They laugh until they cry

I have been delegated to enter this update because Ame is apparently too embarrassed to do so. Last night she was curled up reading a book by Garrison Keillor, a humorist, and had been laughing pretty frequently through it. Then, she got to a part which was evidently too funny for her to handle, and she started laughing until tears began to well up in her eyes, at which point she began moving away from laughing and towards crying. She says it's pregnancy hormones, but I think she may just be crazy.

Rewind to this past June, and this little scene becomes just part of the ongoing saga. We were in San Francisco visiting Ame's sister and had decided to go on a sort of date night where we got dressed up and went out to eat. Afterwards we headed over to a nearby shopping center and stopped in a Borders bookstore, where we gathered up a handful of books and parked ourselves in the cafe section. So here I am thumbing through a few baby name books (and deciding that our baby probably doesn't need an Albanian name) while Ame is reading a book called The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy, and she gets to a section describing, in apparently hilarious detail, the various afflictions of pregnancy, where she begins laughing. Having undergone a few of these afflictions herself, Ame was so amused that she just couldn't stop laughing. Then, you guessed it, the tears began to well up, and in a matter of seconds she was bawling. (Keep in mind that we're still in the cafe section of the store, surrounded by about half a dozen people.) I wasn't sure whether to laugh with her, laugh at her, or try to console her. I imagine that I probably did a combination of the three. So I did my best to usher her out of the store, though not before putting all five or six books back into their proper places, a move that I don't think she appreciated.

I think that the bookstore experienced helped her, though, because last night she never really got to the point where she was just crying; she was fighting back most of the tears with laughter. And it certainly helped me, because I knew what was going on and was able to just laugh with (or at) her without needing to really be too concerned. Really, I kind of look forward to more of these little laughing/crying fits; it's not often that one gets the chance to really unashamedly laugh at a crying woman.