In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah interviews Dr. Meggie Smith, a reproductive endocrinologist in Nashville. Dr. Smith helps people build families and has also taken a different path herself — freezing her eggs during fellowship and then moving forward with a pregnancy as a solo parent. She shares her story on how she is achieving the best of both worlds.

(You can also listen to BOBW through iHeartMedia’s channels!)

In the Q&A, a listener asks how to cope with first trimester exhaustion and nausea when she hasn’t told people about the pregnancy yet. This can be a really rough time for many people (physically and mentally!) even if you are thrilled to be pregnant, so Sarah and I share some advice.

Please give the episode a listen! And please consider joining Sarah and me for round 2 of Best Laid Plans Live! This year I will be officially co-hosting this retreat in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, from November 7-9, 2024. We will learn some planning and time management strategies, and as this is in late 2024 we will plan 2025 (yes!) together. Our capacity is limited (after opening ticket sales to prior attendees and the BOBW Patreon crew this weekend we are well over half sold out) so if this sounds interesting to you, you can grab your ticket here. Early bird pricing is available until March 10.

It was mostly a good time. I say mostly because being 8 months pregnant is just hideously uncomfortable. My normal self would think nothing of walking around a museum for 2 hours. My current self took advantage of every available bench, but it turns out you can still see a lot of art while sitting on benches, so there we go.

My husband drove us into the city on Friday afternoon. We stayed near Grand Central (courtesy hotel loyalty points…this was a cheap baby moon too). We took in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is open late on Fridays. I spent quite a bit of time looking at American landscape paintings, and then at a special display of historic clocks. The angel-bedecked Christmas tree is always spectacular.

We then took a cab across Central Park to go to the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus concert on the upper west side. I sang with the choir for 9 years when I lived in Manhattan, and I definitely miss it. Young (good!) voices can produce quite a tight sound, which was particularly apparent during the men’s production of Biebl’s Ave Maria. Humorously, there are still a few singers who joined around the time I did…which means they are not young. But the definition is fluid!

After, my husband and I went to a Mexican place near our old apartment. Then back to the hotel where I thought I would not sleep. I can barely sleep in my own bed right now but after a 5 a.m. wake-up, I managed to get back to sleep again by 6 a.m. and then slept until…8:30. Not bad!

We went to breakfast at the Gemini Diner, which we used to frequent as a young, childless couple. I think we ordered the same things we always did. It was fun to reminisce, and to see which businesses were still around as we walked through our old neighborhood. Then it was back in the car to drive to PA.

The kids were not exactly thrilled about our taking this trip but now I have no plans to be gone overnight for roughly the next 4 months. So it was good to get away for a bit…

The boxes are arriving fast and furious as we order Christmas presents. I’m trying to be a bit more mindful this year about lists and opening the boxes to know for sure what we have and what we don’t. This weekend features a few festivities: my husband’s office Christmas party (I have a little black maternity dress which will hopefully work with my not-so-little self), and my church choir Christmas concert. I hope to make progress on the Christmas card list too.

In the meantime, a quick round-up of what I read in November. I’m feeling like I’m in a bit of a reading slump, though I did start December by re-reading To the Lighthouse, which is always one of my favorites. My November reads:

Design Mom, by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

As I think about renovating our house, and packing another kid in here, I’ve been interested in books about home design. Blair’s description of how she lives with her six kids (and the photos!) are interesting; my favorite take-away for big families is that it’s fine for bedrooms to be mostly about sleeping, with more effort put into making common spaces workable.

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, by Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Sarah Ruhl tackles 100 different topics from theater to parenthood in this book of micro-essays and micro-memoirs. I don’t know that the subject matter was particularly intriguing to me but I do like the format of micro-essays and I have been pondering how to use that in various ways. It seems to work well with current literary attention spans…

Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero, by Christopher McDougall

I’ve read McDougall’s book Born to Run multiple times, so after reading an excerpt of this book in Runner’s World, I decided to pick it up. McDougall and his family moved from Philadelphia to Amish country, and while there, he helped rescue a donkey from an animal hoarder. He soon became obsessed with training for a donkey race out in Colorado. There are always hiccups in writing narrative non-fiction; for instance, he trains with a teenage boy suffering from depression and in a perfect narrative arc they’d run the race together. In real life the kid gets injured. Whoops. McDougall also occasionally overplays the drama to make a more compelling read, but in general this is a fun story for anyone who likes books about running.

Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach

Science writer Mary Roach tackles the logistics of humanity in space. Putting human beings who need to breathe, eat, and (yes) go to the bathroom into weightlessness is no small matter. Roach is funny as usual, and is willing to try much in the pursuit of her story.

Having re-read To the Lighthouse, I think I’ll re-read a few other shorter classics and see if this gets me in more of a reading mood… What are you reading these days? Which “book assigned in school” (like To the Lighthouse) do you think makes the most compelling re-reading as an adult?

This birthday — Thursday this week — is a milestone plus one. It’s kind of fun to read through these older posts and think about the updates. I have run for an additional 365 days straight. We did some international travel with the kids this year (St. Lucia, the Bahamas) and some interesting domestic travel (Yosemite is amazing). I am still not reliably sleeping through the night because I am 8 months pregnant with baby #5, which is certainly the biggest development in this first year of my 40s. I am writing fiction, having spent November editing another novel, with a reasonable draft now finished.

In any case, I don’t have big birthday plans. I’ll spend a chunk of it in a hotel room and on an airplane. It’s my last work-related flight before I go into no-fly mode. There might be ice cream cake this weekend. I’m not sure. I’m thinking forward to next year, when I can picture an 11-month-old baby starting to toddle around. We will have to decorate the tree differently, and no more Lego Advent calendars left on the floor. Will we have renovated the attic? Stay tuned! Life keeps changing — but generally in fun ways right now, which I am grateful for.

If you’re reading this and thinking “hey, I’d like to do something for Laura’s birthday!” would you consider rating and reviewing one of my podcasts on Apple Podcasts? You could also rate/review one of my books on Amazon, BN.com, Goodreads, or wherever you post about books. Thank you so much for considering it!

There is much to be grateful for on this Thanksgiving weekend. On the other hand, I have reached the stage of late pregnancy where everything is just physically uncomfortable. And while reaching this stage of pregnancy is itself a cause for gratitude (hello, I turn 41 this week!) it’s slightly harder to feel that way as I haul my heavy self around. Getting in the car is difficult. Bending over is an unpleasant experience. I get winded going up stairs. This is going to be a long next 6-7* weeks.

So I am just taking it day by day. In the morning: hey, I made it through another night (hopefully not too bad of one…I read or work if I can’t sleep). In the evening: another day in the books! I tend to fall asleep easily, even if I don’t stay asleep, so it’s kind of a treat to nestle into the comfy spot I have carefully constructed from what seems like a fort-worthy number of pillows.

In Off the Clock, I devote a section to how people get themselves through challenging times — more challenging than what I’m facing, but the same lessons apply.

First, know that the time frame is probably limited. Certainly that is the case with pregnancy. All time passes. If you need to stay in a miserable job for 2 years, well, 2 years is 17,520 hours, and you won’t work for all of them. When you can set a reasonable end on the time frame, you can pace yourself through a great many things.

Second, find little moments to enjoy as you can. I don’t always feel terrible. Even if my physical body is a mess there are some really cool things going on professionally and personally in my life. And sometimes there are good moments that are enjoyable precisely because of their contrast with the crummy situation. I loved Tough Mudder champion and ultrarunner Amelia Boone’s description (in Off the Clock) of seeing the sun rise after she’d been out all night on a freezing obstacle course. It was just a normal wintry sunrise, and someone out driving on the highway would have thought nothing of it. But there in the cold morning, Boone was elated. She had earned that dawn.

In any case, I’m trying to enjoy what I can of the holiday season. I got a particular kick (not the fetal variety!) this weekend out of seeing my kids select gifts for each other. It’s not always easy to roam a toy aisle and move beyond “I want that” to “I bet my brother would like that.” But they picked out fairly thoughtful things for each other. Apparently that empathy muscle is developing somewhere!

*I presume. With my advanced maternal age, there is pretty strong pressure not to go past the due date.

Photo: Last gasp of fall color. I snapped this photo, then we had wind and freezing temperatures and that was the end of that.