JURYMORE

JURYMORE is two people narrating a pregnancy while it is happening to them. Justin Robert Young and Ashley Paramore sign off by name, and they keep things loose, teasing and occasionally salty. Nobody plays the expert here. One declaration of total confidence about the birth falls apart into a string of emphatic no's before the verdict that they are going to be great. The body gets plenty of airtime. There is tight skin, a belly button that might vanish after a big late lunch, third-trimester tiredness and a walk in heat close to a hundred degrees. In 'Weightlessness', the first swim of the summer shows how heavy the belly has become. From there the talk moves to 41 weeks, an aging placenta and whether to put an induction on the books. That stretch is thoughtful rather than jokey. It weighs why inductions and C-sections are so common and notes that hospitals have scheduling interests of their own. Other stretches are pure play. In the episode titled 'The First 15 Minutes of Saving Private Ryan', the couple are less than a month out, one of them tired from a COVID booster that day, and they read out prop-style odds on the baby's first initial, first word and hair color at birth. 'Jack Sparrow Baby' wanders into who chooses the music and a gleeful parody of stereotypical bad country. Advice is the running irony. The recurring opening line asks listeners to email unsolicited advice to babyjurymore.com. Yet 'Exit Row Blues' includes a vent about people grabbing at the belly, unprompted monologues on motherhood that one of them calls a gendered thing, and the much-repeated tip to get sleep now. They still ask people who have had babies for hospital go-bag suggestions. Real life keeps intruding. 'Bad Advice Corner' includes a job search, a house to paint before the baby arrives without tipping into a pink overload, and friends from their little galaxy of podcasts offering to help, Briny among them. Thank-you cards go out, along with a joke that the surest way to get one is to buy something off the registry. Under the jokes, their thanks to listeners is plainly sincere. Then the baby arrives. 'Six Months Later...' is recorded around 10 PM in quieter voices, with a daughter asleep downstairs. The subject is solids: frozen breast milk in teethers, boiled carrots, the strawberries she loves, and a grudge against the acronym BLISS. She is, they note, still very small. For the pregnancy stretch, 'Weightlessness' and 'Exit Row Blues' are good places to start, and for life after the birth, 'Six Months Later...'. Either way the sign-off is the same, stay pregnant, even once it no longer quite applies.