Primula Baggins carried her unborn child with pride, and walked slowly, with her head high and back straight. "Lad or lass?" asked relatives, and she answered with certainty: "Lass." It was a surprise to her, then, and to Drogo, too, when the midwife informed them briskly that they had a fine strong son. "A son?" said Drogo blankly, and Primula received the bundle of blankets and carefully checked for herself. "Well," she said. "A tricky one, this. What other surprises have you in store for the world?" she asked the babe. Frodo did not answer, only opened his blue eyes and gazed solemnly at her.

* * * * *

Bell Gamgee did not let her pregnancy interfere with her work, anymore than she had let the loss of two babes before their births do so. "This one is strong," she said, "he'll hold on." And it seemed she was right, for the babe did hold on, even though Bell began bleeding in her seventh month and was ordered by the healers to stay abed. She did--for two weeks. Then she maneuvered her heavy body from her bed because the hole on Bagshot Row was getting, in her words, "too wretched messy to live in." But the bleeding stopped, and Samwise came as he should, two months later. He grasped his father's finger with a grip like tree roots, and the Gaffer (though in those days he was still called just plain Hamfast) almost smiled.

* * * * *

Esmeralda Brandybuck took the news of her pregnancy with stony silence, and regarded her swelling body with distrust. But in the sixth month she caught her hands caressing the roundness that was her child-to-be, and she felt herself slipping helplessly into love, no matter how she cursed. She spent the last month of the pregnancy in her bed, and though it angered her, in some deep, secret place it pleased her as well, because, in the few moments when she was left alone, she could curl round her belly and whisper to her unborn babe, stories of the sisters that had died years before. And when Meriadoc was laid in her arms, she looked at his funny sweet nose and then up at her husband, who carried the same Brandybuck badge. "Well, perhaps this one will not break my heart," she said with resignation and no real hope.

* * * * *

Eglantine Took had circles beneath her green eyes, and carried small, and complained to any who would listen: "The child is never still. It kicks when I wake, it kicks when I try to sleep. This one is not like the others." And it wasn't--not only was the babe a lad (a creature new in Paladin and Eglantine's experience, they being blessed already with three daughters), he came too soon--much too soon. "Perhaps now you'll slow down," she said to the infant, but despite his fragile appearance and stick-thin arms and legs, Peregrin never did stop moving--he kicked his long thin feet and waved his arms, and not too many months later, he climbed from his cradle well before he could walk.