In case you ever thought about trying to avoid washing a pot by hard-boiling an egg in the microwave, let me give you some advice: don’t. There are two reasons for this; first, cleaning soft-boiled egg off the floor, counter, walls, ceiling, and microwave interior takes a lot longer than just washing the stupid pot. Second, your wife will laugh at you (even as she tries not to) as you kneel amidst egg fragments with paper towels and a bottle of bleach. And your wife will absolutely not clean up your mess because she warned you that eggs and microwaves do not mix. Nor will she be impressed when you tell her that from your carefully-conducted experiment, you were able to conclude that the force created by an exploding egg is strong enough to blow open the microwave door. So just restrain yourself from the entire exercise. Trust me, you’d be better served by going over to your trailer and hanging a few more sheets of drywall until the urge blows over. Not to mention that you’ll probably extend your life-expectancy by following my advice.

While I’m giving advice, let me give you this tidbit as well: if you plan on renovating, say, a trailer, and you want to move in on a certain date, like, the week before Christmas, just do yourself a favor and forget it. Especially when you’re completely dry-walling a room, and you’ve never dry-walled before, and there’s only two of you doing it, and one of you is seven months pregnant, and you’re trying to keep your nineteen-month-old from eating screws while you’re holding a sheet of fifty-pound sheetrock over your head while your wife tries to get the screws in straight. Yeah. It’s gonna take a while. Either that, or you’d better plan on sleeping in an unpainted, uncarpeted room for a few months.

While you’re in the trailer trying to hang dry-wall, don’t panic if sometime you’re answering nature’s call in the bathroom, and you look over in the dust-coated bathtub (because your husband sanded the walls in preparation for painting and got dust everywhere) and find paw prints of a variety that does not belong to your family in the dust. Don’t panic—but do nag your husband into driving quickly to your nearest home-improvement store, buying a sheet of 3/4 inch floor board, and patching the two-foot hole in the northwest corner of the master bedroom that you cut out a month ago but haven’t gotten around to patching yet. That will go a long way toward keeping cats out. Just a bit more friendly advice, in case you wanted to know.

To completely change the subject now, Christian is nineteen months old, and the sooner he gets potty-trained the better. And let me tell you—keep a dictionary handy when your nineteen-month-old starts talking, because ducky, puppy, tractor, water, birdy, flag, and airplane all sound very much alike—much like the rest of the indistinguishable gibberish you hear from him. I understand that when you’re working from a limited vocabulary, you’re going to have to double up a bit, but honestly—a little enunciation goes a long way. At least helecopter is understandable. It’s a start anyway.

For those of you who are wondering what the new baby is going to be (as far as gender goes), let me set your mind at ease. It’s going to be a boy. Or a girl—one of those two. I’m not sure which yet (I’ll know for sure in February).