It's Friday and I'm Pregnant: Week 21

Aw, man. She's stretching out my new Cloud Cult T-shirt.
And she made the bathroom mirror have spots on it!

I used to imagine the sensation of being pregnant as similar to holding an amphibian cupped in one's hand. This, say, mini frog would wiggle and squirt, bark, and inflate its pinky-sized chin and I'd have to close an eye and stomp a foot to bear it. Eventually I'd visualize the sausage-link string of turd it was winding into a mound in the crevice between my palms and I'd end up flinging the poor sucker halfway across the nature center.

At this point, the Powerful Baby Girl's movements aren't like this at all. Mostly it feels like bubble wrap popped while underwater. Sometimes it feels like a tiny bare foot trying to take out the passenger window of a '72 Pontiac -- but in slow motion. Sometimes it feels like butterfly kisses. It seems like I get them a lot; It's still not enough. "How you doing, Baby Girl?" I'll ask her, trying to rustle up a response.

I'm trying to determine triggers through various scientific experiments: Does the madame like Cinnamon Life, the new House Cereal? How about the soothing sounds of Terry Gross? Does she want me to walk faster, slower? Does she want me to sing Journey, giving it all my karaoke power, while merging onto I35? As would be expected: Her moods remain unpredictable.

It's hard to know for sure, but somethings I think I can feel movement from the outside -- especially near the base of the bump. A few days ago I thought she socked my palm. I want Chuck to get in on this action, but it's mostly been like this:

"There. Did you feel that?"
"No."
"That?"
"No."
"That?"
"No."

Once in awhile he comes at me with his pinky and gives my belly a couple taps.
"It's not a fishbowl," I remind him.

Then we remind each other that we will not be the kind of parents who throw back the curtains in her bedroom and salute the new day in song. We know that life. It's why we both prefer dark places.

"I was craving movement, so I sang along to 'Don't Stop Believing' and hoped she would like it," I told Chuck on Wednesday.

Then he pointed out that "Don't Stop Believing," to a Powerful Baby Girl born in the summer of 2013, is the equivalent of "Swinging on a Star" sung by Bing Crosby would have been to a Powerful Baby Girl born in the summer of 1975.

Perspective!