(InStyle.com) -- A thriving career. And a sure-to-be-adorable baby (due any minute). It would be easy to envy Halle Berry -- if she weren't so nice. The Academy Award opens up about the blessed event.
"'Isn't She Lovely' by Stevie Wonder has been playing a lot in our house .. that song keeps coming up on my iPod too... We're like, 'It's a sign! It's a girl!"
Ooh, baby
Right now Halle Berry's brain is running on the All Baby, All the Time channel. Draped in a flowing black Club Monaco dress -- "It's a perfect time to be pregnant because everything in fashion is loose-fitting with an Empire waist" -- she talks with unfettered enthusiasm about the world she's building for her child: a nursery of soothing neutral colors, old-fashioned wooden toys, and organic, chemical-free clothing (one favorite designer: Under the Nile).
She still swears by her favorite skin-care line, Kinara. But just about everything else in her daily life has been transformed.
She has traded in her relaxing end-of-the day glass of wine for one of sparkling cider. Her exercise routine has downshifted to include a bit of yoga, lighter weights, using an elliptical machine and swimming, while she remains careful about her diet (she has diabetes and must be especially vigilant about sugar intake while she's pregnant). 
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But with all the monitoring of this and that, Berry is more radiant than ever. Anyone would swear that this pregnancy had rolled back the clock a good decade. "My skin is aglow from all the hormones. I actually wear less makeup now, which is really good. I want to stay pregnant forever," she says.
Little wonder, then, that Berry is relishing her maternal state to the fullest. Ask her how she's feeling these days, and Berry answers without missing a beat: "Fantastic! The second trimester, everybody told me, 'You'll see, you're going to be a whole new woman.' And it's true! I know it will change in the third trimester, but right now I just have so much joy and energy that I feel like I've already done 12 things today. I can just go and go and go."
Which makes the technical term for her "delicate condition" a little confounding. "Did you know that they call this a geriatric pregnancy?" Berry asks, with a smile. "I cringe when I hear that. I'm like, Take that off my chart!"
Super Mom
Berry says she won't be hiring a full-time nanny because she wants to be as hands on as possible -- just like her own mother. After her father left, when Berry and her older sister, Heidi, were still young children, Judith, a psychiatric-ward nurse, raised the girls on her own in Cleveland.
"She never wanted me to focus on my physical self," Berry once told a reporter. "My mom always said, 'Beauty is what you do.'" She has another charming recollection of her role model. "My first memory as a kid was of my mother and her long blond hair -- which she probably dyed," she says. "It was just so different from mine. I remember looking at her and thinking how beautiful she was." E-mail to a friend 
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