I took this photo in the veterinary lab at the Duke Lemur Center in October, on a tour at the National Association of Science Writers meeting. The bin sat next to a sterile operating room where, according to the scientist who was showing us around, they mostly do emergency caesareans for lemur mothers in distress. […]
We (me, Pete, the baby) have had a wicked mystery cold going for 10 days and counting, and have reached the point where we can’t remember not being sick — have we ever gone anywhere, done anything? Adding to our dismal mood, arborists came to cut down the majestic walnut tree that has provided us […]
This summer, my parents pulled out an ancient family VHS tape and we all gathered around to watch a video of me at 18 months old, in a full body cast that extends from my chest to my right foot. My femur is broken, a spiral fracture, into seventeen fragments — the result of a […]
This post first ran in April 2019. As I get ready to go on maternity leave, I’m struck by how many things, large and small, had to go right for the tentative desires I felt five years ago — for a garden, and maybe even a family — to materialize. It’s been a messy and […]
We attended our first childbirth preparation course last week, Pete and I. It was 2.5 hours long, on Zoom, and would have made an excellent drinking game (drink every time you hear the word blood! Or mucus!) had I been drinking. Instead, we just watched it in bed on my laptop, passing a block of […]
This post first appeared in March 2021. My longing for more spontaneous museum visits continues. A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic […]
This week we had our 22-week ultrasound, the detailed scan for all the things no one wants to think about: cysts in the brain, malformed heart chambers, exposed vertebrae. Will (we’ve started calling him Will) is moving a lot now, rotating and arching his back, kicking his legs and arms. In my mind he’s like a […]
Pete and I just got back from a winter trip to Colorado. It was a real vacation — we drove around the mountains and mesas, hiked up side canyons, went to bed early, slept in, ate our hosts’ homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast. (We also saw Christie, who made us such good pizza, and […]