Being pregnant is neat in a science-experiment kind of way, but mostly it blows. You're ridiculously huge and uncomfortable, and you have to ask for help putting on your shoes and socks. (I suspect that's where the "barefoot and pregnant" thing originated--pregnant women throughout history were often unable to find someone to put their shoes on for them, so they were forced to waddle around barefoot like bloated penguins.) You get tired of sleeping on your back all the time, and on occasion you thoughtlessly try to turn over, only to end up sort of 'beaching" yourself on the bed in a half-turned-over postion that you now have to figure out how to get out of. If you drop something on the floor, you pretty much have to just leave it there til someone of normal proportions happens along and offers to pick it up for you. Not to mention you are now wearing the silliest looking clothes possible, because maternity clothes are apparently manufactured exclusively by and for circus clowns. Your novelty-sized belly runs your life.

Maybe the only fun part about being pregnant is mulling over potential baby names. I've always thought I'd be into names that were kind of different and cool. Not totally out-there, like Shaniqua or Gypsy, but a little more unusual than the average Bob or Tina. Although, when I married a guy whose last name is Sweat, that closed a few baby-name doors for me--Summer was no longer an option for a girl's name, for instance.

But to keep it interesting (and to frighten my husband), I toyed with several less-than-common names:

Ghandi Sweat
Batman Sweat
Malcolm X Sweat
Muhatma Sweat
Dimebag Darrell Sweat (only amusing if you're a Pantera fan)
Genghis Sweat
Adolph Sweat
Elvis Sweat
The Baby Formerly Known as Prince Sweat
Confucius Sweat
Nat King Sweat
Liberace Sweat
J. Edgar Sweat
Fidel Sweat
Lee Harvey Sweat
Socrates Sweat
Shamu Sweat
Mao Tse Sweat
Pol Pot Sweat
Martin Luther Sweat
Blackbeard Sweat

All fine names, but Mr. No-Fun rejected them all. I'm still fond of Mao Tse Sweat. That one would have presented a problem, though: Would we call him Mao? Or Mao Tse? Or M.T., to keep it hip? Genghis sounds nice, but I guess there's a lot to live up to there, what with all the raping and pillaging. Probably best that we avoided that one. I like Blackbeard, but it would have been too tempting to constantly yell things at the poor kid like "Avast, ye matey!" or at least repeatedly refer to him as a landlubber. In the end, we settled on Jake, which is a lot more normal than what I had been contemplating, but still a nice name. So far, I don't use it alot, though. He's still too young to be horrified by me, so I am using this time to entertain myself by calling him things like Cutie Booty, Diaper Butt, Fat Face and My Nizzle. Note to self: Stop that just before he starts understanding language.

Labels: The Karlababble Household