If you watch enough TV, you’ve spotted that awkward situation when an actress is pregnant – but the baby bump doesn’t work with the story line. Suddenly your favorite character is shot only sitting in bed or with her torso placed carefully behind a filing cabinet or giant potted plant.

For the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” the challenge is twofold: The show’s two lead actresses – Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, who play Lily and Robin, respectively – announced their real-life pregnancies, within weeks of each other, last fall.

Series co-creator/executive producer Carter Bays talked about how, aside from a wink-at-the-viewers stomach bump after a hot dog-eating contest, the show will deal with the moms-to-be.

“We always sort of knew that with two young women in the cast, that we’d have to deal with this eventually. We just thought maybe they’d go in shifts. There’s a couple things coming up in other episodes where we sort of take advantage of Lily’s expanding belly. There are a few other little jokes we try to pepper in here and there. I don’t want to give anything away, but we try to use every tool at our disposal to not just hide this, but take advantage of this.

“But we still try and hide it to some degree, and the wardrobe department has just done a stellar job. There’s a lot of flowy tops, a lot of giant scarves.”