On your stretch mark, get set, go!

Each week during my pregnancy my husband photographed my ever-expanding belly.  I loved comparing the weekly silhouettes and mentally documenting their differences.  Until some time in the third trimester.  That's when I noticed the tattoo on my hip (or at least where my hip used to be) was looking less like an ohm and more like a blown out tire.  I thought I had narrowly escaped the wrath of rapidly stretching skin, but it turns out they were there all along, hidden beneath my range of vision. As any mama knows, with a growing belly comes the disappearance of any body part below the belly button.  This can lead to some hairy situations (pun DEFINITELY intended).
For a while I suffered from SSMD--Serious Stretch Mark Denial, and by this point, my favorite sentence was "Hun, can I have another brownie?"  And so it went, and 37 pounds later I was teetering dangerously close to the 200 mark on the scale.  But I didn't care, because I was making a human!  And we all know that takes a LOT of chocolate.  Besides, slap a little cocoa butter on that belly and those stretch marks will disappear faster than your post pardum sex life.
Seven  months later and I am still the proud owner of those little (big) red lines, happy reminders that my body is actually pretty extraordinary. Besides, scars are poetic, so why should stretch marks be any different?  If you got 'em, rock 'em.