Owen pulled himself to the standing position in his crib. At 3:00 a.m. And then couldn't figure out how to get out of it. I had to get up and rescue him.

This is one reason we put Annabel in sleep sacks at night. She can still crawl in them, but she can't pull up and cruise.

I had a teacher that not only required them, but didn't allow you to veer from them. That might be what got my hackles up about them. It is natural, during the course of writing, to be inspired by a better idea. With fiction, it is almost guaranteed to happen.

That's just evil, and I can't even imagine why she did it, unless it worked for her, and she's one of those people who can't imagine that other people's workstyles differ.

I'll never do a UW romance writing extension class that some people in my RWA chapter rave about, because the instructor was a speaker at one of our meetings, and her required methodology would drive me crazy and kill every bit of creativity I have. She makes you start with an outline, then do synopses of increasing length until you have a 50-page synopsis. Only then does she let you start writing the book!

Obviously, this must work for some people, or she wouldn't be teaching it continually to full classes. But I can't imagine what one would do with a synopsis somewhere between a quarter (for a short category romance) and an eighth (for long single titles like what I write) the length of your entire book! I'm afraid I'd feel like I'd already told the story and wouldn't have any energy and enthusiasm left for my first draft.

That said, part of what I've learned about the difference in writing a 400-page novel vs. a 10-page term paper is that for the former, outlining is my friend. My first novel was such a big rambly mess, nearly 500 pages of 12-point Courier for the first draft even though it barely had a plot, because I just made up everything as I went along.

So for the wip, I wrote a 2 1/2-page plan of events, just the barest outline of the plot. I realized that without even trying I'd come up with a neat three act structure (hurray for me, I'm finally learning to plot!). Since I know about how long I want the final product to be, I know that if Act I ends much after p. 150, I'm rambling too much.

Anyway. We'll see how it works. I might come up with an entirely different method for Novel the Third.

Plei, I love Lillian Elizabeth.

I'm fond of Clara, particularly since it was my grandmother's name, but I think it would be hard on a modern child.

No more so than Annabel, Lillian, or Emeline.

BF is one year to the day younger than his sister. So his mom was pregnant with a three-month-old. Yikes.

I had a teacher that not only required them, but didn't allow you to veer from them.

I'd have shot her. Seriously. This is why my father - a world-class musician - never allowed me near formal musical education; he said the imposition of too much artificial structure on individual creativity had rotted more good musical brains than opium ever had.

Plei, do you think she'll demand to be called Lily at some point? Or even Lilah?

It happens a lot, Robin. People don't realize that you can be fertile almost immediately after childbirth. I've heard OBs say that they routinely see women at the 6-week checkup who are already pregnant again.

Plei, do you think she'll demand to be called Lily at some point?

Well, it would be Lilly, wouldn't it? Hey, like Lilly Kane!

I've heard OBs say that they routinely see women at the 6-week checkup who are already pregnant again.

t thinks about this

t strokes out AND DIES

Am I a horrid mommy for putting Em on her tummy to sleep?? It's the only way to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night. I must have made Joe check her breathing 4 times in a half hour this morning.

Can she roll over on her own yet, Aimee? That's when our pede said it was OK.

She can't.

No matter how often I put mine on their backs, as soon as they could, they rolled to their fronts and slept like rocks. They were a lot less fussy that way.

I've heard OBs say that they routinely see women at the 6-week checkup who are already pregnant again.

Heh. t TMI If they'd had MY childbirth experience, they wouldn't have been. Things just weren't quite, um, healed enough that soon. t /TMI

We're thinking of waiting till 2008 or so, even though I'll be 37 then. Combination of wanting to buy a house, give me time to write a few more novels and hopefully sell one, give me time to get in better shape, and I'm just not ready to face labor again anytime soon. I've never been so strongly tempted to slap DH's grandmother as when she said at Christmas that none of her labors were over 12 hours, and isn't it wonderful how you forget about the pain as soon as you have that wonderful baby in your arms? Well, Grandma, maybe you did. I adore Annabel, but I still remember labor all too clearly.