feet the size of a planet....

There's not much going on at the moment. Not much at all. Not much of interest anyway. Things proceed as no doubt they are supposed to proceed. Everything is swell. More exactly, everything has swelled. My stomach, my feet, my wrists, my ankles, you name it, it's gotten bigger.

My feet have taken on a particular growth cycle of their own, not to mention mood swings. I have no idea when I wake up what is going to be attached to the ends of my legs. I sleep with my feet elevated most nights but only on some mornings have I managed to achieve a point where the bones in my normally scrawny feet are visible.

My feet, for all their problems, have been two parts of me which have always remained immune to the vagarities of my weight. Yes, they're big. Yes, my toes are freakishly long. Yes, I appear to have one more ankle bone than most people do - but one thing I have always been able to say about my feet with some accuracy is that they are thin. Skinny, in fact. Bony. And, for all their length and calcification, reasonably elegant. High, firm arches. Smooth skin. Slender ankles.

Not any more.

Somewhere along the line I traded in my old feet for a pair of balloon-animal feet. Feet which have creases at the bottom of their fat little toes. Feet where the skin is stretched so tight that it hurts the skin to move them. Feet with no visible bone structure. Feet which merge seamlessly into the calves with no visible ankle mechanism. Feet which take on the impression of whatever is laid next to them - shoe straps, sock patterns, other feet. Feet which hit the floor on every available surface - fat, swollen, arch-less feet.

Walking on these feet feels exactly how one would expect it to feel - like walking with a pair of balloon animals strapped to the bottom of ones legs. Shoes no longer fit. Sandals are stretched to their limits. Ship-builders are being contracted in to create land-based corracles to fit them.

The upshot is that I spend all my time with my feet in the air which helps only in as much as an ankle bone may begin to take shape under the skin but only for as long as the foot is up. This means that I am currently in the market for a house elf to do all the work for me. I haven't vacuumed in two weeks and the only dinners I am capable of creating come out of a box - or worse, a bag.

Poor D is performing his house-elf duties with remarkable forbearance however what I need is not help here and there, it's a full-service agreement with detailing. Foot massage, lymphatic drainage, total French waiter attention with icecream on top.

What I need most, however, is my old body back - it wasn't perfect but by god it did what it was told.

Oh, it's a lot of fun this pregnancy business. A lot of fun. It's a journey around one's own biology with a stop on a new continent every day.