And Baby Makes Three

Chapter 27

If your baby’s a boy, his testicles have probably moved into his scrotum. Sometimes, one or both testicles don’t get into position until after birth. This is nothing to worry about. Undescended testicles often correct themselves before the first birthday.

Your baby gains a third to half of her birth weight during the next seven weeks, fattening up for life outside your uterus (womb). Thanks to this fatty layer, your baby’s skin is plumping up nicely.

“Apparently the baby will get up to half of his or her birth weight during the next seven weeks,” Kurt announced from where he’d been reading from a baby and parenting website on his laptop. “I hope it’s all cute and fat like the babies you see in those stock photos on the Internet.”

“I don’t,” Blaine groaned, “I feel the size of a house as it is. I actually don’t think it’s even possible for me to get any bigger.”

He should have been looking through a catalogue of nursery furniture, but had since abandoned it in favour of stretching out on the bed with his eyes closed, drifting between sleeping and wakefulness. He’d taken to rubbing random patterns on his stomach whenever he was still or unoccupied, and he’d told Kurt once that the rhythmic movements helped him sleep - and get the baby to stop moving as much so that he could sleep.

“That’s what it says here.” Kurt said. “But I promise you will never get as big as a house. You’d be like Alice after eating the mushrooms and scare all the neighbours.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve already scared them away,” he said quietly, and that made Kurt sit up a little straighter and look at him curiously.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What? Oh, it’s nothing. Just something stupid.”

 "Blaine. C'mon. We’ve talked about this. You promised you’d tell me when bad stuff happened. So what happened?“

"I was out with Sam and Tina at The Lima Bean - and don’t worry, I didn’t drink any coffee, as much as I would kill for a medium drip I’m not going to risk anything - and there was this - woman. She kept staring at me the whole time we were there and I swear I’ve never seen anyone look so disgusted, which is saying something because this is Ohio." 

"I’m sorry,” Kurt said sincerely. “But we’ll be in New York soon, and it’ll be so much better than Ohio. A million times better. And we’ll be there together.”

Blaine reached across the space on the bed to hold Kurt’s hand. “Is it weird that as awful as Ohio actually is, I’m kind of going to…miss it, when I leave?”

“No. I think on some level I miss it, too. My dad’s here, Carole’s here, it’s the place I grew up in. I mean, it was horrible, but I still grew up here and that has to mean something, right? You can’t really forget the place you spent a quarter of your life living in that easily, no matter how bad it might have been. And it was bad. But it’s not something I can just forget.”

Blaine could understand that. It wasn’t something you could easily forget. He’d had his own share of bad experiences, some more recent than others, and the memories of those experiences would be forever tied to Ohio and Lima and the oppressive small-town environment.

But it was also the place where he and Kurt met, had fallen in love. That was also something he wasn’t going to easily forget and another, happier memory that would forever be tied to Ohio and to Lima. In that sense, maybe the good might just outweigh the bad.
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