Does my baby make me look fat?

24 weeks pregnant

I'm a whopping 5 pounds over my pre-pregnancy weight!  I'm so proud of myself.

Baby likes to sit high (a girl, perhaps?), right under my diaphragm, for most of the day.  Which makes baby's hiccups all the worse.

I'm not one for selfies, but I was feeling exceptionally good about myself one day.  My hair fell nicely, and hubby and I were finally getting a date night, so I tried looking extra cute.  And so I posted a picture of myself.

20 weeks, barely any bump

24 weeks, notice how high the bump is? 

I've been pretty open about the difficulties in my pregnancy since we went public, so at this point, it's known that I lost close to 10 pounds before I started gaining it back a few weeks ago.  All my weight is baby, and as a petite person I'm going to look a bit more pronounced around the middle.  In the month between the 2 pictures, I had finally regained the last of the weight lost, and had actually gained 5 pounds.

But as I started going out and about, I actually started getting a lot of comments like "are you sure you're just 24 weeks?" and "are you sure there's just one baby in there?"  (If you haven't taken time to ready my list of pregnant women do's and don'ts, check out part 1 and part 2 here.)

I'm not usually a person who wakes up and says "wow, that was a weird dream."  I leave that to my husband who has the strangest dreams.  But early in my pregnancy, I woke up from a nightmare, in which we went to our scheduled ultrasound and found that while we'd only heard one heartbeat, there had been two babies.  I couldn't shake that dream for WEEKS, still almost 2 months later when I think about it it makes me so sad.

I don't know… all women have issues with vanity.  When we're pregnant we're suppose to gain weight, and unfortunately need to prepare ourselves for these comments.  But why do other people, especially women, have to make such bold and tasteless comments - to our faces.

I want to believe that it's not intentional; that they're not trying to be hurtful.  But as a woman going through HG, I don't want to be told I look fat, I want to be told I look healthy.  I don't mind the comments of people saying, "you've finally got some color on your cheeks" or "you don't look all skin and bones."  I mean, find a different way to say it, you know?  Like "baby looks like it's growing," instead of "wow, got a watermelon under your shirt?"