It has taken me a freaking long time to edit the pictures of Jen from when I visited her in Portland.  I did mention in my last post having to crawl around on the floor of DSW to pull out shoe boxes and shove shoes on her swollen feet.  Which I gladly did because Jen is the kind of person I want with me when I take my last breath.

I’m not kidding here.

Sometimes you are lucky enough in life to find someone who understands you so well that you don’t have to explain shit to them.  A person who sticks by you for thirty years like a turd squished into the deep tread of a sole on a brand-new pair of Doc Martens.  This friend knows you will fuck up once in a while and forget her birthday, but she knows you still love her and will send her a really great present from the guilt you feel about the whole deal.  And a friend who will be there when others choose to drift away, because sometimes that happens in life.  But this friend is not a drifter; she is on your permanent rubber lifeboat and she will beat the hell out of that third weirdo on the lifeboat with her wet granny panties when he starts to say things about how my leg is looking really tasty.  She will throw his ass off the boat, and you both will roll around laughing about his horrible body odor, unibrow, and ugly-ass feet.  But in a later conversation you will both agree how you still would probably have sex with him if someone paid you five million dollars.  In cash.

When we took these pictures of Jen, the options were scarce.  We waited until 5 o’clock at night to even start her makeup, and it was raining buckets so the light outside sucked, and then we kept cracking jokes about stretched-out vaginas, old nipples, and thirteen-pound babies.  All this wasted lots of valuable time, so when I got the whole thing set up, I had to get kind of creative.  It made taking pictures a little challenging because we were relegated to her bed, where at least I could attempt some sort of backdrop and the lighting in there didn’t look like the inside of a Wal-Mart.

As I think about this more, this makes TOTAL SENSE and is quite serendipitous, because that bed is where the fetus WAS CONCEIVED in the first place!  This means I listened to the gentle whisper from God to take the pictures in that room.  GOD, I LISTENED!  It’s like an even more real documentation of this little fetus’ beginnings.  The grammar in that last sentence sucked, but anyway, GOD, YOU ROCK.

Why do people not like to use the word fetus?  Really, they don’t.  I swear.  They would rather say “the baby” or “it” even though they are only like 28 days pregnant.  Maybe the word fetus is too close to the word fart.  Or it brings about visualizations of crazy loons who make horrible picket posters to wave around at women’s clinics.  Who knows.

Anyway, here are the pictures I’ve managed to edit and it only took me close to three weeks – which is PRETTY FUCKING GOOD, considering I have only washed my hair once since I returned and I forgot picture day last week at my daughter’s preschool.  Oh yes, and I started to weep as I worked on these photographs, because they made me think about the fact that I will not be at this baby’s birth and I probably won’t get to see him/her more than a few times a year.  Which makes my heart ache and makes me remember how important Jennifer is to me.  Perhaps this is another reason why I wanted them all to be perfect, because sometimes it is so hard to give a loved one a gift that is meaningful.

After all these cute belly shots, I have to include my sexy mama shot below – no belly showing, thank you very much.  Because here’s the deal – I totally, fully, one-hundred percent believe in editing the shit out of pregnancy photos.  If you have to grow a baby in your belly for almost ten months, you deserve all the edits you can get.  I’m not saying Jen needed very many, because she’s so damn photogenic in the first place.  But if you have gone through hellacious acid reflux, gas, stretch marks, interrupted sleep, rude people asking you if you’re having twins, sore ligaments, swollen ankles, barfing, and trying to have sex with your husband in positions you only see in the Kama Sutra, you should look like Kate Friggin Moss.

Piper will make you look sexy as hell.  You deserve it.  And I love you.