… requires three things:

1. Patience
   I have probably the most unsteady hands in the history of unsteady hands and can recall numerous times my nails have been uneven. Or a time I have completely forgotten to clip my pinky nail.
2. Desire
   When I used to play the violin and guitar regularly, I detested any nails at all on the ends of my fingers, so I carried around a nail clipper with me (in my violin and guitar case, especially). The feeling of my nails scratching the finger/fret board drove me batty.
3. Goggles
   An absolute must unless I want to be the next Hellen Keller. Yes, I do believe finger/toe nails have minds of their own and are out to not only blind me, but also take away my sense of hearing. Call me insane, but I swear it’s the truth.

I used to subscribe to Disney Adventures or some such and remember a section of the magazine that focused on the extraordinary but true. There was a story of a man/woman/hermaphrodite (most likely one of the former two) who collected all of his/her/its finger/toe nail clippings and stored them in a jar and displayed them in a closet. If this person weren’t featured in that magazine, he/she/it could likely be misconstrued as a serial killer because it definitely sound like something right out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to me.

I’m not entirely sure how the above paragraph relates to the bulleted items, nor how this sentence really relates to anything - I felt inclined to share that little Disney Adventure memory I have of a possible hermaphroditic serial killer in Texas.

It’s commonly believed that pregnant women tend to crave extraordinary combinations of food, such as pickles with ice cream or pizza topped with cherries. In the past 39-ish weeks that I’ve been pregnant, no strange desires of such food pairings ever hit me.

For the most part, I only craved beverages of the fruity variety. In particular was Hi-C fruit punch, loaded with 100 percent Vitamin C (*cue that infamous Graduation song*) and probably 110 percent sugar. My baby will probably have a sweet tooth, just like me.

That said, there’s no need for explanation about my huge craving for chocolate. My intake of chocolate got rather ridiculous, feeling the need to have at least one piece of chocolate on a daily basis, otherwise life as I knew it lost all purpose. Dramatic, yes. Thankfully my intake of chocolate over the past couple weeks has dwindled to eating a piece every other day.

I suppose the only odd combination of foods that I craved was bagels with cream cheese and hot dogs. Or tortillas with cream cheese and hot dogs. But that’s actually a combination I craved even before I became pregnant, and I never considered it a strange craving.