Is she or isn't she?

If a  new little person is indeed on the way, I don't think anyone seriously cares about its gender.

I skyped with PseudoAunt. She's nearing the conclusion of a fairly momentous trial. It's not tremendously important in the annals of California crime, but in terms of her own career, it's a milestone case. I cannot say more about the trial  until it has wrapped itself up. I usually would have helped PseudoAunt, and from the looks of things in terms of how exhausted she is, she certainly could have used my assistance, but the very last thing she needs at this juncture is exposure to pink eye. 

Since not very many people read my blog,  I will say something I wouldn't usually say in a public forum. PseudoAunt's level of fatigue is almost unprecedented considering that she hasn't dealt with even a minor illness in quite some time. No one is suggesting that she's ill, now, either. She can't, however, work for more than four hours without looking like she's in serious need of a nap. Even the judge  noticed her state of weakness and  expressed concern on Friday. PseudoAunt's breathing sounds fine. Her coloring is good at the very least. 

I will go on record as saying that I believe PseudoAunt is in the extremely early stages of pregnancy. She should not be very far along, as she drank a glass of wine at her husband's urging just under two weeks ago, and she never would have done such a thing had there been even a consideration that she might  have been pregnant. I would even go so far as to say that she probably conceived at some point between that glass of wine and now.  It's time, as she's twenty-six , and the clock moves in a forward motion for her just as it does for everyone else. She's also dealing with those cystic fibrosis lungs, which do not get better but only degenerate. The time now is probably as good as ever for her to have a child.

She's certainly not sporting anything as obvious as a baby bump. Her midsection is as concave as it's always been. She'll probably need to be at least three months along even to have a flat stomach.

Some people would say I'm violating the privacy of the Pseudos with my prediction. While such may be the case, A) very few people who know them read my blog (hell, even they're too busy to read anything I write these days); and B) I will not say whether my prediction was on the mark or somewhere out in the middle of left field until they make their own announcement.


Some experts and pseudo-experts will say that a female body has no physiological response to pregnancy for at least two to three weeks. I will defer to those whom I would consider the true experts concerning pregnancy, which are those who have been pregnant. My own mother has been pregnant twice and has said that she knew less than twenty-four hours after conception that she was pregnant both times. My friend Jared's mom, Stephanie, has given birth six times. In three cases she was sure within a week of conception. In the other three cases, her husband knew. For the record, neither my mom nor Stephanie had any false positives in terms of believing they had conceived when they hadn't.

Jared's Aunt Brooke conceived twins very shortly after having given birth (to a singleton). I won't go into all the details of the conception, because I know more than I should know about it, and just because I know doesn't mean that the rest of the world needs to know. The conception of the twins, however, happened on the very first encounter  of the sort that produces pregnancy following the birth of the previous child. It was earlier than Brooke's OBGYN had okayed such activity. Immediately afterward, as in before the couple was back in their clothing, Brooke was groaning about what she was going to tell her doctor. "Why do you think you need to tell him anything?" her husband asked.

"Because I'm pregnant!" she answered. Her husband laughed hysterically as though he was speaking to a crazy woman, but nine days later the home pregnancy test confirmed the presence of something that hadn't been there before, and a little more than seven months after the positive home pregnancy test, twin girls appeared on the scene. 

Not every woman who is pregnant will have confirmation of it before the sperm and the egg meet up in the love canal. We hear on TLC all the time, in fact, about the ladies who didn't know of their impending arrivals until visiting the E.R. with unexplained lower abdominal or back pain during the transition phase of labor. The vast majority probably fall somewhere in between, perhaps experiencing their first symptoms between two and four weeks.

In PseudoAunt's case, she's not even the one proclaiming her pregnancy at such an alarmingly early date. I don't know if she suspects anything or not. For that matter, I could be wrong. (I'ts happened before -- my being wrong --  believe it or not.) PseudoAunt could have a UTI or something equally boring, except to the person suffering from the UTI.  I've had kidney infections, which are not exactly a walk through California Adventure Park, and I can't imagine the standard  UTI being all that much more pleasant. To those of you who have in the past or are presently suffering with a UTI, absolutely no disrespect is intended. Seriously. I do not wish for God to smite me with a UTI. Pink eye is almost more than I can handle.