Baby Bumblebee

When I sit in the obstetrician's waiting room, I try not to make eye-contact with the other women. I don't, however, try to avoid eavesdropping on their conversations. I am always amazed at the great number of people some women bring to their appointments. Today, I saw a woman with her parents, her husband's parents, and her sister. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if they had spread out a picnic basket and broken out a bucket of chicken and some Lone Star. I overheard another woman with a daughter in her twenties filling out paperwork. The mother had the clipboard on her lap and was asking her daughter questions like "When was the first day of your last cycle? What? You don't keep track of that? You should. You need to be able to answer that question. Make sure to tell her how irritable you've been and that you're constipated. When are you going to tell that boy about this?" I found this incredibly odd. If her mother had followed her around with that clipboard for her entire life, she probably wouldn't have found herself in the obstetrician's waiting room with her mother. (I'm just saying.)

People are weird. Pregnant women are weird. I think this is just how it works. I find myself getting weirder by the moment. I think this might be irreversible. Today, it took the obstetrician a few minutes to find the baby's heartbeat. In the past, she's found it pretty quickly, so I began to worry a little bit. Don't worry, she said. He's probably just a stubborn baby boy. And I thought, if David were a fetus, he would without a doubt hide from the thing trying to hear his heartbeat. And then I thought that this baby is going to be a carrier for both of our genes and I laughed out loud. I know he will come into the world with a personality of his own, bearing the mark of God in his own way, but he will also come into the world with Irish passion, German logic, and plenty of Weird. I imagine him floating around in his amniotic fluid, with his beard and his glasses, listening to his i-pod and reading the Wall Street Journal. Just a little longer until we can know if he is a boy or a girl. I'm excited.