My fellow-mom friend once told me she loved being pregnant, and that she missed it, almost, after she gave birth.

I hope my face didn’t reveal the horror I felt at that statement.

I was reminded last Thursday of this moment of disbelief that anyone would miss the bulging waistline, the non-flattering way clothes drape — because that’s what clothes do to pregnant ladies; these yards of cotton (always too-worn cotton) don’t flatter, they drape — over puffed-out mid-sections … Ah yes. My second foray into maternity clothes was accepted with a certain amount of relief (12 percent), disgust (85 percent) and self-loathing (3 percent).

I did not go quietly into that Rubbermaid container to heave out the clothes no one, not even their makers, could love. I made Dave go fetch it from its place of exile in the basement, and I watched as Alice pulled out all the shirts and pants and tossed them aside. And I sighed.

Long-sleeved shirts were in short supply so I tried to rally around a shopping goal, but scanning the racks at a few stores proved fruitless. Who looks good in big, knotty sweaters that hang to the knee? (Let’s not kid ourselves — I’m 5-foot-1, it would hit my shins when I walk.) Why do these clothes have to be so … maternal? Why are the acceptable items so expensive? Why are there three racks at Target, crammed between the tank tops on clearance and the plus-sized clothes? Three racks for nine months. REALLY, TARGET. REALLY?

WHY I’m doing this is clear. I want another one of these:

I’m lucky to be pregnant, I’m lucky to have Alice. Of course. But elastic-waist pants and bell-shaped shirts take more getting used to than one might imagine.

OK, thanks. I feel slightly less angry now.

Surprise! Our child’s afraid of leaves, just like our dog.

Not wanting Alice to feel like the baby’s giving her an eviction notice — and scared that Dave would start moving his CD collection back into the empty room that once was Dave’s Room – Do Not Enter and is now Alice’s Big Girl Room — I hurriedly picked out a toddler bed online and shipped it to the house last week.

The whole affair took me an hour to assemble Friday night, plus another five minutes to stare at my mechanical genius, and a solid 10 minutes to pick out a mattress at the store the next day.

Saturday night, I put her in her new bed in her new room at 7, and she lasted til 8:30. OK, so she lasted til 8:30 because that was the fourth time I’d poked my head behind her door to make sure she wasn’t falling out and breaking her skull open. You know, on the hard carpet we just had installed.

But by Monday night she’d slept through the night-ish. This is one of those rare success stories. I must write it down and save it, so when I yell “WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SO DIFFICULT” she can say “not always. Remember that dark November night?” And I will concede.

But I say “-ish,” because today around 2 a.m., I heard a whimper.

Reaching back for my best “If you don’t move, Dave will think you’re in deeper sleep than he is and he’ll get up” move, I tried to steady my breathing. But then I heard babbling.

And what did my wondering eyes find behind her gated door down the hallway from our room but a toddler, sitting pretzel-legged on the floor, “Good Night, Gorilla” in her lap as if she were reading to herself.

She wrinkled her nose and did her exhale-and-laugh-through-your-nose sound as if she knew she’d been caught. She giggled when I said “Ooooh, honey, 2 in the morning isn’t for reading,” and I picked her up and put her back in bed, and she waved to me after I kissed her good night.

And then she slept til 7 a.m.

That was one of those times that dulled the fatigued caused by a 10-minute howling fit over dinner that wasn’t done EXACTLY RIGHT THIS INSTANT. I said dulled. Not erased.

With Dave’s dumb hours, this mama gets to be the enforcer five nights out of seven. Under my regime, she must pick up toys. Her hands and face must be cleaned after meals. She must take baths, she must cut her nails. She must brush her teeth, go to bed.

I’m the bad guy.

So when Dave’s home on Sundays and Monday nights, I sometimes ask him to do it; or some of it.

I do this because when she wants to read a book, Mama can’t do it if Super Daddy’s in the vicinity. Nooooo, not Mama. It has to be Dad. If she wants a snack, it has to come from Dad’s hands, or else no, her head shakes, she doesn’t want it. I do this because she’ll watch TV on his lap. She’ll squeal when she hears the toilet flush upstairs, because she knows he’s on his way down. Seriously.

I do this because, OK, so what. I’m jealous.

So tonight I gave her to him so I could wallow in self loathing for a few minutes. I was doing fairly well with it when suddenly a wail of colic-like proportions erupted from the bathroom. I raced into the bathroom to find my poor baby — MY BABY — on the floor, torrential-downpour-sized tears streaming down her face, WHITE, FOAMING TOOTHPASTE in her mouth.

If you have no children this will not strike you as anything but annoying.

But my husband had her innocent little Elmo toothbrush covered in COLGATE. Adult Colgate. Her baby toothbrush.

Oh, she screamed. It burned her gums, which are already deep pink from teething. It tasted nothing like her bubble gum training paste, with the cute little bear on the package and no warning about calling the Poison Control Center on the back. Oh, my baby.

“ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL HER?!” I hissed — yes, hissed, it was one of my better moments as a wife — while trying to wipe it out with a washcloth before she swallowed it all.

“What? What did I do?”

And just like that: She wanted her Mama.

Redemption.

In better news a quick Google search says she probably won’t die from it. And she let me put her into her big girl bed in her new room, with hugs and kisses. Just for Mom.

Oh, I needed that.

When you ask her where the baby is, she’ll point to my stomach (or her own, which is slightly disconcerting). But I know she has no idea what’s coming.

And do we? We slept in ’til 9 a.m. Sunday and my first thought upon waking was “In about six months we won’t be able to do this.”

The last pregnancy showed up around the time we were deciding it’d be cool to get pregnant … in the next few months. This one took some work. Every twitch last time had me Googling and diagnosing cancer of the entire body, convinced I had it bad. This one’s just causing me to have daydreams at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday about eating some chicken wangs and getting that unnaturally orange sauce all over my fingers. Mmm. Or some salsa. Yesss, Lara’s Tortilla Flats salsa.

Dave bought me a whole jar of the stuff last week. It’s almost gone.

I’m clearly going to go over my 42-pound weight gain for the first one if I give in to these demands.

Seconds-hands on clocks took minutes to pass during the first trimester with Alice, and there were lulls in between those seconds-hand movements that I died multiple times and came back only to hope it was late November and I could stop worrying I’d scream “I’m PREGNANT” in the middle of the office and have to gasp and slap my hands over my mouth and run back to my desk.

This time, seconds were seconds, and my Tourette-like fears never surfaced. I didn’t want to tell anyone. We told our parents, my two “TMI” best friends. We told our siblings, our babysitter, our bosses. Then we told no one else. And it was the warmest, happiest little secret I’ve ever kept in my pocket.

Of course one could argue not mentioning it to many people made it less real, and therefore I could forget how strongly the urge to growl hits you when you’re heating up a toddler’s food as fast as you can but she keeps “MMMMMMM”-ing and what does “MMMMMM” mean?!! AND WHY WON’T THIS MICROWAVE HEAT UP and “MMMMMM!!!”, she whines, and now it’s TOO hot and she doesn’t UNDERSTAND why I have to stand here and wave the food in front of her face and blow on it.

And it’s all very CAPITAL LETTERS.

Perhaps one could make that argument. Well, we’ll see if the crazies come back now that I’m outed.

The impetus behind the echoing silence on this blog is only partly explained by Alice’s energy.

There’s an elephant in the room, my friends, and it’s called “Erin’s getting chubby,” or … OK, yes, I’m pregnant.

Oh yes. It’s true. On May 5-ish, my life will get a lot more complicated.

The second time around, I feel smarter. I feel less scared. I feel just as moody. I’m always right on the edge. I don’t know what’s coming next. Dave is really nice to me.

I feel like a pooch showed up around day 14, before the pink line even registered on my fourth pregnancy test, and firmly — or softly, kind of jiggly — refused to do much but hang over my pants’ waistbands.

I also feel like Elmo’s been raising my child, and I don’t feel guilty for that. I regret having “Sing, Sing a Song” in my head at work, but these are the side effects of second pregnancies, I’m sure of it.

I’ve also realized the second time around is more fun to keep secret.

At 7 a.m. on Sept. 24, alone with a technician while Dave was at home feeding Alice her toast, I saw Cashew 2’s heartbeat, and I had to wipe a tear away because OH MY GOD WHAT DID I DO and he/she is already growing fingers and kidneys and perhaps a Wasinger nose.

And then I had to go home to show Alice and Dave our latest edition:

Alice no longer requires constant babying: no coddling, no holding, no hovering. She requires some toys and some space, please. About 18 inches’ worth of space, to be exact. She requires a sippy cup of water or juice, some crackers, some cheese.  Her clomping shoes and her straight-legged marching wander around our first floor and toddle up the stairs, and no she doesn’t want to hold my hand while she does it. She wants to read “Peter Pan” and Golden Books and coloring books. She wants to pull the DVDs out of the TV stand and then she wants to point and ask you to name each character, each movie.

When she watches a movie, she wants you to be there. And she wants her blankie, her pink and white silky blankie.

She’s 16 months old. She’s old.

This is what I thought of when I got to work and saw I had a couple voicemails and 670-something e-mails from over the last week. I just sighed, walked slowly to the fountain to fill up my water cup and then I sulked back and sat heavily, and cursed at every single soul on this planet. Except Alice. And probably you.

Logging back on the computer at work after a vacation with sand and sun and margaritas isn’t as hard as logging on to the computer after a vacation with Alice, the 16-month-old.

Guilt isn’t something I had before Oct. 9, because quite frankly hanging out at home with a demanding baby isn’t as much fun as it may sound. It’s cute, but it’s work. It’s easier to spend a few days at home with the baby, absorbing that talcum smell and those squishy cheek kisses, and then go back to work with adults who never scream at you to burp them.

Had I acted out how difficult it was to go back to work today, you would have been able to find me screaming obscenities in my driveway, my fingernails ripped out and bloody as I fought my way back to the house while The Man dragged me to work.

Understatement of my life: I really did not want to go to work today.

This is a development that has smacked me in the face, completely unexpected.

I don’t even know myself anymore.

The idea was to relax and get the house to look as if upright-walking people lived in it instead of a pack of hyenas. Hyenas apparently don’t do dishes, is my conclusion. They fold laundry but let it sit on the loveseat all week. They loathe dusting. Mopping, not so much. These are the facts — and you can take them to Wikipedia.

Well. Instead I’ve decided I need to find a benefactor so I can stay home, at least part time. If anyone is interested in supporting this end by sending money to me and getting nothing but gratitude in return, let me know.

I’ve never had a whole week in my own home — without a newborn — without having to go to work. Alice and I have colored, watched “Toy Story.” We sat on the kitchen floor and I showed her the finer ways to eat string cheese. I set her down in her big puffy winter coat on Monday in the kids’ section at the library and let her linger over the puzzles table instead of our Saturday routine of begging her to go, come on, let’s go see Daddy, he needs the car to get to work.

When Dave was home earlier this week, we could eat dinner without him wiping his mouth, tossing his napkin on his empty plate and saying “Well, I gotta get going.” Mmm, potatoes without resentment are so delicious.

We played a game together for the first time since the Bush administration. Scrabble. I won. Dave’s big word: Peep. Peep? Oh yes he did spell peep.

And hey, we’ve got a Halloween costume. She’s gonna be a cat. How about that.

Today is day two of my week off work, which I took for no other reason than being able to see my husband for more than an hour a day and perhaps to sleep in past 8 a.m.

We’re a day away from being married three years (will we make it — duhn, duhn, duhn — stay tuned!), we’ve got a kid, a dog, a fish and some exciting things going on — did you see that new carpet? I mean, come on.

Four years ago this week, we were paying rent with a credit card (… inadvisable. We’re still paying for those few months) and Dave was scrounging up a measly paycheck of about three bucks working for a record store. Three years ago this week we were in our wedding best. Two years ago I was just pregnant. Last year I was saying we weren’t unhappy, just … parents of a newborn. This year, we got some new carpet. Romantic, yes. We’re great, thanks.