I "showed" early; it was my mother's fault.

"I found out I was pregnant and the next day I rolled out of bed and into my maternity clothes," she told me. So when my underwear got tight in the sixth week of my first pregnancy, I cursed her.

"How many months?" The lab technician at the doctor's office gazed at my protruding belly.

I was proud of my twelve-week-old bulge and gladly told her.

She shook her head sympathetically. "I didn't need maternity clothes until my seventh month." I wanted to pull my sexy new maternity undies over her sympathetic head.

At my baby shower, seven months pregnant, I endured the tummy pats of every relative and family friend who speculated over the sex of my unborn darling. <continued below>

"It's a boy," one would say, "she's carrying high."

"A girl," another decided, "she's got clear skin."

"Has the hair on your legs stopped growing?" called another. "If it has, you've got a boy there."

And then, from my grandmother, "It's a girl, take a look at her backside!"

Nana was right.

Thinking these comments would end with the onset of labor, I was unprepared for the comments that echoed the halls of the maternity ward. The two nurses on my first shift were perky, and thin. I was to be induced, and as I bared myself from the abdomen down for my initial exam, I heard a gasp.

"Oh my!" one exclaimed, her eyes wide. I was alarmed, I hadn't seen beyond the underside of my belly for months and thought something was amiss. "You poor thing," she went on. "I have never seen such dark stretch marks."

I knew I had stretch marks. Applications of baby oil, cocoa butter and Vitamin E had been to no avail, as my body resembled the workings of a mapmaker gone wrong. I was sure that one morning I would wake up to find that Rand McNally had added me to the 1997 World Atlas, complete with river, mountain and interstate markings.

The two gaped and I, thoroughly embarrassed, never thought that I would consider the sight of my doctor, her "knitting-needle" in hand, a welcome respite.

Twenty hours later I was rewarded with an eight pound eight ounce bundle of baby girl. At last, I thought, the comments about my condition would end. And end they did, only to be immediately replaced by the inevitable slew of baby care comments.

"Cover her face, there's a breeze," my mother advised as we left the house with my days-old daughter. "You don't want her to get gas."

Jennifer Doloski is a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer from Illinois. She is a regular contributor to The Daily Times of Ottawa, IL. Suite 101 Parenting Humor