No, I'm not!

The first shock came on a recent Sunday when I went to pick up my Chinese food for dinner. I walked into the restaurant, and the very cheerful woman at the desk says, "Oh! When the baby due?"

I thought I misheard her. "I'm sorry, what?" I said.

She pointed to my midsection. "The baby. When the baby due?"

I was dumbfounded. All I could do was stare at my belly and try to gauge if the boxy red shirt I was wearing was really THAT boxy.

"Oh, you no have baby?" she said.

"No, no," I said. "I do have a little one, though."

"Oh, how old the baby?" she asked.

"About 16 months." (OK, he was closing in on 19 months at that point, but I figured shaving a few months off made me seem like less of an exercise slacker.)

"Let me see," she said, coming around the counter and poking my upper stomach area. "You know what I do? Every morning, I do sit-up in my bed. Like this."

And this little Chinese woman -- who's probably 5 feet tall on a good day and weighs about as much soaking wet as I weighed when I was 10 years old -- proceeded to demonstrate for me, from a standing position, how to do sit-ups.

"You do that, that help a lot," she said. "And no eat so much cheese!" she tacked on at the end.

I almost said, "Maybe I should no eat so much Chinese food!"

About a week later, I was working at our sister paper in Lebanon, the Lebanon Daily News, where I worked for about three years. In fact, that's where I was working when I was pregnant with Sam.

One of my former bosses trotted past me as I was sitting, working on a computer, and told me I was looking like I was rounding out nicely (or something like that).

When I gave him a puzzled look -- because I simply couldn't believe it was happening again -- he said, "Aren't you pregnant? I thought somebody just told me you were pregnant again."

To his credit, he apologized profusely.

Three days later, a very sweet elderly woman I used to work with there asked me in the bathroom, "So you have two children now, right? Two boys?"

"Yes, I have two, but I have a girl and a boy," I chatted back as I washed my hands.

"And do you know what this little one's going to be yet?" she asked.

Turns out she had heard the same rumor that I was pregnant.

And THEN, to top it all off, I was getting changed in my bedroom the other day, and Sam was hanging out with me, which she usually does. As I was standing there in my bra, trying to pick out a shirt, she came over to me and started drumming on my belly.

"Mom, are you having another baby?" she asked with disdain in her voice.

"No, sweetheart, I am definitely not having another baby," I said, feeling my self-esteem plunge into my shoes.

"Good," she said. "Babies are a lot of work."

I once heard a comedian say that you should never ask a woman if she's pregnant unless you actively see a child coming out of her -- and even then, that's probably not the time to be asking.

I'm beginning to like that guy more and more.