STOP MAKING ME UGLY!

Today I spent roughly twenty minutes accusing Pete of making me ugly. This happens every two weeks when we take my baby bump picture. I look in the mirror, and I'm not ugly; I look at Pete's picture of me, and I am ugly. So it stands to reason that it is his fault.

Sometimes he makes me look like I forgot to apply makeup or do my hair:

Sometimes he forgets to move the camera strap:

Sometimes he makes me look pasty and crazy:



And sometimes he gets bored and forgets which bump he's supposed to be documenting:

But every now and then, he stops making me ugly and lets me be a cute pregnant lady:



(23 weeks, baby!)

Our Firstborn Shall be a Son

If there were any part of Pete that wanted to wait until the birth to find out the sex of our child, I beat it out of him with my bare powers of annoyance.

"What do you think it is, a boy or a girl?" I would ask at various times during the day. (Pete never claimed to have any intuition about the sex of our baby, which bothered me to no end. Once I pointed out that he should have intuition, since he was the one who determined the sex. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I wasn't really paying attention at the time.") He wouldn't ever answer my question, so I would follow it up by asking, "Do you think it's a boy?" to which he would nod in response.

"Really?"

He would shake his head.

"So you think it's a girl?"

He would nod.

"But you just indicated that you think it's a boy."

And so on. We repeated this exchange no less than three times a day for fifteen weeks, and then scheduled our ultrasound for the very first day that they allowed us to schedule it. I devised a brilliant scheme: the ultrasound tech would put the "results" in a sealed envelope for us to open with Pete's family at the reunion in Lake Geneva that same day.

The ultrasound went really well, but no sooner had we walked out of the office when I noticed a big, obnoxious, telling grin beaming from Pete's face.

"YOU KNOW!" I said, shaking the envelope in my hand. "HOW DO YOU KNOW?"

He shrugged.

"Did you see something on the screen?"

He shrugged.

"You don't know."

Shrug.

"HOW DO YOU KNOW?!"

In the end, the joke was on Pete, because the "female" that he saw on the screen referred to ME. He spent all afternoon imagining life with a daughter -- pink, dolls, pigtails, a wedding aisle -- and then we pulled "It's a Boy!" out of the envelope and he about fell over. It was an emotionally taxing day for Pete, followed by an emotionally taxing weekend for me, as the tech's office was closed and I couldn't call to ask why Pete had seen "female" on the screen. We sorted it all out by Tuesday.

So it's a boy! I knew it all along, anyways, and here's why: I have always been a boy magnet. Baby brothers flocked to me, one at a time, four in a row. Just look at the chubby-cheeked baby boy perfection I was surrounded with:



See what I'm saying? It only makes sense that a boy magnet would also be a boy-making machine. Our firstborn shall be a son, and judging by the boy-genes I have been bestowed, he's gunna be a cute one.

So bring on the blue stripes, miniature sailor outfits, and the quarter-sized sports equipment; bring on the trucks, the cars, the Thomas the Tank Engine and all of his friends; bring on the guns made out of everything including lunch items, the pitch-perfect machine gun noises that I still can't make, and the spit-infused sound effects to elaborate hot wheel crashes. Ask or tell me anything about your penis, little boy, and I'll respond without a blink... although I may spend a few minutes laughing into a pillow behind a closed door. If you look embarrassed about your underpants (and I know that look well), I'll look away until you get into the tub. My cabinets will always have a sufficient amount of Band Aids and peroxide, and my feelings won't be hurt when you lurch out my arms when daddy gets home. You know why? Because I am a pro at this. I got this one. You are one lucky little boy, and I already already feel like the luckiest mom in the world.