"Why, my head would squash like an eggplant!"

Last night, we were lazily watching t.v., sprawled out on the couch, and a cat came crawling into the mess of legs, looking for love. Mike lunged for the cat, grabbed him, and pushed back into a sitting position, dragging cat to his chest for some forced love. And by pushed, I mean pushed off my abdomen with his elbow!! At first it just hurt, and I grimaced, and he gasped, "Oh, I'm SO sorry! Did I hurt you?! I didn't mean to!" and then, "Did I hurt the baby?!"

Okay, that was the last thing on my mind. But it suddenly scared the shit out of me! In truth, my first reaction to that last question was, "No, no, it's fine, you got me way higher than that." But as I rubbed where he pummeled, either the spot was psychosomatically moved lower into my abdomen, or I misjudged how high the spot was in the first place. I was suddenly rubbing a spot 6 inches to the left of and 6 inches below my belly button. And though I said nothing to him, I panicked inside. I tried to picture the baby, and how big it is, and where it could be arranged, and how much amniotic fluid there is to protect it, and how big my uterus is now, and if the head could have been in that precise spot. I think I've gotten over it, as I have felt some little jiggles in there that are probably baby moving. (For now, let's hope it's not rigor mortis.)

But since then, I've been trying to imagine just how big the baby really is. I know that it's about 6 inches long, and it weighs several ounces, less than a half pound. So how big would its head be? Like a quarter? No, bigger than that. Like a Barbie head? Yeah, that's about it! But not as long as a Barbie, more like Skipper, Barbie's little cousin (or friend or whatever, what do I know? I wasn't allowed to have Barbies because my older sisters ripped all their heads off.) So I was imagining Skipper's head in my belly, except not that tough plastic like Skipper, but soft bone that is barely ossified, rice-paper thin skin with blood vessels popping out of it, and I was imagining what would happen to that little head under Mike's monster elbow. And it was a little disconcerting.

And that led me to many morbid thoughts: how would I even know if we squished the thing's brains out? Would my body know? What would my body do with the baby? What if the head wasn't on that side, but we squished its legs or ankles, and it'll never learn to walk?

But I'm not so scared now. I'm sure it'll all be fine. I think.