As I’ve told many people IRL and online already, I’m hoping that IVF will produce one more miracle baby for us by the end of 2010. But because I’m anxious, I’ve started to get a little scared that it won’t work the second time as easily as it did the first. Sometimes I think that I just shouldn’t talk about it. Maybe if I keep my hopes secret from the universe, then it won’t burn me. But then I remember driving to my first date with my future-husband, CH, and saying, “Universe, I’m ready, I’m truly ready,” and that turned out pretty well. So I look at pictures like this 4-seater orange Vespa, and I imagine myself and CH on it sometime during the 2020s with our daughter, Betty, and her future sibling, tooling around the Italiano countryside, and I think, “Yes, this could happen.” For whatever reason, I’ve always believed that if I talk aloud about something good happening, then it will and if I imagine something bad happening, then it won’t. For example, I never, ever imagined that my mother would die early, but before my date with CH, who I was really excited about, I said, “Universe, I’m ready, I’m truly ready.” The other day I read something which opined that a novelist shouldn’t tell anyone about her work in progress, just like a mother shouldn’t tell anyone about the life growing inside of her until it’s at least three months old. I actually believe the opposite. When Betty was confirmed, I told EVERYBODY. I called up friends, I wrote about it on Fierce and Nerdy. If a random friend asked me how I was doing two weeks after I found out Betty was a go, I would say, “Well,...