To the fifty thousand readers of her "Bringing Up Ben and Birdy" column on BabyCenter.com, Catherine Newman is one mother of a writer. Delightfully candid and outlandishly funny, Waiting for Birdy charts the year she anticipated the birth of her second child while coping with the everyday frustrations and joyful epiphanies of raising a toddler. As she navigates life with the gentle, existentially curious Ben ("Are those lobsters happy in there?" he asks, about a restaurant's doomed tankful), with her doozy of a pregnancy ("The grilling burgers smelled, to my sorry self, like someone had set a live cow on fire"), and, finally, with the ravenous newborn Birdy, Newman lends her irresistibly tender and funny voice to the secret-but universal-thoughts and fears of parents everywhere.