If I have learned anything the past few months is that pregnant women require two things -- sleep and a steady supply of food. Take either away, and all hell breaks loose.

Sleep
Elisa is sleeping about 16 hours a day, and the other eight she talks about how "tired" she is and wishes she were sleeping.

But say Elisa has to live in, well, the real world. And assume she has to work, well, eight hours -- all big hypotheticals, I know, but let's assume them for the moment -- then you see the problem. Something has to give. Work, or sleep.

And given we need Elisa's insurance and salary, work kind of edges out sleep. But I wish it didn't, because a tired Elisa always seems to translate into a puking Elisa, with healthy doses of bitchiness and whininess. I know, I know, it's not her fault, and the gods know I would never subject myself to anything as heinous as pregnancy, even if nature had played such a cruel joke on men. But it does make things a bit more difficult.

Except on weekends, when things are a bit better. As my brother said in our first full day in Chicago this past Thursday -- "I said 'good morning' to Elisa four times today!" -- and that was just at 2 p.m.

On rest days, the schedule goes something like this:

4 a.m. -- get up for snack
4:10 a.m. -- back in bed
8 a.m. -- get up for breakfast
8:15 a.m. -- take a "nap"
10 a.m. -- get up for mid-morning refreshments.
10:10 a.m. -- get a little 'shut-eye'
12 p.m. -- Get up for lunch
1 p.m. -- Take a 'siesta'
3:30 p.m. -- Get up for mid-afternoon snack. Complain about how tired she is.
4 p.m. -- read a book or watch baseball for a while. Drift in and out of sleep.
6 p.m. -- Get up for dinner
7:30 p.m. -- Say 'goodnight' and turn in for the day.

In any case, upon closer study of her weekend sleep schedule, an interesting pattern should emerge -- the only thing that gets her out of bed is the need for sustanance. Yup. It's all about

Food
Talking about lessons, here's the salient one Elisa and food -- if her stomach is empty, she vomits. If her stomach is too full, she vomits. So she's a tight-rope artist, always under threat of impending yacks.

And, to top make things worse, she sometimes vomits if she's too tired, or if a particular food doesn't agree with her, or if the car she's in rounded a corner to quickly, etc. She's a time bomb ready to erupt.

Like on our way to Chicago. We were at San Francisco International, walking into the gate, when Elisa had to hack up her lunch. So much to the delight of a dozen people waiting at a taxi line, Elisa walked up in front of them and promptly (and loudly) proceeded to "deposit" her lunch just feet from them. I wanted to explain that Elisa had had too many shots of Jaegermeister the night before, but the whole line suddenly decided that cabs were overrated, and that they wanted to take shuttle buses home.

Or on the way back home from Chicago, driving on 101 north. When Elisa starting doing to "cat with a hairball" impersonation. I quickly pulled over to the side on the highway's left-side median. Elisa popped open the door and started depositing "yogurt" on the road, as cars whizzed by feet from her head at 80MPH. Not only did Elisa not even notice the cars, but I don't think she would even care if one had gotten too close.

And there was the time Elisa had a cab pull over while on a business trip in Vegas. Elisa explained she was pregnant between heaves, while her Pakistani taxi driver, standing next to her puddle of bile and vomit, happily proclaimed, "This is such joyous news!"

Ahhh. Good times...

But in all honesty, all this puking is somewhat comforting. Our first pregnancy, the one that ended in miscarriage, Elisa suffered no "morning sickness". We thought we had lucked out, but it might have been a warning that things weren't well with that pregnancy.

This time around, I remember Elisa calling me days after we found out she was pregnant to announce to me, pride filling her voice, that "I just threw up!" I let out a great cheer! This was wonderful news! This vomit told us that perhaps this pregnancy would be different.

And the vomit became a key comforting occurance in Elisa's thus-far difficult pregnancy. In fact, when she went a whole day without vomiting, she called our midwife in a blind panic thinking she had lost the baby. Luckily for everyone, she vomitted nicely the following morning, and all was well in the universe.

p.s. Next time, I may actually talk about "food" in a section sub-titled "Food".