Happy-girl-and-pregnant-ladBy now I thought I'd be boring you all with the sordid details of my pregnancy but instead I haven't been talking about it at all.

Turns out I don't really want to revisit the suckiness of my first trimester and the second trimester was (thankfully) pretty uneventful. Can you believe, I'm now in my third??

There's not much to report, really. Unless you want to hear about the process of my belly button turning inside out revealing what seemed like a decades-old substance…

NO? Don't want to talk abut that?

OK, how about my TOP TEN REASONS THIRD TRIMESTER IS KIND OF AWESOME?

I know it seems hard to believe, what with the middle-of-the-night calf cramps and the swelled feet (by the way— is your husband commenting on your sausage-looking-toes grounds for a divorce or am I overreacting?), but pregnancy is actually chock full of awesomeness once people stop wondering if you're fat and know you are OBVIOUSLY PREGGO.

Can't think of anything good about your third trimester except that it's almost over? Let me help…

1) If you've spent your whole life trying to hide your less than flat stomach (as I have), suddenly you are totally comfortable having it on full display.

2) When making restaurant/take-out/dinner decisions with a group of friends/co-workers/relatives, everybody always defers to you to make the final call.

3) You can use "I'm not feeling up to it" to get out of pretty much anything— work meetings, visits with your mother-in-law, bedtime routine with your toddler, etc. 

4) You can send your husband out on emergency errands like "It's 11pm and I need Twizzlers!" or "I know we have five cartons of ice cream in the freezer but none of them are Ben & Jerry's Americone Dream!!!"

5) If an old person gets on the bus/train/subway, you don't have to be the one to give up your seat. (I'd say that people will give up their seat for you, except that it's never happened.)

6) You can alternate between the same two outfits for three months and nobody bats an eye.

7) Random strangers smile at you on the street and it's not creepy.

8) Bathroom lines magically part for you, restaurant employees allow you to use their facilities even if you wandered in off the street and have no intention of eating there, and Broadway theater ushers will pick you out of obscenely long intermission bathroom lines and escort you to magical private bathrooms that you never knew existed.

9) Nobody ever expects you to carry anything.

10) You may look and feel like a whale, but it's a whale with AMAZING HAIR.

I should probably also mention that at the end, you get a baby! (Except jury is still out on whether my husband and I are ready for that one.)

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If you'd like to read about things like decades-old belly button lint and sausage toes, I'm talking about pregnancy's unmentionables on Babble today.

Or, if you've had enough preggo stuff, I've also got a post about my success with Dr. Harvey Karp's tantrum stopping method called "toddler-ese". Check it out, it's really helped me.