9 weeks or so with #1--I got off really easy. About 22 weeks with #2--it was miserable, and my reflux kicked in about two weeks later. 15 or 16 weeks with #3. I only threw up once or twice with each of them; the morning sickness was more constant nausea.

Same here. DH and I both walked down the aisle with both of our parents.

I wouldn't. My husband has traveled to conferences, and I really don't change anything, safety-wise. Home invasions/child abductions are just honestly not on my radar of things to worry about. I don't think their having the cell phones on the kitchen table is weird. I don't think her not triple-checking locks when her husband is gone is weird. I just find it suspicious because it is incredibly, incredibly rare for toddlers to be snatched from their cribs by strangers, so I'll always assume it's the parents or somebody else very close to the child when something like this happens, unless there's very compelling evidence otherwise.

If you had a surprise pregnancy, especially if you were being careful at the time, were you really nervous about becoming intimate again after you gave birth? Right now I haven't gotten my Mirena in (my uterus wasn't quite ready when I went in for my pp appointment), and DH isn't sure he wants a vasectomy (I feel like we could have one more child, but I told DH that if he's 100% sure I'll support him). So we're relying on barrier methods. Or, would be, if I wasn't so afraid of getting pregnant again that I won't even take the chance. Am I just being rationally cautious, given that we did get pregnant when DD was an infant and, while I'd be open to another baby in a couple of years, I am *not* even anywhere near the outskirts of the universe of ready-for-another-baby land? Or am I being overly paranoid? I'm just concerned that even once more effective measures are in place, I'll still have this lingering fear and won't want to or enjoy being intimate, at least for a long while. We'd been fortunate enough to never get pregnant when we didn't want to before this (and that was over the course of 15 years), so I never really had a fear of unplanned pregnancy until now. Did other people have this concern, and did you get over it?

In a restaurant, I think either would be fine (eating or wasting). If they had been guests at someone's home, though, and that person had served the salad, I do think that eating it would have been the right thing to do, rather than refusing or wasting. I know that people have different opinions on that, but my view on it is that being a gracious guest supercedes ethical or religious choices or obligations. If we're talking about a situation where the person either didn't state their dietary needs/preferences ahead of time, or they did and the host didn't realize the dressing had meat, I do think that the right thing to do is to just go ahead and eat it without making a fuss. (Food allergies/sensitivities are another thing, obviously.) Now, if you said that you were abstaining from meat and the person decided to serve steaks, that would be a different situation, but I can't really see that happening too often. That's just my stance on it. I wouldn't criticize or question another person about why they refused to eat something their host served them. But, personally I think that being a grateful, gracious guest is a more pressing moral obligation than keeping to dietary guidelines, even religious ones. In a restaurant, though, the gracious guest thing isn't an issue, so I think it really just depends on what the individual felt more comfortable with.

I have a deep and abiding hatred of pickles, so no. I would never have let such an abomination into my home in the first place. (I seriously do hate pickles to the point of actually feeling kind of sick around them. I have no idea why.)

I feel like a real homeschooler. ;)

I tried for two years and then gave up. I was pretty frustrated. All I wanted was another mom to trade childcare with for a few hours one morning/afternoon a week--or every other week, or even once a month!--and I just couldn't find anybody willing to make that commitment. Then #2 and #3 came and I figured, if I couldn't find anybody to switch off care for my one kid (and I would have happily watched multiple kids on their morning off), there was no way I'd find anybody willing to watch three.

My son wants a sheep and a chicken.

I'm terrible at pushing. With my first I pushed for 4 hours. He had a 16" head, though. With my second, I only pushed for about 25 minutes, but it was all directed and it was awful. With my third, I pushed for 6 minutes. However, it was six minutes full of me saying, "I can't do this. I'm seriously going to die. I hate this part. No, really, I'm seriously going to die. Can't one of you people just pull him out? I'm not going to do this. He is never going to come out. This is the last time I'm doing this, and this time I mean it!" I think, though, that really most of my very negative feelings about pushing come from my first birth. After you push for four hours, maybe that's what happens. ;) My last push with him, though, the CNM who was attending suggested that, instead of one giant push, I try doing a series of little pushes. That actually felt much better and he came out much more easily. If I do ever give birth again, I would love to be able to give birth standing/squatting. I think that position would work much better for me.

I started elementary school in 1983. There was no corporal punishment. In elementary school, you got your name on the board, had to sit in the corner, has to stand on the side during recess, got send to the principal's office, or got a call home. In middle and high school, you got send to the principal's office, got detention, or got a call home. Or a suspension, if it was very serious. I'm pretty sure, from my parents talking about their school days, that corporal punishment wasn't practiced in the public school my mom went to, and this was in the 1960s (in NJ). My dad went to Catholic school in the 1950s and 1960s, and he did get hit with the ruler or paddled by the nuns. He would never have considered sending us to Catholic school because of that; he thought it was barbaric. And, he is NOT by any means a flaming bleeding-heart liberal. He votes Republican most of the time and he has no moral issues with spanking; he just thinks that corporal punishment has no place in schools. I had detention one time in elementary school, for talking. That was the only official punishment I received during my entire 13 years in public school. And, it's not like my parents spanked me into submission at home: they only spanked me twice, the last time when I was two. I was just a naturally compliant child and so hated the idea of anybody being upset with or disappointed in me that I was very careful to always either do what I was supposed to or be so sneaky about doing what I wasn't supposed to that I wouldn't get caught.

I'm going to give your DH the benefit of the doubt here. If he'd said, "You need a hobby because you're boring," I wouldn't. But, I'd assume that, for some reason, he was thinking about what life will be like for you guys after the kids are grown, and just offhandedly thought that you guys will need hobbies. Do you have hobbies that are on hold right now because of your other responsibilities? Or is your DH concerned because he's not aware of any hobbies you would like to be doing? I don't know, if you really aren't interested in developing or restarting any hobbies, I'd tell him that, and let him know that you'll have time when the kids are older. (I have a number of hobbies, but with two under two, they're going to be mostly on hold for a bit.) But, I think you could also see this as an opportunity. If your DH is encouraging you to (re)start a hobby, then I'd say he's got some responsibility for providing the time for you to do so. You have a really packed schedule, and maybe you could use this as a way to figure out, with your DH, how you could get some downtime to yourself. I just think sometimes husbands can say something very well-intentioned and sometimes even right in the worst possible way. My husband said something to me at one point about how he thought I should spend more time working on some writing projects I'd talked about working on. Now, I'd talked about them a while before that, and there were two babies who came after, and I just didn't have the time or mental energy to do it. I was really hurt, and felt like what he was saying was that how I was spending my time was worthless. But, when I told him that, and we talked about it, that really wasn't it, at all. His "you should be writing more" was, in his mind, an invitation to help me out so that I could write more. It was his very clumsy way, he thought, of telling me that he was willing to take on more childcare/household duties, so I could pursue things I was interested in, rather than how I took it, which was as "Hey, you need to figure out how to do everything you're already doing AND write a novel while you're at it." So I'd probably try to interpret this in the best possible way, and maybe see it as an opportunity to figure out places where maybe your DH can help you out and give you more time for you.

No. If I were attending services as a visitor at a place of worship where it was expected or customary, though, I would, out of respect for the others there.

What's up with all the polls?

"You're still pregnant?!" I actually have gotten that a lot, with two different meanings. There were the people who asked me that when I'm like 9 months pregnant and huge. What do they think? "No, no. I had the baby. I just carry him in a big ball under my shirt"? Of course I'm still pregnant! The second were the people who hadn't seen me in a while. My last two are 16 months apart. I had a bunch of students and colleagues who I had seen when I was at the end of my pregnancy with my DD, and then didn't see while I was off with her after she was born, and then saw me again when I was back at work and pregnant with DS. There was a lot of confusion (I'm assuming they just didn't keep track of how long it had been since they'd seen me, although they knew it had been a while), and knew it would be weird if I was still pregnant, but probably didn't assume I'd be pregnant again. So I got some really confused "Wait, you're still pregnant?"s. I would just usually say, "Not still. Again." :)

That's not a run-on sentence, and it is totally my kind of sentence.

I've generally been part-time employed outside the home (I generally teach one or two college writing courses each term, which usually means I'm out of the house 1-2 hours twice a week or so), but have had periods where I've been at-home full-time.

Neutral. People are people everywhere you go.

I have positive feelings about public education. I had a great public education. I'm from a long line of public school teachers. I have wonderful friends who are public school teachers. I don't deny there are problems in the public school system (not that there are not with homeschooling!), but I think that overall public schools do a good job and are a good thing. So I voted "good."

My kids LOVE Veggie Tales. If it's any consolation, although we are Christian, my son has gotten nothing religious/spiritual out of the shows. He has, however, learned many, many silly songs. With a few exceptions--mostly, I think, the holiday-themed shows, although there are others--the stories themselves tend to be free of religious and especially of specifically-Christian content. It's the intro and outro that frame the story religiously. So you could always fast-forward through the intros and outros.

Absolutely.

I prefer it in the evening, but that's not realistic. I'm an early-to-bed person, so even when I don't have an infant who is up late nursing, my oldest doesn't go to bed much earlier than I do. So, if I want it, it's usually in the morning. At this point I'm okay with quiet time, though, even if I'm not alone. As long as nobody is asking me for something, I'm good. In generally I can't complain about not having enough alone/quiet time, though. My DH is excellent about being the primary caretaker on evenings and during the day on the weekends (on weekends we kind of switch from our weekday routine, and he mostly watches the kids during the day, while I do most of the hands-on parenting at night). I very rarely feel like I'm not getting as much time for myself as I'd want, and I definitely get as much as I need.

Not to sidetrack, but I have trouble with the idea of people "turning to the government to fix things." Last I checked, in a democracy we ARE the government. So, when the government "fixes" things, it's because the people decided things needed to be fixed and decided to do it. What's the alternative? Waiting for corporations to swoop in and save us? Sure, people can get together on a small scale and work on things. But people getting together en masse to tackle problems is sort of what the government is, or at least should be and sometimes is.

Just to be clear, I do NOT mean that religion is necessary to moderate that impulse, or that other things can't do a better job. I'm just saying that, for example, religion--especially post-Crusades and particularly post-Holocaust--might have some features that moderate that impulse in a way that, say, competitive sports doesn't. Considering that the vast, vast majority of people have some form of religious faith, and only a very tiny number of them are committing acts of extremism in the name of their faith, I think it's very, very difficult to argue that religion causes violence/fanaticism moreso than other institutions or ideologies. See, it's this constantly being misunderstood and interpreted in the worst possible light that I kind of blame the New Atheists for. I have spent my entire adult live attending or teaching at large secular research universities. I have always been around many atheists and agnostics. And I don't remember having to be constantly qualifying what I say so that I'm not misunderstood before New Atheism took off. I don't remember people immediately jumping to the conclusion that I must be saying that people need religion to be good, or that by talking about what I believe I'm saying that other people should believe it too, or whatever. But this idea is now there that ALL religious believers think certain things or want certain things, and it turns what should be pleasant discussions into minefields. I pretty much never, ever, ever talk about my religious beliefs IRL. The only time I do is when somebody who has beliefs similar to my own brings it up. I don't talk about it otherwise. But some people take simply knowing that you aren't an atheist as proof that you side with Rick Perry on everything. I feel like it's created a destructive amount of distrust and animosity between people who had previously gotten along just fine.

Part of my concern with the New Atheist movement is that, by classifying moderate and liberal religious believers with fundamentalists, and saying that they are all the same (or, sometimes, that moderate/liberal religious believers are actually worse because their seeming-reasonableness gives legitimacy to the beliefs of fundamentalists), it is unnecessarily divisive. I think many atheists realize this, but in general moderate and liberal people of faith are not "against" atheists. They don't see them as the enemy. In fact, many see atheists as on their side against religious extremism. So, it comes as a shock to realize that some of these people have decided that you are the problem. I think that driving a wedge between non-religious people and religious moderates/liberals that was not there before (and that allowed them to work amiably together on all number of social justice, political, and anti-fundamentalist projects) is just not a good move, either practically or morally, at a time when religious extremism is growing.