I'm not fat, I'm pregnant

I've worked hard to get to a point where I have ok feelings about my weight. I have figured out where my weight seems to like to fall, dieting doesn't generally do much to get me below my comfy weight and it takes a while for me to get above it. I have a 5 pound range that I'm ok with. With the gradual decline of morning sickness and a fetus now the size of a "large pickle" (wierdest mental image ever!), I'm starting to creep past my 5 pound range.

Theoretically, I totally get that if you are pregnant, you will gain weight. You have to. There's another person depending on you to gain weight. Apparently though, years of conditioning to start thinking about what I'm eating once I hit that high end of my range is difficult to subvert. My husband pointed out to me that I can actually gain more than 1 pound per week, at this point, and still stay right around the 25 pound mark for weight gain. He's taken to complementing me on "showing." I'm excited about the showing, I know I'm eating fairly sensibly, but, I never thought I'd be one of "those women" who worries about getting fat when she's pregnant. The whole issue makes me hope we'll have a boy who can have problems with expressing emotion appropriately but, at least, will never wind up wondering if he should eat the whole pizza.

I am also thrilled to note that there is now enough room, as well there should be with all the creepy loosening that's been going on, to accommodate both the baby and my bladder. I can now sleep for a full 4-6 hours without having to get up. I consider this to be a major coup! This advancement has been accompanied by much catch-up sleep. I now am capable of sleep-of-the-dead, pillow face, don't shift position for 3 hour naps and still fall asleep by 10, sleep.

I'm still waiting for that energy burst that supposedly comes in the 2nd trimester but, I haven't given up hope. For now, I seem to be "nesting" or what I might refer to as an impending sense of doom. In the last several days, I've decided that if the garden doesn't get in shape in the next 3 weeks, I will never have any hope ever again. The fact that I have been relentlessly tackling the garden for the last 2 summers and still haven't actually gotten the whole thing weeded seems immaterial to my hormone driven garden blitz. Similarly, I am concerned that if the nursery doesn't get completed and all painting projects finished by July, we will forever scar our baby with paint fumes. Important to note is that the baby isn't actually due until September. As I was an overachiever in the realm of morning sickness, I seem to also be striving for great heights in the "before the baby gets here, we need to..." department as well.

Eeep!

I think I may have felt the baby for sure this time. I'm thinking it was the baby's head or butt, personally. I was laying with my laptop on my tummy when I suddenly felt my tummy pushing pack at the laptop. I felt my tummy and there was this firm spot and then the firmness went away. Now I am even more loathe to get up and be productive today because I just want to lay here and see if it happens again. Eeep!

Hmmm...

So, I continue with the wierd dreams. Last night I was a writer for WB cartoons. I came up with a story line involving a bully and a possessed marble interspersed with scenes from Mad About You. It was tres odd.

I suspect that I may have started to feel the baby but am hampered by an inability to figure out how things are arranged in my abdomen at the moment. Up until the last several weeks I could confidently identify the placement of my intestines so that I could tell I was feeling gas and not the baby. Now, not so much.

I'm still not showing significantly and am still wearing my looser, regular clothing. The one big advantage to extended morning sickness seems to be that I've had no trouble with excessive weight gain. I'm a little worried about what will happen now that it seems to be tapering off but, I guess I'll just have to see what happens.

I had my first tummy touch on Sunday. I really thought I had a while to go before having to deal with that. It seems like you at least need a bump you can see through your clothes before the rubbing of the Buddah begins but, alas. I will have to re-instate the step-shuffle thing I used to do in middle and high school to avoid over-eager young things and their very fast hands.

Hyperventilating in the toy aisle

First, an apology. I wrote this lovely post last week but didn't actually post it. Oops. So, sorry for the long space between postings.

I am now in the middle of my 17th week and it looks like I may, finally, be wandering away from morning sickness. Apparently sacrificing a goat was just what the doctor ordered. As I have started to notice that there is a world beyond my gastrointestinal system, it's begun to dawn on me that we are almost halfway to having a baby actually in our house. So, when my husband needed to hit Home Depot, I decided to check out the baby section at Target. Shortly thereafter the hyperventilating began. How can there possibly be so many variations of the same thing? I came the the conclusion that there was no way I could navigate strollers or sleep "systems" without a sherpa and large amounts of dark chocolate. So, over to the cute little toiletries section I went. I was immediately struck by the thermometer conundrum. I have heard rumor that the ear thermometers are less than accurate but, I seriously doubt that I will ever pull off the entire heiny temperature taking thing. I was encouraged by the existence of the pacifier/thermometer but thought that there must be something up with it since there was only one version of the pacifier kind while there were a bevy of options for the ear and heiny thermometers. The only thing I left feeling confident about was that I did not want a diaper genie.

In other news, it looks like I'll be having a c-section for several reasons I don't really want to go into and I had my first experience with real maternal guilt. I won't be able to feed the baby for a few hours after the surgery. I understand that they do have bottles and what not that they can give to the baby if the baby is desperate. I understand that my husband will be with the baby the entire time. I even understand that they have cute little blankets and hats and that my little darling will not just be placed on a rock to await my recovery. But, I'm totally stuck on the whole "Ack! I will introduce this child to the cold cruel world and the baby will be hungry and I will be napping! Ack!" Interestingly, I have yet to encounter a baby book with a page for "Mommy's first guilt ridden panic attack at 3 am."

I have noticed that now that I can actually sleep long enough to get to REM sleep and not have to hop up to pee, puke, contemplate if that cramp might indicate a miscarriage, or any other of the wonders of the first trimester (or first and some change, in my case) I am having really weird but vivid dreams. The other night I was in prison and wearing a mask like Jason wears and I was hosing off other inmates. I was really glad I was wearing the mask because I was in a men's prison and I didn't want them to know I was a woman. Then I was released from prison and was a pregnant nun (no, I didn't get pregnant in prison- just a magic dream pregnancy). But, I didn't want people to know I was pregnant (all about the secrecy in my dream life). So, this other lady was pregnant and somehow I passed my baby off as hers and then raised my child (a girl) in the dungeons of the Nunnery where she grew blonde hair, was brilliant and spoke french. So, anywho...

In a completely unrelated note: Am I the only one who is completely dying to see both Stick It and that movie about the English town that starts making shoes for transvestite?

Cravings...

I continue to be cautiously optimistic with the morning sickness. I can now go for about 2 days at a stretch without puking. I do seem to be a little odd in the morning sickness world however as, I have either been waking up to puke at 4am or puking after breakfast even when I was assured that if I just ate, I would feel better. As a tip, firmly telling your stomach that you aren't puking results in a guffaw, using the phrase "I refuse to puke anymore" results in hysterical laughter by your entire digestive track. The plus side of all of this being that I can drink a milkshake whenever the opportunity presents itself with a feeling of near-virtuousness as I still haven't actually gained much weight to speak of and may have actually lost a little.

In the midst of all this fun, I have been having some rather odd cravings. Specifically latkes and jello shooters. I have been wanting a grape flavored jello shooter since at least Thursday. No, grape jello isn't adequate, there must be the bite and sting of the everclear or vodka in it. I have found that rinsing with mouthwash with a high alcohol content seems to abate the craving for "the sting" somewhat but really, nothing can replace the jello shooter. Might I also note that I last had a jello shot at least 3 years ago and perhaps even longer ago than that. I'm really not sure where the craving could possibly come from. And, after examining the "plush plagues bag" at judasim.com, I'm totally consumed by a craving for latkes...with sour cream and applesauce. So, to sum up, I apparently only crave items which are completely forbidden to me or which are a massive pain to prepare. I love me.

The Garden

In pregnancy news, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about the morning sickness today. While I have had several iffy moments, I have not actually puked today. We'll see if it lasts.

In other news, the garden...

My yearly war of the roses (and mint and wisteria and blackeyed susans and...) has begun. The last couple of days have been in the 60s and 70s with a nice breeze and I decided that the time had come. The previous owner of our house lived here for about 30 years and apparently liked to garden- as in, he spent 4-5 hours everyday working on the garden. He had a particular fondness for anything invasive, aggressive, or high maintenance. It also seems that he severely neglected weeding and mulching for his last couple of years here. When we bought the house, I naively thought, oh, a garden! Great! This is my 3rd summer with the garden and I still haven't managed to actually weed all of the existing plots. There is one massive plot and 2 smaller ones. We have a total of 13 roses, most of which being the wussy tea rose that is the best friend of Japanese Beetles, black spot, and any other funkiness that wishes to have a passing flirtation with rose leaves. He also had a fixation with rose bushes that produce maximum thorns. Did I mention I try to garden organically and knew nothing about rose care prior to moving in?

In addition to the oh so pitiful roses, I have spent the last 2 summers having long talks and practicing tough love with the wisteria (non-flowering), mint, etc. I won't even mention what I think of his fantastic decision to go with goldenrod as a way to add late-season color. Sometime in late July/early August napalm begins to come into discussions about the garden.

In a wonder of genetics, at this point, nothing in the garden is doing much but the forcythia (invasive AND aggressive- double score!) and the many, many dandelions. With an eye to the fact that I may be physically incapable of actually bending down to weed sometime in the relatively near future, I finally broke down and bought some landscape fabric. I have seen some gradual improvement. Last spring I was able to differentiate early poppy growth and dandelions (hint: poppies are furry) saving much heartache and wasted time. I also got a jump on the side bed in April last year and applied 18 billion tons of mulch and that bed actually looked mostly decent for a hunk of the summer with little further intervention from me. And, when I pruned the roses yesterday (yes, it's late, I know, do I care?) I noticed that there was far less dead and/or diseased wood than there has been the last couple of times. And, I do love me the 4 peony bushes that do what they're told, look lovely, and smell nice as well as the false indigo- quite pretty and happiest when staked and then neglected.

No one does "paranoid" like Jack

So, still with the morning sickness. I have tried everything short of sacrificing a small yak to a minor deity. I have finally given in and simply take the phenergan. Yes, it knocks me out for 4 hours at a stretch but, for the rest of the day, I can actually enter the kitchen and no, I can't just take a 1/4 pill as that makes me just sleepy enough to be dizzy and get motion sickness- not such a help. On the up side, it IS just morning sickness. I can keep liquids down, I don't need iv fluids, I haven't gained any weight but I'm only down by a pound or two. It could be so much worse. I tell myself this a lot, especially at 4 am...

Since I have nothing amusing about pregnancy to say, I thought it was time for a puppy story! Gather round!

Thunderstorm season has started here. To be more precise, it started at 2am a couple of nights ago. That was when we discovered that sometime between last fall and this spring Penny has become much more frightened by thunderstorms. We also discovered that the safest place to be during a thunderstorm is under my pillow, barring that, sitting on my head makes a close 2nd. Interestingly, while the thunder is definitely of concern, Penny seems much more worried about the pounding rain on the roof. She spent a good hunk of the storm looking around frantically trying to identify where the invaders were. While I maintain that Jack Nicholson does the best brink of psychosis paranoia (re: The Shining), Penny was running a close second. While she was wandering around the bed, trying to dig a nice nest in our bed, climb under the bed, sniffing the air, or taking a quick foray into the bathroom to contemplate hiding in the bathroom closet, my husband and I were debating about what to do.

Shirley is our other dog and she is a very worried dog. Shirley has a lovely prescription for Xanax. We debated giving Penny some. Finally, brilliant puppy parents that we are, we realized that we crate trained the poor dear and then put the crate on the 1st floor while we, the pack, were inconveniently located on the 3rd floor. In times of danger, This Will Not Do! Penny is a firm believer that there is safety in numbers but her crate is the safest spot in the house- what is a puppy to do? We finally came to our senses and brought her crate upstairs so that both the crate and the pack were re-united. Penny has spent 75% of her time chilling in her crate ever since. Apparently, all is again right with her world.