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Our baby is now around the ten-week mark and today my wife told me, “Our baby is now the size of a kumquat!”
To which I immediately responded: “I didn’t know we’d kumquat so far…” (Thank you, Kip Addotta.)
After she hits me with the book she’s reading she goes on to tell me that besides being the size of a kumquat our baby has eyes, toes, internal organs and even the beginnings of a spine. All of this begs the vital question:
What the hell is a kumquat?
A quick search of Google leads me to the Kumquat Growers Inc. website which tells me that Kumquats “have been called ‘the little gold gems of the citrus family’. The kumquat has a thin, sweet peel and a zesty, somewhat tart center.” That’s kind of boring, so I turn to Google Images with the word kumquat and get all sorts of interesting things, mostly resulting from a Fark.com photo contest a while ago. It’s here that I discover “Bravequat“, “The Bad, The Good, and the Kumquat“, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Kumquats” among others. God Bless the Internet.
This search also pulls up some useful information:
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Florida Kumquats |
Miss Kumquat 2005 Melissa Marcus |
You can see why I never get any work done when I’m sitting at the computer.
Now that I know what a kumquat is, and about how large our baby is, I borrow my wife’s book and continue reading over some of the information. Our baby is now beginning the “fetal” period, which is when it will be busy transforming from “a little blob” to “a little blog with tiny human features.”
Our baby is spending a lot of time growing all sorts of vital parts. You and I probably take this for granted, but it’s a pretty big deal. Here we have a little creature about the size of a grape tomato and it’s growing fingers and arms and internal organs like some sort of super alien from the fifth dimension. I’m in my mid-thirties and all I can grow is hair in my ears. And even that is unintentional.
Our baby is also growing genetalia at this point, which I’m a little ambivalent about. I know that genetalia were pretty important in creating this baby, but if I have any say in the matter our baby won’t learn about that until he or she is 35. I should do just fine as a father. Our baby is, however, using that genetalia to urinate, which is a pretty disgusting thought when you realize the baby is still inside my wife. Yay for biology!
While our baby is growing a lot of important parts, I’m sad to say that this is the stage when our baby loses its tail. I think this is kind of a shame because a tail would definitely give our child an edge up on the other children in gym class and you know a tail will come in handy in that post-apocalyptic future all the science fiction movies have us living in.
Overall life hasn’t changed much for us. My wife is watching what she eats (no kumquats) and we’re both starting to read a few books, but neither of are grasping the enormity of this yet. We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the fact that there is a teeny little person inside my wife, much less the idea that in another seven months or so that little person is going to be coming out.
And as I mentioned in a previous post, the descriptions of our baby’s size on these websites is less than endearing. First our baby is the size of a mustard seed, then a raisin, then a grape, then a walnut and now a kumquat.
No, I’m still not feeling very parental… But I do look at produce in an entirely different light…
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One Response to “Our Baby: The Kumquat”
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Flo says:
Hello Tom,
I noticed that this is a good dictionary and is free to download. It defines many words, even slang. Works for me.http://www.snapfiles.com/get/thesage.html
March 11th, 2006 at 7:42 pm