The other night, Mark and I were sitting together after the kids had gone to sleep and I told him that recent comments on my blog were thrilling me. You see, you all have been stoking my personal vanity by complimenting me on one of my two favorite body parts. When I asked Mark what he thought my two favorite body parts were, he laughed, put a hand on each breast and said, "One! Two!" And that was a good guess, I suppose, for a sex addict.

I actually love my breasts more now than I ever have in my life. Before I had children, I always had what my mother (from whom I inherited my breasts) called "fried egg breasts." Firmly entrenched in the "A" cup size, they were nothing more than roundly protruding man-nipples. I remember being in the gym locker room my freshman year of high school, seeing a well-endowed older girl change clothes and thinking, "I guess, by senior year, I'll have breasts." Then one day, during my senior year, I was changing in the same gym locker room, and it hit me that I was a senior and I still didn't have breasts. And I thought to myself, "Holy crap, I will never have breasts!" Of course, I didn't think about having kids.

Pregnancy and breastfeeding took those little "A" cups and filled them out to somewhere between a nice full womanly "B" and "C." A friend of mine calls these less-than-firm post-breastfeeding breasts "National Geographic breasts," but when I put them in a nice supportive bra, they make me look curvaceous, which beats the hell out of my old fried eggs. So, yes, these days I do love my saggy, life giving, womanly, National Geographic breasts, but not as much as the two parts of my body I've loved my whole life.

I can take or leave most of my body: face, eyes, hips, bottom, legs, feet, toes, even yes, my breasts and those special, special womanly parts. I've been complimented on all of them all at various points in my life, but they mean nothing to me. I am secretly really vain about just two parts of my body: my fingernails and my hair. I love my hair and nails beyond reason. I love the way they look; I love the way they make me feel; I love that they will both keep growing after I die.

I never, ever have a bad hair day, unless I simply don't wash it. I never style it; I never blow dry it; it always looks good to me. It is every shade of golden mixed together, from a deep earthy golden brown to a sweet honey to a rippling sunshine. It is soft as silk, and I love to run my hands through it and rub it across my face and lips. When I go to the beach, I love to put it in my mouth and suck the salt water off of it.

I love that my nails are both strong and flexible, that they grow long without effort and make my hands look pretty. The first great sacrifice of my parenting life was when I cut my nails after my son was born. He liked to use my finger as a pacifier and my nails poked the fragile inside of his tiny mouth; I cut my nails down to stubs in the hospital room the day after his birth and cried as I did it. I cried because, in becoming a mother, I was losing a part of myself that I loved. And I cried because I loved my son so much I was thrilled to sacrifice this tiny part of me that meant so much.

My fingers aren't used as pacifiers anymore, but they still get hell from all the scrubbing and cleaning and dishes and laundry and bathing of children's bodies and wiping of children's bottoms that my hands do. I even have "housewife's eczema," a form of contact dermatitis caused by overexposure to soap and water. It leaves my formerly soft hands dry, rough and cracked. And I am often so busy in a day that I skip showers, leaving my hair limp and greasy.

It was a treat to take a few trips where I could shower every day and enjoy my silky hair. It was a treat to grow my nails out for the reunion and the wedding, to paint and pamper them, to spend a few days not cleaning and let my skin soften, to doll my fingers up with now unaccustomed rings. And it was a treat to have you all compliment the end results and tell me I could be a hand model. Unlike David Duchovny's bit part as a former hand model in Zoolander (possibly one of the greatest movies ever made), I don't have the luxury of encasing my hands in glass to preserve their beauty, but it is nice to take them out of their rubber household gloves and show them off every now and then.