Advice

Here's a piece of advice for all the pregnant women out there -- actually, it might be good advice for anyone when you find yourself responding to everyday stresses in a less than productive way:

• Your husband excitedly says "It's your birthday tomorrow!" and you respond by slowly rotating one raised forefinger in the sarcastic gesture that indicates "big deal."

• Your three-year-old fails to pick up his toys and you respond by saying, "I guess these are my toys now, and I'm going to throw them all in the trash because I'm tired of cleaning them up."

• Your stomach hurts a little because of completely garden-variety pregnancy indigestion and you respond by saying, "My body is failing me and I will never ever be able to successfully give birth to this baby."

My advice: eat something!

Whenever life looks especially bleak and I feel hopeless, it turns out I'm just hungry. Change your blood sugar, change your life. Maybe this is why I now weigh 160 pounds.

(This is according to yet another scale, however, and in the middle of the day with all my clothes on. So I don't know how much I "really" weigh, but I will admit to having moved up to the size 8 pants. With six weeks to go still. Sigh.)

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Poor Isaac was left worriedly asking, "Are you really going to throw my toys away?" Threatening to do so seems to be an unsuccessful parenting strategy I unfortunately inherited from my late maternal grandfather, who, when finding his daughters' clothes on the floor, was known to throw them out the window. (The clothes, not the daughters.) He also ripped the hard-wired phone out of the wall when they refused to hang up, which I am ashamed to admit I can also see myself doing.

I didn't know my grandfather very well, so I'm not sure how I managed to inherit his less attractive traits. I don't think I learned them from my mother, who was never a tyrannical or impatient parent. Can parenting temperament be genetic, and if so, can it skip a generation?