In the final days...

Watch him grow

For my pregnancy, I've been reading Great Expectations (by Sandy Jones and Marcie Jones, not Charles Dickens) for the play-by-play of each week. It's like What to Expect, but without some of the objections of that book. Plus it's much more geared towards women who want a drug-free delivery and plan to breastfeed.

One of my favorite parts of reading the book each week is hearing how much the baby has grown. But I find the descriptions of this aspect of development totally hilarious. Below is a compiling of the ways in which these authors describe the baby's approximate size (sometimes weight, sometimes length) each week.

Weeks 2 and 3 -- Fits on the head of a pin
Week 4 -- Barely visible to the naked eye
Week 5 -- Size of a grain of sand
Week 6 -- Size of an M&Ms candy
Week 7 -- Weighing no more than a chocolate chip or a berry
Week 8 -- The size of your thumbprint
Week 10 -- The size of a garden beetle
Week 11 -- The size of a peanut
Week 12 -- As tall as a squash ball
Week 13 -- The size of a medium goldfish
Week 14 -- As wide as your fist
Week 16 -- The size of a small gerbil
Week 17 -- Weighs as much as a bar of soap
Week 18 -- The size of a lobster tail
Week 19 -- The size of an apple
Week 20 -- The size of a mango
Week 21 -- The size bear cubs are when they are born

Looking ahead:
Week 22 -- The size of a small grapefruit
Week 23 -- Weighs as much as a box of sugar or a bag of coffee beans
Week 24 -- The size of a banana
Week 25 -- The size of small bag of sugar
Week 27 -- The size of a small pot roast
Week 28 -- The size of a bag of flower
Week 30 -- As long as a laptop computer
Week 34 -- The size of a bag of sugar
Week 35 -- The size of a small roasting chicken
Week 40 -- Size: Huge

I like the bear cubs and the small roasting chicken, personally. And Week 16 gives credence to our fears at our first ultrasound that the screen would show a hamster inside of my uterus.

Box of Baby Books

The nausea continues, but I’m making it through. I was telling Wes tonight that the pregnancy symptom that most resonates with me isn’t the nausea or breast tenderness or baby brain – it’s the smell factor. Everything is potent to my nose. Things that I would otherwise enjoy smelling or only be bothered by a little really smell strongly. I can’t stand being around a smoker – even when he or she isn’t smoking. The cafeteria food made me gag. Even Wes’s dinner tonight – the same thing I ate (at least some of) for lunch – made my stomach turn over. It’s amazing how true the pregnancy symptoms are. I don’t know why they surprise me. I guess it’s the whole sinking-in process.

I got a box of baby books today. There’s one about nutrition, two about fitness, one about baby gear, and another that’s a fun name book. I’ve paged through all of them already, but Wes really latched onto the name book. We talked about not discussing names until after the first trimester – the whole self-preservation thing – and we’re not exactly making lists, but we are talking about it. The book tells how popular the name is today, when its popularity peaked, what category of names it falls under, nicknames and variations, and good names for brothers and sisters that “go” – along with a little tidbit about when or why it became popular, what it conjures, and so forth. We looked up our names – and Lucy’s, of course – to see what they said. I have the #9 girl’s name! The most popular name 20-30 years ago was Jennifer, which is why it’s now the #1 name among pregnant women (including my sister-in-law, who is, to my knowledge, not currently pregnant but has two kids). We looked up one or two names that we’d talked about before we were even pregnant. It was fun. It’s not your ordinary name book, and that makes it neat. I definitely want kids’ names that kind of “go” together – like how mine and my siblings’ names seem to fit together.

Dear Husband Part 4

When I told Wes about my realization that pregnancy leads to babies, he looked at me weird and said, “I think you might need to read the end of that pregnancy book first, and then go back.”