Now that the holidays are over, I feel like I should send out a preemptive notice to all concerned family and friends: unless you’ve been otherwise informed, you may assume that I am fine and that I haven’t given birth yet. I’m still a few weeks away from my due date(s), first-time mothers tend to go into labor late as it is, and I’ve experienced no signs that this baby is particularly anxious about making his appearance.  Trust me, if I give birth, we’ll let you know.  Really, it’ll come up in conversation.

Happily (?), I still have plenty of work to do in the interminable meantime to keep myself distracted, and no major physical complaints.  I still sleep like a log, and feel only moderately creaky in the joints.  I have to say that I’m really looking forward to someday being able to bend forward again in order to pick up objects — I now regard the coffee table with a slight glint of animosity in my eye, because my drink is right there but my torso will come to a sudden halt whenever I try to lean forward and pick it up — and being able to sleep (even if only in 1-2 hour stretches) without the contents of my stomach, currently perched in an unnaturally squashed, elevated, and profoundly sloshy state atop my uterus, quietly trickling their way back up my esophagus.  That said, I find it amazing that pregnancy isn’t significantly more uncomfortable, when you consider the increasingly insane contortions that my internal organs have been forced into for the better part of a year.

One recent matter of no small curiosity has been my progressively more ridiculous shape.  Although I can’t get a good photo of myself these days to save my life — I am just too vain to want to put photos of myself with that many apparent chins on the internet without good reason — my torso is accommodating its extra charge by growing straight out, not side to side.  The only real stretch marks that I’ve obtained are located in an uneven splotch directly above my navel, which I regard with some alarm — like, there’s just not that much more room right there for outward expansion.

More to the point, I’m serving as a ready reminder of why we joke about smuggling beach balls or watermelons when we talk about pregnancy.  Because dang, you guys, I look remarkably hemispherical when viewed in profile.  I had Pete take a photo to corroborate this:

… and took it into Photoshop to prove my point:

It comes as no small consolation to see that my third trimester is so geometrically correct.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 at 10:10 am and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.