Of the Sick and Twisted Variety

Michael has recently taken to referring to me as the Tauntaun. Meaning, every time he looks at me, he is visualizing this:



Which seems about right.

While out to dinner with Michael and my mom the other night, we noticed a recently evicted baby being rocked in her car seat while the parents ate. This sparked the following conversation:

Mom: That will be you guys soon. You never stop rocking. It's all you do.

Michael: What's with that? Why do babies find that so comforting?

Jen: (Super excited to know the answer and dazzle the world with her wealth of knowledge and ready to receive the thunderous applause and cheers for being brilliant) Well, the baby is used to being in the womb and moving around all day. I can feel it already. The Bean sleeps while I'm up and about doing things. It's when I sit or lay down and stop moving that she starts kicking and punching me.

Michael: It's probably because she thinks you died and is trying to let the outside world know she's still in there.

My mother stared at us horrified as Michael and I spent the next 5 minutes enacting exactly how The Bean was signaling for help from inside and cackling the entire time.

Look! I drew you a cartoon so you could see the sublime humor in it all (you may need to click on them to enlarge them to see the full scope of genius):





Poor Nana. She's going to have her work cut out for her trying to make sure this grandbaby grows up well-adjusted.

Momentous Moments in Momentdom

Michael finally got to feel The Bean last night.

Her new trick is acting like a lunatic at a mental asylum with padded walls--so she'll fit in well around here--and flinging herself and all her body parts against my womb. This is a fun addition to her previous repertoire of tricks which consisted solely of beating her heart (while appreciated, is fairly boring for us spectators).

For those who want to know about baby kicks, the best description I can give is: it feels exactly how I would imagine it would feel like if I swallowed a live fish and it was flopping around in my stomach.

Being a typical woman, she's been toying with Michael up until now. She'd be all practicing her break dancing moves and I'd go running to find Michael so he could feel her. He'd put his hand on my stomach in anticipation and she'd play dead.

I found this wildly funny. Michael did not.

But by last night I had it. He was going to feel this baby move because all the websites say he should be feeling her by now and we were not going to be behind schedule goddammit.

She played her 'torment Dad' game and kicked and squirmed right until he put his hand on my stomach. And I was not standing for this behavior another minute.

I got a big glass of ice water and downed that sucker as quick as I could to send a cold, arctic blast down into my warm baby growing facility.

Mom wins. (Hey, it's not child abuse until she's born, right?)

That jump started her and Michael got to feel her kick/punch/head butt/whatever it is she's doing in there.

It was this totally super sentimental, moving moment where suddenly everything in the room is bathed in God lights and angels sang and we were the perfect family unit. Our lives were forever changed and we're whole.

Sort of.

Not at all.

What really happened:

Jen: (feeling the third kick in a row) Ugh, did you feel THAT one?????

Michael: (jumping off the bed) Oh gross! Ewww. You have aliens inside of you. Stay on your side of the bed and don't touch me with your alien body...until after she's born. (Sneering in disgust at me and my stomach.)

Yep. That sounds much more like us.


And look! A special treat since I put make-up on today...a new bump (25 weeks):