Is she pregnant or is she expecting?

I've noticed that Emily and I have different perspecives on the whole pregnancy experience.

Maybe I can explain it with an example. At about Thanksgiving time, Emily puts out the creche and pulls out the Christmas CD's and starts planning and actually doing Christmas shopping. She loves Christmas time. She loves the anticipation. She loves the whole season. She is like Buddy the Elf. I think she really could eat a whole tube of cookie dough.

I, on the other hand, am more like the 'bah, humbug!' Ebenezer Scrooge. Not really. In fact, I enjoy Christmas day and I enjoy the carols and the nice decorations. For about 2 weeks. Which means I'm sick of the Christmas season right about the time December starts. I don't enjoy the shopping, I don't enjoy the decorating, and I get sick of Jingle Bell Rock about half-way through the first of the approximately 1.23 million times I hear it each year. December is the month you have to endure for the pleasant family-oriented day that Christmas should be.

The point is, while I enjoy Christmas as much as the next person, I don't appreciate the anticipatory season as much as those whose livelihoods are in the retail sector. Or Emily. She loves the build-up as much as the Christmas climax.

We have similar attitudes about the federally mandated 40 week wait period that those in the "medical profession" call "being great with child." I think she really enjoys being pregnant. She likes thinking about decorating a nursery and buying maternity clothes and picking a name and having "showers" and all the great things with which I would rather not be involved. To me it's just an anxious wait for the real event: when I get to see my child for the first time.

To me, pregnancy is not the enjoyable experience. It's the 40 week period where space aliens have taken my wife and replaced her with an individual that is the same in almost every way, except they weren't able to get everything perfect. Now her tear ducts leak all the time, her self-awareness is confused to the point where she feels much fatter than she actually is, and she can't remember simple things like why she would ever marry someone like me or precisely which emotion she is feeling at any particular time. The aliens promise, however, that if I pretended like none of this is happening, at the end of the 40 weeks they'll bring my wife back. Of course when they bring her back, her feet will be swollen, body parts I didn't know she had will hurt, and I think the tear duct thing will still be going on.