Week 23

The pickle is a baby doll at week 23! By this time we're measuring a full 8 inches from the top of the head to the bum and at long last weighing in at one pound. These dimensions (coupled with the now well formed features of eyelids and eyebrows) have the pickle closely resembling the kind of baby dolls that toddlers carry around.


AWWWWWW!

In the 23rd week Kasha and her belly flew to the US. She was in mourning over the loss of her Grandma K, but what an opportunity to introduce the belly bump to her entire extended family. Um, by my last count there are seven hundred and thirty-five Krupanskys strewn all over the US and abroad!


The pickle also got a chance to "meet" some new friends! It was a real pregnant belly showdown in Detroit during week 23.


Here's Kasha and her high school/ MSU pal Carrie (who's due date is fast approaching!) Carrie is responsible for introducing Kasha and I all those years ago.


And here we have Kasha and sister-in-law Andrea (who is due in June) going back to back.

Have another look at these pictures, will you? They say you can glean some info about the sex of a baby by the way the mother is carrying. Now, that sounds like a big pile of codswallop to me, but perhaps there's a nugget of non-BS in there.

Another thing to consider is that individual mother may carry very differently so what can you infer from that? Carrie and Andrea are both seasoned mommies. Carrie has a daughter, Emmy, and Andrea has two boys, Henry and Victor.

Still, we're playing a game of 50/50 here, so why not roll the dice?

Looking at these pictures I think it's gonna be like this:
Carrie- boy
Andrea- boy
Kasha- girl

But I don't have any insider info, and I don't know how to interpret the pictures of how these ladies are carrying. It's not even a hunch. I actually just flipped a Wu Jiao coin. Heads (5) it was a boy, and Tails (flower) a girl.

There's no shame in my game. Say what you will, but my contention is the old coin toss is just as accurate as any old-wives-tale! Then again, old wives have had babies, and guys like me are idiots. We'll see in the coming months, and until the final word is in, I welcome dissenting opinions.

Shall we move on?

What is notable about the pickle's development in this 23rd week is that the fetal pancreas is formed and functioning. In the earlier weeks, the pancreas was learning to fabricate insulin. Now, however, insulin is actually being deployed to break sugar down into useable bits and, indeed, to fine tune the amounts of insulin that are released. Learnin', yo! now, take a look at this pancreas. Just take a look and tell me I'm not crazy.


Whoa! Who knew the pancreas was so wienery? Sheesh. We all know how the camera catches us best (not me... I'm ambidextrous in terms of my photogenic "good side") and, seriously, if I was the pancreas I'd've been like, "hey, don't draw me from that angle... it makes me look like a dick!"

What!? Did you want me to just let that one slide? You don't know Wesley R Smith that well, I guess. I could've said that in week 23 the lanugo hair is turning black... but I didn't really get too much positive feedback the first time I brought up Lanugo.

How about this... I will leave you on a high note. In week 23 the pickle's face and body have finally acquired the cute baby appearance of an infant. Better?

Stickle Pith

Ancient Chinese Proverb Say-
"the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names"
(in bed)


Really though, you can't argue with that contention. And like so many truths, its converse is equally weighty. You can strip all meaning from observable fact by playing around with the words. Remember when President Clinton infamously deadpanned, "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is"?

I won't even get started on what Clinton's successor did with our language during his tenure!

The fact is that every word we use has capacity. Words can hold gobs of information. They have denotative capacity that changes over time and depending on what part of speech a certain word is being defined as. Then there is connotation which also changes over time, changes between cultures, and is subject to myriad devices such as sarcasm, ironic application, vocal intonation, double entendre, and even the occasional, well-employed gay lisp, Mexican affectation, or Southern Preacher Dra-a-awl.


The beginning of wisdom might be apt usage of the correct words, but that's just the beginning of it. Right? I mean, how were those ancient Chinese using 'wisdom'?

Most of the time people mistake the 'wisdom' in question. Wisdom and understanding are interchangeable here. Instead of thinking in these simple terms, using clear language to foster precise and complete understanding, people want to have uncommon wisdom. I'm not saying it's easy to speak clearly and use the exact words that are fully understood by whoever is listening whenever you talk. Man, that's a tall order!

Try telling people what happened to you on the bus today, or the narrative of the last dream you remembered. The number of clarifying statements required will soon outnumber your original message. You'll see.

By comparison, it's a lot easier to use really flowery or jargony or high-fallutin' vocabulary and feign 'wisdom' by the mere fact that nobody knows what the hell you are talking about. We all know who these people are because we're all us one of them. Maybe we don't always do it for accolades, maybe we just have a wacky hobby, a penchant for using rare acronyms, or have recently finished reading a challenging book and have something to prove to ourselves.

Whatever. If somebody is talking to you and they seem Abstract or Aloof on purpose, then maybe they are just an A-hole.

I mean to be clear.

I love the pickle. Always have liked the food. By saying that I always liked pickles, I mean that I liked salty cucumbers with dill. I especially like the Toledo, OH -by-way-of- Hungary update to this simple recipe: the Tony Paco's Pickles n Peppers (now available all over the US!).

But I like all the dill pickles! The only sweet pickles I ever cared for was the series of children's books based around personified animals and thematically linked to the Alphabet, Character Traits, and the City.

So, cucumbers and vinegar with plenty of salt and dill. That's what I like. But that's just the itty-bitty pinky toenail on the body of an immense set of food pickles! Yeah there's sweet cucumber pickles, but there are vinegar/brine pickles for every food you can imagine.

A lot of people love pickled eggs! I think pickled cauliflower is top slot. Who would disagree with saying that capers and olives belong to the pickle phylum? I don't even know what exactly a phylum denotes... so I'd be too afraid to disagree with the notion.

When I lived in India I had the pleasure of being introduced to subcontinental pickles. These are usually fruits (lime and mango are personal favorites) that are pickled in oil and turmeric instead of vinegar. Super tasty pickles, certainly, but not what usually comes to mind when we think about pickles is it?

There are also very many pickled meats (if you want to consider the feet of pigs as actual meat!) and fishes. Now, I'm not 100% about this but I think you can pickle fish (herring, notably) in milk. Like I said, I can't be sure. Alls I can usually get is a quick glance before my throat fills with barf. Pickled herring! Ughhhch!

But one man's trash is another man's treasure! I think a pickled onion makes a gin martini, but I understand that a good many people think Gibsons are garbage. And these are people who love other pickled vegetables, or love vodka with olives in it. Really has little to do with pickles as we know them, though. Turns out that the word pickle has a greater capacity than one might imagine.


Benjamin Franklin said that 'Hunger is the best pickle' or something like that. Two hundred and fifty years later Jesuit novice Bernard McAniff tried to explain to his tenth grade English class that you can say one thing and just leave it in the air with several different meanings. On the one hand, pickles are what we think they are: salty foods that make you more hungry and more thirsty. They are food we eat to, perhaps, increase our appetites. So perhaps Franklin was saying that genuine hunger is the best reason to have an appetite. But pickle also means problem and hunger also means desire/ drive/ motivation. Could Ben Franklin have been channeling Buddhist philosophy? Is it not possible that his words were another way of saying that desire is the cause of suffering?

Search me! Ben Franklin never said so one way or the other. And the soon-to-be Father McAniff never cleared the air either. All that's certain is that one word can have many meanings and some words have even greater capacity for conveying various information. Understanding that fact and using words to their fullest capacity means taking control of the destiny your speech creates.

I totally heard that in a rap song!

In summation, I dig on the pickle. Big time. Dig it. Pickles as food, that's great.

I love the idea that pickles are problems that take ingenuity to solve (whether or not said problems involve baseball rundowns).

I connect with the idea of keeping or preserving that the word pickle implies.

The pickle hidden on a decorated tree somehow came to mean good luck in my mom's house. Who on earth doesn't like luck or a well decorated tree, I ask you?

In computer terminology pickling is serializing or deflating data for ease of sharing and storage. Sure, I can get behind all that, too!

So yeah, I am full of love for the pickle, any way you slice it. But in the final analysis, from here on out, I mean the Pickle when I say I love the pickle.

The End!

stickle (v intransitive)- to raise questions about, or make difficulties, especially about trifles

pith (n)- the essential part; the substance; gist

Week 22

The 22nd week is a "first" week for Kasha. What the week-by-week baby book tells us is that in this week pregnancy is starting to feel like "fun" for the first time.
The key reason for this is increased comfort. The urge to puke is gone, the belly is small enough to allow for unimpeded bending and walking, and all those little "normal" discomforts are a reminder that going through labor will be just fine.


During her 22nd week Kasha was able to get a little taste of that comfort by finding a massage therapist to come to the house and really toss her around. Sounds bad, I know, but before finding this guy, Dr. Deng's his name, Kasha had not been able to find a willing masseur. Or rather, she'd go and pay for a massage and instead she'd get lightly tickled!

I thought I'd give massage therapy a try, too. This Dr. Deng is in his late fifties and weighs (maybe) one hundred twenty pounds but he was able to lift me clean off the ground by my neck (pop, pop, cr-r-r-rack) and then by my armpit (which for some unknown reason turned my spine into bubblewrapp). Basically, the guy's a real horse.


The real treat was when he pulls the skin of your back 6 inches off your spine! When he gets done with your back, your pants are too short. Weird, no?

Now how 'bout that pickle? This 22nd week we'll be focusing of the liver. People always use the personified liver (especially when chopped) as a name tag for the unappreciated. Well, they do back home, anyways. Here in China liver kebabs (called Chew-ARR in Beijing) are a delicacy on many a street corner and is so loved that people often buy it in the streets and take it into restaurants as a sort of BYO- Appetizer.


I am sure the pickle is pretty pumped about all that the 22nd week liver development can do. The long and short of it is that babies have less stable red blood cells, which are dying off more rapidly than in those of us already born. So their little livers have to process those old cells and get them out of there (through the placenta and back into mami) before they build up and lead to jaundice.

If the liver is over-stressed, then so be it. Yellow is one of Kasha's favorite colors anyways!

PICKLE-MANIA

Ooooh, man! The Pickle! I have honestly never been as excited about anything in my entire life than I am about the doggone pickle. I'm just keeping it real. Now, there's no doubt I was super excited that one time I saw "Macho Man" Randy Savage and the beautiful Miss Elizabeth walking through Detroit Metro Airport. There might even have been a minor tinkling over that episode. The man had technicolor sh*t-kickers on and he was so completely covered in muscles that the entire terminal began to smell like pastrami.


But that was happenstance. Just blind luck, really.

Sure, I have experienced extreme symptoms of anticipatory excitement, too (like when we collected enough cereal box-tops to mail in for the Star Wars Emperor figurine) but the pickle leaves all these other instances in the dust.

FYI- the dust given off by Randy Savage is exactly like the dust in the bottom of a bag of Funyuns. Not a bad dust to be left in!

Flat out, I think about the pickle, I get very excited. The same can, of course, be said of Kasha. That's seems fairly straightforward. What surprises me is that people all over the world are starting to catch Pickle Fever as well.
That episode where Kattie's entire plane got deloused by SWAT doctors in radiation suits- that wasn't about Swine Flu... they were trying to halt the spread of Pickle Mania.


It's hard to tell exactly who has been exposed. One of the main symptoms is an eerie, knowing stare that all those with advanced stages of Pickle Mania display. You may not even notice it, but be advised. This manic excitement spreads more easily than creamy Jif!


And once it has set its vinegar-y hooks into you there's no going back. It's all you'll be able to think about day and night!


You'll find yourself thinking about the pickle at work...


It'll creep into your political philosophy...


Um, you'll think about it when you're just hanging out with your best friend, who might happen to be a horse.

Why bristle from it? It's not like avoiding the rain ever actually prevented the spread of the common cold. And look at this guy-

He doesn't appear to be suffering, now does he?

And in some cases, not all cases, but some of the time... extreme, prolonged exposure to pickle mania has been alleged to completely transform you into a Pickle Pimp.


I wanna catch what this dude has! All day long.

According to my Aunt Margaret, Pickle Mania is already rampant in Dallas, TX. What are you waiting for? Catch the Fever today!


NOTES-
1) In all seriousness, consult with your doctor if you have any nasty crap going on with yourself. I had the stomach flu last week and convinced myself it was just excitement. I was going to see a magic act and spent the entire time in the toilet making onion rings reappear. God, I wish they'd been conjured from thin air or pulled from a top hat! In explicit terms, Pickle Fever only causes nausea in Kasha... and thankfully, those symptoms are long gone.

2) DON'T go using Pickle Mania as an excuse to be a gauche. This goes double for all you pervs out there with your minds in the gutter!

Week 21

Let's just face it: 21 is a beast of a number! It's fierce. Everyone on earth older than 10 held their breath as we broke the threshold into the 21st Century... and a good many of us were a little more than peeved when the 21st Century arrived without flying cars! Talk about a dry shave!


People who are big into numerology could tell you piles about the number 21.

Anybody who's ever been in a casino knows you've got some pretty decent odds with blackjack as long as you can count to 21 (with or without actual numbers).


What about the Human Highlight Reel? He's done more for the number 21 than Johnny Depp and Richard Grieco combined.


You get the picture! 21 is a serious number for the Pickle too you know... this is the week when the pickle is halfway home! Hip, hip... * Hip, hip... *
How do you love them apples?!
The half way mark. Gawsh!

So let's us do the numbers, shall we? At the 21st week the Pickle is about 10.5 ounces (or 300g) and nearly 7 and one quarter inches long (or 18cm) from punem to tuchis. You can think about this as the size of a big old banana.


There's something else about the 21st week that ties it in closely to the 21st year. This is, of course, drinking. By the 21st week, the pickle's digestive system has developed to the point where it is able to swallow amniotic fluid and even absorb the water in it. Thirsty work, being the Pickle, I s'pose. I'm just guessing about the thirstiness part actually. What the literature says is that the time spent in the uterus is largely subconscious practicing, sharpening skills for the party-hearty real world. Alright, the literature didn't say all that. I wanted to keep going with the 21st birthday stream.


And what about Kasha at week 21? The book talks about nutrition and cravings at this point in the pregnancy. Although the appetite is no longer diminished by nausea, the capacity for filling up continues to decrease as the pickle (and all the surrounding tissues) continue to increase in mass. Bummer, eh? You know you're hungry but you always feel full! The book talks about the most widespread cravings of expectant mothers at this point and Kasha seems right on the norm. 19% of pregnant women crave citrus fruits and juices. Kasha knocks back lemonade and smoothies like a sailor on leave! 20% are known to crave (non-chocolate) sweets, which I believe the caramel frappachino qualifies as. The only discrepancy between the book's purported cravings and what Kasha has experienced is that book claims chocolate is the most common craving. Not Kasha. No, sir! Every time I try to eat a chocolate-covered ice cream bar, she knocks all the chocolate off before eating any of the ice cream. So much for that finding!

Pregnancy Math 101

This is a constant source of glee to me when I am not pitching fits about how counter intuitive it is, but really, who came up with the mathematical ciphering that we use to discuss a pregnancy? Seriously, I haven't seen anyone go so far to obscure real understanding in the name of science since the Great and Mysterious Oz.

Right off the bat, what are we talking about? The way I see it, we've got a build-up to delivery on our hands. Due dates are not an exact science (believe me, this much I know!)but would not a count-down be more appropriate? Imagine the launch of a space shuttle or the dropping of the ball at Times Square on New Year's Eve going up instead of counting down. Didn't that suck?

Okay, OK. I know that the build up is the only way it worked in the past, but how many mommies (in the States, at least) schedule their delivery date to the 15-minute block in this day and age? Google it, people, I'm making a point about misleading jargon having no place in everyday communication... people can do whatever they want with their bodies!

It's not like it needs discussion at all. If you say it's the 40th week and I say it's really 38... that won't stop the world a'turnin', and it won't matter one bit to the so called unborn child, either. It's just that doctors talk to people about the babies they'll have in a way that clouds the a-ha! People don't even know it. I didn't. You see somebody with a belly bump, or hear that a friend is expecting and the knee-jerk utterance is, "How many weeks is it?" Then you hear the answer and by that time your mind is wandering in twenty-five thousand different directions.


So, here's what we know: we're talking about a pregnancy and weeks is the unit of analysis. Good. Now there is a little matter of Gestational Age (what doctors go by, and hence, what we all are using) and there's Embryonic Age. OK, no big deal. But what are you concerned with?
I think the natural answer is that we are interested in the age of the baby. Isn't that what you're asking?
Could you ever see yourself walking up to a woman and asking her, "So, um, when was the last time you menstruated? C'mon, c'mon, I'm talkin' to you here! When was your last period? Spit it out, sweetheart, when was it?!"

Hey, that's just rude!

But that's what doctors have us doing, you know?
Gestational Age is the number of weeks since the beginning of the final menstrual cycle before conception, while Embryonic Age is the age of the embryo/fetus since conception. So, if we're gonna insist on using weeks to discuss pregnancy here's the formula:
Let x equal the number of weeks of the pregnancy.
If Gestational Age is x weeks,
the age of the pregnancy is x-1,
the Embryonic Age is x-2, and
the actual age in terms of Embryonic age is x-3.

Um, where x is weeks,remember? Got it? Good!
So, when we say we're in the 6th week...
are you ready?
That's what the doctors tell us and it means that fetus is 3 weeks past conception.

WHY, why, oh why?!


I'm just assuming that it's an inside joke by doctors to make each other crack up once we've left their offices. And I know doctors. I just spent a week with a doctor who'd attended the delivery of countless babies. One of my oldest friends, actually. I confided in him that I was nervous about my ability to hold it together during delivery and so I asked him what I could expect. Do a lot of fathers get woozy, do any of them pass out, should I expect a rush of heroic fervor, WHAT?!?


He told me a lot of moms poop during delivery!
Thanks a lot, Doctor!

But there's more funky pregnancy math to unearth:
Here, it's fun!
Our favorite baby book puts it this way: "You can calculate your due date by counting 280 days from the first day of the bleeding of your last period" and it continues that you could also "count back three months from the date of your last period and add seven days" and then substitute the following year (obviously!) if the fisrt method isn't involved enough for you.
Please bear in mind that only 5% of women will deliver "on their actual due date" when you undertake to begin these computations!


Awesome!

But before all this is an issue there's the pre-pregnancy math! For example, it seems so simple that one egg+ one sperm = one fertilization. And that narrative is vastly more common than any other fertilization scenario, although we've all heard of the outliers. What leads up to that coupling, however, is a pretty daunting presentation of numbers.

Let us hop right to it, then. If the pickle is a little girl in there, then she'd have more eggs now than any time in her future. That is to say that by 5 month gestational age, a femal fetus will have produced 6.8 million eggs. At the time of birth female babies will have only 2 million eggs. Don't ask me where they are going, either... obviously the overwhelming majority of babies are born pre pubescent (Benjamin Button, aside). But even so, by the onset of puberty, a female human will only have an average of 400 thousand eggs left, and that number (theoretically) should be decreasing at a rate of roughly one egg per 28 days.
Now dudes, dudes on the other hand are playing an equally baffling numbers game that goes on its own weird ride from mind-boggling hugeness to that one + one = one outcome.
Each male deposit (I know, I would've used 'serving' too if I were the original source of this material!) contains up to 350 million sperm. Every time, to a man, like clock-work. Right. And of that number, say 200 million may reach the fallopian tube where the egg is (it's a "don't take the wrong exit" scenario for our trepidatious little swimmers) and then I can only imagine they do "Scissors- Paper- Rock" for the honor of fertilization. I don't know, maybe they 'call' it at some point in the vas deferens.

The point is that we're talking about one pickle who ought to be delivered in a party store and immediately buy some lotto tickets. Go figure the odds: one egg of a possible 6.8 million joining up with one of (I mean countless!) sperm and then snap-crackle-pop, you know the rest, magic!


So there, we all know smart is sexy. And I think we've just used math to prove the converse as well...
OK, class dismissed, quiz next Friday!

Week 20 finally!

During Week 20 the pickle was about the size of a hollow, chocolate bunny nestled in a bed of shredded, green plastic grass and accompanied by hatchlings made of industrial mallow-goo and pastel sugar. Oh, pardon me, no. Excuse me. The pickle was in the 20th week of development for the Easter Holiday, and was roughly "five and two thirds to six and one half inches (14 to 16cm)" from crown to rump, according to Glade B. Curtis,M.D., M.P.H and Judith Schuler, M.S. the authors of Your Pregnancy, Week by Week. Man, they're getting more and more precise as the weeks go by, eh?



Yeah, Kasha and I went to Yang Shuo, in the Guilin province with our friend, Leslie to celebrate Easter. There were no jelly beans, no marshmallow peeps, and no chocolate. Notice I did not say no Bunnies. Look, you name it, we could've ate that!
Imagine those fancy, fresh-catch joints you always see on the TV. Classical music wafts over the air while sophisticated diners eat buttered bread with the correct fork while your waiter motions toward the aquarium and asks sir and madame how many pounds will your lobster be tonight?
Our experience was actually more like guys in stained shirts tried to block our progress as we scooted past sidewalk cafes with a collection of live critters trapped in kiddie pools. The point is, you could pick the individual you wanted to dine on. It wasn't lobster, niether. That would've been too predictable!
We had the choice to eat fresh (read: squirming) turtle, snake, rat, weasel, chicken, duck, all manner of fish- eel- crab- snail, and yes... The Easter Bunny hisself! Yummy!

You can imagine the smell. Is that lemon-herb butter or did somebody go in their pants?


We went with a stew of tomato, beer and fresh water fish of questionable species and origin... but certainly very big and with just enough 'fight' left in him. Washed those down with sour-hot snails in a soup that contained the very first taste of lemon grass I've come across in Chinese cuisine since arriving here. I'm just saying.


It was a great place full of fun sights and interesting people from all corners of the globe. A bit rainy, but what do you want? It was nice enough for us to go on a five-miles bike ride punctuated with river rafting on traditional bamboo rafts. We learned that the characteristic 'round' mountains of this part of China (and to a lesser degree, Vietnam) were once deep unda da sea. "500 Million years ago," said our bike-guide. The rocks were washed smooth and round and eventually massive, prehistoric seismic activity drastically altered the topography of the area and produced a unique source of pride for the Chinese.


I'm searching, really reaching here, but it's sort of like the pickle's original fingertips forming in the 20th week. These features are genetically predetermined at the moment of conception but it is only in week 20 that the skin develops into the dermal and epidermal layers allowing the "fingerprints" and such to take shape. See? That wasn't so bad, a little history, a little biology, some food and religion. Reminds me of UuhD High!

Globetrotters, Harlem and otherwise!

Nowadays the pickle moves around in every possible sense. Over the past several weeks the "kicking" has increased in frequency and intensity, sure, but the pickle moves around in the transport sense more than anything else.

It's hard to imagine a more mobile mama than Kasha for sure, but thinking about the pickle in all these locations starts to stagger the mind.


Week 1: Beijing China and the onset of Urban Mega- Metropolitan Winter. Desert-adjacent.


Week 4: Mid-Michigan, USA in the midst of a hundred-year blizzard. Froze-over Freshwater Ocean State.


Week 5: From balmy-Me-Ah-Me to the shores of every Caribbean Island. Tropical Paradise.


Week 6: Back in the P.R.C.


Week 10: Harbin Festival of Ice. Imagine Hell Frozen Over, now pound all your toes with a hammer and then get shamelessly mugged in the open by every person you encounter while a horse is euthanized in the streets of a city where your pasty skin and icicle-d beard earns you no other option than to be greeted in broken Chinese-Russian. No joke: Worst Place Ev-va.


Week 20: the Rounded Mountains and Meandering Lakes of Guilin. Start the day with Spelunking and finish it off with Beer Fish and River Snail Surprise!


Week 23: Motown via Tokyo, the Lego-land of the rising sun.
Sub-zero-to tropical, mountain climbing and cave diving, urban/rural, rivers, lakes, oceans, planes, trains, taxis, busses, boats and bikes... the pickle gets around like pork flu!

I wonder what this says about the future. I mean (besides Canada, eh!) I never left the USA until I was 20 years old! In as many weeks, the Pickle has been to half a dozen countries all over the world. I say, keep on punchin', Pickle!

Look, it is kinda nerve-wracking to think of Kasha navigating international airports alone, that's just the truth. But they say that travel is inoculation against bigotry, and (besides DTaP Vaccine) there is no better vaccination I could imagine.
Plus, it seems like travel is unlikely to require needles for at least a few more months. We'll see. Kasha, along with 300 of her travel compatriots, on arriving in Tokyo from Detroit, was held for nearly two hours while every person on board had their temperature taken by a team of doctors in haz-mat suits!


Hey, if it prevents one person from catching some microscopic no-good, I'm all in favor of it.