The (Fake) Name Game

Now that I'm very visibly pregnant, it's pretty much the first topic of conversation with everyone I meet. Close friends, acquaintances, and perfect strangers all tend to ask variations on the following three questions:

1.) When are you due?
2.) Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?
3.) Have you picked out a name yet?

The first two are easy to answer, but the third has presented me with a few problems. My standard response is "not yet!" and most people end the conversation there, but there have been a couple who try to force the issue. I know, I know, it's one of the biggest things that people talk about regarding babies, and many people are comfortable sharing their name choice ahead of time. We are not. We don't want to invite commentary on our son's name prior to his arrival because we don't want it to appear that we're asking for opinions or approval, and if I can be honest, I think we're also a bit superstitious. Once he's breathing air and not amniotic fluid, then we can announce his name with a ticker-tape parade for all I care.

So, what have we been telling the nosy but well-intentioned people who really want to discuss name possibilities with us? Fake names. Let me demonstrate:

"Do you know what you're going to name the baby?"
"Yes! We're just trying to decide between Pubert and Bort."
:::silence:::

Okay, so not everybody gets the joke. (Although I do find the occasional person who immediately gets the Simpsons reference and mentions Bort license plates!) But it tends to derail the conversation long enough to distract the questioner, and often they start suggesting their own fake names to add to our list.  Besides Pubert and Bort, we have also been experimenting with:

Kenmore
Dyson
Seiko
Agador Spartacus
Darth
Danger (as a middle name)
Spiderman

If anyone has any suggestions for additions to the fake name list, by all means let me know! I'll just be over here singing "The Name Game" to see which one sounds best: Bort Bort bo Bort banana fana fo Fort...

Photographic Proof... Maybe

Dearest readers, I am thrilled to be able to present you with this exclusive new image of our unborn child:

Wait, what's that? You don't see a baby in this picture? It looks like a bunch of random... stuff? Well! Let me help you out a bit:

So, you see, this could be anything! But I'm told it's probably a picture of our unborn child's face. Part of his face. We think. I feel confident that we're looking at one nostril, at least. And it is an ADORABLE nostril.

In other news, everything looked fine on the rest of the scan. Hooray! Onwards!

Linea Nigra and Stretch Marks

Sigh. I knew I was unlikely to be in the minority of women who escape stretch marks in pregnancy, but I had high hopes. After all, I hit 30 weeks without incident, but I knew I was on borrowed time since evidently they often don't show up until the 3rd trimester. And, sure enough, there is some weirdness happening to my bump now that wasn't there a week ago.

It still isn't a traditional stretch mark per se - the long jagged lines that are already all over my womanly curves from past weight gain are what I think of as "classic" stretch marks. This is more of a stretch spot. It's an area about the size of a pencil eraser, red and shiny, approximately a centimeter above my distended belly button. And when I say I'm getting a linea nigra, it too doesn't have the presentation I had expected. It didn't start coming in until the 7th month, and it's slowly getting darker from the bottom up. Honestly, my bump is so big now that I rarely see it, although that makes it kind of startling when I do glance in the mirror.

Between the line, the weirdness of my belly button - which is only partially an outie, and partially a flat area of some funky-looking skin - and this new red patch, I will say that my belly is beginning to truly not look like my belly anymore. Up until now it was still recognizably mine, just bigger, but now the alien takeover is moving into a new phase. The fact that it often moves in unpredictable ways of its own accord doesn't really hurt the general out-of-body feeling it has going for it. (Seriously, what are you doing in there, unborn child? Redecorating?) And I can't wait to reread this post in a few weeks or months and see how much more it has changed!

The Pregnant Lady Olympics

Last night, while watching the Olympic women's gymnastics coverage for the millionth time, Harry said "you know, there should be an Olympics for pregnant women." And I agree! We can compete in areas like:

- Picking something up off the floor
- Standing
- Eating a burrito with no heartburn medication

Of course, I take my hat off to the actual pregnant ladies who have competed in the Olympics, including this totally badass shooter who is currently 8 months along and still made the trip to London. I bet she'll have an amazing scrapbook for her daughter to read one day!

Apropos of Nothing, Here's an Update on my Fingernails

I've been on prenatal vitamins for a long time now. At some point back in 2010 I ran out of my Women's One-a-Day and bought a big bottle of generic prenatals instead. I didn't expect miracles, of course, but based on the movie Juno, I figured my fingernails (and hair, maybe?) would start doing amazing things. No such luck. I don't pay too much attention to my nails, but I can tell you they didn't do anything special.

Except now. I feel like they actually are growing faster than usual - I cut and file them so they're nice and short, and I turn around, and all of a sudden I'm FloJo. I'm having trouble typing since they're dramatically longer than they were a few days ago! Evidently this is not unheard of, but this BabyCenter article seems to imply that basically anything can happen with your nails: some get softer! some get harder! it's nail pandemonium out there!

Ha - like these are my hands! I think the last 

time I got a manicure was for my wedding.

Anyway, not much else to report (you have to figure that if I'm taking the time to talk about my fingernails, nothing particularly interesting is going on, right?) Coming up on 30 weeks this Thursday - go, baby, go!

I Like Glucose and Glucose Likes Me

I passed my glucose screening test! Hurrah! Of course, I studied really hard and took lots of practice tests and had a great tutor. Nah, just kidding. It's sheer dumb luck that I didn't develop gestational diabetes, and I'm surprisingly impressed with my body for not dropping the ball on this one. Good job, pancreas!

In preparing for the one-hour test (called a Glucola test by my lab) I read a lot of people's comments online about their experience. "Oh, the stuff they have you drink is so sweet! I felt nauseous the entire time! I was so bored!" Errr... this was actually a total non-event for me. Regarding the drink, let me ask: have you ever been on an airline? Maybe a budget airline? And you asked for juice but instead were handed a little nondescript cup of vividly colored sugar water? That's all this is. I drank it, I sat around for an hour in the waiting room with my laptop doing work, and then I had a blood draw just like every other blood draw. No big deal.

Now, I didn't do the 3-hour test, which involves fasting, a sweeter drink, and a longer time spent hanging around the lab waiting for consecutive blood draws. I suspect the fasting would make things harder to get through - for the record, I ate an omelette that morning (with cheese!) in an effort to keep things from getting too carbtastic, and it was fine. I mean, I wouldn't start off the day by consuming a 5-pound bag of sugar, but they did tell me that eating beforehand was allowed and it ended up being no problem.

My final number was 108 (130-140 is the cutoff for requiring further testing depending on who you talk to.) So that's one more pregnancy-related hurdle I have successfully jumped, though to be honest, at this point I kind of feel like approaching the tasks ahead the same way this guy does:

Hurdles? What hurdles! BAM!