Are you listening to us?

Today we had our first baby shower. Mom (my mom) threw one while me and a couple of friends were in Miami. I invited my very good friends in to visit as well, which led to interesting conversations. We'll get to that in a few.

First of all, parties at my family's house get LOUD. I mean, seriously. You get a dozen people around drinking and it doesn't take much for passionate discussions to ensue. I think this is why I didn't get much baby movement today. He seemed quiet. But he head was sticking out on top all day. No feet kicking, no rolling arm against my side. Not even sitting on the bladder. I didn't mind, his head did move around. But it was almost as if he were standing up and trying to figure out what was going on all day. That's pretty interesting.

I also noticed that the shape of my stomach was changing based on his position. When his head was dead center, I had a nice pointy looking belly. But when he slid off to one side, the belly looked lopsided. It was neat and a little disturbing at the same time. I had a couple of people tell me that would happen, but it's still weird to watch your body change shape without you doing anything specific to cause it. Wacky.

So once my girlfriends got there, we were laughing and carrying on. That was tremendously fun. I noted for them at the time that his head had been high and poking all day. We were laughing about how he must be trying to hear. I noted for them that I could feel the head and see my belly moving and they were a little surprised. I told them that soon he'd be big enough where you might see the shape of an appendage in my skin. Or that he would sit in the belly and put his face against the side and it would look like one of those music videos in the 80s where people were trying to press their faces through the rubber and you could see all their features smooshed against the plastic. Now, I didn't just explain this, I demonstrated it with facial movements and sound effects. I'm not really sure that any baby could produce quite that effect in a belly, but that's just the visual that's popped into my head. My friends flew off in fits of hysterical laugher. They couldn't imagine anyone else thinking of their baby that way. Later on, one of my visiting friends from VA said that it seemed quite a reasonable analogy to her. At least it's not just me.