The baby has sure been getting stronger, by the day, it seems. She kicks and bounces up a storm in there and sometimes to the point where I start to wonder if she can do any real damage to any nearby internal organs. I keep imagining keeping her contained with some sort of circular fetal gate but, she’s not paying much attention to my subliminal messages. And even though her kicks feel mighty powerful to me, even a bit painful, up until a couple of days ago Benoit still said he only feels light pulses through my skin with his hand pressed to my belly.

But just a day or so ago, I woke up with a furious start, alarmed at how jolting the baby was being. So, I called him in and told him he had to be able to at least feel something stronger with this much of an energetic wakeup call. Turned out, he not only got to feel our little soccer player in the making, he SAW her too! My belly was literally erupting with punches and kicks! It was so funny to watch as my navel bounced around, side-to-side, jiggling on every whim of the baby inside. It lasted only a minute or so, presumably until the girl finally found her comfy spot, but it was a sight to behold and I’m sure it’ll get more impressive as she grows and gets stronger. Not sure if we could have captured it on camera but I’ll be waiting with it by my nightstand, just in case.

This may be too much navel contemplating for some, but last night as I got dressed for bed, I realized there was no hole where my belly button should be. I have a lump of pure white skin taking the place of the shallow little hole my belly button called home for almost 28 years. A sad night indeed. Though it isn’t to the done perfection of a turkey timer, as some have suggested it will resemble, I had the unbearable chore of wiping away childhood dust from my tummy last night, the last undetected batch of sloughed off cells have been cleared and wiped away. My belly button and I are now the same age. We wear the same old skin, no traces of infancy remaining.

It’s an odd thing, after all, to see the end of one’s belly button, that part of you which remains hidden, out of sight, a cloy, sexy object of piercing’s desire. It makes me wish I had pierced it, somehow adorned it while it was still inside me, a little gesture of my affection for a thing I thought could never change. Too late, for this innie turning outtie. I have cleansed away the last of its innocence. I now bare it to the world, sans artifice, unjeweled, unadorned. I am sad to see it go. (Plus, all this turning inside out is a damn itchy affair!)

This is one of the few times in life, I’ve decided, that one can say, “hey, I’m busy contemplating my navel” and it would be true. Every other week or so I seem to have this noticeable growth spurt in my belly (duh! I’m pregnant!) but the past two weeks I’ve been noticing the expanse of belly button real estate that has gradually usurped the general midpoint of my belly. In fact, I did a double-take in the mirror this morning as I was getting dressed because I thought I saw the beginnings of a pointer, the once “innie” soon-to-be “outtie” that is my belly button. Though on closer inspection I see 90% of my button is fairly cached, it is threatening to bulge once more and by my calculations there are only a few more millimeters that this button can give up before succumbing to the light of day and turning what was virgin territory, unexposed to harmful uv rays, into the sun-kissed tanness more common to the rest of me.

I think this newest development is somewhat early in terms of the law of averages (week 30 being the more common point of no belly button return). But, I’ll take this quite prescient moment to revel in the fact that I have been contemplating my navel at all, an excuse or ridicule once levied at me as an adolescent unprepared for the Socratic method in government class but now just a normal, accurate description of today’s preoccupied thoughts. You can’t imagine how fulfilling it is to have the right to comment on one’s belly button. Just try it and see if anyone takes YOU seriously. On the pros and cons scoreboard of pregnancy I’d have to put this one on the pros! Yippeee.

Now, the belly-button-popping watch begins! Anyone care to make a wager on when this fortuitous event might finally take place? You can comment on the Belly Shots page and see the latest photo there too.

Today I walked with a friend around the Crystal Springs Reservoir. So sad to see the water so low, 14 rungs of dried land etched clearly around each island in the middle. A deer stood alone on the headlands, head cocked to listen to something, a bird perhaps, in the brush 100 feet away. Surely this little one would not have had to venture so far out of the safety of the woods only 6 months past.

But, we walked on, careful to observe any passing salamanders or interesting bugs in our paths and talking of all the changes we’ve noticed in ourselves these past two weeks when we had not seen each other. She, a little wider herself, commented on how much bigger my belly looks now. And I noticed how our pace has slowed since the first walk we took around the reservoir a month ago.

The cooling air signals a change in seasons though the trees around us here in California do not shed their leaves in glowing shows of auburns and yellows. These are the kind of days I can’t wait to introduce my little girl to, the crisp night air, the crunchy acorns underfoot, the people beginning to wrap up in scarves and jackets. I will bring her to little Butano falls, walk across the downed tree there at the creek, point out the mottled color of the poison oak that grows so abundantly alongside our trail. I will teach her to be quiet and watch the deer go on feeding, fuzzy antlers gently scratched on big redwood trees. And Benoit and I will make these California forests seem so natural she will want to call them home and she will have a place in her heart for all these things I adore, for they will be hers too, a childhood of memories in fall.