Whoa- So True. Saves me from writing my own memoir | Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic...

Newman's Confessions are Authentic, Honest, and Reassuring | Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family | Catherine Newman

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	• Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family Catherine Newman Penguin (Non-Classics), 2005 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Delightful

Buy this book. I adore Catherine Newman and her writing. She's witty, insightful, and very candid about parenting. I've read her on-line for years now, but only just bought this book for a beach read this summer. She is more than honest, admitting more about parenting and it's highs and lows than most are willing to. She's admittedly neurotic, but in a delightful, funny, relateable way. She deals with some heavy issues in this book, and even though she is a very different parent than me, I can't help thinking she'd be a great friend to have. Her "black humor" reminds me very much of myself. This book had me laughing out loud on several occasions, and shedding a few tears too. I can't sing her praises enough.

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Whoa- So True. Saves me from writing my own memoir

This author is a riot. I love her writing- it's fantastic. I'm agast at how much her kids are like mine (or at least the older one)- its a little eerie. Here I thought my kids were unique and there they go and show up in this book! I am going to slip a highlighted version of this in my kids baby book and save myself some writing.

One thing I think she touched on that I rarely see is how your feelings slighly change for your firstborn when the second comes along. Its hard to put your finger on but its so true that loving another child as you used to solely love them changes the dynamic a bit. Lets say youre suddenly diversified in your child love holdings. Plus with that second baby the first do appear suddenly giantic, loud and (sometimes) annoying. Poor kids. She is so right on.

Anyway, love this book, so glad I was on a memoir kick- she rocks.

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Newman's Confessions are Authentic, Honest, and Reassuring

If you're ten pages in to Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family and you have not laughed out loud, then just go ahead and put the book away. You probably haven't creased it too much, and you can probably successfully re-gift it. But chances are you will be chuckling, snickering and even snorting in delight all the way through Catherine Newman's hysterically honest-to-the-bone memoir of her pregnancy with her second child.

Newman relates the magical, green-tinged, anxious year before her second child's birth, as she shares her wildly contradictory feelings of motherhood ("a disorienting blur of love and crushing anxiety") and the guilt familiar to most parents that she surely is ruining her firstborn's life by having another baby. Newman's stream of consciousness writing style has a comfortable, easy effect on the reader. It's like talking to your lovingly kooky best-friend-since-childhood over tea and chocolate chip cookies (or, more likely, margaritas and, well, more margaritas). Newman is refreshingly real about the mixed bag of motherhood, warts, runny noses, sleepless nights and all. She writes, "I didn't understand that having a baby would feel like falling in love, but like falling in love on a bad acid trip. With an alarm clock - a pooping alarm clock."

Newman's humor appeals to any parent who has woken with a start in the middle of the night, engaged in an internal struggle over whether it's necessary to check if the baby is breathing, decided she's crazy and should go back to sleep, and then gotten up anyway to just take one quick peek at the baby. But Newman takes checking on the baby to a whole new level as her unbridled paranoia about aneurisms, Coxsackie viruses, and the barfing flu runs rampant in a strangely self-satisfying way that makes one murmur, "At least I'm not that crazy." Yes, Newman is a worrier of the first order. She worries about leaving her son to go to the movies with her husband, she worries about her pregnancy, she worries about lackluster libidos and toxoplasmosis and fleshy arms and deadly pathogens. In other words, she is a completely typical mother.

After all too many picture perfect images of mothers - from Mrs. Brady to anyone ever photographed for the magazine "Fit Pregnancy" - Newman's confessions are authentic, honest and reassuring. Throughout the seasons of her pregnancy, Newman holds up the mirror and shows us Everymother...and we just have to laugh.

Quill says: Buy two copies because the person sitting next to you will want to know what's so funny!

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Better than Lamott.

Catherine Newman is the kind of person you want living next door. Funny, irreverent, with a heart as big as the mattress on her family bed. She also is a great writer, with the ability to notice the little things and comment on them in a way that gives them the importance they deserve. Wry, witty, and self-deprecating, Newman tracks her journey to the birth of her second child in "Waiting for Birdy." Nothing -- from the tangerine-sized hemorrhoids to the "barfy flu" to her sometimes absentminded OB -- escapes her laser-like scrutiny.

If there is a drawback to this book, it's in Newman's recounting of every cute moment and utterance from her preschooler. Everyone thinks their child is the cutest, brightest, most witty -- and reading about her son's latest witticism grew a bit tiresome at times. But he does sound pretty darned cute.

All in all, though, Newman won me over, though I am five years removed from giving birth. It made me long for those delicious baby days, almost enough to give it another try.

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The BEST book!

This has to be my all-time favorite book. I've had it for almost 4 years now, since I was pregnant with my daughter. Now, reading it again (this is probably the 10-15th time I've read it) while pregnant with our next child, it is STILL laugh out loud funny (literally). My husband will hear me laughing those great belly laughs and immediately knows the book I'm reading (again.)
Can't recommend this one enough.

To fifty thousand readers, Catherine Newman is the beloved author of "Bringing Up Ben & Birdy," a weekly column on babycenter.com. Now in the delightfully candid, outlandishly funny Waiting for Birdy, Newman charts the year she anticipated the birth of her second child while also coping with the realities of raising a toddler. As she navigates life with her existentially curious and heartbreakingly sweet three-year-old, and her doozy of a pregnancy, she lends her irresistibly unique voice to the secret thoughts and fears of parents everywhere. Filled with quirky warmth and razor-sharp wit, Waiting for Birdy captures the universal wonder, terror, humor, and tenderness of raising a family.

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