Beauty

Inclement weather is especially cruel to the pregnant. Julie's coat doesn't close around her stomach's orb, so yesterday's perfect storm found her run-waddling from Macy's to the car while screaming "Eeeeeeee!" I ran behind her with arms outstretched to catch her should she trip, and managed to snap this picture before she fixed her hair.

Macy's was just the first stop on our BABOS date (stands for Buy A Bunch Of Stuff, remember?). By the time Target came around, she had me drop her off and pick her up. Then at Byerly's, she sat in the coffee shop while I made the rounds. The energy wanes, you see, which I suppose could be explained by the fact that she's past 37 weeks, otherwise known as hella-pregnant.

"What if our baby is ugly?" she asked yesterday, clearly joking. But you know how it is with some babies: they're like potatoes with limbs. And when you say "She is so beautiful," what you're referring to is the beauty inherent in all living things, not the actual physical qualities of the potato-child in front of you. But the parents don't know that, so they go along thinking that you think that their baby could model for Gerber or Target. Which is all fine and good.

See, there are a couple reasons why Julie and I in particular do not need to worry about the physical attractiveness of our baby. The obvious reason is that our own beauty defies description. Julie is a Disney princess. And I am a smoldering hunk of man-pretty stud cake (my blog, my delusions).

But the real reason is that having a baby causes you to revise your paradigm of beauty. In other words, whatever our daughter looks like will automatically become our new definition of beautiful, by which we'll then judge all living things. So if you don't end up resembling our daughter, your beauty rating will decrease, at least according to us. Sorry: those are the breaks. You're the same way with your kids, right? Well, I hope you are.

Since our daughter will look like both of us, thereby making us even more beautiful, we might struggle to walk past her crib mirror without preening. Then again, if she's in there, I doubt we'll be looking at anything else.