Keep Your Pants Up, Maternity Edition

I've been having trouble this whole pregnancy with keeping my pants up.  Doesn't matter if they are low-rider maternity, larger normal pants, pants with elastic, pants with buttons or even the over belly pants, I've been in near constant need of suspenders.  My solution had been to walk while holding onto them.  Which both looks awesome and doesn't really work that well.

Then I was in Pea in the Pod because I needed to grab some additional clothes as I needed to be a little nicer than business casual for four days at a conference.  I ended up deciding that I would get cut enough slack that I didn't need suits, but I did need some additional non-worn out business clothing.  And while I was there I remembered the secret!

Here's the secret.  You know Spanx?  Holds your fat in and reshapes your lines normally?  Well, there's a product called Mama Spanx and that is not really what it does.  What it does is give your pants something to adhere to!  When I saw it on the rack I immediately remembered that this is the magic trick!

So I grabbed some.  And it was brilliant.  Pants stayed where pants should be!

However, I was struck one day by the amount of layers that were over my belly and so I took a series of shots to document the semi-absurdity of it.

Image 1: this is fully covered.

Image 2: this is with the top sheer shirt pulled up

Image 3: this is with the pants that had stretched over the belly pulled all the way down

Image 4: this is with the fitted tank that I wore under the sheer shirt pulled up. (Note to self: I should probably stop wearing my nice theory suit tanks before the growing belly ruins them for future wear)

Image 5: this is the Mama Spanx pulled down as well.  Yes, four full layers with two going each direction over the belly is what we just saw there.

So, it might seem a bit absurd, but it's brilliant and makes you able to walk, talk, laugh, dance, jiggle, and climb an aircraft carrier all without having to hike your pants!

And yes, I literally mean hiking and climbing all over a low-rider.  Did all the tours of the USS Lexington in this, including the 4-inch heels and the pants stayed up!

I tested it the last day with a pair of low-riders (I'd broken down and just accepted the over the belly all the previous days) and it worked!

Apparently having the hotel full-length mirror inspires me to examine how my clothes stay up!  These are all at just before, exactly and just after 21 weeks.

And for fun, here's one of my feet after I forgot about the hiking part of dinner on an aircraft cruiser when I got dressed:

And for more random biological shots:

As I have a very deep belly button normally, this is a bit freaky.  And on occasion, you can catch a dancing baby here.  Not sure if you can tell if you don't know when to watch, but this is definitely the earliest I've seen motion from the outside.

And last, just to round out with cuteness and awesomeness, here is Trajan this morning at the dentist.  Trajan loves him and so do I.  Except he said we should talk to our pedi about having him seen by the ENT again and possibly pulling out his tonsils as part of a strategy to help his overbite which does not excite me.

Dentist and Work

Chiron had his first dentist appointment on Thursday.  It was at 9:30, so I was going to drop him off, go to work for an hour, pick him back up and then go when a coworker mentioned she hadn't gotten to see him in a while and so I decided just to bring him in with me.

He had a great time playing and meeting folks:

Origami King Tut Mask is so tasty!

And yes, that's my desk that is completely overrun wtih papers.

I did find one thing particularly amusing.  There was a professional exam being administered in our office and the signs warning people in the area to be quiet had not gotten put up and so our receptionist asked if I could do it when I was on my way out.  It for some reason amused the heck out of me that she was sending a baby to put up signs telling people to be quiet including directly on the door of the conference room where the test was taking place.  Of course, Chiron is so easy going that I wasn't really worried.  He didn't make noise other than babbling the whole hour and change we were in the office.  It was just the premise that tickled my funny bone.

Then is was off to the dentist!  He was tucked in the sling and the women in the front office all came around to look at him, which earned them bonus points in my book for appreciating his awesomeness.

You might be asking why I was at the dentist with a 10-month-old.  Well, last winter when I was in with Trajan, I happened to mention that he had a brother now who was a preemie.  The dentist, who we love, said that there can be some issues with the enamel on the teeth of preemies and so he likes to see them by one year to get everyone on the same page, establish good habits and just to get a baseline on their mouths. 

He really wasn't as starled/distressed as that picture looks like, but I love the idea of, "you're going to do what to my tooth??!"

He actually was amazing about it.  Even got his tooth cleaned!



A couple bits of good news.  First, we apparently have good oral hygiene habits, yeah!  And two, I had thought that the enamel issues would be both baby and adult teeth, but he said that it is more often confined to just the baby teeth and the latter ones at that.

He goes back in six months!