When I was pregnant with my little girl I was two weeks away from my due date and I was already outgrowing my clothes. With such little time left in my pregnancy, I vowed that I wouldn’t buy anything else even though my pants were slipping down because my belly was too big and my shirts wouldn’t cover my stomach so it was popping out for everyone to see. I was going to Target to get a few things and maternity clothes were definitely not on my list. As I was walking on the crosswalk from the parking lot to the entrance, there was a car full of late-high school or early college-aged guys waiting at the stop sign. When I walked across they yelled “GET A BELT!!!” as they drove away. Did they not know that I was PREGNANT? Or did they think that I was trying to show off my “midriff”? I was so embarrassed that I went straight to the maternity section, bought a new shirt and changed in the dressing room before I started the rest of my shopping. I also called my husband to cheer me up because I felt even more huge than I already had 5 minutes earlier.

When I was pregnant with my son, I complained nonstop to my (then) cubicle-mates about my discomfort and how ready I was to NOT be pregnant. While I was quietly working away on a project one afternoon (at week 34) I felt a warm trickle down my leg and discovered that my water broke! I thought I could ignore it, but noticed the growing dark spot on the carpet underneath my chair and the told my office mate. She grabbed one of the other ladies to escort me outside into the lobby and as we waited for the elevator, the VP, a director and our president came running outside to check on me. Apparently my co-worker told everyone else in the office what was going on! Here I was thinking I was so stealth in my exit and everyone knew why I fled!

When I was expecting my first child, my mother came up 2 weeks before I was due to help me out when the baby came. I was feeling really good and so she and I went shopping. On our drive home, I rounded a bend in the road only to find a toppled traffic cone in the middle of the lane. I couldn’t change lanes due to traffic nor stop in time, so I ran over it figuring it would pop out a little scraped up behind me. Well, it got stuck under the car and we could hear it dragging along with us. I managed to exit on a side street, but the cone would not come out on its own and I was not about to crawl under a car while 9 months pregnant. We finally got it out by backing up and it came free. Between laughing my head off and mortification, I didn’t know what to do with the cone so I threw it in the car and it stayed in our garage for years as a reminder of waiting for baby.