Page 93 of Unexpecting

″Back to baby names?” I finally ventured. “I like Sarah.”

″Not bad.”

″What do you think? Boy and girl.”

″Well, I like Ben, for a boy,” J.B. finally said slowly. “For a girl, I kind of like Dorothy.”

″Dorothy?” I repeated. “Really?”

″Kind of.”

″She might need a pair of ruby slippers and a dog named Toto.” I gave a little laugh, not knowing how serious he was about the name. “But I guess we could call her Dot.”

″I was thinking Dory,” J.B. said defensively.

″Dory,” I echoed. “Like the fish.”

″What fish?”

″Haven’t you seen Finding Nemo?” At the shake of his head, I smiled. “We better get you watching some kid movies.”

″I guess. So maybe not Dory. What about Sam, if it’s a boy?”

″Sam Samms. I don’t think so. Sort of like Bob Roberts.”

″The last name’s going to be Samms?” J.B. asked.

″Well, I guess. It is my name. I hadn’t really thought…” It was then that I got called in for the ultrasound. I left J.B. sitting in the chair without any resolution on the last name of our children. It was not bad enough that I—we—had to figure out so many first names; now there was going to be confusion with the last name as well.

There was no problem with seeing the babies this time, and the technician got all her measurements without using the internal probe. This one wasn’t as nice or talkative as my Scottish Jeannie, so I just lay on the table with my mind wandering until she asked if I wanted her to call in the father.

″Please. His name is J.B. Bergen,” I told her. Bergen-Samms, I wondered to myself. Or Samms-Bergen. Sam Samms-Bergen still didn’t work.

J.B. followed the technician in, and I smiled when I saw his eyes flicker to the sheet covering my lower body. I knew he was looking for the probe sticking out from between my legs again. “Just the regular one this time,” I told him as the technician squeezed another dollop of gel on my belly.

″It’s bigger,” J.B. said, and for a second I thought he was talking about the babies. Then I saw him looking at my stomach.

″This is nothing,” I smiled. “I’m going to be huge.

″There’s one,” the technician interrupted, pointing to one of my—our—babies on the screen. Both J.B. and I eagerly leaned forward at thesame time, and I ended up bumping my head on his chest. For a moment I breathed in his cologne, and then moved away.

Despite the technician’s best attempts, our babies were modest today, and there was no way of discovering if they were girls or boys. Not that she could tell us, I was informed, but later J.B. said he was sure he saw something like a penis on one of them. I replied that it must be wistful thinking, and the way he is, it would serve him right to have three daughters. The bad thing about not knowing what we were having was that I still had to figure out a lot of baby names.

Chapter Forty-One

“Feeling the babies move is one of the most magical moments of a pregnancy.”

A Young Woman’s Guide to the Joy of Impending Motherhood

Dr. Francine Pascal Reid (1941)

Iliked being pregnant.Actually, I loved it, as you may have expected. I was born to have babies—maybe not three at once, but this is what I was made for. I mean, look at the size of my hips, small pelvis or no small pelvis.

It was fun being pregnant. Every day I seemed to get bigger and noticed new strange and wonderful things happening to my body. And some not so wonderful, like the constant flatulence, but we don’t need to get into that. Despite the nausea and urge to throw up all the time, I loved being pregnant and everything about it. Well, maybe not the heartburn I’d been getting at night. That was another new and not so wonderful thing. Or the leg twitches that kept me awake, or the continually full bladder and the constant need to empty it. But I loved it. I was looking forward to when the babies are born, but I really liked being pregnant. Even the maternity clothes weren’t all that bad. Except the underwear, which I did draw the line at. My bikini panties worked just as well.

It turned out I’m one of those women who loved people touching their bellies, talking about them, and just giving me loads of attention for being pregnant. Plus, when I told people I was having triplets—which I did a lot, especially on the subway—I got tons of sympathy.

I finally had to tell the kids at school after one of them rudely informed me that my belly was getting really big and maybe I needed to go on a diet. Some of them thought the idea of me being pregnant was pretty cool, but most of them ignored the belly unless I couldn’t manage to fit at one of the tables. Except for the one little darling who seemed to come in every single day with a new and horrifying tale of his little baby sister, usually regarding how often and loudly she cried or how often and messy her bowel explosions were. I have no idea what his parents were feeding the kid, but remind me not to get feeding tips from them.

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