Anyway, more lessons from the school of hard knockers: Don’t travel when in the third trimester. If you must travel, get a hotel room that has nice beds, and even more important, nice pillows to alleviate and elevate the stress on the tum. Also, buy one of those completely absurd back-massaging car seats from Walmart; I did and it was both a cultural eye-opener (Walmart, as far as I can tell, is a universe within our universe, similar and yet…utterly strange) and great for loosening up those knots incurred while propped in the car seat for hours on end. Plus, if you don’t have knots but are bored, you can probably vibrate the sneaky bits and alleviate that ennui quite readily. I didn’t, but I know you could!

And yet another new development: it seems that pregnancy makes one completely incapable of buttoning one’s coat with the right holes. I stepped out of our hotel numerous times looking like Forrest Gump because I couldn’t button in the correct order. Chemistry? Mind holes? Hormonal button imbalance? I don’t know, but it’s a disturbing phenomenon.

[The husband would like to interrupt this entry to announce that we are officially t-minus 1 hour until the third trimester. He knows this because his little calendar told him so. He's funny like that.]\

So we’re back from Vancouver, where we visited my brother on his 26th birthday and scrutinized his new girlfriend (who stood up to the harsh light of familial cross-examination with flying colors). We’ve returned salted, poorly buttoned, and with fond memories of men carrying moose antlers and child seats. It was a fine trip, back-ache and crankiness be damned.