This horrible scan of an already blurry ultrasound image clearly shows a dolphin located somewhere in or near Lola. That’s the last time I let her go to SeaWorld without me.As Lola fills up with dolphin, her body has less room for other things, like tact. On consecutive days I was told upon my return home from work that I’m fat and smell like poop. She didn’t phrase the former quite like that. All she said was “Better brace the floor boards; Chumba Wumba’s coming through!” The comment itself wasn’t entirely insulting, but I could have done without her jiggling my stomach fat for the next eight minutes. So now I’m on a diet, which kind of happened on its own anyway since Lola stopped cooking and I’m incapable of providing for myself. The mere smell of food is enough to make her vomit, but which odors will cause this violent reaction varies on a minute-by-minute basis. One day she had a potato for dinner. She stuck it in the microwave, pulled it out, and swallowed it whole. It’s a little known fact that snakes and pregnant women are the only two animals that can voluntarily dislocate their lower jaws. After she finished inhaling the vegetable, she informed me that I was free to eat any food I wanted just as long as that food was also a potato. If I chose to eat anything else I had to do so on a different floor of the house or, if possible, in another house entirely. The next day, the mere thought of potato wedges so sickened her that I had to remove them from the fridge when she stood outside and closed her eyes. Apparently potato matter is okay, but angular shapes displease her dolphin.
Much of the food in our fridge is now off-limits to Lola. Apparently pregnant women aren’t supposed to have caffeine, aspartame, or heroin.At least our house should be less crowded by the time our marine mammal arrives. Sensing that we won’t have enough resources to support both them and the new offspring, the dogs have started aggressively attacking every power cord they can find in an attempt to courteously remove themselves from the household. They tore the cord for our Rock Band microphone into about sixteen pieces, but the Xbox360 wasn’t on at the time. As I was typing this they chewed all the way through the cord for the lights on our Christmas tree. If the cord had been plugged in at the time, I’d be guaranteed at least one warm meal for a change. It is said that pets imitate their owners, and while they have yet to emulate my excellent habit of not chewing on power cords, they’re quite fond turning partially digested food into a projectile weapon just like Lola. It’s not uncommon to have her and at least one of the dogs puking in the same evening. Half of the rooms in the house are now blocked off by baby gates to limit the areas in which the dogs can chew and spew, so I guess we’re already set up for a baby. Too bad we’re having a dolphin instead.
Natural selection has to be plugged in to work.Our friends, Phoebe and Rocco, have had an entirely different pregnancy experience. She’s had no morning sickness. To be fair, Lola only has about fifty percent morning sickness. The rest of it happens in the afternoon. We don’t have it all bad, though. Phoebe’s been experiencing violent mood swings, although if you bring that up with her she’ll politely disagree by ripping your face off. Lola, however, has experienced only two emotions up to this point in her pregnancy: hunger and unconsciousness. She exhibits both traits most of the time, which I guess makes her stable. Just don’t touch her when she’s sleeping or she’ll eat your hand. You’ll get it back thirty seconds later, though.
Phoebe and Rocco also differ from us in that they’ve already confirmed that their pending offspring is a boy. For some reason they rejected my helpful suggestion that maybe the kid is just giving them the finger from the womb. Lola and I plan to be surprised by the gender of our kid if only because I don’t want Lola to get discouraged by just how big the dorsal fin gets on male dolphins. There’s really no good way to get one of those through the birth canal. In one of the rare moments when Lola was both awake and not throwing up, she and I accompanied Phoebe and Rocco to a baby store nearby so they could stock up on tiny blue clothes. With Lola gaining negative weight, I felt like all the waddling women in that store were silently accusing us of being frauds. I was kind of surprised there wasn’t a bouncer at the door with a sign stating, “You must be this pregnant to enter the store.” She might not have the belly, but she has enough morning sickness for a whole herd of pregnant women. It’s hard to get too excited about this whole child-bearing thing when you realize it’s pretty much identical to the flu.
Maybe I’m looking at this wrong. Perhaps I could market a Lola-style pregnancy as a great new diet fad. It’s technically not bulimia if you have to do it because of an estrogen overdose. Either way, this while problem should go away by September 3, which we learned today is Lola’s due date. On her current diet plan, Lola should weigh about fourteen pounds by then.
