After a week of complaining about my symptoms, Jorge convinced me to pee on a stick.
“Babe,” I said, “It’s highly unlikely.” (Not to be confused with the version Jorge loves telling, wherein I supposedly said, “Babe, I KNOW my body!” These words have never crossed my lips, nor will they ever.)
After we got home from a dinner with friends, I tried a test. It had a weird response…almost like a positive, “you’re pregnant” response. I scrunched my eyebrows and tossed it in the trash. Walking into the bedroom, I told Jorge that I needed to take another test in the morning.
Which I did. This test also had a curiously positive result. Did I admit it was possible? Did I beam, tell Jorge the result and giggle and laugh with him until he farted? Nope. Blank-faced, I simply told him we needed to make a doctor’s appointment. Jorge smirked and teased, “I tooooold you soooooooooo.”
A week or so later, voila. Doctor confirmed. And from the size of my innards he guessed I was around 9 weeks. Nine weeks! We Googled it immediately: a large green olive. We scheduled an ultrasound and celebrated with Mexican food. For the next two weeks we continued to call the tiny parasite in my belly “the olive,” and though we ached to tell “the girls” and family we were creating a human, we decided to wait until after the ultrasound, when I would be almost done with my first trimester and have ultrasound pictures as proof.
At the ultrasound apt., we found out that I was actually much earlier than we had estimated–8 weeks, 1 day. It wasn’t even an olive yet, but a juicy raspberry. We got some fuzzy pictures which the hurried ultrasound tech labeled creatively as “baby” and looked forward to watching our little alien grow to an olive all over again. As can be excepted, the nickname has stuck, and the kid will probably be called “the olive” until we find out the gender (20 weeks) and decide on a name–God help us.
Blurry photos in hand and raspberry on board, we began to plot our surprise announcement…
(On a sidenote, as I type this, our little one finally(or still) is an olive–9 weeks)
Growing an Olive 