10 weeks.

Dear bean in my belly,

Congratulations, little bean! You have graduated from the embryonic stage to the fetal stage! Next step, gen-u-ine baby! But for now, you are eight weeks old and the size of a kumquat. You have all your teeny tiny parts, and for the rest of the pregnancy they will grow rapidly and mature. Some of your vital organs -- kidneys, intestines, brain, and liver -- have started to function. Your spinal cord is forming and your head accounts for half your body length. (That's because it holds your huge, burgeoning brain, little bean.)

This weekend Shane and I worked at the Viva el Mariachi! Workshops and Festival. If you want to know how to make me the crankiest I've ever been, get me 9 1/2 weeks pregnant and then make me get up at 5:30 am and work for 13 hours. It was a long, exhausting weekend, and I'm glad it's over. (Shane is glad it's over, too. I'm not kidding when I say I was cranky, little bean!) I had Monday off and I slept for 18 HOURS! I had no idea a human being was capable of such a thing! I think even as a sleepy-headed teenager the longest I pulled was 12 hours. My body must be doing very important things if it's using so much energy!

Nausea continues, on and off with no rhyme or reason. My only reliable tactic remains eating whatever sounds whenever it sounds good, and Shane remains a good sport with emergency trips to the grocery store. If the cashiers at SaveMart haven't figured out by now that his wife is pregnant, they are very dumb indeed.

Jury's still out as to whether I'm sporting an actual baby bump. I haven't gained any weight but my belly remains stubbornly pooched. I maintain that it's a migration/rearrangement of fat, but Shane insists that it's you. (I have explained to him 57 times that neither you nor my uterus are anywhere near the protrusion, but he remains unconvinced.) It would make me feel better if I could feel my uterus through my belly like all the books and Jacquie says I should be able to, but let's be honest, little bean, I have no idea what I'm feeling for or exactly where I should be feeling for it. It just feels like I'm massaging and squishing my belly fat all around, which is not a good feeling, so I haven't tried for very hard or very long. I'll just wait till you make my uterus a little bigger and more pronounced. Okay, little bean?

Love,
Suzanne