I don’t know what happened, but I turned around today and realized that I’ve gone from “adorably pregnant” to “smuggling a cannon under her shirt”. I am seriously huge. This is not necessarily a bad thing, considering that I’ve only gained about 15 pounds or so in this pregnancy, but I loathe to think how much bigger I’m going to get by the time L.B. arrives in two and a half months.

When I came home from teaching Hebrew School at Chabad this afternoon, I found Yonah in his high chair, happily slupping up his split-pea and tofu soup and sporting what looked like a huge spot of tomato sauce on his cheek. Not quite. It was actually a nasty red welt/cut. Apparently, he took a nosedive off the sofa, smacked his face on his toy bin (really a metal wastepaper basket) and ricocheted onto his back on the floor. As far as Yonah is concerned, it was old news 30 seconds later, but I practically needed smelling salts at the sight of anything remotely resembling blood anywhere near my son. Obviously, I am happy that the cut is the only result of his fall; it could have been much worse. I am also secretly a bad person because I’m happy that it happened on Shuie’s watch and not mine.

When I told my sister about my plan to become a midwife, her first response was, “Can you handle blood?”. “Sure,” I replied casually, not quite sure how truthful I was being. Since then I’ve been toying with her question. When I was at the midwives meeting on Tuesday, a student photographer was showing us pictures she’d taken of some homebirths which were actually quite cool. However, I happened to peek at them while eating my lunch and felt the teensiest twinge of queasiness. It made me a little nervous: what if I don’t have the stomach for this? So, this morning I decided to give myself a little test. I went on Youtube and checked out a video of an episiotomy (that’s when the doc cuts a little extra room into the perineum for the baby’s head to come out…sorry to get graphic), which, if you watch it before 7 a.m., is a great substitute for caffeine. I am pleased to report that the nausea factor was pretty slim, but my resolve to avoid anything like that during this birth has been kicked into super-high gear. I can think of a few other things I’d rather be doing than waddling around for weeks sporting adult diapers with ice packs attached to my crotch.