Esperansa- (the re-write)

Holidays

“ I wonder how long it’ll take them to work it out,” I mused. We were only a few streets away from our siblings’ home in San Diego, the place of this year’s first annual birthday holiday. It had been decided a few months before we knew we were soon going to be parents, that from now on we would have a family holiday the last week in August to the second or third week in September since Nessie, Bella and Brooke all had birthdays around the same time.

I was pondering over whether my family would notice that I was twenty nine weeks pregnant, we had- well I had- decided it would be more fun not to explain the baby but let them see it for themselves when we arrived for the holiday. We had sent texts instead, one to Rosalie and one to Bella, both written differently. I had remembered Nessie’s hints for a cousin, a girl cousin at that, a few years ago when her brother was born. So I had sent a text message that read: Tell Nessie, as a belated birthday present she’ll get something she asked for years ago.  The other text was an appetizer Emmett’s adulterated sense of humour it simply said: wait till you see what Jazz gave me! ;). It would definitely be enough to get the clogs turning in his brain, whatever happened the real outcome would be a big surprise.

Big had become the operative word since over the past weeks I had ‘popped’ as the pregnancy books put it, I suddenly no longer had a curve, I had a real bump. I’d gone from a size 4 to a size 10 and from a B to a D in a week. The worst of this was not the entire lack of fitting wardrobe but the horrible fiery dark red lines they left in their path. Stretch marks are product of that exactly as most people know, but what many don’t is that stretched skin is itchy, very, very itchy.  And just to add to my little bundle of changes my belly button had popped right out, so much that it almost appeared to be poking in the way and the dark linea nigra had also came out of nowhere starting at my belly button and going down to somewhere I won’t mention.

Being this size felt horrible and unnatural, I was told this was likely to be because I hadn’t really changed physically in all the time I had been a vampire, so for a very long time then. It wasn’t so much my now huge radius but the fact my feet had began to rapidly disappear that was getting to me- do you know how hard it is to walk down the stairs when you can only see the tips of your toes?

Jasper had been trying to persuade me that I actually wasn’t that big, Carlisle had agreed with Dr Andrews, I was actually measuring small for my dates , the length from the top of my uterus to my belly button was supposed to be the same as the number of weeks I was. I should have been thirty centimetres then but I wasn’t, I was only twenty three. There wasn’t too much need for concern, the length was only a general guide and because of my height they couldn’t actually rule out dwarfism as a cause since my 4’10” made me perfectly on the border for the condition.

Jasper, as is easy to imagine had been perfect, he was reliable and caring and even said when the day arrived that I could no longer reach my foot he would learn to paint my toenails. All the way from the airport in the hired car he had been quizzing me, was I too hot, too cold, getting cramp? A sore back? Thirsty? Hungry? He had everything covered and I bet there were many women in my place throughout the world that wished they had such a focused husband as I was lucky enough to own. In fact I had already banned Jasper from using the word condition because he cared so much he could be overbearing and the word made me feel like an invalid, like I was ill. I had constantly tried to remind him that millions of women had gone through this before, a baby was born every three seconds throughout the world and I was sure I could survive this occasion.

“I still don’t think they will be able to tell straight away,” my husband replied, shaking his head

“No?”

“No, your belly isn’t that big, it’s still discrete enough under that dress.” He was right about that. The dress I wore was my own design, it was a gypsy style, with tiny extra ruffles around the stitching, I had made it out of lose fabric hoping it would fit me for the summer at least if not the remainder of my term.