Looks like a regular, long tunic dress from American Apparel, right?
Think again! It's a regular, long tunic dress from American Apparel that also has this bizarre boob-access panel for easy breastfeeding.
And I have a cute new top to wear after all this "being pregnant" nonsense compromises my sense of style (seriously, having to wear flats every day is killing my spirit).
I know it's been a few weeks longer than a month, which means I'm pretty much already a terrible mother, right? Actually, I meant to update a couple weeks ago, but the photos I cajoled Scott into taking accidentally got deleted, then we got a new computer (Compy 2000 was like, 10 years old, had been rebuilt 4 or 5 times and sounded like it had a jet engine, not to mention it only had enough RAM to run one program at a time), and then I went into the field for a week, and you know how it goes.
Ooschie - that's what I've nicknamed him (it's a German boy's name that means "waterfall") - is getting rather big and kicking the shit out of my guts. Conversely, when he's not kicking the shit out of my guts he seems to be pressing on them with his tiny feet, preventing the shit from coming out of them. I also found out that the random seizing of my ute into a rockhard balloon is the early Braxton-Hicks contractions. They don't really hurt yet, but trying to walk in the midst of one is somewhat akin to eating a huge meal, then chugging a liter of water, then getting up and trying to walk. Whilst wearing a thick, elastic band around your waist.
My energy waxes and wanes a lot. I get winded just walking through the house carrying a stack of towels, and feel like I need about 12 hours of sleep on the weekends. I'm trying to stay active so the rest of the pregnancy is smooth sailing, but I've also begun counting down the number of weekends I have left to sleep in.
Getting Oosch all fired up is a fun and easy task. Drinking a swig of juice or grabbing my belly and giving it a good, stout shake both work to get him to perform for my friends. "DANCE FOR ME, COLIN!" is one of my new favorite things to yell at him. When he kicks too much Scott likes to scold him in a babyfied stern and patronly voice, "Ooschie! Be nice to your mother!" and then we collapse into giggles at our horrible fetal mistreatment.
Anyways, now that I've entered the third trimester (I've gained about 25lbs) - the home stretch, the final countdown, if you will - I will try to update more frequently. No more procrastinating! We've got the nursery at about 50%, and I'll show you all the cuteness when it's assembled.
p.s. When I was putting this post together and he heard a snippet of the mp3 I was embedding, Scott said he was totally gonna play this song in the delivery room, but I told him I'd rather hear Eye of the Tiger.
Had the "find out the gender" ultrasound yesterday, and guess what?
If there were ever a more obvious ultrasound picture, I have yet to see it. The little fella is still under a pound (lucky number 13oz, in time for my birthday on the 13th), and he's started squirming with enough spastic flourish that I can feel the light thump inside me once in awhile. It feels like a fingertip flicking against the inside of my belly. My favorite part of the ultrasound was seeing him get bucked around in my womb when I laugh - he's in his own private moonbounce and I am the conductor of his lulz.
Other exciting gestational updates: started getting intermittent heartburn (chugging ice water helps, will start the Tums when it really starts to pick up) and woke to my first raging charley horse the other night. Word of advice: punching a leg cramp doesn't work to relieve the pain. I just woke up so abruptly (sleepily screaming a muffled "aghhh!") and started pounding it with my knuckles like so many big brothers demanding a cry of "uncle". I tried rubbing and stretching it and was eventually able to return to sleep.
* * * * *
Stretched out on the couch last night, legs strewn across Scott's lap, it occurred to me how fleeting these moments suddenly are; those lazy evenings lounging with my mate, watching whatever happens to be on the TV, with no care but my personal comfort, are numbered. Tomorrow, we'll be spending a week in Hawaii to revel in ourselves, our relationship and to reflect on the vast turns our lives are about to take.
Scott finally took a few shots of the belleh, but he still needs a little practice with my camera. This one, the best of the lot, was a bit blurry so I added some softness effects to it in Picnik. It's still so hard for me to believe that the little nugget is only about as big as a croissant, yet my body has changed this much. How did my intestines move so far up into my abdomen? At 14.5 weeks, some women have barely started showing and are perhaps still hiding their pregnancies, whereas I had strangers asking me about it at 8 weeks.
The appetite is still weird. I'm hungry a lot, and can eat more variety of foods (the aversions are pretty much gone, though the texture of shrimp is still completely appalling to me for some reason), but I can only eat a fraction of the volume of food I could pre-pregnancy. Kinda sucks, I was really looking forward to packing it away with a lumberjack's abandon before I got pregnant. I haven't gained any weight in a month, and I feel like I should have at least put a few pounds on. I'm up only ten pounds, and that was all gained in the first trimester.
Water aerobics has been fun. The girls in the class are sweet and funny, and not at all Stepford-y like I assumed they'd be. It's really wonderful to see so many round bellies and curvy bodies in their various stages of gestation. I feel like I can now relate to other women in a way that I always thought so "women with a y," so yaya/travelling pants-ish, so eyeroll-inducing. A lot of my cynicism about "sisterhood" is still there, but I think I'm starting to soften up a bit in a way that I kind of like.
I spent last week in the verdant hills of the Central Valley, approximately 30 miles from Fresno. The last round of botany surveys (on this project) sent us to the east side of the valley, among the mariposa and datura, and the intoxicating perfume of orange and lemon blossoms wafting up on warm breezes from the citrus orchards below. Last week I hiked from the foreground of this photo (actually, about a quarter mile from it) to the bottom of the last big hill in the background. Only a couple miles, as a crow flies, but it felt like forever when climbing a hill with a 45° pitch for a half mile.
You can see by the angle of the tree trunks and fence posts to the hill the steepness of my climb. I had the worst of it, being on the steepest side. I just put my head down and wove back and forth in a tight zigzag pattern to keep from sliding down the dirt cow path (I still ended up sliding, and grabbing the wooden fence post to break my fall yielded a stout splinter in my thumb). If I stopped too long to catch my breath, the mosquitoes would get me, so I really had to keep moving. I cursed under my breath the entire time, but felt like a complete champion at the top. It'dve been a tough stroll for anyone, but pregnancy adds the sweet nuance of being at 5000 feet above sea level - the shortness of breath we experience from the ongoing surge in progesterone makes even normal tasks feel monumental.
I'm still finding myself too nauseous to blog about food, or even look at photos of it (sorry about the slack in my commenting, but I assure you I'm still visiting), and I'm still pretty iffy on eating much but ice cream and fruit (I've moved on to a cantaloupe-with-a-little-salt kick), but I find that what really helps with the puky feelings is staying active and moving around. Not always what I want to do when I'm tired, but even puttering around the garden for a few hours helps.
I dreamt about the baby last night, that I was nursing it in the backseat of a car. It wasn't the first time I've dreamed that I had a baby, or even that I'd nursed, but it was the first one since I've been carrying a little blob around in me. In my dream, it just latched right on and went for it, and left me feeling like it would be obvious and natural, and I wondered how women could possibly need to be trained in nursing their babies. But this was just a dream, and I suppose I'll have to be taught how to properly insert the nipple and plug it against the alveolar ridge, just like many American women.
The baby in my dream was a generic Everybaby - big, dark eyes; a soft, round face and silky, brownish hair on its head. It was genderless, as are all babies spare the colors in which they're dressed. It was an amalgam of all of the babies you see on tv or in magazines, and I loved it. I keep having the feeling that I'm carrying a girl, maybe even two of them.
This weekend we're going to visit Ecohaus for green flooring options and no-VOC paints. We need to replace all of the flooring in the upstairs (and repaint) thanks to the complex social lives of cats. Unfortunately, this means spending around $4/sq ft instead of $1/sq ft to get something guilt-free that won't offgas our baby into asthma.
We're going for a Totoro theme for the nursery, and I can't wait to start painting snails, ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits in the forest on the walls. Plus this will fold a most beloved franchise perfectly into all of the Fuzzy Town shit that I've been dying to start collecting (seriously, the baby flying squirrel and owlets make me squee). I heard a horrible, terrible rumor that Fuzzy Town had closed its business, but the website being online is giving me hope. Plus the store that told me that said it was a Japanese company, and this appears to be in Washington.
Looks like a regular, long tunic dress from American Apparel, right?
Think again! It's a regular, long tunic dress from American Apparel that also has this bizarre boob-access panel for easy breastfeeding.
I know it's been a few weeks longer than a month, which means I'm pretty much already a terrible mother, right? Actually, I meant to update a couple weeks ago, but the photos I cajoled Scott into taking accidentally got deleted, then we got a new computer (Compy 2000 was like, 10 years old, had been rebuilt 4 or 5 times and sounded like it had a jet engine, not to mention it only had enough RAM to run one program at a time), and then I went into the field for a week, and you know how it goes.
Had the "find out the gender" ultrasound yesterday, and guess what?
If there were ever a more obvious ultrasound picture, I have yet to see it. The little fella is still under a pound (lucky number 13oz, in time for my birthday on the 13th), and he's started squirming with enough spastic flourish that I can feel the light thump inside me once in awhile. It feels like a fingertip flicking against the inside of my belly. My favorite part of the ultrasound was seeing him get bucked around in my womb when I laugh - he's in his own private moonbounce and I am the conductor of his lulz.
Scott finally took a few shots of the belleh, but he still needs a little practice with my camera. This one, the best of the lot, was a bit blurry so I added some softness effects to it in Picnik. It's still so hard for me to believe that the little nugget is only about as big as a croissant, yet my body has changed this much. How did my intestines move so far up into my abdomen? At 14.5 weeks, some women have barely started showing and are perhaps still hiding their pregnancies, whereas I had strangers asking me about it at 8 weeks.
I spent last week in the verdant hills of the Central Valley, approximately 30 miles from Fresno. The last round of botany surveys (on this project) sent us to the east side of the valley, among the mariposa and datura, and the intoxicating perfume of orange and lemon blossoms wafting up on warm breezes from the citrus orchards below. Last week I hiked from the foreground of this photo (actually, about a quarter mile from it) to the bottom of the last big hill in the background. Only a couple miles, as a crow flies, but it felt like forever when climbing a hill with a 45° pitch for a half mile.
You can see by the angle of the tree trunks and fence posts to the hill the steepness of my climb. I had the worst of it, being on the steepest side. I just put my head down and wove back and forth in a tight zigzag pattern to keep from sliding down the dirt cow path (I still ended up sliding, and grabbing the wooden fence post to break my fall yielded a stout splinter in my thumb). If I stopped too long to catch my breath, the mosquitoes would get me, so I really had to keep moving. I cursed under my breath the entire time, but felt like a complete champion at the top. It'dve been a tough stroll for anyone, but pregnancy adds the sweet nuance of being at 5000 feet above sea level - the shortness of breath we experience from the ongoing surge in progesterone makes even normal tasks feel monumental.
This weekend we're going to visit Ecohaus for green flooring options and no-VOC paints. We need to replace all of the flooring in the upstairs (and repaint) thanks to the complex social lives of cats. Unfortunately, this means spending around $4/sq ft instead of $1/sq ft to get something guilt-free that won't offgas our baby into asthma.
