As regular readers of this blog know, I’m currently expecting my second child, a girl. Monkey should join my family at the end of February or maybe early March. I’m quite excited to meet my little girl. What better way to get in a baby mood by start reading some books about babies!
I gave birth to my son Raisin without any drug intervention and with a midwife when I was living in Australia. While I don’t have the midwife option in Illinois (silly laws and insurance issues) and I plan on delivering with a doctor (that I trust) in a hospital, I still love the stories of stress-free natural deliveries, and I’m hoping this baby’s arrival will be as good an experience as (or better than) my son’s arrival.
Baby Cather by Peggy Vincent (published 2004) is a memoir of a Certified Nurse Midwife who spent many years delivering babies in hospitals and at women’s homes as a private practitioner. With frankness about her ignorance of the process of delivery in the beginning, personal stories from her own three pregnancies, and numerous stories about home births gone right and a few gone wrong, I loved it.Continue Reading
When the confident orphaned young American woman at the center of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (published 1881) receives a fortune, it seems she will be able to live her dream life of happiness. Yet, James’ portrait of Isabel Archer’s character, emotional development, and her choices is a complex one. As a relatively independent woman, Isabel is still restricted by the social and cultural restraints of being a woman in the mid-nineteenth century. As with my read of The Mill on the Floss (discussed 
Maggie Tulliver is a quick-witted child, one with appalling manners for her strict Victorian house and community. She cannot seem to be a proper young lady. When the novel opens, she is about nine years old, and I couldn’t help adoring her childish antics, especially as she regularly brought disappointment to her mother and aunts with her lack of girlish charm. From my perspective, who wouldn’t love a girl who is so determined to read, to learn, and to be all the imaginative things she desires?
