Five and a half months. The weeks are flying and crawling by, all at the same time. I can’t wait (but I CAN wait) but I can’t! I want to see this little person, meet them, see whose eyes she got, whose sense of humour he has. But I’m not ready to give up the sleep, the hours of yoga. I’m not quite ready to dive into that ginormous bucket of uncertainty that is our lives come October 2012.
I’ll be done work sometime between Mid-September to Mid-October, Adam is tying things up with his business and will be done either late August or late September (do you see, already the uncertainty? Do you hear my teeth clenching?) and without work tying us to this town we’re thinking about moving sometime after Christmas.
So. Want to do some quick math? Me not working, plus newborn demon baby, plus Adam at some as yet unknown job, plus a (maybe?) move, plus a (maybe?) house purchase, plus plus plus plus EQUALS CRAZY!
I’m trying not to think about it. I have willed myself into a blissful state of denial and I sit here and rub my belly like a magic lamp and say my positivity mantras (oh what? You didn’t know I have mantras? I HAVE mantras) and I’m just…hoping everything will work out.
When my baby sister Mawney was in Thailand she went to a Buddhist temple and they were having some sort of special ceremony that day ( I think?) involving string. She asked one of the monks to bless a piece of the string and made it into a bracelet for me and I’ve worn it ever since she got back. It’s supposed to bring good fortune and I think that so far, it has.
Despite it’s small lumps and bumps, this pregnancy has gone so much better than I ever thought possible. I had no idea what being pregnant would do to my kidney condition, and although I’m tired, really tired, and my levels are low and don’t seem to be getting higher anytime soon, besides all of that I have been buoyed by this swelling sense of anticipation and happiness. I’m very grateful for that.
I now weigh 121 pounds (BOOYAH!), which is 11 up from where I started (or 6 up from my pre-pregnancy weight, but I ‘ve decided to count from my my lowest morning sickness weight because really, I have gained that weight back. So. 11lbs it is!) and I am eating everything lately. Life right now is just a non-stop eating party where I am running behind my appetite trying to shove something healthy in there instead of the gummy candies that are suddenly consuming my thoughts.
Breakfasts have become huge in our house, especially on weekends when we both wake up together, and this is weird as I’ve never been a breakfast person, I always skipped eating in the mornings, could never stomach much more than a smoothie (which I had been trying to eat every morning for the past year or so because I know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day don’t email me, mom!) but now I wake up starving with our little pumpkin kicking at my sides demanding sustenance.
I spend ten or fifteen minutes just lying in bed thinking about what I’m going to eat, it’s quite the production. Adam, obviously, is loving it. Especially since for the past three Sundays he has been served breakfast in bed, usually a huge traditional eggs, bacon, toast OJ affair but one time an epic breakfast sandwich with spinach and sliced peppers and goat cheese and bacon and fresh fruit on the side and OHMYGOD I’m hungry just thinking about it.
(YES I took pictures! If I don’t take pictures of this shit, people who know me in real life will never believe it happened! “Madeleine cooking? Breakfast? When she could be sleeping?!”)
Actually it’s not just breakfast- food in general has been a good time lately. Adam has been living vicariously through my cravings as evidenced my the chicken Caesar spinach wrap I made last night. I wasn’t craving it for myself, I just wanted to make it, to see it. I wanted someone to taste it.
I must admit though, I have been entertaining thoughts about *gasp* meat. I’m a vegetarian, (you can read about why, and judge me for it here) but also I’m a strong believer that given the opportunity, your body naturally craves what it needs. So I had promised myself that when I got pregnant if I started craving meat, I would eat it. The craving part was sort of important, because as it stands the thought of eating meat just completely grosses me out – it’s dead flesh, and we’re eating it! How weird is that? It’s been almost ten years since I went to the green side and now the idea of eating meat just seems strange. But, I vowed that if that changed, if I started craving juicy steaks, I would listen to my body and go for it.
That hasn’t happened quite yet, cooked meats still reside firmly on the gross side of my brain, and yet. Last weekend I sat next to one of my teenagers as he worked his way through a bag of beef jerky and I would be a filthy liar if I said that I wasn’t drooling.
(OKAY I TRIED A PIECE. I tried a piece of beef jerky. It was awesome. I want to eat beef jerky ten times a day and bathe in it and call Lady Gaga and get her old dress and make it into beef jerky and then EAT THAT TOO.)
Adam’s dad goes hunting quite a bit and sometimes makes jerky out of deer or elk, and this, I think, is the best and safest meat to eat, so perhaps when we’re en route to their cabin in a few weeks I can see if he has any extra lying around that his favorite daughter-in-law can shamelessly devour in the span of three seconds.
Of course, a side effect of all the gestating and the eating and the weight gain is that I. Feel. Ginormous. Huge. Adam has affectionately dubbed me “The Blobster”. I know that in the grand scheme of pregnancy I am not in fact huge, that things are only going to get bigger around here, but right now I feel like my skin is stretched to its limits. When I lay down in yoga I can feel the top of my uterus (or, to use my brother’s favorite word, my “fundus”) lying an inch or so above my bellybutton. That means that half of my torso is now devoted to the Demon baby, which leads me to wonder “What more do you want?!” I feel like by the end of this I’ll be feeling kicks in my collarbones.
Things just feel a bit squished and stretched and full and I look at myself and wonder how on earth I’m possibly going to get bigger. But I am. So I just wish myself into that sweet state of denial and rub myself with belly cream and try not to think about how far out this thing will go.
Also: it is now possible to see the baby’s kicks from the outside, but apparently they don’t translate very well onto film, so if anyone wants approximately 1,865,267 videos of my bare belly moving up and down as I breathe with absolutely nothing else happening, just let me know mmkay?
Love you Demon Baby!