Being Pregnant is Fun

I know from experience that reading blogs written by pregnant ladies is really tedious. Occasionally you find a good one but most of them are saccharine and a bit self-involved, and usually involve a lot of exclamation marks. So bear with me here, because truthfully, beyond the many many projects that hubby and I have on the go (which I've already gone on about ad nauseum), being pregnant is really the major task I'm doing right now, and I am rather self-involved to begin with.

Gestating a human is an interesting thing. For those of you who have not done it, it takes awhile to get used to the idea that there's someone living inside your stomach. Someone who has hair. Speaking as a person who for years thought that she might never have a person living inside her stomach, who kind of convinced herself that it is OTHER people who get to do all the gestating, it is a totally alien experience. You already know all the major parts from the movies – morning sickness can be a bitch (but not for everyone!), you gain weight, your ankles get swollen, your boobs get big, etc etc., but there are other things that happen to your body that, wisely, nobody really mentions until you're in the middle of it.

Herewith, I am going to list all of the little observances that I've made over the last five-and-a-half months, so that all of you who are newly pregnant or thinking of doing it are forewarned. Those of you who are not interested – this is a long one so you may want to just skip it.

1. You smell. Nobody told me, nor did I read it in any of my pink-and-blue baby books, that when you are pregnant you smell like a farm animal. Honestly, I get up, take a shower, put on deodorant, get dressed, drive to work, take off my coat, and already my armpits smell like the inside of a bellybutton. Also I sweat a lot, even in mid-winter. Consequently I spend a lot of time at work sneaking sniffs of my armpits to make sure I'm not offensive.
   
   

2. Your feet hurt. I guess this is a relatively common complaint, but I just thought it would happen much later on in pregnancy. Not so. Even wearing my comfortable sensible nun-shoes, the bottoms of my feet feel all prickly at the end of the day and I've acquired a limp. I blame it on the extra 10 lbs I'm carrying around. My dogs can start barking after a day of sitting.

3. People want to touch you. I hereby apologize to every pregnant woman whose belly I've ever touched without invitation. This is a natural yet off-putting reflex, and it's not until it happened to me that I realized how weird it is. It happened early on, so my belly wasn't even sticking out, and I thought to myself "under no other circumstance would a colleague that I hardly know put her hand on my stomach. " Ok, maybe in an emergency CPR-type situation, but still – weird. Why is this considered weird you ask? Well, because your stomach is awfully close to your lady business, frankly, and your boobs, which already feel large. It's where I breathe, and where my bowels live. It's alive. Call me an introvert or whatever but please, unless you're a friend or family, get your hands away from my body in general. It's nobody's body but mine (and maybe my husband's, and definitely my baby's).

4. You aren't infinitely hungry, just immediately hungry. When they recently aired (and re-aired) the episode of "The Office" where Pam and Jim had their baby, one element of it struck me as wrong. Pam and Kevin are shown sharing large meals together in the lunch room – Kevin is excited that finally someone wants to eat as much as he does, so he prepares all these elaborate meals for the two of them. Pam is about to give birth any minute. This felt wrong to me, as I am finding that I can't actually eat large portions of food*, and I imagine this will become truer as time passes and my stomach gets compressed. The stereotype of the pregnant woman who wants to eat everything under the sun just doesn't apply to me. I want to eat certain things*, in moderation*, or a sequence of lots of little things. The thing that I notice most is: when I'm hungry, I don't get hunger pangs. I need to eat IMMEDIATELY OR I MIGHT DIE. There's no grey zone between not-hungry and starving. Consequently, I find dinnertime difficult, because I get home hungry, have to eat a little something, then I'm satisfied for the time being and not really into cooking or eating a big meal. *Except poutine, in which they do not make a large enough size.

5. Sometimes you are blocked up, and sometimes you are not. And I don't mean your nose. Drink lots of water, but also, be prepared if things start to go a bit too fast. Anything can happen, really.

6. Your brain shuts off. I have described before how dumb I was for a week or so earlier in my pregnancy. They say that 'mommy brain' is a myth, but frankly, I find it's challenging me. After some analysis (highly scientific of course) I've deduced that I'm just distracted all the time. I have a lot to think about. Perhaps my brain has just switched gears rather than shut off altogether. For example, this morning I found myself thinking about my future moody pre-teen daughter – where will we put her desk? What if she wants to hang up posters of teenaged celebrities who I don't find poster-worthy? What if she becomes a Justin Bieber fan (or whatever construct the 2020 version of Justin Bieber will be?) What IS a Justin Bieber and how do I keep it out of my house? You see, there are lots of things to think about. Work is kind of on the back burner – sorry work, I'm still doing my job, but I'm foggy in the head a lot, as I obviously have larger issues looming (see Bieber, Justin). As a side note: Sorry mom and dad. You were so very patient between the years of, say, 1988 and 1998. I owe you big time.

7. Sleep is an issue. They say it prepares you for becoming a new parent, but frankly, when I'm a new parent I won't have to go to work early in the morning all fresh and groomed and thinky. Trying to concentrate when you're up, flip-flopping around, from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. (because I fall asleep 20 minutes before the alarm goes off), is a bit rough. Seeming enthusiastic at meetings becomes an impossibility. For about a month there, I would have given my right arm to sleep through the night. I understand that this will get worse, but like I said, while on mat leave I intend to wander around the house all day in sweatpants and watch a lot of daytime television. The issue is that I discovered I am actually a back-sleeper, and they (the books, doctors, etc) advise you not only to NOT sleep on your back, but to actually try to sleep on your left side. For me, this means facing my back-sleeping snoring husband, who doesn't always have a great sense of where in the bed he is positioned while asleep (sorry hubby – it's natural, but true). Also, have you ever tried maintaining one certain position through the night? It's near impossible unless you're in traction or something. I bought a long body pillow, which now lives in the middle of the bed where I can put it between my knees and prop it under my belly, and it seems to have helped. Either that or I'm just getting used to the sleeplessness. Not sure. I often wake up with it on top of me so the jury's out on the body pillow.

8. Everyone who has ever had a child has advice for you. How many times in the past 5 months have I had a conversation that went something like this:
   "hey! Wow! So how are you feeling?"
   "well, I feel pretty great. I wish I could sleep through the night, but otherwise, pretty great."
   "oooh hoho hooo just you wait."
   Then the person proceeds to rattle off all of the parts of parenthood that I will hate, then makes suggestions for where my baby should sleep, how I should/will treat my dog once the baby arrives, what exercises I should be doing, where I should shop, what I should buy, what I shouldn't bother buying, and what I should do once I go back to work. A lot of advice is appreciated and/or solicited – as in, I ask my experienced friends lots of annoying questions – but a lot of it is just strangers talkin' smack about my kid, you know?
   I also find it funny when people tell me how wonderful my hair looks, since my hair looks wonderful because (a) it's a weekday – readers here have all seen my weekend hair, (b) I just had it cut, and (c) I don't put any crap in it, from dye to gel. Honestly, it feels no thicker and looks no shinier than it did before, but everyone tells me "oh your hair looks so wonderful! Just you wait…It will aaalll fall out." These are not compliments people!

9. Maternity clothes are either ugly, expensive, hard to come by, or all three. Awhile ago I found myself at Thyme Maternity buying a pair of black pants of such terrible quality that I would never have even touched them before becoming pregnant. Being between a rock and a hard place (i.e. I have to go to work every day, and pantslessness is not yet an option) I shelled out $69 for these cheap pieces of crap. I washed them once (cold water, hung to dry) and now they are charcoal grey pants. The overwhelming majority of maternity tops are made of stretchy polyester which, if you read point #1 above, you will deduce is not really something I want to wear. Also, a lot of maternity tops are just plain hideous – it's like they were made of leftover fabric from last season that nobody wanted for anything else. The styles are not exactly cutting edge either – awhile ago I was shopping with my pregnant friend Anne when she said "why are these clothes all designed to make me look virginal? I am very obviously not a virgin." I have been fortunate that my mom is a sewing wizard and has made me a lot of nice stuff, and also that the style these days leans towards long stretchy tops, so I've gotten away with looking decent so far, but man, those maternity stores have you by the cahones. There are 0 maternity stores at the mall downtown in my city. I made the mistake the other day of buying a new bra at Thyme, which cost $45, but then got home and realized WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS JUST A NORMAL BRA IN A LARGER SIZE. So the bra will be going back to the store, and I will be shopping for larger sizes at Winners, because Gennyland pays no more than 20 smackers for lingerie. I'm practical!

10. You don't have a period, which is awesome, but you are also incontinent. Hee hee. I went to the doctor last week concerned that I was leaking amniotic fluid because there was a lot of liquid in my nether regions, but was told that nope, nothing to worry about, I was just sitting in my office peeing myself all day. You win some, you lose some.

11. Your stomach can take quite a lot of abuse. Last night I was laying on the couch with my feet up when Rosie decided to grab a log out of the firewood pile, hop up on top of me, and chew it to pieces. I shifted a bit, because it was actually kind of uncomfortable (her elbow was in a rather personal area), and then realized that the little thump thump thump I was feeling was the baby kicking Rosie to get off. Literally, my fetus was kicking my dog, THROUGH my stomach.
    My dad once got mad at me because I was poking my belly, trying to make it kick, but I had to remind him that the baby's tucked behind: my skin, close to an inch of fat (let's not kid ourselves here, may be more than an inch), my uterine muscle (which, by the time I give birth, will itself weigh 2 lbs), the wall of the amniotic sac, a bunch of amniotic fluid.

So my gentle pokes don't bother her. But having a 67 lb Labrador retriever plop on top of her, chewing a log, really pisses her off.

12. The internet is evil My friend Dawn has suggested that perhaps I need to put a child protection-style filter on my google, because every single thing you look up on the internet while pregnant immediately leads to a miscarriage, preterm labour, or birth defects. At the same time there is a lack of useful information on there – for example, the other day I was curious as to where my organs have relocated themselves now that my uterus is in charge. I image-googled "pregnant diagram torso" and "diagram pregnancy organs" and "anatomy pregnant woman" and what I came up with looked like it was drawn sometime in the 12^th century, by monks. I learned that my bowels are now somewhere at my sides and behind my uterus, and that my once-proud bladder is quickly becoming a pathetic little pancake (see point number 10), but it took some figuring out to come up with that information. Also, that it will all lead to a miscarriage, of course. Just yesterday, after a particularly bad day of back pain that kind of radiated down the backs of my legs (an obvious mechanical issue), I learned that someone had that once and a week later went into premature labour caused, obviously, by her sore tailbone "so u bettr get that checked right away by ur dr!!!!". Or that my tailbone's broken or infected. Or that I might need back surgery. Nobody told me that if I just went home and put my feet up and slept in a different position it would get better in two days.

Phew. I've been complaining for 4 pages now. I say all this because the reality of being pregnant is somewhat different that I'd imagined it to be, all of those years. All of these things distract from the real craziness going on inside. Once in a while, I will still lean over to my hubby with my eyes bugged out and go "Holy shit. Holy shit Mr. Gennyland, I've got a person in me! I've got a tiny person with eyeballs and hair! I'm, like, NEVER ALONE" and I don't think that will go away. I have often, over the course of the last 5 months, imagined what it will be like when I meet that little person, touch her hair and kiss her eyes and count her fingers and be able to say "look what I made in my stomach!" There I go with the exclamation marks.

Progress Report: Spring 2010

Although I'v e been relatively quiet lately, progress has been made on our many spring projects. I know you are burning with curiosity to know, for example, whether or not we have yet built a dock, and how my seedlings are coming along.

Way back when, on Easter weekend, it got really hot. We headed up to the land on the Friday to see what the damage to our trailer was after the winter, since we'd meant to build a little shelter over it but never got around to it. When I opened the door, it smelled no different than if we'd been there the weekend before, though it was filled with kayaks and a bunch of mouse poo. Not an excessive amount, but I can see that one or two mice had used it as their private apartment for the winter. There is one area, below a window frame, that sustained some water damage and probably began to mold, but I think it's an easy repair job, if we even bother doing it at all. I think we may just plug the hole and call it a day.

We also plotted out a spot for our dock. It won't sit right smack in front of our cottage, because right smack in front of our cottage (future cottage) is our beach, and we don't want to lose beach space, especially not with a toddler or two in our future. Also the water is quite shallow there. So, the dock will be way off to the right of our cottage view, and we may not even catch a clear glimpse of it through the trees. In its future spot, the water drops down a bit more steeply, so we will actually have something to dive into without fear of whacking our heads on the bottom of the lake.

Speaking of the dock, hey docks aren't cheap are they? I thought we were being clever building it ourselves, but by the time we purchased the floats ($1600), the hardware ($500) and the wood ($1000) this is not an inexpensive enterprise. We're not screwing around with it though – we bought the right stuff for all, because this is a major investment and we don't want to be doing repairs constantly or jerry-rigging things. It will be built using real black plastic dock floats, proper galvanized gigantic heavy-duty hardware, and cedar (western red and local white). Because our spot is so shallow, and because we want the dock to be a place where groups of people can hang out and have a good time, it's not a tiny dock either – it will be two 8x12-foot sections, hinged together (because who can maneuver an 8x24 dock into place?), plus an 8-foot long ramp (2 of those feet are on land). This dock will be 8 feet wide, and about 30 feet long, all-in. No wonder it is so costly. Anyway, soon we'll have the wood at our place and we're going to lay it all out according to our plan, mark it all up, pre-drill what we can, and figure out all the possible glitches before we get on-site, where the terrain is steep and there's no power save for what our tiny generator can produce (one tool at a time).

Also of note, and also using our 'money cannon' as my hubby likes to call it (as in "ok whatever. Load up the money cannon and fire.") We recently had new eavestrough and sofit installed on the house and I must be getting old because I was inordinately excited by it. And it actually came in under budget for once – I was thrilled. Next, our trusty handyman Stuart is coming to FINISH the siding on our house. I never want to see another piece of blue siding again. The three walls to be done are all high up, and I can no longer negotiate a ladder, so Stuart will do us the honours next week. I am also excited for this, probably way too excited. I can't wait until the damn house is finished. I'm tired of describing it as "mostly blue, but with some green walls, and the windows are mostly red but some are still white…"

Aside from all this, we moved the living room furniture around in anticipation of the baby's arrival and the moving of the t.v. from the back bedroom into the living room. Of course this will necessitate bringing in an electrician to fiddle with some wiring and install a new plug, so there's light over our couch, but whatever. The money cannon's getting a good workout this year, and things will finally be done for awhile.

The seedlings must be coming up by now, because I planted them like two weeks ago and they've been on timers ever since. I will check them tonight. I planted three varieties of tomatoes and hot cayenne peppers, so this weekend I'll put in a bunch of basil. I am a bit pissed off because my garlic started to sprout in the garden, but I have only about 5 heads – I think something ate it over the winter or in the fall. I think I may try to stick some more in while the weather's still chilly, for a bit of a later crop. I have to source some sweet potato seedlings/seed potatoes (however they grow) because I want to plant them up at the land, where on Easter weekend I cleared a spot (with a BBQ fork – I was unprepared) and planted a whole whack of onions. I have high hopes for my cottage garden.

Everything else in the garden is coming up gangbusters. It's been an early spring (probably everywhere) so things shot up early, and then stalled a bit when the weather cooled. But still, the apple trees are in bud, and the pear tree that got knocked over by Mr. Plow this winter (root ball and all, and stuck under a snowbank, so nothing even got bent) is happily replanted and growing, I believe.

We had a baby shower thrown in our honour last weekend. It was early (I was only 22 weeks) but still, it was really lovely to be spoiled rotten by our friends. We are lucky. Baby equipment is well in-hand – in fact I am off after this writing to pick up an infant car seat from my good friend Anne, who bought it last August for her baby, who was large and grew out of it quickly. The crib has been ordered and is on its way, and soon we will go and get that stroller that I've been eyeing. I officially need no more baby onesies in 0-3 month size, since I went mad and bought everything tiny that was cute and caught my eye. Our baby will be pantsless, but decked out in consistently adorable onesies. Ah well, she'll be born in August. She won't need pants for a month or two. I set up a baby registry at Babies R Us but I think I stuck a bunch of onesies on there as well because I lack control, apparently.

The belly's grown too. I'm not enormous – I am not a large pregnant woman, as it turns out. I am showing but people still give me a confused look when they see me, in certain outfits. I haven't gained all that much weight (maybe 10 lbs so far?), I still have whatever waist I used to have (not much of one to start with) and thanks to my mom, I've been dressing well. I haven't gotten sloppy yet, though I guess there's lots of time for that this summer, when the weather turns hot. I had glimpses of that on Easter weekend, when I had to dig out some horrible old shorts that were largish and fasten them with a hair elastic around the top button. It was humbling, to say the least. Mama's gotta take a trip to find some maternity shorts, and probably maternity yoga pants too, because soon my old yoga pants will no longer cut it. Here is anonymous photographic evidence:

This is long, so I will end it here. I will write again and post pictures as I promised ages ago.

Things I'm Going to Do This Weekend

The following is a list of things I am going to do this lovely four-day weekend:

• Go up to the land. Vacuum out/clean the trailer, and de-mouse it as necessary.
• Bring up all trailer supplies, including the chemical toilet.
• Meet with the fellow from the local hardware store, to discuss dock hardware.
• Lay in the sun.
• Check out brother-in-law's glamorous new cottage.
• Await delivery of our dock floats. Stuff them into the newly-cleaned trailer once they arrive.
• Plot out the dock position.
• Rake the leaves and dead stuff out of my garden, and off of all my newly-sprung bulbs and perennials.
• Say farewell to the last snowbank, on the north side of the house. Bye snow.
• Walk the dog a bunch of times.
• Fix the fence around my veggie garden, kind of.
• Eat.
• Perhaps shop for a stroller. Perhaps.
• Move some preliminary stuff around in and out of my house.
• Set up the deck: bring out the furniture and the BBQ baby! Hubby will mostly do this.
• Not drink a cold beer on my deck.
• Sunbathe my giant belly in a now-indecent bikini. Watch out neighbors!
• Groom myself (see above). Think about a cheery red pedicure.
• Nap. A lot.
• Start my seeds.
• Assess the wood needs for the remaining siding, which I am not doing myself. Yay.
• Admire my brand new bargain-basement (and lovely) eavestrough and sofit. Watch the squirrels get all frustrated.
• Open all the windows in my house. Put the screens back in first to deter frustrated squirrels.
• Take the winter tires off of our car (hubby will do this). Consider an oil change.
• Eat Easter dinner with my family. I'm voting for ham and scalloped potatoes (hi mom!) but I always vote for ham and scalloped potatoes.
• Clean the house.
• Call around and find a house cleaner.
• Have coffee with my mom at least three times.
• Find shorts among my collection which can be converted into maternity shorts by my wizard mother.
• Sleep. Did I already say that?

I have great ambitions this weekend. It's only four days, but I think I'm up for it.