Didn’t we just do this? Feels like we just did this. Like…just a few days ago. Ha! Well anyway, here we go!
BOOM! 32 weeks!
After sitting at around 130lbs for what seems like months, I suddenly made up for it by gaining three pounds in a week. Booyah! How that happens when you aren’t allowed to eat deliciousness like ice cream and/or potato chips I have no idea, but somehow I managed it!
(Cheese, Internets. The answer is cheese.)
Yesterday I woke up and Baby had decided to crawl up into my ribs for the day. It was the most bizarre sensation, like wearing a corset cinched to its tightest (but without any similar silhouette-slimming effects, obviously).
I just couldn’t breathe, sitting was uncomfortable, standing was uncomfortable, lying down was alright until it wasn’t. I spent a lot of time yesterday on my hands and knees, trying to coax baby away from my vital organs, and I think it may have worked as today I can take a full breath without feeling like I’m going to pass out. HUZZAH!
We have an appointment with an OB in the city on Thursday morning, to talk about c-sections and perhaps get a date. It’s such a strange thing to contemplate – this timeline – that I think I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.
Pregnancy is so obsessed with time, weeks and days and months are charted, meticulously recorded, your progress at each stage compared to some universal standard beyond your control. At the beginning of all of this (way back in February…my god, has it really been that long?) we were told our due date was October 23, give or take two weeks either way.
I remember thinking how bizarre it was that I had a month-long window where the baby could come. Now that uncertainty has somewhat disappeared, because six weeks from today is likely the latest we will be holding our brand spanking new son or daughter.
So we have a finite end date to this thing, but getting that end date solidified has seemed to highlight the uncertainty beforehand even more. While 6 weeks is the latest, it could also be literally any time before that.
I have been trying to stay mindful about the amount and type of activity I’ve been doing – trying to be good about asking Adam to lift things, and accepting stranger’s offers of help too (even if I do feel absolutely ridiculous asking Adam to lift a vacuum three steps to the main floor, and feel the need to explain myself the entire time when I ask a bagger boy to bring one lousy bag of groceries to my car for me). I’m hoping that all of this taking ‘er easy will result in the baby laying low until 38 weeks too.
But friends, if I have learned anything on this journey, it’s that I have no control. And I’m totally surrendering to that, and preparing myself for the fact that things could happen any time.
ANY. TIME. (!!!!!!!!!!) (!)
Hence my to-do list has been bumped up a bit – things I have been putting off until the end of September are being done now. Car stuff is the first priority, then putting the crib together in case baby arrives before my dad has time to come back and fix the bassinet.
I’ve also started the list for my hospital bag-holy mother- and will start packing that probably early next week. In preparation for this I bit the bullet and bought one of these gorgeous kaftans from Etsy that I’ve been admiring for oh, I don’t know, a YEAR.
I wanted eight. I bought one. They’re loose and flowy so they won’t hurt my incision, and the buttons down the front will be great for breastfeeding.
I’m also looking into nursing bras and some sort of gigantic maxi-pads all mothers assure me I will need, as well as gigundor granny panties I can toss afterwards. (I’m beginning to think there is going to be a lot of blood involved in this whole shebang. Am I right? Blood? Bleeding? Gory, movie-style crime-scene type deal? Great. Okay cool. Just checking)
My mom arrives this weekend to stockpile some freezer meals, do some baby shopping, pamper me with all sorts of amazing pregnant-lady spa things (I love you mom!) and, of course, to help celebrate Adam’s birthday.
32. The dude turns 32! He has marked the occasion by getting himself a retainer.
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…
I know.
I KNOW!
I can’t talk about it without laughing, and certainly can’t write about it without the proper visuals so I’ll save that for later this week but…I will say this: It is everything you are imagining,and more.
One of the strange things that perhaps some more experienced moms can help me with is this weird disconnect I feel with the baby. Conceptually, I don’t think I have realized that it IS a baby in there – does that make sense?
I thought that the further along I got, the more pronounced the movements and bigger I got, the more real it would become. And logically I understand what is happening, I know what will come out of me, I still squee over newborns and feel like crying when I see birth stories, I just….don’t seem to be making the connection that we will have a baby soon.
Is it normal, this feeling? I’m wondering if perhaps all of the focus that’s been paid to me and my body during this pregnancy (my kidney condition, my electrolyte levels, my placenta, my diabeetus) has distracted me from the other person involved. You know, the small person I’m housing who seems to love poking their butt out above my belly button at the most inopportune times. The person that all of this has been for.
It feels strange admitting this, I feel like I’m betraying some secret code of motherhood, thou must love thy unborn child. And I mean it’s not that I don’t love it, because I do!We do! His/her existence has already changed our lives in the most delicious of ways.
But still, I’m just not sure what exactly I’m loving. I can’t picture the face, the hands, the big chubby belly. It’s hard to envision, a hard feeling to hold onto.
I suppose those are the questions that will be answered in a month and a half’s time. I’ll get to put a face to a name (and a name to a face), I’ll be able to actually touch and hold and acknowledge the tangible there-ness of this little person.
I’m really, really looking forward to that.
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