Some ramblings on Circus Act

Circus Act, for the uninitiated, is the handle I have given to my unborn child. I haven't done a ton of pregnancy-related blogging, since I've been kind of busy making sure Phook doesn't eat too much paste. The other thing is, I don't want to wax all poetic about the unborn because it feels like counting my chicken before it is hatched. Of course even my crusty person has fuzzy bunny baby thoughts on occasion, but it just feels like some kind of bad to pour it out there before I have a healthy little swaddled bug on my lap when I do it. However, I feel like it is fair karmic game to just throw some of my impressions about the kid out there for fun. You know, so I can come back and read this in like 6 months and be totally wrong, and then laugh at myself.

I have a very strong sense this baby is a boy. I know that when I initially announced this pregnancy I made some cocky comments about Big K not being able to produce a boy or some shit like that, but I've been using male pronouns in reference to the baby for several months without the slightest conscious effort. In my mind, this baby just IS a boy. That's weird, because we have no medical insight into the matter. The heart rate has been high-ish all along, just as it was with Phook. During the ultrasound, we got not even a whiff of what was or was not betwixt the thighs of this child. And yet in my head this is decidedly a baby boy. With Phook, I had no sense of her gender in advance of her birth. I know some people say that mother's intuition is actually somewhat on target in these matters, but I don't give myself that much credit. Maybe it is the tea leaves of my varicose veins sending me a message. Maybe it is the undeniable southward shifting and fundamental expansion of my ass. I don't know. But if this baby comes out female, I'll probably actually make some profane expression of surprise right there on the birthing table. It'll be a shame too, because I really like our girl name a lot and now I'm scared we won't get to use it. (It's gonna be funny when we have a girl now, isn't it?)

I think this kid is going to be huge. I mean, my husband and I are both in the 300th percentile or some shit. The fact that Phook's weight remains stubbornly in the 50th percentile and her height just randomly jumped into the 80th (after being around 50-60th for most of her life) continues to mystify Big K and I. How could she be ours? How could we have a child whose physical proportions appear to be human rather than beast? I don't know. Big K has a ridiculously short brother and I'm pretty sure that if you stacked his mom and grandma on top of each other I'd still have six inches on the pair of them...so it's not really that much of an anomaly that we'd have a normal-sized kid. But these huge genes of ours have to manifest themselves somewhere. My entire family is like Kong-sized. My sister is the shortest member of my immediate family...and she is 5'10". My Dad is 6'5" and has some really tall sisters. I have some gigantic Amazonian she-cousins. Anyhow, it is my sense that Circus Act is supping on a steady diet of growth hormone and will be markedly huge. I'm really hoping that he is born at least within the normal range of human babies and then sprouts rapidly thereafter, but I fear that the growth is already underway. My husband has recently called me "Frank the Tank" and has also seen my belly coming around corners several minutes before the rest of my body and has made a wealth of eloquent comments such as, "Woof. You're huge," and "Holy shit, how many more weeks do you have to go? You're going to be as big as a house!" You know, in the most oblivious loving way possible. So there's that. I wouldn't be shocked to have a 9-pounder. Kid won't even get to wear all of Phook's "Just Born" sized undershirts I just lovingly laundered in Dreft.

Circus Act's level of fetal activity is unprecedented, at least in terms of my own personal womb occupation experiences. If I hadn't seen the correct number of limbs on the ultrasound, the smart money would be on me birthing an octopus. Then again, the ultrasound tech was a student, so maybe there is a rogue twin in there adding to the fun. (My husband's brothers are twins, and they didn't know there would be two until the second one came out. How would that be for a shock?) Anyhow, yeah. I don't know much about how fixed a baby's position is within the uterus at 31 weeks, but it sure as hell feels to me like the child is fully capable of complete rotations. There are times when I am getting pummeled in my left hip and the right side of my rib cage simultaneously. On me, that's like a 20-inch span. Jesus. Sometimes something will catch my eye and I realize it is the tremendous quake-like movement of my entire abdomen. The thing just bounces and rocks and shakes and gets tossed about. I mean, man. It's like a litter of puppies in there. And to take that one step further, it's like I'm a Chihuahua pregnant with a litter of Great Danes. I don't know what Circus Act is doing in there, but his name is apt. This is all great fun for Big K. Sometimes at night I roll over and press my belly into his back just so he can experience 1/1,000th of the fun. He's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, he's strong! Oh man, dude! That kid is huge!" He too is sold on the "boy" gig and is already surely having fantasies about his son crushing the skulls of other children in the image of his father.

Whereas Phook came out practically able to sit up unassisted, I think this is going to be the kid that I have to try to coax into crawling by putting his sippy cup just out of reach when he's 11 months old and still lazily refusing to ambulate. However, I suspect this kid will say "Shit" even earlier than Phook did. This one will be the talker. Phook is the jumper/bouncer/dancer/runner/climber. Not my roly poly butterball fatty Circus Act. Circus will be reciting the Gettysburg Address from the high chair while stubbornly refusing to move his hugely chunky thighs in anything resembling coordinated movement at 14 months. At least that's what I see in my crystal ball. Perhaps this contradicts the fetal movement observation described above, but it's just what I'm feeling.

This baby will look like Big K. Boy or girl, that's a given. That was the one solid intuition I had about Phook during my pregnancy with her, and what do you know she is his clone. In the ultrasound photos for Circus, you can even see the Big K profile at a mere 19 weeks, which includes a bobbed little pig nose and an ape-like head shape. (I don't say that to be mean spirited. Both Big K and Phook have these features and I find them both to be very cute.) So yeah. Dark hair, pig nose, monkey face. I can't really see the dice rolling any other direction on this one. His genes are just steamrollers, at least as far as physical features are concerned. (It was quite clear when we were on a walk the other day and Phook picked up a leaf from the sidewalk and gingerly placed it back in the grass that my gene for love of orderliness not only made it to Phook but amplified tenfold. So that's some consolation.)

So, there you have it. Those are my pre-birth predictions on this creature I'm harboring. Won't it be funny to see how it turns out?