Basketball Baby

Some friends of ours are here visiting while their son is in EFY. Actually, my friends aren't here--but their mom is. Anyway, when they saw me, Bro. Parret said, "You look like you stuck a basketball up your shirt!" Sis. Parret gasped when she heard I was due this coming Sunday and exclaimed, "That's not a basketball! It's a grapefruit!"

This got us wondering whether or not I really am as big as if I had stuck a basketball up my shirt.

Unfortunately, we don't have a basketball. In fact, we have hardly any sporting equipment at all. I think we have 3 racquetballs, one racquetball racquet, a Frisbee, and a pair of figure skates. Oh, and an exercise ball. That's about the inventory of our sporting equipment, unless you count sidewalk chalk, which I don't.

We went on a walk the other night though and found a basketball laying in someone's yard.

Ordinarily I wouldn't have been tempted to pick it up and play with it, but we just couldn't help ourselves. Besides, being in the Stake Primary Presidency has made me a lot braver in our neighbourhood. I'm constantly having to talk to people I don't know and more people know me than I know, so since we were within our stake boundaries, I pretty much was feeling really comfortable. (The pictures, however, we took at my parents' house because we didn't feel comfortable enough borrowing some random kid's ball and yard for a photo shoot.)

Andrew picked it up and held it next to my stomach. Indeed, my stomach was smaller than the basketball. I'm not sure that I'm entirely grapefruit-sized, but I'm not quite a basketball, either.


Of course, when you measure a basketball against a baby, you have to account for part of the baby that is inside the mother--the part of me that would ordinarily be there if the baby hadn't pushed whatever used to be there into my ribcage. Leaving room for my spine, I suppose my stomach is about as big as a basketball.


Josie was willing enough to stick a basketball up her shirt to model this point further. As you can see, the basketball sticks out a lot further on her for the simple reason that the basketball isn't rude enough to push all of her entrails aside, unlike the baby who has shoved the contents of my abdominal cavity all sorts of places thereby making room for her to fit (very) snugly in my pelvis.


The basketball resides completely outside the pelvis, so it actually makes you look much more pregnant to stick a basketball up your shirt.

So, there you have it, folks: If I was actually walking around with a basketball instead of a baby I would poke out a lot more than I actually do.