Fries with that?

According to “the books,” Vegas will be doubling in size over the next couple of weeks.  This could explain so many things – my recent back aches, strange itchy spot on my outer thigh (just one thigh), unquenchable thirst, trouble sleeping, feeling drained, and the nudgings/pokings/jabbings from him as if he’s trying to claw his way out to freedom.  So this is my cue to really get my leafy green vegetables on.  Oh sure, sure – I should have been eating spinach and kale like they were mini Cadbury eggs all along here, and we’ve been doing relatively well, but I don’t want to give the kid hamburgers and fries to double up on.  How fair is that?  “Hey, kid… growing a brain and some arm-length?  Here, have some fat and grease.  Chop chop!”

It’s becoming less of a weight complex about myself, and more about making sure this kid comes out with every advantage under the sun to finally break away from my pre-disposed familial beefiness.  I’m not saying big isn’t beautiful, but big sometimes means sucking the fun out of things like riding roller coasters, or flying in a plane, or walking with thin people.  See, my whole family is hearty.  Sturdy?  Thick, as my drummer would say.  I’m the tallest of the bunch (at 5’6″) and the thinnest (see other post re: size 22).  Environmentally, my mom started sabotaging me with feeding me fast food every night (as my only dinner option) long before it hit the evening news out of popularity and concern.  Call her a trendsetter.  I’ve also had this body type since I can remember, and these broad shoulders started eclipsing other kids’ when I was about ten, as evidence by line-up-type softball pictures in which I look like I’ve eaten a teammate before the photo shoot.  Now, we don’t talk about “the donor” a lot, for various reasons, but I will say that we did make sure to pick a guy who was pretty lean (with a family history of being lean), and not very tall (in Caucasian donor standards, which is around 5’9″).  Lean, to hopefully off-set some of my chub-genes.  Not very tall, cause… well, we’re not very tall, and didn’t want a kid to tower over us, as if one of us boinked a basketball player on the side.

Also, my wife and I already have a tendency of unintentionally growing things on the large side.  We have large cats, a large dog, large plants, and so on.  The last thing we need is to grow an amazonian child.  Since some obese-prevention will be in place immediately by stopping my mother’s tradition of delightfully putting a straw-ful of Pepsi in his mouth when he’s six months old (“Get ’em started young!” she says), the majority of making sure he’s not made up of layers of oatmeal pies and corn dogs starts with what I put in my mouth.  Here’s to leafy greens, fresh fruits (man, that farmer’s market cannot start soon enough), legumes, and lean meats.  Yeah, it takes the fun out of having wonky, fabulous, decadent cravings (which, oddly enough, I’m not having a whole lot of?), but I’m trying to think of the long run here, which is always easier said than done, but here’s hoping.