This is such an awkward stage for clothing. I’ve been wearing 2-sizes-too-big jeans with an XL men’s t-shirt, and it’s not going to do the job much longer, but when I put on maternity clothes this morning I looked ridiculous: the soft panel of the pants came up nearly to my bra and kept falling down, and the shirt looks like a pretty triangle I can spin out into a circle when I twirl.

Part of the problem is that my maternity clothes are a little too big for me. When I was pregnant with the twins, I read a tip that said that even though normally you buy maternity clothes in your usual pre-pregnancy size, with a twin pregnancy that won’t be big enough and you should buy a size larger. Sure enough, by the end I was in a huge pair of men’s pajama pants, because the jeans were too small. The shirts were larger and DID still fit, but perhaps that’s why with a single-baby pregnancy (and only an 18-weeks pregnancy at this point) they look comically large.

“And what of the Christmas decorations?,” you are asking. “Surely when you went down to the basement to bring up the maternity clothes, you brought down at least one box of decorations.” Let me answer that with another question: Wouldn’t Christmas lights be pretty for Valentine’s Day?