French Children Don't Throw Food Read Online Free

straight from the menu, and nibbling at the occasional hunk of
foie gras
. My French starts to sound less like excellent Spanish and more like very bad French. Before long I’m almost settled: I have a home office, a book deadline, and even a few new friends.
    Simon and I have talked about babies. We both want one. I’d like three, in fact. And I like the idea of having them in Paris, where they’ll be effortlessly bilingual and authentically international. Even if they grow up to be geeks, they can mention ‘growing up in Paris’ and be instantly cool.
    I’m worried about getting pregnant. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying, very successfully, not to, so I have no idea whether I’m any good at the reverse. This turns out to be as whirlwind as our courtship. One day I’m Googling ‘How to get pregnant’. The next, it seems, I’m looking at two pink lines on a French pregnancy test.
    I’m ecstatic. But alongside my joy comes a surge of anxiety. My resolve to become less Carrie Bradshaw and more Catherine Deneuve immediately collapses. This doesn’t seem like the moment to go native. I’m possessed by the idea that I’ve got to oversee my pregnancy, and do it exactly right. Hours after telling Simon the good news, I go online to scour English-language pregnancy websites. Then I rush to buy some pregnancy guides, at an English bookstore near the Louvre. I want to know, in plain English, exactly what to worry about.
    Within days I’m on prenatal vitamins and addicted to BabyCentre’s ‘Is it safe?’ column. Is it safe to eat non-organic produce while pregnant? Is it safe to be around computers all day? Is it safe to wear high heels, binge on sweets at Halloween, or holiday at high altitudes?
    What makes ‘Is it safe?’ so compulsive is that it creates new anxieties (Is it safe to make photocopies? Is it safe to swallow semen?) but then refuses to allay them with a simple yes or no. Instead, expert respondents disagree with each other and equivocate. ‘Is it safe to get a manicure while I’m pregnant?’ Well yes, but chronic exposure to the solvents used in salons isn’t good for you. Is it safe to go bowling? Well, yes and no.
    The Anglophones I know also believe that pregnancy – and then motherhood – come with homework. The first assignment is choosing from among myriad parenting styles. Everyone I speak to swears by a different book. I buy many of them. But instead of making me feel more prepared, having so much conflicting advice makes babies themselves seem enigmatic and unknowable. Who they are, and what they need, seems to depend on which book you read.
    Another consequence of this independent study is that we Anglophone mothers-to-be become experts in everything that can go wrong. A pregnant Englishwoman who’s visiting Paris declares, over lunch, that there’s a five in one thousand chance her baby will be stillborn. She says she knows that saying this is gruesome and pointless, but she can’t help herself . A Londoner I know, who unfortunately has a doctorate in public health, spends much of her first trimester cataloguing the baby’s risks of contracting every possible malady.
    I’m surrounded by this anxiety when we visit Simon’s family in London (I’ve decided to believe that his parents adore me). I’m sitting in a café when a well-dressed woman interrupts me to describe a new study showing that having a lot of caffeine increases the risk of miscarriage. To stress her credibility, she says she’s
married to a doctor
. I don’t care who her husband is. I’m just irritated by her assumption that I haven’t read that study. Of course I have; I’m trying to live on one cup a week.
    With so much studying and worrying to do, being pregnant increasingly feels like a full-time job. I spend less and less time working on my book, which I’m supposed to hand in before the baby comes. Instead, I commune with other pregnant Anglophones in due-date-cohort chat rooms. Like me,