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tell everyone already? Um, no!
    ―Come on, lady. It was ninety degrees yesterday and you were wearing a friggin‘ cashmere coat. Sorry, no!
    As the book‘s publication date approached, my cute little belly was not so cute and little anymore. The buttons on my beloved cashmere coat were starting to pop. I sent photos of my belly to my publicists with an email saying, ―I don‘t think we can hide this anymore! Finally, my ―team agreed that I would confirm my pregnancy on the cover of People magazine, and there would be a book excerpt in the same issue. I was five and a half months pregnant. It was about time. I‘d lost the baby weight for the weeklies. I‘d hidden the pregnancy from the media. Now, no more contortions. I had a reprieve to be a pregnant mom, as is.
     

Round Two, Round Again
    M y pregnancy was public, and public fodder. Being pregnant on TV was a little hard at first. I was on a reality show, which sometimes meant that when I came downstairs in the morning, I‘d walk right into a scene. I came from a background in scripted TV, where not only do they work on your hair and makeup for hours, but they carefully light every single scene and pick flattering angles so everybody looks perfect. There are no real surprises in a scripted show. On our show I often had no makeup on, and I‘m far from a professional hairstylist. I just had to accept that I couldn‘t predict what was going to happen and that I was going to look like crap at times.
    Hair and makeup aside, sometimes I felt absolutely gigantic.
    When I was getting my ultrasound—talk about unflattering!—I had at least three chins. Seriously. I think my neck was carrying a baby too. I was horrified when I saw myself on the footage.
    But I got over it pretty quickly. I figured, if I‘m going to show the real me, people won‘t expect me to look perfect. In a scripted show if you don‘t look good, that‘s a legitimate problem, a violation of the viewer‘s expectation. But everybody knows that people don‘t look perfect in real life. Maybe it‘s even a good message—a nice contrast to the perfectly lit, professionally styled actors you see on scripted shows. At any rate, I got used to this new standard pretty quickly, and after that it was a relief to feel like I didn‘t have to look like some TV-manipulated version of myself. I could just be.
     
    My attitude wasn‘t always this casual. During my first pregnancy I worried about what might happen to my body. In Mommywood, every mother‘s obligation is to make herself look as hot as possible through all stages of being pregnant and raising babies. I went into my first pregnancy worried about stretch marks. But then I discovered fabulous belly creams! I became obsessed with belly creams and slathered them on every day. I figured if I used them, I‘d be fine, and I was. Phew.
    Also with Liam, I wasn‘t prepared for losing sight of my lower region. Nobody tells you that‘s going to happen. I‘d say,
    ―Dean, how‘s it looking down there? Do I need to shave? But of course I couldn‘t shave. So Dean had to shave me. He‘d hold up a mirror and say, ―See? How‘d I do? Or he‘d take a picture with his BlackBerry to show me. Definitely never thought that would happen. It brought my then-new husband and me to a new level of intimacy—one that we figured was good preparation for childbirth.
    Now, for the second pregnancy, I knew what to expect. I thought I‘d be a little savvier when it came to the stretch marks.
    I did a little research. It turns out that there is no scientific evidence that belly creams work. They don‘t really do anything.
    If you look closely, some of them even say that they reduce the
    ―appearance of stretch marks. So they‘re, like, cover-up? So much for the belly creams. Ridiculous. I‘d like to say I said
    ―Screw it and dumped the belly creams. But, oh, that Internet.
    It had more to say. The web told me that stretch marks are hereditary. Uh-oh. My mom had