Since a few days after July 2, 2009, Toph and I have been tracking the growth of Baby Desmond with the help of various books and websites. A favorite ritual is sitting down to read weekly updates in books like Your Pregnancy Week by Week or in emails from Baby Center, the subject lines of which declare “You’re X weeks pregnant!”. Honoring the allotted time for learning about what’s happening in there induces anticipation similar to the kind stirred in kids by the daily opening of an Advent calendar door to reveal the chocolate candy piece inside during the countdown to Christmas.

The updates always include a size comparison, to give you an idea of the baby’s growth. I get a big kick out of the fact that these similes are always made to food items, since food is my professional life. A short sampling:
At 6 weeks our baby was the size of a lentil bean;
At 12 weeks, a lime;
At 16 weeks, an avocado;
At 20 weeks, a banana;
At 27 weeks, a cauliflower;
At 31 weeks, my current status, Baby Center tells us that our baby weighs about as much as 3 naval oranges.
(For a complete picture slide show of size comparisons, go here)

The likening to food is helpful because you get a clear image of the size. Usually.  Sometimes, though, it’s baffling. When my friends Erika and Deacon were expecting, they wrote about a confusing comparison to shrimp:

“This one website did use a shrimp as an example a week or two ago, which was kind of weird. Are we talking a curled up shrimp? One stretched out? We talking 31/50 count shrimp? Or maybe U8 shrimp – those are pretty big.”

I had a similar experience when a book approximated Baby to a squash and another source held it up to “a small pot roast”. Not only were the comparisons seemingly so arbitrary when pitted against each other, the small pot roast analogy was just ridiculous since at the time the baby was just barely 2 pounds. I mean, if you’re going to invest in making a pot roast, it really should be bigger than that!

Oddly enough, not long ago I bought two beautiful heads of cauliflower on a Wednesday afternoon to make for a dinner gathering on Friday night. Come Thursday, when the “You’re 27 weeks pregnant!” email arrived, it read “this week, your baby weighs almost 2 pounds (like a head of cauliflower)”. This coincidence freaked me out a little bit. (Oh, but if you’re a fan of cauliflower, I did develop a tasty recipe that week for my Serious Eats column, which you can find here: Spaghetti with Roasted Cauliflower and Bacon Herbed Breadcrumbs.)

It’s been amusing learning about the baby in terms of food. Now, let’s just hope Baby likes such a variety of food when the time comes for him/her to get acquainted with it.

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