So you’ve probably noticed by now that it’s all the rage to compare the size of your unborn child to items you’d find at your local farmer’s market. As you can see on the right sidebar, we’re following the trend and letting everyone know, based on how far along we are, just what kind of fruit our baby is this week.^* This phenomenon gives a whole new meaning to the expression “the fruit of my loins.” It does seem to make sense though — one alternate definition of “fruit” is “the result of labor,” so I guess it’s apropos.

Oh sure, early on the comparisons were more about seeds than fruit. We were very excited when our baby went from a poppy seed to an apple seed. That was a big deal. But now we’ve graduated to the handheld fruits and before long we’ll find ourselves with the only-eaten-after-being-peeled-and-sliced variety of fruits. I know Alison is also slightly frightened by the concept of the final product being a watermelon or a pumpkin (depending on which baby website you prefer).

Now I don’t know for sure, but I’m fairly certain my mom never compared me to an apple or an orange during my nine-month stay with her, which makes me wonder, how did this baby-fruit analogy get started? I have a theory that it all started when some doctor said, “At this stage, your baby is a little bit over five centimeters long” to a mathematically-challenged mother-to-be. (I don’t know anyone like this of course). This poor pregnant woman set the entire fetus-to-fruit comparing world in motion with her follow-up question: “So…how big is that?” What else could the doctor do but answer, “Well…it’s about the size of a plum,” at which point the lady of course replied, “Ooooh! My baby is a plum.” And now here we are.

At first, I must admit, I found the whole thing kind of ridiculous. I even found a fairly clever dad-to-be website mocking the whole concept. But honestly, I’ve actually come to like the idea. (Hence the ridiculous amount of time I spent to make that stupid fruit-tracker on the sidebar work just right.) It’s really kind of a neat way to think about how our baby is growing each week.

Every Friday morning Alison and I wake up and look at each other wondering “What’s our baby now?” I can’t wait until the end of this week so we can open the iPhone app and find out just what level of fruit we’ve finally reached.

*I’m using TheBump.com as the source of the produce-comparison data because they have nice images. However, there is definitely some general disagreement among sites like BabyCenter.com, WhatToExpect.com, and TheBump.com because they all vary slightly when it comes to what fruit the baby is on any given week.