Interesting fact about being pregnant: once you hit a certain point, there's no hiding the fact that you're baking a baby in your belly. No sweatshirt is large enough to cover the ever-rounding stomach, the waddling, the wheezing. So that means when you go into a gas station to grab a Snapple, the cashier is going to look at your belly, smile, and ask (in rapid succession) When are you due? Do you know if it's a boy or girl? Do you have names picked out? As if 1)it were any of her business any of it and 2)the answers actually mattered to her.

Granted, there are women out there who love the attention that comes with incubating life. I have a friend who's that way. She takes every opportunity to rub her belly in public. She'll shake her head no, say she wasn't out on Saturday night because (and here's where she points to her belly) she's expecting. She likes to giggle and talk about names, cravings, weight gain, night sweats--all things baby. But I'm not really that way. I like to pretend that I have other interesting things to talk about--my graduate classes, stories I'm working on, that trip to Europe I took last summer, the state of our nation, who should be kicked off American Idol--but no one wants to hear about that. They want to know if I've started mixing pickles with peanut butter or ice cream and summer sausage. They want to know if I can feel the baby kick, if I've picked out a crib, if I'm enjoying sleeping in while I can. Because that's going to stop as soon as you have a kid, they all say.

Hmm. I had a point when I started this. But I've forgotten, as I've forgotten so many things lately. I can say this--on CNN today there was a post about a study done on pregnant women and their memories. They've proven a link between being pregnant and being forgetful. The study also showed that three months after giving birth, memory usually improves (thank goodness!).