Funny, I tend to think your last trimester is something like Halloween every day. I wake every morning feeling like a cross between a giant duck and a bloated walrus. At the end of the day my fat suit feels a hundred pounds heavier and my skin feels like plastic wrap trying to keep a large Tupperware bowl fresh.
The most disturbing idea I found scouring the web for ideas were not all Zombie Babies bursting from the womb, but actually a woman who had painted her outie belly button like a huge nipple. The effect of creating a huge breast was so surreal it reminded me of a perverse Jap animation. My naval never pops out during pregnancy. Mine is like a black hole that gets flattened the bigger I get so I had nothing to work with or I probably would have painted my belly like a big boob.
On a poll of my friends I got suggestions to dress as a Kangaroo, a Cow, a Mummy, a Nun, and the man who had an alien jump out of his belly at a diner on Spaceballs movie. Another friend suggested going as a Shotgun Wedding Bride – Ha! I did that for real!
I got married at plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana barefoot and pregnant not far from Angola Prison. I even got to sign our paperwork at one of the prison’s shared office buildings. The prisoners were being kept in a building that resembled a dog kennel with a small area for each inmate to go outside, maybe to pee. Some of my wedding photos were even taken beside a prison bus. Beat that!
For fun I decided to experiment with decorative belly painting. My friend and purveyor of StyleSegment painted a cute Fishbowl Baby on my belly that matched my kids’ fishbowl heads. My daughter and son have huge blond heads that are in the 97 percentile for their ages. Their bodies are in the 5 percentile so they are like little lolli-pops.
Over the weekend, my husband and I will be attending a technology themed costume party. We are going to as Facebook and Twitter. I get to be a big white bird and he gets to be a bald white dude that resembles the Facebook silhouette.
Some other notable sites that I found while looking for interesting ways to dress up my belly include;
1) www.pregnantchicken.com
2) www.pregnancy.thefuntimes.guide
3) www.coolest-homemade-costumes.com
My Monster-in-Law: A Familiar Tale of Nightmare Proportions:
When meeting your partner’s parents everyone is overtly nice and polite. That wears off quickly if they are a Romanian grandmother that has come to live with you for months at a time. It is not that my mother-in-law is particularly horrifying to meet, but to live with – yes. To put it bluntly, she sucks the life out of you, sort of like a vampire.
She comes from the old country and the old way of raising children, with lots of order and regimented intervals for every piece of life. There is to be no spontaneity and you must speak Romanian.
Absolutely nothing in the world pleases her and you will rarely here a kind word from her. She counts saying “good morning” as being nice to me. Instead she tells me quite bluntly that everything we do is “no good”. The clothes I bought for my children are “no good”. The shoes I bought for the children are “no good”. The way I feed my children is “no good”. Every day and for hours she can go on about the most benign details. For instance, she thinks yogurt should not be served straight from the fridge, rather room temperature. Yuck.
She putters around the house telling my husband and me every possible thing that she thinks is wrong and refers to a fifty-year old Communist era book of how to take care of babies.
When I asked her what she thought of my son because last year she said he lacked personality as an infant. She said, “He is so sweet when he sleep” and “So difficult when he awake.” That was the sum total of her reflections.
My husband is the polar opposite of his mom; spontaneous and carefully cluttered around the house. We are figuring life out as we go. My mother-in-law likes to cry dramatically about how America has changed her precious child and even turned him into an atheist. The irony is that Patrick was always this way he just ignored his mother and censored himself like a good vampire baby.
Why is it that most of the men I have dated have behaved this way with their moms? I have watched them seemingly listen to their moms while doing their dutiful best to ignore their complaints or diatribes usually propped up in the kitchen more concerned with eating. Patrick even asks me, “Why don’t you ignore her?”
Well I will tell you why! She is in my face all day telling me the pants I put on my son are too big and she doesn’t have to close the baby gates because they can open them anyway. What is it with Europeans that dress their children in clothes so tight they get camel-toe wearing a diaper!
This past week has been the hardest. I can’t even look at her anymore. She wants to be told specifically what to do and specifically what time. Although we wrote a guide she raved that it wasn’t enough and nothing is organized enough for her. This is a woman who can spend hours, I mean hours, grating carrots very slowly with the smallest knife in the house. One day she ranted about how she folded bibs and burp clothes so perfectly then the kids messed them up.
She wanted to leave the first week, not because of me, but because my kids were not minding her. She raised her arms in the air and proclaiming that she never had such problems with her children. They never refused to eat or get dressed, or had tantrums. You can imagine this woman making her kids respond to a whistle.
It is a familiar story of the mother-in-law turning into a monster-in-law. She flipped on me this week contorting her face into a scary monster screaming that she couldn’t put shoes on my son because there were too many to choose from. Her face was contorted in such a way that even now I cannot look at her for fear I will see the monster again. I mean she is from Transylvania after all.
Sorry to laugh at your expense, but this story is a hoot! How much longer is she staying?
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