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Hark:  In less than two weeks we will have the opportunity to find out the sex of the baby!  Place your bets, people.  I always thought that it would drive me insane to have a person inside of me and not be able to know its sex until several months had gone by…but in fact, it doesn’t bother me at all.  I am very interested and excited to find out, but I’ve been pretty content so far with my abstract, mysterious fetus.  Whatever it is, I’ll be thrilled, and probably terrified.

Speaking of Fetus, I thought I felt him/her moving around this morning, but it might have just been a particularly robust moment of digestion.  All’s I know for sure at this point is that he/she’s still in there with a healthy heartbeat, that my uterus is apparently “the perfect size” for this stage of the pregnancy, and that despite some undeniable abdominal embiggening, I haven’t gained a pound and am still under my pre-pregnancy weight.  That means I’ve only got about five months left to gain the recommended pounds (which equal a staggering 20% to 30% of my current weight!).  Egads, but that’s a lot of pickles.

This evening I was in the shower singing the chorus to “Tarzan Boy” (as you do), having heard it on the radio earlier in the day.  Jared asked me if I was singing “the Listerine song”.  Shortly thereafter I sought to verify whether I had in fact been singing “the Listerine song”, so I did some quick Youtubing and found this.  The commercial’s computer graphics had apparently impressed my then-teenage husband so much that he reserved a little corner of his brain for it…for the better part of two decades.

-Today at work I officially said “fuck it” and started opening my fly every time I sat down.  Fortunately for us all, my Bella Band arrived in the mail today.  I shall never button my pants again.

-I was reading a pregnancy website and came upon a section forebodingly titled “Is It Safe?” and I reflected upon how frustrating it is that according to the modern media,  everything you’re doing, or not doing, is Wrong and Bad For Your Baby. Not that it was necessarily better to make babies in an age where doctors prescribed cigarettes as a cure for morning sickness, but what the hell.  I also started envisioning that dental torture scene from Marathon Man and then I shuddered.

-Even though I am still sick, I am generally somewhat less sick than I was a couple of months ago, and that’s good.  Early on I spent most of my time in bed, very occasionally dragging myself to the couch where Jared would ask how I felt and I would respond by silently acting out the scene in The Fly (1986) where the fly angles Geena Davis’s shotgun towards his forehead, beseeching her to end his misery.  Now I spend most of my time on the couch, saying, “Ow, my ass!”* while Jared plays video games next to me.  I also spend a lot of time staring suspiciously at the contours of his head.

-*Ow, my ass!  Even now, in the early second trimester, my ligaments are going slack, allowing my pelvic bones and vertebrae to separate so that Baby Bighead can one day tear me asunder and enter this cruel world.  Sometimes when I sit down I can actually feel (and, alarmingly, hear) the bones shifting slightly.  It’s like the faintest cracking of a knuckle, but in the “lower back”, which is to say the ass.

-Yesterday was a holiday at my job but not at Jared’s, and I had plans to go visit a co-worker’s new baby.  I decided to make a banana bread for her, and was doing so as Jared was headed out the door.  “I’ll just be here baking and gestating while you go to work,” I said.  “I’ll be riding my motorcycle to my tech job, where I’ll do a bunch of math,” he replied.  Then we both puked all over ourselves, for reasons having nothing to do with morning sickness.

Jared and I went on an impromptu trip to the supermarket on this fine Saturday night (we’re as wild and crazy as ever!).   While walking into the store I dry heaved without breaking my stride.  As we shopped, Jared carried most of our groceries in a basket and I picked up a couple of items to carry myself.  As we headed for the checkout lanes, I noticed that I was waddling along with a jar of pickles in my left hand and a carton of ice cream in my right.

Engh.

Despite having a more involved medical history than the average healthy 26 year old, I still have several body systems as yet unexplored by the cold gloved hand of Science.  Pregnancy is gradually changing that, as I have learned a few interesting things about myself while being scanned, prodded, and probed in the name of prenatal health.

1) I don’t have syphilis.  Phew!

2) My uterus is retroverted, or “tilted”, meaning instead of curving forward over the bladder it reclines casually backwards towards my intestines.  Or it did, anyway, because apparently being pregnant forces it to assume the traditional position.

3) I am not Caucasian.  I learned this while reading through a pamphlet about genetic testing.  As an Ashkenazi Jew, I apparently am at much higher risk of carrying all manner of broken, mutated genes (hey, Hitler was right after all!) so even though I married a gentile whose superior blood would preclude our baby from being born with horns or whatever, I had some testing done out of curiosity.  At that point I was given a pamphlet with a photo of a curly-haired brunette woman with a prominent nose pensively touching her abdomen (bitch took my modeling gig!) which explained that Blacks have x% risk of certain diseases, Caucasians have y% risk…and Ashkenazim have z% risk.   I’m not white anymore!  I’ll be jiggered.

One of his (arguably) more absurd theories was that “morning” sickness represented a pregnant woman’s loathing of her husband and desire to miscarry the fetus through her mouth.  I thoughtfully reflected upon this concept tonight as I hurled a stomach’s worth of pizza, applesauce, and my prenatal vitamin into the toilet while my husband lovingly patted my back.

Faaaack you, Doktor.