Welcome back to the work week, peoplefriends. How was your turkey (or tofurkey and gluten-free stuffing, if that is your proclivity, you filthy hippy)? Any wine-soaked tryptophan-and-football induced hallucinations involving giant inflatable muppets floating down the Broadway of your dreams? I would expect nothing less. Did you shop until you dropped, pull yourself up, rub some dirt in it and head back out to the mall, bloodied but unbowed, your maxed-out credit card mere swipes away from bursting into flames? God bless America!

I'm afraid I'll just have to live vicariously through you guys this year. We here at I, Breeder headquarters had quite possibly the most-grim Thanksgiving of our lives. Downright depressing, it was. You see, the past couple years, we've packed up and headed West to engorge ourselves with my fambly. And each of those trips took, oh, about 3 years off of our lives:

* Three tickets to LA? $1000.
* A rental car for a three-day weekend? Another $300 or more.
* Flying on Thanksgiving day and having the airline lose your luggage which is particularly unfortunate because your nap-boycotting child spent the past 5 hours screaming, until, upon landing, she gagged herself and vomited all over you? Priceless.

So we decided, much to the chagrin of Nana Breeder, to stay home this year and cook up a feast for other New York orphans. Thank goodness we did this because, as it turns out, my bride fell ill. Thursday she was far too sick to host, much less assemble a turkey feast, even with my semi-capable assistance. She's actually been quite unwell for the past month. There is a reason for this, dear readers, and verily it is a reason for which we are Very Thankful Indeed: she is heavy with child.

Actually, she's not heavy with child. She's too busy ralphing to get heavy. Unfortunately, this is a road we've been down before. When she was pregnant the first time around, she morphed into Sir Barfsalot for about five months. Five. Months. You've heard of, I am sure, morning sickness, yes? Well replace "morning" with "every freakin' minute of your life" and sickness with "hurling until you turn yourself inside-out and you see the bottoms of your feet pop out of your own mouth" and you have a general idea of the pit of despair that our home has become.

There is a name for this condition. It is called hyperemesis gravidarum, which is Latin for "Oh God, BlooorrrhuMAKEITSTOPuugghhhh!!!!," and 100 years ago it was a leading cause of death among pregnant women (including, apparently, Charlotte Bronte). Because they couldn't get hydrated. Because they were barfing all the time. Anyway, she doesn't quite have it as bad as some women get it--some women spend the bulk of their pregnancies in the hospital. Others need to go to the emergency room to get an IV drip hooked up to their arms. (We've already had one emergency room close-call ourselves). She's been prescribed a very powerful anti-emetic called Zofran, which is what chemo patients are given to stave off the up-chuckery. This helps her keep food down, but it doesn't quell the nausea. It's also an incredibly strong drug which, despite being routinely given to pregnant women with no proven side effects yet, has never really been tested on pregnant women. Fabulous!

So anyway, imagine being hungry all the time, because you're pregnant, and also being nauseous all the time, because you're pregnant. I believe this is a level of hell that proved too great for even Dante to fully fathom. So you see, for Thanksgiving, we stayed in and did nothing. I had a disgusting cold turkey-bacon club. I made her some chicken stock (from scratch, because that's how I roll). She had a big day, actually, she made it all the way from her sick bed to the living room couch. She ate her broth and sobbed quietly, muttering something about my "poison seed." Which seemed a little harsh to me. Poison? I like to think of it as just very, very powerful. Freakishly strong. Certainly too much for SOME PEOPLE to handle, it would seem.

There you have it. I'd like to tell you that I was contractually obligated to procreate again because Newsweek wasn't convinced that having just one kid was enough to consider me a "breeder" -- but then I'd be lying. In any event, I'll certainly have lots more material to work with in the coming year(s). A whole 'nother kid to exploit! So stay tuned and come on back now, y'hear?