It's awesome, amusing, and amazing to get to know this little person even before she is born. She's busy, she becomes even more active after I down my juice in the afternoons, and she appears to have a distinct distaste for classic rock.

I found that out this evening soon after I climbed in the car to drive home from work. I was in the mood for something nostalgic and began pressing the preset buttons on the radio when I ran across a few notes of Van Halen's “Somebody Get Me a Doctor.”

All of the sudden I felt an enormous drawing back in my abdomen away from the front speakers and a tremendous shift of weight toward my spine. I laughed out loud and changed the station, and that crazy, wonderful sensation of an internal physical cringe coming from someone other than myself subsided in an instant.

Parents and their youngsters have been battling over taste differences in music for decades. I just had no idea it would start so early!

So she's not a Diamond Dave fan. I can live with that.

29 weeks

One of the things that always catches me off guard is how big I look. For some reason I never notice it in the mirror when I’m brushing my teeth or putting on my makeup. Instead it always sneaks up on me out of the corner of my eye, like when I pass by the windows leading into the grocery store or catch my reflection as I step out of the shower or see pictures and video of myself. Afterward it’s difficult not to associate my self-image with the phrase “lumbering hippo.”

Normally there would be some solace in knowing I’m not the only pregnant woman who doesn’t realize how big she’s gotten, but not the way I found out.

Chip and I were standing around after birthing class with another couple, Sylvia and Carl, enjoying some light refreshments and talking about the night’s lesson. Kiki had talked about fundal height, the measurement the doctor takes each week to make sure the baby is growing, and said obstetricians often can estimate how much the baby will weigh by taking it into account.

Since Sylvia and I have due dates just days apart and are roughly the same size, I laughed and gestured to our bulging stomachs. “We’d better make sure we have some big baby clothes on hand!”

Sylvia frowned before displaying all the tact of a charging rhino. “But you’re bigger than me.”

I thought the drinks in the guys’ mouths were about to come out of their noses. And not just because of her social blunder. Sylvia is my size, if not bigger.

I had a retort ready, but I held it after seeing the look in Sylvia’s eyes. She looked like a cornered animal, desperate to believe she could not possibly be as great a cow as her friend Ellie.

Being a lover of truth, I typically don’t advocate letting someone live in denial, but I let this one misconception slide. I figured it wouldn’t do either one of us good to set her straight, even though her indiscretion hurt me terribly.

Oddly enough, not only do I now know another pregnant woman who doesn’t see herself as she actually is, but her verbal faux pas also confirms I’m not the only one in the birthing class suffering from preggy brains.

At least I can find comfort in that. And in the fact that I won’t have to see her again after tonight, since it was our final class.

Month Seven: December

“Hey. Cut it out.”

Raising my head from a deep sleep, I looked past the back of Chip’s head to the nightstand, barely able to make out the time through my blurred vision. Two a.m. “Are you talking to me?” I mumbled.

“Yeah. Stop thumping me.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’m not thumping you.”

“Yeah you are.”

“Chip, I was sound asleep.”

“Well, you’re thrashing me while you’re doing it.”

As I put my head back down on the pillow and spooned up to him again, Chip sat straight up and looked at me, jabbing a finger in my direction. “That! That right there. That’s what I’m talking about.”

I know the look on my face told him in no uncertain terms he was crazy. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Well then, who did?”

Somewhere between my grogginess wearing off and my ire rising, I felt a kick to my inner abdominal wall. I began to laugh.

Chip clearly thought I was nuts. “What’s so funny?”

I sat up, took his hand, and placed his palm firmly against the taut skin of my stomach. Sure enough, within seconds, our future soccer star gave her daddy’s hand a good, hard whack.

Chip’s face took on that same look of wonder and awe that he’d gotten the first time he felt the baby move. “That wasn’t you, after all, was it?”

“Told you.”

He hunkered down with his mouth next to my stomach. “Hey, sweetheart! This is your daddy. I know you want to play—”

The baby kicked in acknowledgment.

“Hey, that’s really good, but Daddy needs his sleep. And Mommy needs her sleep, too. So cut that out, okay?”

Violent flailing from my womb.

“Well, Chip,” I teased, “maybe she's not as obedient as we first thought.”

He rolled over, yanking a good portion of the comforter with him. “Just like her mother.”

28 weeks

What attracts a woman the most? Money? Power? Jewelry? A handsome man?

No. The most attractive thing to a woman is a baby, and a woman about to have a baby is a close second. My belly has garnered more female attention this year than George Clooney and Brad Pitt combined.

Like an insane person, I agreed to get up at six a.m. with my sister and mother to hit the After-Thanksgiving sales at the mall. No matter what store we went to, my presence incited a pregnant-woman sighting, and all the bargain-crazed women in the vicinity descended upon me like vultures to carrion. It's like my protruding stomach has a homing beacon.

Happy Thanksgiving

As I ruminate on Thanksgiving, I find one of the most pleasant surprises for me as a journalist has been that I’ve rarely encountered the unbridled hostility so often directed toward members of my profession. Perhaps it’s because I’m just an unimposing features writer and not an investigative vigilante. Or maybe I simply exude an aura of trustworthiness as the people I speak with sense my genuine interest in their stories. Whatever the reason, it’s been my experience that the journalist is not a pariah, but a priest. In interview after interview people invariably bare the deepest secrets of their souls, and not merely because I happened to ask the right question. Time and time again they bring up something totally unrelated with the segue “This isn’t for publication, but…” or “This is off the record…” or “Please don’t print this, but….” Admissions range from the sheepish confession of a woman who, unbeknownst to her husband, named her son after an ex-boyfriend, to a hospital chairman who confided that the new wing of the medical center was originally going to bear someone else’s name. Following a polite refusal from the would-be namesake, a second community philanthropist was approached under the guise that she had been the sole choice all along.

Sometimes this overwhelming need that people have to unburden their souls makes me uncomfortable. I've had people angry with me because—and again, keep in mind that I’m just a harmless little features writer—I asked a question that they didn’t want to answer, and instead of just telling me they were uncomfortable with responding, they answered but resented me for broaching the subject.

On the upside, because I hear and deal with the truth so much, I know exactly when I’m being played and can always tell when someone is trying to blow smoke up my skirt. I try to never tip my hand to let them know that I know.

Pregnancy is similar to my journalistic experience, in a way. Not only has it been a positive experience (except for the losing my mind part), but I feel a sense of belonging, a comradeship, a camaraderie with other moms, even though I haven't actually gone through the birthing and parenting process. So often I catch other women giving me a kind smile, an almost wistful expression as I waddle up to the counter at Target or stand in line at a fast food restaurant. I get the feeling that most of them are remembering their own pregnancies, and all of the sudden I realize that I'm an ambassador of sorts, that my being pregnant bestows happiness beyond just me, Chip, and our families. In an amazing, unwitting way, it also brings others a modicum of joy and nostalgia.

How serendipitous.

Third Trimester: 27 weeks

Tonight Kiki had us lie down on thin blue mats strewn across the floor before she turned off the lights and turned on new age music interspersed with whale sounds.

“Breathe,” she said, the light from the hall illuminating her hair bun and sweats as she walked between the mats like a ballet instructor. “Again!”

Struggling with a cold, I tried to oblige.

Next she told the women to sit up and lean their backs against their spouses and pretend to push. “You might even want to moan,” Kiki encouraged.

It was all the permission Chip needed. “Ooohhh,” he said in my ear.

“No!” I hissed.

But he wasn’t going to be deterred. This was payback for my spending eighty bucks on nonsense birthing classes and making him waste evenings that could have been spent more constructively in front of the television, which, he liked to point out, is free.

“Ooohhh,” he said louder. Couples on either side began to giggle.

“Ooohhh!” he ripped a third time.

Poor Kiki. She decided to dismiss us early.

Chip whistled almost all the way home. “You know, tonight was kind of fun,” he admitted.

Our second birthing class was almost our last. Chip and I were two minutes late and sneaked in under the cover of a dark room illuminated solely by a film projected on one of the walls.

“Oh good!” Chip whispered as we sat down. “We get to see a movie!” His smart-aleck buoyancy quickly turned to horror when he saw the featured presentation—a full-on shot of a woman giving birth.

I tried to concentrate on the film but found it difficult with my husband throwing his arms up in front of his face as he jerked his body in an attempt to look everywhere but at the graphic image projected IMAX-size on the wall across from us. As soon as the lights came up, he and two other expectant fathers bolted from the room with their hands over their mouths for what I believe was the very first male communal bathroom run in the history of the human race.