Teen running

My 15-year-old is the new runner in the family.

He used to run with me, but even before I got pregnant, I just started holding him up.

At the same time, he still hasn't beaten my best 5K time, which is odd. It's clearly not because he can't. I think it's more a matter of miscalculation. I don't have anywhere near his athleticism, but it's a matter of strategy as well.

I'm hoping he'll annihilate my time soon.

I think there's a good chance he will; some of his problem is that he was concerned with how his heart behaved after sprints. So, one of my doctor errands this month was to take him to get a treadmill test.

The results were outstanding. Everything is normal. In fact, according to our family doctor, he's in excellent condition: "You must run," the doc said.

One surprising thing I enjoy doing again

Now that I'm really, really pregnant, I'm enjoying talking to men I don't know again.

When I was "just a little" pregnant and looked tubby, they had stopped starting conversations with me. Before that, I was getting a lot of irritating, condescending kinds of attention from young men -- and semi-sleaziness from older ones.

Now, I have much more wholesome, friendly dealings, which I prefer, of course. There's nothing like being nine months pregnant that takes any weirdness out of the equation. I'm sure there are pregnancy fetishists, since there are fetishists for darn near everything -- but I haven't been (un)lucky enough to encounter any.

Things I don't want to do anymore

1) Prepare vegetables. So, when we go out, I make sure I eat a ton.

2) Stand. I'm fine walking. I'm fine sitting. Standing still, however, is incredibly exhausting.

3) Get up. Having to rise from a chair or -- even worse! -- the ground has turned into a huge pain. I'm just happy to stay sitting there doing my Jabba the Hut impression.

Bump photos

OK, here is the picture. Yeah, I'm just a little high and all in front.

Because the 13-year-old took the pics for me, she then made this request:

"OK, now do a peace sign and fish lips like a teenage girl's Facebook picture."

And I indulged her.

Being overdue

Here's a video of a woman dancing herself into labor at just over 40 weeks, while pregnant with twins.

I've been there. Well, not the twins part. And I certainly wouldn't choose the Black-Eyed Peas to dance to. (I am a complete and utter music snob, and I hate the Black-Eyed Peas more than I hate Coldplay.)

But my 13-year-old came 20 days "late." It was more that it wasn't a good due date, which I told the OBs from Day 1. In fact, that's what started my habit of "answering the question they want to know rather than the one they're actually asking."

You see, they calculate the baby's due date by asking you the first day of your last menstrual period, and they assume that the baby is conceived about two weeks after that.

For those of us who know when we ovulate (the whole Catholic thing) and who know that it wasn't on that magical two-weeks-later date, the due date is then completely wrong. I've conceived babies more than a month after the doctors would expect as well as earlier.

So, ever since the debacle of 20 days "late" Baby No. 2, I take my ovulation date and subtract two weeks, give that date to the docs -- and then I get a more accurate "due date." All my other children have been born within in a couple of days of their date.

I'm hoping, though, that I won't have to do any baby dances.

A month of appointments

I finally realized that oh-my-goodness-I'm-having-a-baby-soon. Yes, I know I should have figured it out a while ago, but I just hadn't.

So, this month, I'm doing lots of things I should've been doing over the last few months -- like getting the other kids their physicals and -- just imagine -- nesting a bit. I'm doing baby errands like washing the clothes in Dreft and trying to get organized for the chaos to come.

I now have doctor's appointments every week. I was getting weekly phone calls from a nurse who was part of a program to avoid premature births. But I have, as she said, "graduated" because I'm now 36 weeks along.

In other pregnancy news, Michelle Duggar of "19 Kids and Counting" fame announced today that she is pregnant with No. 20. She's someone who makes me look sane and rational on the reproductive front.

Seriously, although I admire her commitment to her faith, it just seems foolhardy to me to do that, considering her age (older than me) and the fact that she and her baby nearly died with her last pregnancy.

I'm more of a "Trust in God -- but lock your doors" type. I tend to prepare for things -- and that's one reason I'm being more conservative with this birth plan than I have been in the past.