Big Blueberry

I'd like to take a brief detour from my all too common sarcasm to say "praise God!" Our Lord doesn't promise us that everything will go our way in life (in fact - quite the opposite) but I do believe that ALL good things come from Him and so an earnest AMEN is in order for my amazing follow-up doctor's appointment.

Baby on the way is "growing up a storm" and is on-track for a healthy pregnancy. Heck, we even bumped up the due date a notch, going from Aug. 21 to Aug. 20! (P.S. -- Major props to me for ovulating late, craftily skirting what would otherwise have been a due date of Aug. 15. You're crazy if you think I'm going to be blowing up balloons and renting Bounce Houses on my wedding anniversary!) 

Now for a little teaching moment. My advice to anyone newly pregnant and equally clueless as me when it comes to all this pregnancy business, is to go in to these appointments with some questions in your back pocket, if for nothing else but to fill the air with comfortable chatter while doc's going about her business measuring your teeny tiny growing baby. Reason being, you're in stirrups, which makes the experience seem agonizingly, painfully LONG. So of course, you talk and talk and TALK. Like me!

I felt compelled to relay to my extremely professional and educated MD that my husband and I (OK, just I) had made a bit of a hobby out of reading about the stages each week and found it incredibly cute that the baby's size is compared to a blueberry at week 7. At week 8, when we should have been delighted to move on to the obviously more mature "raspberry" phase, we were already attached to our "little blueberry," as we'd become accustomed to referring to the baby, and insisted on calling the baby our "big blueberry" instead. My doc - who is LOVELY - took it all in stride and said we could continue calling our baby a blueberry, technically incorrect as it was. (See? Lovely!) But really? With a little thought and preparation, surely I could have come up with a better way to fill the awkward silence. I mean, I'm sure that appointment cost about $50 a minute, so technically, UnitedHealth Care dropped a Benjamin Franklin for me to gush about my fetus' nickname.

Now how's this for a curve ball. Fast forward to a whopping NINE weeks (as of last Saturday) and now, according to the experts, that's about the size of a large grape. Maybe it's just California's screwed up fruit hybrids and fancy plant food, but aren't raspberries and grapes kind of the same size? Regardless, neither make for a respectable nickname ... so if you hear us talking about Blueberry like it's part of the family already, you'll know we haven't completely lost our minds and are just excited to have a healthy, growing baby on the way!