Sarah's Recipe for Romance

I have been blessed with a quiet, peaceful baby. That said, he still needs to eat a couple of times in the middle of the night, and he is not always eager to go back to sleep after his meal. At times he even fusses a bit. However, I am always ready to crawl back into bed. I find it next to impossible to stay awake when starting at the nursery room wall. Even the T.V. lulls me to sleep at 4am. But now, after a month of 2am and 4am feedings, I have found 10 ways to stay awake.

One- read Julia Quinn’s new release, 10 Things I Love About You, while the baby nurses.

Two- read 10 Things I Love About You aloud to the baby while the baby fusses after eating a large meal.

Three- take a break from the book to burp the baby and share the top ten reasons you love the baby.

Four- continue reading 10 Things I Love About You aloud to the baby, this time using different voices for each character.

Five- now that you have the baby’s attention and he is wide awake (but thankfully no longer fussing) explain the nuances of society in Regency England to the baby to enhance his understanding of the book.

Six- continue reading 10 Things I Love About You aloud using different voices for each character. (Be very glad you have not been reading Goodnight Moon over and over to the baby for the past hour or two).

Seven- allow yourself one more chapter (or two, or three) even though the baby has fallen asleep in your arms.

Eight- finish 10 Things I Love About You as the sun begins to rise.

Nine- realize that it is now time for the baby to eat again, and that instead of sleeping while the baby slept, you were reading.

Ten- reach for the next book in your TBR pile as the baby wakes. (Anna Campbell’s latest!)

Where have I been for the past month? I wish I could say writing and revising my way through the final months of my pregnancy, but alas fate had other ideas. At the end of March, my husband and I closed on our new apartment and Brooklyn. It is an amazing space with a room for our soon-to-be born son in a very kid-friendly building. And it was a great deal, mainly because it needed some work. Nothing major, but enough that we enlisted the help of a local Brooklyn handyman to help us paint, redo and add moldings and change light fixtures. All of this would have gone smoothly if the building itself had not been under construction.

Before closing, we learned that our new building needed a new roof among other things to fix some leaking issues. Sadly, this meant that the terrace we were so looking forward to using was now home to scaffolding. Ok, we thought, it is only for a few months. We can live without a terrace, especially since we’ll have a newborn to occupy our time this summer. So our handyman set to work and we scheduled our big move for April 21st. Plenty of time to paint and whatnot, or so we thought.

Then we got the call.

The building needed to perform work inside our unit, specifically in our bedroom. They needed to build a wall through the middle of our bedroom to protect our unit from the dust as they drilled inside our new home. In a matter of weeks, we had lost access to our terrace and the master bedroom.

Still, we moved our belongings and our cat to the new apartment. We threw the mattress down on the floor in the almost-finished nursery and waited for the wall to come down so that our handyman could finish his work.

And then, just as one would expect in a book or a movie, my water broke.

At 35 weeks pregnant, I got off the subway in midtown Manhattan this past Monday and just like that it happened.  Stunned, I waddled as fast as I could through the pouring rain to the nearest Starbucks. All the while, I was thinking: this can’t be happening.  It’s too soon and we’re not ready.

I called my husband from the Starbucks bathroom and then our midwife, who assured me that yes, it was happening, and yes, I needed to go to the hospital. Immediately. My husband abandoned his business dinner, hailed a cab, and came to pick me up on the corner of 51st and Broadway.

Thankfully, my baby and my midwife decided it would be best for the baby to stay inside for as long as possible. So here I am, at the hospital on bed rest. Waiting. I have been told multiple times that I will not be heading home until I have the baby, which will likely happen in the next week or so. He will be full term (37 weeks) on May 9th, which also happens to be my 30th birthday.

In the meantime, my husband has been doing his best to get our home ready for our baby. He demanded the building finish our unit and take the wall down. My mother flew up and washed the baby clothes for me. My mother-in-law arrived from the west coast to help set up our home. And our handyman, bless him, has been working around the clock to finish the apartment. His name is Stephen Kitts, the Park Slope Handyman in case anyone in the Brooklyn area ever needs his services. I can’t recommend him enough. He was at our home until 1am last night painting so that my friends and family could set up our furniture today. Thanks to my husband, Stephen, my family and friends, my baby will have a nursery, complete with a crib, when he comes home from the hospital.

So that was my April. Hopefully May will be smooth sailing once the baby arrives and I will be back to blogging and to my guest appearance series-I haven’t forgotten about it, just had to put it on hold a bit! And of course, back to writing. I had just started a new manuscript and another round of revisions for Courting Scandal when April began.

Happy May Day everyone! And if you have any great reading suggestions, please send them my way. I might be lying here for another week.