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A few weekends ago, my mom hosted a baby shower for me in Eugene, my hometown. Before I drove down with my mother-in-law, who was visiting from Michigan, she checked out my outfit. Thankfully, it passed the bump test by showing and not covering my then-22-week belly. “Now people will know it’s not a hoax!” she said.

The size of my bump, and how obviously pregnant I am, has turned out to be a topic that’s up for debate since the day I retired my pre-preg jeans.

At one of my recent midwife visits, for example, the midwife said I finally looked pregnant and not just like a skinny girl who ate a giant burrito. (Is that what I looked like before?) Friends scoffed when I pointed out my budding bump. And when my mom saw my first profile shot, from around 19 weeks, she skeptically asked, “Wait, are you sticking out your stomach?”

I was indignant. Of course I was showing! Monumental changes were occurring within me, and surely everyone else could see the outside evidence. Right?

Even stranger, I found myself feeling defensive. When I went in for a massage (a Valentine’s Day present from my husband!), the therapist remarked on how little I was showing. When I lay down on the table, I hoped my belly stuck out under the sheet to demonstrate how wrong the therapist had been.

Why all the need to “prove” my pregnancy? Am I alone in this compulsion? Or do the abundance of bump shots on pregnancy web sites and Facebook hint at a deeper wish to cement our status as pregnant women?

As it turns out, I probably don’t need to worry anymore when I ask the waitress if the Brie is pasteurized and if the Caesar dressing contains raw eggs. (“Does she think I’m a neurotic foodie or can she tell I’m carrying?”) Yesterday, for the first time, a stranger asked me when I was due. I was standing in line at Safeway, waiting to order a sandwich, when the woman behind me singled me out as a mom-to-be. I wasn’t even wearing an empire waist dress or another belly-accentuating outfit.

The conversation was brief. I went back to customizing my sammie, but I felt as if I had crossed some threshold. I am, for all the world to see, going to bring another life into this world. And my bump will precede the rest of me, announcing that I’m going to be a mom.

Yesterday a dear family friend visited Portland with her outgoing two-and-a-half-year-old son, Tai. We went to OMSI, where I hadn’t been since I was not much older than Tai. I remembered pushing buttons to make different part of a model’s nervous and circulatory systems light up, and standing beneath the enormous jaw bone of a shark.

Despite a long line, Tai was delighted with the trip the moment he spied a plane made out of duct tape, a part of the MythBusters exhibit. He was curious about everything, from the virtual reality ride that made all the noise with the pistons and compressed air to the puzzle where you have to fit a square block through the square hole.

I reignited my own open-mouthed wonder at an exhibit on the stages of fetal development. It began with a photo of a newborn that covered one wall; Monica explained that there was a baby in my tummy, too. He pointed to my bump. “Baby,” he said. I melted.

The main exhibit contained actual embryos and fetuses—as well as a few uteruses—from ages four to 32 weeks. I leaned in close to see what Peeper must have looked like back when we called it Appleseed: a tiny speck of a creature. I slowly walked along, imagining our own baby at each stage.

The folks behind me, a father with two children, talked about each step they passed. They guessed at the sex of each fetus and marveled at the miniature fingernails and eyelashes, just as I did. “What’s that coming out of its belly, dad?” the little boy wondered, pointing to the umbilical cord. “That’s what connects the baby to the mother, and when you came out and we cut it, it left behind your bee bo.” (This last bit of kiddie vocab I actually got! It’s a reference to the insanely cute Belly Button Book by Sandra Boynton, whom I apparently must pay close attention to, as I’ve already received three of her board books for Peeper.)

When I got to the fetus at 24 weeks, I was relieved to see it looked decidedly baby-like, not nearly as skinny and (frankly) creepy as the earlier ones. It also looked huge—bigger than a cantaloupe, even—and I tried to wrap my head around a Peeper that size fitting inside me. (No wonder it’s constantly elbowing my insides. Perhaps it’s trying to stretch my uterus to make more room.)

I felt a bit conspicuous as a pregnant woman staring at not-alive fetuses. (Where did the, ah, specimens come from? What happened to their mothers? Gruesome, but it’s science, right?) Really, though, we all fit on that timeline. The kids behind me were maybe at 300 weeks; Tai’s around 170; I’m 1,558 weeks. We’ve just stopped counting in seven-day increments.

And just as I seemed to see into Peeper’s developmental past, I could flash forward when watching Tai. He’s grown so much from the last time I saw him, at Thanksgiving. He knows so many words. And he can throw like a champ now. Yet he still retains the same generosity (offering me pretend oranges and tomatoes from a model fridge at the museum) and enthusiasm (literally dancing in the aisles at Whole Foods in his excitement for lunch) as the first time we met, when he was only weeks into his life with his new adopted family.

So I wonder at where Peeper and I have come from and look forward to the fun he or she will have pushing buttons at the museum. In the meantime, too, I’ll enjoy the now—while marking each Thursday’s graduation into a new week.

Before I was pregnant, I loved hearing the food references to my friends’ developing babies. (A dear friend in California nicknamed her fetus Lentil after a first trimester comparison—charming, no?) And since I’ve been pregnant, I often hear the question, “What fruit are you this week?”

I loved tracking Peeper’s growth from blueberry to raspberry to grape and beyond. Tomorrow, though, I’m 24 weeks—and a cantaloupe.

Kiwis are cute. Pears are charming. Even mangos have an aesthetic appeal. But once you get into melon territory, the only adjective I can think of is big.

I made the mistake a few weeks back of peeking ahead on The Bump’s fetus growth chart. In the third trimester, the produce comparisons get downright scary: acorn squash, pineapple (ouch!), pumpkin, watermelon. Some I might even have to ask for help to haul into my grocery cart these days, considering the near-constant admonishments to not lift too much weight.

In discussing what we had to look forward to veggie-wise, a pregnant friend asked of the pumpkin, “With or without stem?” An important distinction, to be sure.

The one thing that has bugged me about the fruit chart is now a consolation. There’s so much variety in the sizes, it’s been difficult to really imagine what size my baby is at any given time. (Are we talking a Ghanaian mango or one of those dinky, stringy ones from Safeway? If you cut up the banana, would it overwhelm a bowl of cereal or be just enough banana-ness? If I bought the avocado at Whole Foods, would I be charged the extra-large price?) So maybe, I tell myself, a pumpkin might not be so terrifying.

When I was little, my mom would take us to the pumpkin patch, and the deal was that my three siblings and I could get whatever gourd, or gourds, we could carry from the field back to the hay ride.

My older brother was crafty: He’d stash pumpkins in the hood and pouch of his sweatshirt and end up with four or five to carve. I, on the other hand, searched for one perfect for the jack-o-lantern design I’d brainstormed on the ride to the patch. I inevitably ended up trying to carry a big one from the far end of the field. After a few tearful Halloweens when I was terrified I’d be left behind (the hay ride waits for no one!), I wised up and picked an appropriately sized pumpkin.

So, in my imagination (= denial factory), I can edit “pumpkin” down to a manageable one a six-year-old could carry, even if it feels like a record-breaking monstrosity when it eventually comes out.

Perhaps that’ll be my mantra when delivering: While imagining the tiny, quaint decorations a la Thanksgiving cornucopia, I can repeat “Cute gourd that fits on my mantle!” while a jackfruit-sized baby enters the world.