On the ride to work this morning, Matt asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which is less than a week away. I told him that I didn't really want anything, or nothing big or special, at least. I told him that my Amazon wish list was up to date, albeit with small and uninteresting things, but things that I'd really love to get. In my head, I asked myself the question again: "What do I want for my birthday?" And my head gave me a clear answer: "A baby. A house. Money to go back to Africa." Ok, so suffice it to say that I have bigger things on my brain than my birthday present. Turning thirty was no big deal last year. It felt like an obnoxious but necessary milestone, and I made peace with the fact that thirty isn't really any different than twenty-nine, and everybody still looks at me and thinks I'm twenty-one or twenty-two anyway. Way back when we first started trying to conceive, it didn't occur to me that we wouldn't have a ba