Welcome to Mothership: Parenting stories you actually want to read, whether you're thinking about or passing on kids, from egg-freezing to taking home baby and beyond. Because motherhood is a big if — not when — and it's time we talked about it that way.
Seven months into her pregnancy, Serena Williams' backhand is still on fire. The tennis champ — who won the Australian Open in January returned to the top of the WTA rankings the week after news of her pregnancy broke in April — may be sitting out the year professionally. But the 28-week-pregnant athlete is by no means staying off the court, as her Instagram feed proved on Thursday, when Williams posted a video of herself playing tennis as fiercely as ever.
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A little insight into the 35-year-old tennis champ's built-in doubles partner: According to the doctors on the BabyCenter Medical Advisory Board, Williams' little bun currently resembles a large eggplant (their comparison, not ours), weighing in at a little over 2 lbs and measures nearly 15 inches.
Williams has been sharing snapshots of her pregnancy on social media since the middle of April, when she unintentionally announced announced she was expecting her first child with fiancé Alexis Ohanian in a very 2017 way: via Snapchat. On April 19, the 23-time Grand Slam winner shared a selfie in a yellow swimsuit captioned "20 weeks." A week later, Williams, who is waiting to find out the sex of her baby, confessed in an interview with Gayle King that she had not mean to share her big news with the world quite yet.
"Well, actually it was an accident," she told King at the 2017 TED Talks conference in Vancouver. "I was on vacation just taking some time for myself and I have this thing where I’ve been checking my status and taking pictures every week to see how far along I’m going," Williams explained. "I didn’t tell a lot of people to be quite honest and I’d been saving it," she continued. "Every week I just take a picture and save it and I’ve been so good about it and this was the one time I slipped, but it’s okay." She added, "On social media, you press the wrong button and… 30 minutes later I missed four calls and I’m like, ‘That’s weird.’ But it was a good moment. I was only going to wait five or six more days [to tell people]."
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