AUSTIN, Texas — Sitting at Sweetish Hill sipping a glass of iced tea, Mary K. Moore feels a bit like a new mom revisiting the hotel where her child was conceived.
"I wrote my book here," she says. "It's peaceful here, and I like the vibe."
The book is "The Unexpected When You're Expecting: Clear, Comprehensive, Month-by-Month Dread," (Sourcebooks Inc., $10.95), a send-up of the highly popular "What To Expect When You're Expecting" - and also a great collection of one-liners about planning, percolating, having and raising a baby.
For example, there's this great baby pickup line: "You have fewer folds than most babies, and I'm not just saying that."
The book deals with such pregnancy quandaries as fending off the advice of all your parent friends (like the one who isn't even pregnant but says your chosen name is the one she wants for her baby) and choosing the right name (not Hemp unless you're a film star).
The advice is useful. But most of all, this book is funny. It's especially hilarious for those of us who are out of the baby business for good. (Baby using my bladder for a trampoline: Yeah, I can laugh about that now.)
Moore's book hit the stores on (when else?) Labor Day, and she's finding herself in the same situation she faced when her daughter Scarlett was born three years ago.
"It's like raising a newborn," she says. "It involves getting up early and it's really intense. But, really, it's been a labor of love."
A University of Texas journalism graduate, Moore, 35, was a freelance writer and editor for such magazines as Glamour and Marie Claire until a little more than a year ago, when she decided she wanted to write a book.
Scarlett was 2 at the time. When Moore and her agent were throwing around book ideas, they seized upon the center of Moore's life: motherhood.
"Motherhood was an unexpected joy for me," she says. "It's the easiest job I've ever done."
Moore says she'd get up around 3 a.m. and work on the book at home for a few hours while her daughter slept. Then, after some morning bonding, she'd escape around 10 a.m., with the help of a nanny, and head for a few hours alone writing at Sweetish Hill Bakery & Cafe.
She'd discovered Sweetish Hill when she was at UT, working at a shop nearby, "and I used to wonder who all those people were who are up at 7 a.m. Now I know: They're parents."
The concept for the book, Moore says, is total escapism: "something to read when you're sick of the advice books." And, yes, she did read Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel's "What to Expect When You're Expecting" when she was pregnant - "Every woman who's gestated since Reagan has."
It provided a loose structure for the book, but Moore, since she wrote a lot for fashion magazines, also wanted to address such issues as maternity fashion. She addresses dads, too, urging them not to be the sort of touchy-feeling dad that's always "gazing into his wife's stomach like a crystal ball."
Humor was easy, she says. She's had an interest in being funny since she was at UT.
"I would go to BookPeople and hang out in the humor section," she says, "I discovered Dave Sedaris there."
Putting everything about mommydom down on paper, Moore says, "just came naturally." Like a baby.
So, when will she write her next book?
"That's sort of like people asking you right after you've had a baby, `When will you get back into your bikini?' " she says.
Right now she's still exhausted from writing "The Unexpected," but she says, yes, she's sure she'll eventually be up for writing another.
"Nature," she says, "has that convenient amnesia."
Helen Bryant Anders writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: handers AT statesman.com