Underwater Humor
Checklist for Pregnant Mermaids
✅Find a God-Octopus to raise the baby if I’m captured in a tuna net
Are you a mermaid with a budding bump in the underwater oven? Consult this second-trimester checklist to ensure your hybrid fish-baby stays happy and healthy through the middle stage of saltwater pregnancy. ¹
The Checklist
✅ Drink plenty of krill and kale smoothies.
✅ Invite your centaur friends to a beachfront baby shower. All of us half-people need to stick together.
✅ Capture an obstetrician when she goes snorkeling. You need monthly check-ups, and Universal Ocean Insurance doesn’t cover the human half.
✅ Buy a new hair-curling fork. You deserve to look beautiful.
✅ Eat more delicious brains. BRAINS!!! ²
✅ Release the demonic shrimp souls captured by Ursula the Sea Witch.
✅ Ponder if Disney should make an anti-hero movie with Ursula as the main character and Ariel as a vapid, entitled teenager addicted to dating hammerhead sharks she met on SeaTinder.
✅ Check if SeaTinder — dot — com is available in case all the polar ice caps melt and land-based dating becomes extinct.
✅ Find a God-Octopus to raise the baby in the unlikely event you get caught in a tuna fishing net.
✅ Take plenty of pre-hatching vitamins.
✅ Consider baby names. Fun fact: Mark means a mighty warrior who rides a Kracken into undersea battles. ³
✅ Update your enemies list with every dead, jailed, or bankrupt sea creature who called you a “bloated turd turtle.”
✅ Lamaze breathing techniques don’t work underwater. Take a natural gilling class with your man-fish instead.
✅ Delete all the texts to “Netflix and float?” from your side pirate, Captain Longplank. With a baby on the way, you’re committed to your boring but fertile merman.
✅ Find homeopathic recipes to combat morning land sickness.
✅ Consider if this is the dumbest list Mark ever wrote. ⁴
✅ File a discrimination suit against Planet Fitness because all its gym locations are on land.
✅ Buy Spanx clamshell bras when your baby seals swell to blue whales.
✅ Most mermaids choose a water birth by default. You’re a free spirit who deserves the perfect birthing environment. Reserve an underwater volcano for a violently unique fire birth. 🌋🔥🚼
✅ I wish I had been clever enough to write a hilarious concluding paragraph here. Instead, here is a picture of a seahorse.
Footnotes
¹ The checklist was created by summarizing personal interviews with thousands of experienced mer-moms. As an unlicensed non-medical practitioner, I may have missed important details of mer-care. Let me know in the comments.
² This list may have started out with zombies instead of mermaids.
³ The mighty warrior part is genuine. However, most baby name books are notoriously biased toward land-based creatures and fail to mention my Kracken.
⁴ It’s not. And that is SCARY.
Want more MuddyUm fun by Mark Suroviec, M.Ed.? Yes, I tagged myself like a genuine narcissist.
Or enjoy this MuddyUm mindbender by Ben Ulansey.
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