Books and Your Bump #2: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott and Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son by Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott

When to Read: Whenever! This goes for all Anne Lamott, guys. I read Operating Instructions a couple years ago, when J and I were I guess what you might call baby curious. And Lamott gives it to you straight. The horrors and joys and that sometimes you will hate your baby and that it will all be Cosmically Okay. It’s immensely comforting. I read Some Assembly Required when it came out this year, and while I didn’t love it quite as passionately, you should buy it for the first-time grandma in your life.

Pregnancy Fun Scale: When a loved one plays with your hair or massages your back just because you’re lumpy and pregnant and (s)he loves you.

Representative Passage: All good. Do you hear me? ALL GOOD. (There is a 70% chance this blog will now be an Anne Lamott Appreciation Blog now that we have started this.)

“Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me…But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can scarcely breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.”