100 Words Per Mile: Sweet Sixteen Weeks

My wife begins to change. We find out the sex of our baby.

May 3, 2021
3.00 miles
25:14

My wife has started to experience what we believe is “round ligament pain.” She’s finally begun to show! But this means her uterus is expanding and all of the ligaments and parts of her body attached to that area are elongating and reshaping themselves. This kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball Z. In that show, characters can power up and transform their bodies and I always imagined it must hurt a little bit for muscles and such to expand so quickly, even if it were a fictitious world. My wife is like a Dragon Ball Z character. She’s powering up, her body is transforming into its best self, and soon she’ll be completely unstoppable.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife started telling the rest of her family about the pregnancy. One of those phone calls was made to her grandmother, who already has eight great-grandchildren. My wife’s grandmother is a tiny Puerto Rican woman who can speak English, but in her older age seems to lean more and more into her accent. My grandmother is a tiny Cuban woman who appears to be following the same path. The irony is that my wife and I can barely speak Spanish ourselves (a consequence of boomers and Generation X actively trying not to), but we both hope to encourage our baby to be bilingual.

I thought telling my wife’s grandmother about the baby would be underwhelming, because she already has eight great-grandchildren, but I was wrong. I don’t think anyone outside of our mothers reacted to enthusiastically about it. So here’s to great-grandbaby number nine. We still don’t know if it’s going to be a boy or girl, but of the other eight, there are only two girls. Do we regress to the mean? Or do we stick with the trends? Math, genetics, and all of it are just weird.

Anyway, I might be losing a bit of my running ability, but my wife grows a little more incredible every day. Marriage depends on a good give-and-take, no?