Is it a girl or a boy?

Everywhere you turn lately, you see someone with an extroverted belly button sticking out from a stretched-to-the-limit t-shirt. What is it with the baby boom lately?

Haven’t you noticed? Pregnant women are cropping up everywhere. Pregnant is the new black. It’s cool to be preggers. And more people seem to be getting up there in the multiples: three, four, five, they’re just popping those little suckers out.

I’m waiting for my neighbor’s baby to come and I’ve gotten so caught up in the process. I can see I’m a little whacked, but it’s like waiting for a jack-in-the-box to go “POP goes the weasel.” I can hardly wait to see what’s in there. (It’s a boy, but what KIND of boy!)

Of course there are the usual round of people who shouldn’t be pregnant because they’re too young, or too unmarried.

But even then there’s something magical about waiting for a new arrival. The excitement of wondering what they’re going to be like: stubborn and energetic, or placid and easily amused. My thirty-five year old business-owner girlfriend in Poland has just had her first this year, and she’s had someone just like herself: bossy, relentless, and always on the go.

Our granddaughter just had a little boy named Hunter who joins her five- year old twins who are the definition of “sow the wind and reap the whirlwind” and he’s quiet, cute, and sleepy.

The idea that you never get more than you can handle comes from having kids. The high maintenance ones are usually followed by ten-pounders who come out ready to change their own diapers and make their own cereal.

I’m glad I had my full quiver of kids because I never look at a new mom and think, “Oh, I wish I’d had one more.” I do remember the panic attacks I had when I was pregnant with my last and praying into the night for there to be another way for it to come out besides any of the usual ones.

And the miserable way you feel afterwards is not to be laughed at.

But I love watching the miracle of birth. The hard round tummies so brimming with life, the occasional kick you can actually see. Moving the older kids into other bedrooms to make way for the new.

Seeing the future come into being as new families are formed. Realizing that in twenty years they will be like us, waiting for phone calls and college vacations. Traveling to cities we never even thought of (LaJolla? Kansas City?) to see people who run their own lives and own houses and collect paychecks.

People who we waited nine long anxious months for, people who popped out of my tummy and told us who they are.