Thanks to Becky, I am now chock full of elaborate illustrations and quirky details about pregnancy, birth, and the all-amazing infant development. Behold a quote from the book she gave me:
It's a whole different world in the womb. Apt analogies are hard to come by. I once read an account of childbirth that compared the emerging fetus to a surfacing scuba diver. Both of them move from a watery environment to an air-filled world, the author wrote. Each carries an oxygen supply-an air tank for the diver, a placenta for the fetus. At the moment of transition they simply toss aside their now obsolete underwater gear and take a big gulp of fresh air.
That analogy only goes so far. If a diver really were like a fetus, his lungs would be filled with seawater, his air tank would be connected to his belly button, and half his blood supply would be floating in a sac outside his body. On his way up from the depths he'd squeeze the extra blood back into his body, force the water out of his lungs, and permanently rearrange the flow of blood through his heart. Then he'd pop to the surface, naked and screaming. If diving and childbirth were identical processes, Jacques Cousteau might never have gotten in the water. (Dr. Mark Sloan, Birth Day)Man. If you want to know all the gory detail about this process and laugh and appreciate birth simultaneously, you should get this book. He describes a fetus' brain as pudding, gorilla uteruses as squished toilet paper tubes, and apparently the classic flat-on-the back dorsal decubitus position for labor is all King Louis XIV's fault.
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