For those who don't obsessively Facebook stalk...

So here we are, making our photo début as two conjoined entities: the fetus and me. A lovely sunny photo exactly on the 14-week mark: so 3 1/2 months pregnant. It doesn't stick out but so much yet, but if I sit still at the right times of day I can feel it wiggling its little arms and legs. At least once, I've woken up in the morning to inform the Husband, "your baby is awake. It's moving." It seems to particularly like to move in the mornings once my bladder isn't encroaching on its personal space.

It's terrible that I keep calling my baby "it". I know that. Sometimes, I've taken to saying "he" instead, but I don't really have a feeling for whether Piggly Wiggly is a boy or a girl, and typing out Piggly Wiggly every time I need to refer to my unborn child takes just enough time to make me not do it. I feel like I should start a poll to guess the baby's sex. That said, it'd be a boring poll as there are only two choices (I do not concede to the possibility of a hermaphrodite baby...the odds are probably quite staggeringly against it anyway), not to mention, I'm not planning on finding out what sex the baby is until he's born. Unless, of course, Baby decides that the suspense is too much (or it doesn't want to be dressed in gender-neutral greens and whites) and brazenly flashes the sonographer in another six weeks. I figure, if the baby is waving its bits for the camera, who am I to deny its clear request that we buy it gender-appropriate accessories in preparation for its arrival? If my baby is already that concerned about removing any ambiguity about its sex, I'm perfectly willing to respect those wishes. In the meantime, the policy is to wait and see.

The other policy is to healthily prolong the moment at which I officially weigh more than The Husband. Even though it'll be because I'm technically two people, that is a day best kept in the distant future. However, the gaining of sympathy weight to postpone the inevitable is not an option. I refuse to see his trim figure hidden under love-handles, man-boobs, and bingo wings. Thankfully, he refuses to see this happen, too. Great minds think alike.

New Easter Tradition

As his contribution to his mother's insistence that we cultivate new family traditions, my husband suggested that we play beer pong. Funnily enough, this suggestion did not go down as expected: everyone - even the husband's parents - really got behind the idea. So what did we do last night after going punting on the Cherwell and sitting out in the uncharacteristically blistering English sun? Played our first annual family beer pong tournament.

To be fair, it wasn't with beer...we played with copious quantities of cheap soda, but Soda Pong just doesn't have the same ring to it as Beer Pong does.

What was the saddest part of this whole endeavour? My dreams of beer pong champion status were crushed...by my husband's mom and dad! His dad was actually disturbingly good at the game. Clearly, this is the guy you want with you to challenge the table at a frat party. A good sport and deadly accurate.

Never, even through my years at WF, have I had such a frat-tastic holiday. Long live family beer pong!

The (slightly more realistic) Joys of Parenthood

After reading a recent post on BCC, I've come to the conclusion that - at least in the abstract - you have to find a way to love even what could be the most aggravating parts about parenting small children. (I'm not worrying about kids from about 9 or 10-18: that's an entirely different kettle of fish.)

So with that in mind, I have a list of my favourite misdemeanors and misdeeds that I've witness from other people's children...sometimes while I was the one in charge of them.

1. The wily 6-14-month-old who, with something of a Michael Scofield complex, consistently attempts to escape its parents clutches by crawling under the pews during church. These attempts invariably end with the child suddenly disappearing from view as they are pulled back by an an ankle to sit and fuss under their parents' watchful gaze.
2. A Sunday School class full of 5-year-olds who wouldn't sit still and listen to a lesson unless they were given time to "dance" to some guitar music before we talked about the fishes and the loaves. Of course, "dancing" meant imitating grand mal seizures, crawling under the chairs, and launching themselves from the windowsill into one another.
3. A particularly hilarious little girl who, after insisting that she was the baby bird and I was the mommy bird, informed me that as the mommy bird, I had huge "nickels". Needless to say, she enlightened me as to what she meant by pulling her top over her head and pointing. We were on a walk with several other families at the time.
4. The child who, as the sacrament was passed, kept begging loudly for another piece of bread because the first one had been too small and he was still hungry.
5. A 1-year-old in the supermarket wandering away from her parents to scoop up a few baguettes and toddle off with them. When the baguettes were returned to their display a box of lunch snacks, a jar of hot cocoa powder, and what in the end was a slightly squished bag of blueberry muffins had suffered the same fate.
6. The little girl who, at 10 months, finds that her favourite activity to keep quiet is the violent unpacking of everything in her diaper bag. Everything...from every container.
7. The sneaky defiance of a 3-year-old. After being told by her mother that no, she was not allowed to go wading in the water, waited until her mother's back was turned to slowly remove her shoes and stealthily slip off her stockings to make a slow progress towards the pond and her goal of wet feet.
8. My uncle's 4-year-old mind coming to the conclusion that across the kitchen his baby brother's head (my dad) was the perfect target at which to aim the hard plastic darts that fired from his toy gun. Needless to say, the babysitter did not approve of his high marksmanship.
9. My own little sister at age 3 or so taking a fist-full of crayons or markers and running around the house with them, held high over her head. The result was a very avant-garde chair rail along several of the walls that my mother did *not* appreciate in the least.

It makes me start to wonder what sorts of stories I'll be telling *my* children about their own antics later on in life.

Rejoice and Be Merry

That's right, John Rutter, it may not be Christmas, but I'm feeling like a little merry rejoicing. The husband has reinstalled WindowsXP on my laptop, which means that all the superfluous and useless programmes left on it from my time at Wake Forest are now gone, essentially giving what was otherwise a slowly decaying pile of junk a new lease on life.

It can reboot without the worry that it'll crash on start-up! It has free space on the hard drive! It's fast! Suddenly, I don't mind that it's not as good of a computer as the T-series I got as a freshman. Maybe that's because only now does it work as it ought to.

Now, I just have to win the stupid fight with getting my music off my iPod and back onto my computer. This is one of the many times I curse Steve Jobs and the crap job he's done at making my iPod a useful piece of tech.

The Snark of New-Motherhood

I've just been doing a bit of reading on TheBump.com - a partner website to the one I used to help me plan my wedding. It's been quite entertaining to read the message boards and articles and keep up with different people's experiences of being pregnant.

Just today I came across an article, and several un-related message board threads, about moms judging moms. The apparently popular phenomenon where whatever you do isn't good enough for either your mom, your mother-in-law, friends who already have babies, or women you meet in things like LLL or some other local mommies club. It's as if, along with the instinct to reproduce and nest, women come biologically programmed with an innate need to viciously critique one another. Talk about having to overcome the natural (wo)man to be a good person!

Now maybe I'm just snarkier and generally meaner and more sarcastic than some pregnant women, but I feel like the minute someone felt the need to unilaterally undermine and critique my decisions without knowing my full situation I'd lay them out! I'm no stranger to the snappy and vicious retort. And I'd like to think that I mastered the ever-effective Contemptuous Sneer at a very early age.

So what sorts of things do moms get flak for? Everything. Which ones do I think are ridiculous? Let's review:

1. Formula-feeding your baby is not the same as tying a big rock around his neck and dropping him into a swift-moving river of piranhas. No matter how many people give you the bitchy side-eye for choosing to formula-feed, formula is not Satan. It will not make your baby lose IQ points, give it a horrible disease, or cause some other irreparable harm. If it did, we wouldn't still sell it.

2. Stay at home moms (SAHMs) do not all stay home because they can't afford daycare or because they can't find a good job. Some of them do it because they feel like that's the best thing they can do for their children. Some women would rather sacrifice earning power in order to personally see to it that their kids are looked after and raised in a way they approve of from the very beginning.

3. Working moms are not selfish, suit-wearing, high-heeled narcissists who chase those elusive six figures at their neglected children's expense. Some work because they have to, others because time with grown-ups makes them a better parent, others for still more diverse reasons. It does not necessarily follow that they're selfish or irresponsible for choosing to have kids when they aren't ready to stay at home all day changing turd-filled diapers and telling the baby not to put her finger in the sockets.

4. Disposable diapers are a choice that does not necessarily mean that you hate Mother Earth and have a personal mission to see how many vegan environmentalists in Berkenstocks you can run over with a diesel 4x4 each week. Likewise, cloth diapers don't make you Mother freaking Theresa.

5. As long as the TV isn't a babysitter, raising your children with one in the house doesn't guarantee that they'll be drooling idiots who flunk out of school and work at McDonald's for the remainder of their natural lives (that is, until those government benefits kick in!). Conversely, banning the TV from your children's lives is no guarantee that they won't turn out to be vapid delinquents with the intellectual capacity of a bag of chips.

6. Everyone shows their pregnancy at a different stage - and that even differs with the same woman from pregnancy to pregnancy. Remind me when people decided it was socially acceptable to ask otherwise inappropriate and personal questions of someone just because they were growing new life in their uterus? Unless you're my doctor, it's not your business if I'm planning to have that epidural or not! And the next person who calls me fat, whoever it is, I promise will get a black eye. I'm not fat! I'm pregnant! Believe you me, if there wasn't a baby pushing my guts out of its way and making me sick enough to sit in bed for 3 weeks, my stomach would be beautifully flat and tight. It is not okay to comment on my similarity to the side of a house just because I have a bun in the oven. If it was rude before, it's still rude.

7. This has nothing to do with judging people, but the first person who makes an unsolicited move for my baby bump to rub it like I'm a crystal ball will lose a hand. Just because the bubble that delineates my personal space is bigger does NOT mean that it's any more permeable than it was before. In this respect, I have to follow the example of Cristina Yang from Grey's Anatomy:

Cristina: Ow, ow, ow, ow!

Sidney: What? Am I hurting you?

Cristina: No; you're touching me.

Hello Tiny Person

I made an actual tiny person! How cool is that? There is a little person with fingers and toes and a tiny bum and a tiny nose in my tummy! And that person hiccups! And is 2" long!

Hello, Tiny Human. Your daddy and I had fun getting to see you today.