My wife is a little more than five months pregnant now and she’s beginning to feel the baby moving around inside her. She tells me this during dinner.
“Ugh… ” she says. “Either I just felt the baby kicking or I have some nightmarish gastro-intestinal problems.”
“Ohhh…” I say, thinking about opening a window, just in case.
“Yeah, I think that’s the baby.”
“Feel anything like Alien?” I ask.
“It feels like little bubbles bursting in rapid succession…”
“Ahh…” I say because there’s not much more I can say.
Over the past several weeks the kicks have apparently gotten harder and harder or my wife is getting wimpier and wimpier. We’ll be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly she’ll go cross-eyed and put her hand on her belly indicating that the child either has soccer ball in there or, at the very least, is practicing karate.
My wife is now translating these kicks and punches into what the baby likes and doesn’t like. We now know, through the amount of kicking my wife receives, the the baby likes pizza, ice cream, watching Alton Brown, watermelon, granola bars, bagels, going grocery shopping, chicken, pasta, watching Bobby Flay and malt liquor.
Ha! I’m just kidding about that last little bit. The baby hates Bobby Flay.
Of course I can’t feel any of these kicks so all I’ve been able to take away from these observations is that I should probably be diverting half of the kid’s college savings towards a future membership in Weight Watchers.
Sure, my wife and I have both seen the ultrasound videos and we’ve heard the heartbeat on a microphone, but part of me always wonders if that stuff is all just some elaborate ruse put on my doctors to make a little extra scratch from the insurance companies. It would probably be pretty easy to rig up a DVD player to look just like an ultrasound machine and then just have a video playing each time the nurse moves around the wand on my wife’s belly. I mean, if the Hollywood special effects wizards can give Tom Cruise an acting career then they can surely fudge an ultrasound machine.
But after all these months of videos and recordings it is finally reassuring to have some sort of physical evidence, no matter how small, that a live baby really is bouncing around in there…
…And that my wife isn’t just getting fat from eatting all that pizza and ice cream.
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I used to lay with my belly against my husband’s back to let the babies kick him. It’s the coolest thing. Especially when she’s bigger, and she can sit things on her belly for the baby to kick.
“she’ll go cross-eyed and put her hand on her belly”
Holy crap, I can relate…
Until four months ago (when baby was born) that was me.
For the first five months in utero, I was convinced it was a boy because NO GIRL would kick her mother that way.
It was a girl. Go figure.