Happy Birthday to Me

Today's my birthday. I'm . . . fortyish.

How did I "celebrate"? With 90 minutes of conference calls, a visit to the pediatrician to determine that Snookums did not have swine flu, a greasy gyro purchased on the street, and a couple of glasses of cheap red wine.

I'm not in much of a celebratory mood, seeing as I found out yesterday I'm not pregnant, despite having transferred five fertilized embryos into my aging womb 12 days ago.

Indeed, I'm downright bummed. Not to mention broke. But I'll get over it.

And until I do, I'll keep drinking this cheap wine.

Beam Knock Me Up, Scotty

So I'm doing IVF now and yadda yadda yadda. (Just for the record: We did not have any help when I got pregnant with Snookums, even though I was 41 and hadn't been trying for that long. But that was two years ago, so there you go.)

This morning I had my egg retrieval, otherwise known as "Now, just get all woozy and cozy and go to sleep for a few minutes while we stick a needle up your hoo-ha and suck all your eggs out of you! Oh, and by the way, that'll be an extra $500 for the anesthesiologist on top of the $4,500 you already paid."

I'd been a little freaked out by the idea of this whole thing -- and not just the money, which was bad enough. But I kept picturing either salmon roe sushi and those deliciously salty little red circles exploding, or a spaceship with aliens with big cat-shaped eyes probing me and using my embryos to colonize Jupiter.

Anyway, they got 23 eggs. My doctor was practically clicking his heels together, so I guess that's an unusually high amount. Now I have to look forward to Zany Dad giving me painful progesterone injections in the ass for the next couple of weeks, possibly longer. And we'll do the "transfer" -- otherwise known as, "Now we'll just shoot the fertilized embryos back inside you! And by the way, the doctor's fee is $4,500, cash only!" -- on either Thursday or Saturday, depending on how busy the sperm and egg have gotten in the meantime.

I told my doctor to leave the test tube in a darkened room with some R.Kelly playing. He thought that was funny. But he didn't seem to like the joke about aliens.

Just Call Me "Octomom 2" -- Or Not

As I may have mentioned, the third round of intrauterine insemination (IUI, otherwise known as Ai Yi Yi!) failed. So now we're embarking on IVF, otherwise known as creating a sister or brother for Snookums in a test tube.

My sister, who's a labor and delivery nurse, asked me how many embryos my doctor was going to "transfer" (this is a euphemism for how many fertilized eggs are they going to stick inside me).

"Oh, I don't know . . . Seven?" I said, uncertainly.

A few days later, she called me back in a panic.

"I'm really concerned about the fact that you're having seven embryos transferred," she said. "A lot of obstetricians I work with think this is totally unethical! Have you thought about the fact that you'll probably have to have a reduction?" (That's a euphemism for aborting the extra embryos so that you don't end up like Octomom.)

So the next time I saw my doctor, I asked, "How many embryos did you say you were going to transfer?"

"There's no upper limit," he said. "It depends on how well they do in the lab. For someone your age I usually transfer three or four. The most I've transferred is six, and that was for a friend of mine who's now pregnant with a singleton."

So that was a relief. But in the course of all this, I made the mistake of Googling my doctor, Mitchell Essig. Should I be upset about this clipping I found?

Enough With the Pretentious Names Already

One of the most vile cultural trends I've noticed recently -- besides the use of cell phones as walkie-talkies -- is parents giving their kids Irish last names as first names.

Over the weekend, I was at a children's party thrown by the mothers' group I belong to, when I heard a father say to his son, "Hey, bro."

Now, that's casual, I thought. Then I realized he meant it literally. Not that his son was also his brother -- that would be gross -- but that his son's name was Brody, as it said on his little nametag.

Boys named Brody, Brady, Riley and Murphy. Girls named Wiley and Addison (isn't that the disease JFK had?). At the same party where I met Brody, I met a baby boy named Beckett. I have yet to meet a boy named Joyce -- but I did meet one named Killian the other day.

I say, if you're going to give your kid one of these Irish names, why not go all out? Name him or her McGillicuddy. Or O'Shaughnessy. Or Bumstead, for fook's sake!

Tax Day: Brought to You By Satan

Remember how the other day I felt like this?



That changed quickly yesterday. After talking to my accountant, I felt like this:



She called to say I owed OVER TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS to the IRS.

And I was even paying taxes quarterly! It turns out the handy worksheet my previous accountant -- or should I say "accountant" -- used to calculate how much tax to pay only accounted for Social Security. No federal taxes, no New Jersey taxes, no New York taxes. Boy, did he screw me.

Thank God I had the money to cover the bill in my savings account. Of course, I was hoping to use that money for other stuff -- like IVF treatments, since it's looking increasingly like the only way Snookums is going to get a sister or brother is from a test tube.

I don't know why I didn't Google the "accountant" like I do everyone else. Because if I had, I would have found this website. Dead giveaway the guy's a charlatan...

International House of Paper

This is how I feel right now:



I just finished filing our taxes sending our paperwork to the accountant, which meant I not only had to go through a year's worth of my own paperwork, but I had to organize Zany Dad's office, which looked like it was designed by a hamster (paper piles everywhere).

In the course of doing so, I found a sweepstakes form Zany Dad had filled out to win a "handy chore tractor." ("Can you ever have too many tractors?" the form asks. "Yes, you can," I reply.) Thank God Zany Dad is so disorganized he forgot to mail in the form, because I don't think our neighbors would have appreciated a 4,000-pound tractor sitting in our tiny backyard.

The other irony is that the sweepstakes entry was made out under MY name, not his. This is because Zany Dad is a Privacy Freak. So not only did he want a tractor he'd have no use or room for in our urban neighborhood, he didn't want anyone to know it was his.

First DYHV Celebrity Sighting!

I was walking up Sixth Avenue from my office today during lunch, when who did I spot sitting at an outdoor table at the Belgian restaurant on the corner? Richard Belzer, from that Law & Order spinoff, SVU or SUV or whatever it's called.

I realized as I was writing this post that the only celebrities I've seen in New York are from Law & Order: Chris Noth (whom, most remember as Mr. Big from Sex and the City, but who'll always be Det. Logan to me) and (before he died, obviously) Jerry Orbach -- also, strangely enough, at Markt, when it was in a different location.

Before Snookums was born I saw Anderson Cooper at 23rd St. and 7th Avenue. He is very, very short.

Richard Belzer was very, very tall. He's also better looking in person than on TV. Not that that's saying much.