What You Crave

You knew it was coming. The cravings are here. Everybody was expecting the crazy outlandish steryotypical crazy pregnant lady stuff: Bird's Nest Soup, Ninja Turtle Pizzas, peanut butter and bacon broilers, The Mac-Donald's McChicken, and (yes) Pickles.

But, no, it's nothing that crazy. It's funny how crazy becomes normal when you're expecting crazy; and normal becomes anti-climactic. Maybe normal is always anti-climax-ish, I don't know. It's not for me to ponder, but I think that, a lot of the time, normal is comfortable. And who in their right mind would castigate comfort?

Are you ready for the paradox?


What if, just be rhetorical with me for second, here; but what if you were in a place where the normal, the comforting, the practically-evokes-identical-memories-no-matter-who's-doing-the-re-memoring, is so unobtainable that pining for it becomes crazy? And really, we're not even talking about pining, or hankering for that matter. What we've got on our hands now is a full-blown craving. A lustful longing... for Girl Scout Cookies!

You'd be a certifiable loon if you expected the Girl Scouts to come a-knockin' in Beijing. And yet, in the East moreso than ever back home, we're very sensitive to this steadily inflating yen (double entendre!)...


While I think Kasha is crazy for denying the virtues of the Treefoil and the Tag-along, I won't argue about the inestimable greatness of Samoas and Thin Mints. Once you get going down this road, thinking cookies, you start to look at the Girl Scouts in a new light. A warm beautiful light.

And, by comparison, the Boy Scouts look like a troupe of bandy-armed do-nothings. They oughtta start selling Hoagies or Cheese Dip or something (um, because that's what expectant dads are craving right at this moment).

wisdum

China has been a interesting place to be pregnant. I have gotten some insightful advice from my co-workers and friends here. I hope that I can add daily to this one, because I am in awe of the amount of bologna that they really believe in.

"You can't go near computers or microwaves without your anti- electromagnetic maternity vest."

" You need to take off your belt or the baby will never grow!" -Evyer (Year 1 teacher)

 

"So, you have to get rid of your cats and fish now. You can't keep any animals when you are pregnant." -Sonya (my co-teacher)

 

" Boy. Moving lot means boy!" -My limited English ultrasound technician at my 12 week visit.

 

" your spine is curved, so you will have a boy. Really!" -Sonya (co-teacher)

 

Why the Pickle name?

We are calling the baby a pickle for a lot of reasons:
we love pickles (duh!),
we're nick-namers, we're reading SIX baby books that all use food to discuss fetal body size (like it would completely tank the sales of a baby book to say "at week 26 your fetus is the size of a human skull") and none of them use pickles,
we've noticed that pickles and pregnant women are alarmingly ubiquitous (go ahead, try googling it),
and you know, je ne sias quois. 

But the most important reasons are that we've decided to be surprised about the sex of the child and because it was a Herculean task finding "crave-satisfying" Dill pickles in Beijing.
It's a no-brainer as far as the former is concerned.  Pickles are gender neutral even though they can be discussed in euphemistic terms that range anywhere from humorous to distasteful.  What else would you say can satisfy that requirement? Booger... that reads like "little boy."  Angel?  Unless Kasha is secretly set to birth a Latino, Angel is synonymous with "little girl." I could've been satisfied with "Squirt" as it smacks of cutes-y-ness and gives a long-overdue kudos to the tasty beverage whose dynamic flavors are (somehow) superior even to its Fay-Go Pop counterpart.  Nonetheless, Pickle it is.  Kasha is fond of applying the term to the young members of our human race, and, at times, small cats. 

As for the latter, we'd really never given much thought to pickles in Beijing before the cravings hit.  Sure, we had tried some and been shocked at how far gone a pickle can be screwed up.  We've all seen 'em roll off your paper plate at a picnic and all you have to do is splash some beer on them till most of the dirt is off.  Not the Pickles available in Beijing, boy.  Email me if you'd like details on every gross thing I've even eaten... I'm all about sharing. But as for my purposes here today, suffice it to say that the pickles we had found in China left a great deal to be desired.

Until, a month into the search, I found the one place in Beijing (City Shop, near Nurenjie, downstairs from Starbucks) that had tasty dills.  Kosher Dills, but who's keeping track?  After a search of that length, dill was the operative word and everything else was filler.  Imagine crawling through the desert for a week, sand stuck fast in the deep cracks of your parched tongue.  Along comes a guy with a bottle of Holy water.  You know, we just wanted tasty Dills. And we got Vlasic Dill Pickles, as a matter of fact.  And what's on the Vlasic Pickle jar?  None other that the Vlasic Stork, toking a pickle-stogie!  Ahhhhh! The Stork! And...There you have it, Pickle Smith.

Zodiac Drop

Compatibility between Mommy and Baby Astrology



The Doctors say that the little Pickle is coming on the Second of September, 2009. “What do the Stars say?” is all I want to know. I’m no Astrological expert (if such a term can be applied to the subject) but I do know that a due date in the first week of September means that unless the unforeseeable occurs, the baby will certainly be Virgo.
And I am not denying that the stars affect us while we are on the Earth. It’s just that I usually consider the Sun as being the only star that has impact on my mood.

The truth is that I first learnt of Astrological Compatibility from Kasha when she told me, in a humorless, ‘faith-to-move-mountains’ kind of voice that was unironically matter-of-fact, “No Sagittarius has ever really loved a Scorpio.” [NOTE* She=Scorpio; Me= Sagittarius] Well, OK! I’m one for looking to the oily-puddled, after-rain canvas of the carriageway to prove that sometimes it’s the things that don’t mix which produce the unexpected beauty that makes life so darned wonderful to live . And further, I’d be willing to bet that the coupling of items as ubiquitous as butter and popping corn are now was seen as folly by the first witnesses.

A pointless digression? Perhaps. But then, aren’t we all mentally smelling the movie theater lobby and pumping out extra saliva as the result? And what if we were taking that bucket of buttery popcorn to see _Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom_? I know I am not the only one who sees the connection. Right? C’mon! Sagittarian Steven Spielberg fell in love with a certain Kate Capshaw (Scorpio) during the filming of Indy-Doom. I rest my case!

And if making the claim that Astrological Compatibility is hogwash has me out to seem a cook, then have a look at what the Astrologers themselves are saying:

Virgo with Scorpio
The combination sometimes belongs to the mutual admiration society. The Virgo mind is very fascinated with the mysterious and intriguing Scorpio. Out of all the signs Scorpio is the most likely one to curb Virgo's tendency to sulk. Virgo respects Scorpio's ability to analyze all situations and thereby sidesteps controversial issues before they they become grounds for an argument. If Virgo will keep from hurting Scorpio's pride, this combination will be happy and enduring.

Now, that’s what I call cook-y! I mean really, “The combination sometimes belongs to the mutual admiration society.” Fine, but what the Hell is a mutual admiration society?! How about a mind that is “very fascinated” or an individual that is somehow both “mysterious and intriguing” at the same time!? Kinda makes Astrologers look like big-huge, stupid-dummies, dunnit?

But, having deferred to the “experts,” it looks like the Zodiac favors a strong bond between mommy and the pickle.
But why stop at the Occidental view of the Zodiac? One good turn deserving another, the Chinese Zodiac must also be considered. And really, as far as Zodiacs are concerned, it’s the Chinese that more accurately fit the bill. The Greeks understood zodiakos kyklos as a “circle of animals” just as the Chinese Zodiac is to this day. So let’s see what the East has to say about the pickle.


Compatibility between Daddy and Baby Chinese Zodiac

On the surface, there should be strong connection between Daddy and baby here. Obviously 1977 is the year of the Snake and 2009 is the year of the Ox; and we all know that the Snake and the Ox share the soul-mate level compatibility of Chinese Zodiac Second Trine membership. But it would be a misconception to think that “outer animal” (birth year level) characteristics would bring much to bear in terms of relationship stability.

The Chinese Zodiac is not so simple as your favorite Dine In/Cally Out joint’s placemats would lead you to believe. I guess I honestly thought it was one animal every twelve years, with every person born in a specific year sharing the same general personality traits with everyone else born not only within their year, but all the years before or to come in successive multiples of twelve. Now extrapolate that out to a population soaring over the billion mark: that’s more than a thousand million people, with only a dozen personalities! That level of gross simplification smacks of the type of cultural insensitivity or even (gasp!) racism that more empirical claims like “Germans sound retarded” or “all Chinese look the same” will get you internet death threats for.

But then, how could you be that insensitive to other cultures if you picked up the misconception from a dining establishment that self-applies the cultural identity it simultaneously obscures? Not to be daft, but there’s many a fortune-cookie bigot who’d claim that all Chinese look alike to them while they can clearly discriminate between, say, Cantonese and Sichuan cuisine! Alright then… Yes, there are Twelve Chinese Zodiac Animals (11 and a Dragon, actually) and yes, they repeat like parrots.

But again, it’s not all that simple. The Birth Pets follow a sixty-year lunar cycle, where each of the animals presides over an entire year, once every twelve years, or five times in the full cycle. So why a sixty-year cycle if it’s the same thing five times? Search me! Point is, there’s much repetition for these dozen brave creatures. Months (“Solar Terms”, not Jan-Feb-Mar, etc, OK?) within a given year also have one of the same animals, as do the twelve “large hours” (eh, two hour periods, Sherlock) in a day.

You wind up with a Zodiac too nuanced for take-out. Sure, 1977 was the Snake’s year, but that just means the Snake is my Birth Pet or “outer animal.” I was born on the Second day of December, which makes my “inner animal” the Pig, and my “secret Animal” is the Rabbit (divined from the big hour of my birth) with the result being that I am a Snake only on the outside. People who’d judge me based on the Snake would fail to see that the Pig and Rabbit (both 4th Triners) over-rule the Snake’s “outer Animal” attributes.

As the little baby will almost certainly have the Monkey as hizzerher “inner animal” there is little chance that baby’s Ox-Monkey will even be able to pretend to tolerate my Snake-Pig… let alone the Horse-Pig that is Kasha! Now that’s what I call prejudice!

SuperMami

One of the most common platitudes heard by first-time expecting parents would have to be that pregnancy is (go ahead, say it with me) “beautiful and natural!” And always in tandem, too: Beautiful and Natural. It’s as if everybody is selling hair products or foundation make-up and all they can think to say is Beautiful and Natural, Beautiful and Natural…



And why not? What other processes are there connecting us to the rest of the natural world? Eating and crapping? Sure, that’s natural, alright, but rarely beautiful. New life (especially babies) is definitely a beautiful thing. I can’t even watch a National Geographic special about the Hatching of the Sea Turtles without saying, “AWWW” so many times that I drown out the narration of David Attenborough. And that’s reptilian cute. Maybe a farmer or an Ob/Gyn can transcend the “awww” reflex, but then we’re talking that force of sheer repetition that allows a trickle of water to pulverize a boulder. Beautiful and natural, beautiful and natural, beauty, nature, beauty, beauty, nature, beauty.

The hitch here is twofold. First of all, the repetition of the phrase takes a back seat to its appeal, and secondly, the phrase almost never originates from the mouths of comic dorks. Look, even if it were only said once and then never heard again, an appealing message has the kind of lasting impact only matched by a brutally honest barb. “You look great in black” was said once to Johnny Cash and you know how that ended. It’s like when someone asks you if you ate garlic the night before and then you never eat it ever again, or when somebody else says they can smell the gin on you and you resolve to start drinking alone. When you’re toying with the notion that you may, in fact, be doomed and somebody comes along with, “how perfectly beautiful and natural!?” it replaces your woes with comforting, warm fuzzies. Period. But that’s not the way anyone who ever read a comic book would see the thing.

Living in a world of more or less constantly suspended disbelief, the average reader of comics is always on the look-out for the powerful. To us (“us” being huge nerds) pregnancy is like being a super-human. Pregnant women have incredible capabilities that ordinary women do not possess. No, I am not talking about the fact that they are liable to have a head dangling out of their crotch. They have real, legit powers. For serious. They have their Kryptonite, too, but let’s try and not dwell on that.

Everybody knows that pregnant women have super stretchy skin, which is either a sore subject (pun!) or blows the G rating (again). I’ll leave that one alone. Besides, a big belly in nine months: what’s the big deal? That sounds like Freshman year at college; junk food and keg beer can do that just as soon as pregnancy.
The real super power of growth is happening within. Mommies’ babies expand by a factor of 1000 times the original size from zygote to newborn. In nine months! That’s an average of growing three times your previous size every day! I’d be 140 feet tall by this weekend if I grew like that. That’s Godzilla big.
Having a literal bun in the oven (cinnamon rolls, brownies, baked goods, etc) makes the whole house smell grrrreat. Who’ll argue with that? It’s common knowledge. Factuality. Well, here’s another fact that you perhaps were unaware of and which speaks volumes to the super-human nature of those with a figurative oven bun: Pregnant women have acute olfactory senses. Heightened sniffer prowess. It’s not so much that they are sensitive or that they smell good, but they do develop an exaggerated sense of smell. They smell very well. Gosh, I’d even say they smell swell!

Also, they get really large buh-zoombas, which is roughly equivalent to having the ability to control the minds of men.
I’m not saying pregnant women have bullet-proof legs or nothing like that. .Heroes and villains often have secret identities, pregnant women are prone to frequent mood swings. And they cannot fly either. Far from it. Jeesh, try getting them off the sofa past Seven PM. So they have their Achilles heel. I mean, for one thing, alls you have to do is say, “salt and pepper” and they’re liable to barf for half an hour.

Morning sickness aside, it is a fact that pregnant women are more susceptible to food poisoning than the non-incubating segments of the population. I wouldn’t wish that on my Arch Enemy.

Finally, what trait do all super-humans share (besides powers and weaknesses) that is also a mainstay of pregnant women? Form-fitting outfits, that’s what!
But just as pregnant women make great heroes, so do Comic fanboys make perfect expectant fathers. For one thing, they are used to having to wait for exciting arrivals. Cliff-hangers are nothing to comic geeks, who are only dissatisfied in the absence of a startling, twist ending. And we know that there is no situation too dire to become an amazing save-the-day moment. I almost wish there was an umbilical cord around my neck as I write this!

Week 12

The twelfth week meant another Ultrasound, and another Ultrasound meant another prenatal exam. Between the first exam (6th Week) and the second exam, doctor’s orders were to not discuss the pregnancy with anyone. Now, that put a real harsh on the buzz, if you catch my driff.

This time period is defined by copious amounts of mind-boggling extremes that test everything you ever thought you knew about just-about-anything. And you’re put in solitary confinement by the man in the white coat. It’s been a real roller coaster of wanting to tell everybody on earth that the earth is about to receive the next big thing, and then the next minute alls you wanna do is go punch-crazy and break some glass while listening to Pantera and chewing on nails.

When people approach you and you successfully guard the information from them, you just feel like a big liar. Man, doctors are jerks. It’s not as if I’m asking for the world, you know? I just want to tell anybody who’ll listen that the pickle’s neck is getting longer and straighter and little hairs are sprouting on the head. But no! We’re sworn to secrecy, Dr.’s orders.

And then, right when you’re fed up with the whole charade, they pull out that old, dusty Ultrasound machine and show you your baby’s heartbeat, telling you everything is looking good. And the doctor lives another day!

Week 11

The size is now just about three inches, crown to rump.
The head is still accounting for much of that size, but try and not mention it. We’re feeling a bit touchy about this entire fixation on looks. What’s it all about? Week Eleven: finger nails and toe nails.

Well, La-Di-Da.

What are toenails really gonna do for a person in the course of a life? Seriously, when was the last time you heard somebody say, “Toe nails saved my life!”?


Never happened, never will.

That is not to say that there’s not crucially important (and surprisingly weird) development happening at this stage. What really blew my mind, I mean it made me say, “no way!” while reading, is that during the eleventh week the intestines will travel from the umbilical cord to the fetus’ abdomen.

The intestines are created outside the body and then squish and slide their way in only later. Admit it, that’s bananas! If you say you knew about that before just now, 1) I’m calling Bull Crap, and 2) why didn’t you tell me about it? Yeah, thought so.

Week 10

This pickle is a work horse. Flat out.
It staggers the imagination that such things can happen so quietly and steadily, but the proof is in the pudding.
In the past three weeks, the fetus has doubled in size. Right outside our window, there is an high-rise apartment construction site that runs around the clock and has for the past several months. Look at that gawd-awful, noisy, SOB every day and have yet to notice any significant growth.

And the pickle has silently doubled in mere weeks. Flat out, that work-horse is some kind of crazy ninja! Think of the most impressive thing you’ve ever done. Now imagine having done it with your eyes closed. Yeah, the pickle is about to impress your pants off! All this remarkable growth is now being done with the eyelids fused shut. Talk about no peeking!

I hope I am not the only one to remember the Lymon. That was the half-lemon/half-lime fruit that ostensibly produced refreshingly carbonated soda pop when squeezed. Sprite, to be exact, back before Sprite got all Hip-Hop and started putting the likes of Kriss/Kross in commercials.
Wait, I can explain. One of the many pregnancy books we’ve been so generously gifted up to this point referred to the fetal size in this week as a “rather large lime.”
What do you know that’s larger than the average lime?
Uh, lemon. Lemon’d be ‘bout the size of a big lime, I reckon.

Still not there? I can explain further. Sprite is also the beverage of choice this week because it is caffeine free and tastes nice when you’ve been barfing for a month straight.
If you’re still not impressed, try this on for size: by the tenth week the fetus possesses enough bone marrow to produce its own white blood cells. Aw yeah!
That makes Lemon-Lime soda look like a wet cat.

Week 9

Let’s just say the pickle is a little girl.

I mean, could be, might just as easily be. We don’t know.

But if we were having a girl, by this week there would be little tiny baby ovaries developing in the fetus. Alas, gender speculation is provocative and unscientific rhetoric at this point, so allow me to go back and just compare the fetus to food some more.

By this week, our pickle is about the size of a small, fresh plum. Mmmm, tangy. At this time, for the first time, the argument that such comparisons are dehumanizing may be entertained, as we’re really starting to cook in the recognizably-human department. I’m talkin’ ears; I’m talkin’ nostrils; eyelids: we’re getting there… nipples? Hey, hey, hey! Just stay focused.

Before the ninth week, let’s be honest, it was hard to make the case for cuteness. But now, well, now the fetus has a neck. That’s right: a plum with a neck and nipples. Try telling me that’s not cute!

Week 8

The eighth week is important for fetal development in that it is a rite of passage of sorts. Up to this point, the pickle was a nicely (if a bit rushed) developing embryo. This week, for reasons no one quite knows, we are an embryo no more.

From the eighth week of pregnancy, clean through to delivery, the little pickle is now a full-fledged fetus.

Ahh, it takes me back. You know, one day you’re a twelve year old boy, the next day you’re a teenager. Well, if the fetus is a boy (and we’re opting not to learn the sex of the child until the moment of truth) the eighth week is when he’d begin to produce testosterone. Go get ‘em, tiger!

Little boy or little girl, this week we’re hard at work making bones and cartilage for refining the joints and creating ear slits. By now the uterus has doubled in size from the time before pregnancy, although mommy has no bump (in front) that can be detected by the eye.

Week 7

This week the pickle has passed an Old Imperial benchmark: one inch in length from crown to rrrrump.

Another way to visualize the same thing: the embryo is about the size of a green olive. Pimento, sardine, almond, whatever. Just so long as it’s not stuffed with Blue Cheese. Soft cheeses like that are a major no-no with mothers-to-be.

But protein and calcium from other sources are in high demand as this week the muscles are forming, even allowing (the first) voluntary movements of the still-webbed limbs.

They say that the ears and nose never stop growing. Well, this week they’re starting, although they look nothing like what we’d recognize as human features. But, as a matter of fact, if you knew what to look for you’d be able to recognize that by now there is incredible progress being made toward all organ systems and the internal groundwork has been laid for some of the everyday tools of the human trade. Namely, fingers, toes, knees and elbows.

Week 6

Back home in China we had our first “pre-natal” examination which not only reconfirmed the pregnancy but also allowed a chance to ask all sorts of first-time expectant parent questions.

Questions like “What exactly are we supposed to be seeing in this Ultrasound?” Seriously, it’s 2009. We were supposed to have flying cars and A.I. by now.
Instead we’ve got doctors pointing at blobs and smears on indecipherable ultrasound images, and reassuring us that everything looks good. If you say so. Me, personally, I couldn’t get any information out of our sixth week ultrasound. I couldn’t even get a copy of the thing, but I’ve drawn it from memory and, yes, it looks like a normal, healthy black and white blob.

What I might’ve seen had technology not gotten in the way was about the size of a pinto bean, had a strong heart beating at around 150bpm, and looking less reptilian than in weeks gone past. Involuntary twitching is even causing movement, but nothing that could be felt from the outside.

Week 5

In the Fifth Week, while cruising from the Bahamas to Grand Turks and Caicos, we learned the good news.
For sure, I mean.
“Late” changed to “maybe” and finally the application of urine to a plastic stick confirmed that all our dreams were in fact coming true. Or something like that.

Really, being stuck on a boat with forty-five bars must have been an exercise in self-control for Mommy. Look at Isaac, the bartender, from Love Boat there. How could you say No when you see him saunter up with something that would look exotic and refreshing even if it weren’t poured into coconut? I don’t know because I was too busy saying YES!

But here’s to Kasha for bringing in the New Year without champagne!


Musta been some hard work, that. But the real prize for working hard this week goes to the pickle! At about the size of a blueberry, the embryo is still far from being noticeable to the casual eye, but that represents growth of a staggering ten thousand times as large as at conception! Zowie! Most of that size is concentrated in the head. Figures; both parents have been known to get a big head from time to time.


This is great news for many reasons, but especially because the growth spurts of the head and steadily developing limb buds are taking the spotlight away from that dang tail, which will never grow again.

Rather it will begin to transform into “the rump” which is clearly a gift from the Krupansky side!

Week 4

Week Four is an exciting time, indeed.
We’ve got black dots on either side of the massive head section. One day soon, these will change into eyes and start moving around the head until they settle in the front of the face.
And all the organs have begun to form.
Better than that, the heart has taken its fledgling steps from structural formation into functioning. It is practice-pumping at eighty beats per minute.

In other exciting news, we have the very first nubs of arms and legs (although, at this point they are still overshadowed by the prominence of the large tail.

That said, we’re moving away from a reptilian or seahorse-ish little pickle into something a bit more walrus-y. Now, that is probably a dominant trait from daddy’s genes! Here’s a dramatic re-enactment of what would happen if the embryo were to meet a Smurf. Sike, the little embryo is dong its best to grow quickly, but is still no larger than a BB pellet.

Week 3

The process has now yielded some crucially important human hardware: the beginnings, at least, of a head and a heart. That said, in this very early stage we’re dealing with a critter that bears a striking resemblance to a seahorse (gets it from mommy’s side of the family!) and is about the size of a lower case “o” on the page of a magazine. I mean: nice tail, little buddy! I am reminded of one of the very few jokes that I’ve written about animals. It goes:



“Didjya hear the one about the story-telling Seahorse?
*Tick.*
He had a gripping tale!”

Get it? A gripping tail!? Oh, my goodness! You can have that one. It works just as well with a ‘story-telling Spider Monkey’ or ‘a Pulitzer Prize-winning Possum’ if you want to free-style.

The Beginning (weeks 1&2)

The forty week journey from egg to embryo to fetus and finally bouncin’ baby can get to sounding real science-fiction-y when you think about the amazing amount of growth and cellular specialization that will emerge definitively from the ether in a relatively short time span. Sure, we’ve all heard terms like zygote and DNA before, but blastocyst? Lanugo? I am going to attempt to capture the progress of Momma and the pickle over these magical weeks in words and images, demonstrating the variety of wild junk that will perhaps dust off all the old reproductive vocabulary, and at the very least make you go, “Hmmmmm.”

The First Day (I am going to use conception to refer to the progress of the pregnancy, whereas doctors and the authors of baby books and people like that tend to confuse the whole thing by numbering the last day of the period before conception as the first day of the yet-to-come pregnancy… sort of like calling a farm a sandwich because it is making the crops that’ll one day become bread and such.) of the pregnancy there is a meeting of cells from mommy and pops. This happens in the fallopian tubes and is on the scale of a small speck. Take a look; it’s just random circles, is all.


By the Third Day cells have continued dividing and organizing and we can comfortably call the zygote a trouble maker. As it nears the uterus it has begun to send Mommy’s glandular and hormonal systems into a real whiz-bang dust up.

Between the First and Second Weeks we’ll see the head-of-a-pin-sized embryo find its home in the uterine wall and develop a lump of cells that will begin to flourish into the beginnings of all the complex and diverse organs and tissues that make up a human.


That’s not to say the embryo will be recognizably human. It will be working so hard at rapid growth and increasingly sub-divided specialization that there’ll be no time for aesthetic considerations. In a way it’s a lot like Einstein not giving a hoot about his appearance, and letting the visage of a Hoover-ville hobo disguise a prodigiously beautiful mind. Our little pickle is up to hard work at this point. The development of the amniotic components and the placenta as well as the deepening uterine attachment is serious business; “house-keeping” if you will. But imagine attempting house-keeping with no arms no legs… not even a head. Yeah.