stop, and then when I returned home, I was beckoned by the softness and coolness of my yummy bed. It sucked me in. I fell back asleep for an hour. I awoke to Maggie yelling "Ariba" at Dora on TV. Weird. Then I hung out at the pool with my awesome neighbor, and we had a whine session about nursing, babies spitting up, mean husbands ( not mine, of course! ), and other such topics. Afterwards, I made lunch and then came down with a splitting headache. I was down for the count. Poor Sean arrived home to an ornery wife, crazy kids, a messy house, and no dinner. But being the saint that he is, he went ahead and made lasagna. And it was great! The kids loved it. Mmmm, lasagna. So once again, I am praising my hubby. What would I do without him? He's the best.

It's over

Summer has ended at our house. School started today, and boy am I excited. Maggie and I were ready for some alone time, and to get back to a schedule of some sort. Emma was quite excited to start second grade, and she got the teacher she wanted, Mrs. Cummings.

So long, stomach, and 20 pounds.

Well, the time has come. I've reached 16 weeks (well, tomorrow), and as of last night, I can no longer get comfy on my stomach when I sleep. This is a sad day. It's not like the rest of you who know that merely days after delivery you can return to your stomach sleeping bliss. I have a big sore incision that has to heal before I can return to that bliss. It takes weeks. So you can imagine my sadness. But on a good note, since becoming pregnant, I've lost 8 pounds, which brings me to a total of 20 pounds since my surgery last November. Seems slow, but it's actually right on track for the 2 pounds a month. It's a juxtaposition of good and evil. Yes, I said juxtaposition. So I bid a fond farewell to my tummy, in more than one way. Of course, It won't be long before that tummy is replaced by a growing fetus. I think I can handle that.

This is a poll, of sorts.

Okay. Here goes. I have a dilemma. For the last 14 weeks or so I've felt like crap. This is not news. However, in my feeling like crap, a lot of things have been neglected. My kids, for example, both need haircuts, as does the dog. Those can wait. What is really bothering me is the neglect that is showing in my house. I have serious dust bunnies. Everywhere. Normally I pride myself on keeping a pretty clean house. Nothing immaculate, but picked up at least. And now, as I sit here, I have 3 piles of garbage that need to be taken out, and dishes that need to be put away and loaded in the dishwasher. I just don't have the strength or motivation to do it. So here's where the poll of sorts comes in. I grew up with a housekeeper. She did all the yucky stuff like clean the toilets and dust the baseboards, all those kind of things. I still had plenty of chores to keep me busy, but I never had to worry about doing THOSE things. Now I'm considering hiring a housekeeper to come in ONCE and deep clean all my blinds, baseboards, fan blades, bathrooms and such. This would not be a permanent thing. I just don't feel like doing it, and when I do get a bug to do it, I pay the price for a week! It is a little selfish, but it's for a good cause, right? Before I go any further, I should tell you that Sean is vehemently against this idea. He thinks he could do it all and take the money we would have paid the housekeeper and buy himself something nice. The problem with this is that he doesn't do it. He also tells me I should have the kids (namely Emma) do it, but that actually creates more work for me, thus nullifying the idea at all. So would you do it? I'm interested to know where the women stand on this subject, but the men can comment as well. Remember, I'm growing a person here. It's not just because I'm lazy!

A warning for the emotionally unstable such as myself

This is so awesome, I could hardly watch it through my tears. It makes my efforts as a mother seem trite. Simply click the link in the title, and it will take you to the video. I'll post the story here, if I can figure it out.





I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to Pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck. Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars -- all in the same day (doing the Ironman Triathlon). Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much -- except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs. "He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old, "Put him in an institution." But the Hoyts weren't buying it.

They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "there's nothing going on in his brain." "Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!"

And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that." Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "then it was me who was handicapped,"

Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks." that day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!" And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year. Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?" How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzz kill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together. This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 -- only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time. "No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century." And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago." So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life. Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day. That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. "The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."