Plumber stages paternity photo shoot with his ‘food baby,’ and belly laughs bust out
Who knew Nick Roberts had a bun, or two or three, in the oven?
The whole world does now.
The 25-year-old Boston plumber posed for a faux maternity photo shoot when his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child.
Lacking a baby bump of his own, he created a food baby — thanks to a huge McDonald’s lunch and his self-described “strange talent.”
His gym buddy and partner in giggles, photographer Stephen Cwiok, took the pictures back in May. Roberts posted them to his Facebook page on Dec. 3, and they have gone viral. They’ve attracted more than 7,000 comments on the Love What Matters Facebook page, which also posted them.
“Hey guys. So my girlfriend and I found out we were going to have a baby. So one day my buddy Stephen came to me with the joking idea of doing a maternity shoot ... featuring me,” Roberts wrote on Facebook.
“We rolled it around for a while, then decided it was best to go with it. I felt it was only right to at least try to look a little pregnant, so we grabbed some McDonald’s and off we were.
“If I’m being completely honest, the setting, the occasion, the awful cramps from the double cheeseburgers, it all brought me so much closer to the pregnancy. Now, I’ll never know what being in labor feels like, but i feel in my heart it can’t be too far away from eating A LOT of fast food. I’m truly blessed to have had this eye-opening experience.”
Roberts told People that when he eats a lot he has “a strange talent where I can stick my stomach out really far and it looks like I’m pregnant. I told Stephen, ‘Listen, we have to go to McDonald’s so I can eat and it’ll look like I’m more pregnant.’”
Before the two-hour photo shoot, according to the New York Post, Roberts downed two McDoubles, a McChicken, four chicken nuggets, two chocolate chip cookies and a medium Dr Pepper.
Hello, food baby.
In one photo he strikes the trademark baby bump pose, lovingly cradling his round, engorged tummy with both hands.
In another his shirt is unbuttoned to expose his belly. He’s holding a brown McDonald’s bag in one hand and the Dr Pepper in the other.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed harder than when I was shooting those photos,” Cwiok told People. “Nick is a good buddy of mine and he absolutely nailed the model face and it was killing me all the way through.”
They put the pictures in a wedding-style photo album and set it out for people to find at the couple’s gender reveal party in June.
“We put the album on a table where nobody was sitting, walked away, grabbed a beer, sat down and waited. The album didn’t go unnoticed for very long,” Roberts told the British website Unilad, which noted that on any other day when weightlifter Roberts is not bloated from fast food he can bench press 325 pounds.
“It was everything we hoped it to be,” Roberts told Unilad. “As soon as they flipped the cover to the album, their head whipped back and hysterical laughter began! Not long after, people began to surround the table. Our mission was a success.”
Roberts’ girlfriend, Brianna, laughed, too.
Their son was born on Halloween. They named him Logan.
Raise your hand if you were hoping for McChicken.
This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 2:51 PM with the headline "Plumber stages paternity photo shoot with his ‘food baby,’ and belly laughs bust out."