My mother-in-law is one of my best friends, but that doesn't stop her from trying to get me to eat goat's knee stew. Each time I was pregnant, she and her sister, Zia, made a big pot of goat's knee stew and tried to serve it to me. I understand that they believe that it's good for the baby in some essential way, and I do love the attention, but I refused. Realizing that they weren't afraid to try to sneak it into me, I started to keep an ear out for the Italian word for "knee".
The women in my husband's family believe that if a pregnant woman has a craving for a food and denies that craving, the baby will be born with a birthmark on it's face that resembles the food that was ignored. I blatantly mocked them and my son was born with a bright red V-shaped birthmark smack dab in the middle of his forehead.
Zia unintentionally pisses off pregnant women, and there are a lot of them at any one time in the family. She calls them big. "Ah, you so BIG! SO BIG!", she giggles, absolutely beaming and clapping maniacally. Then comes a long string of heavily accented God bless yous.
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