Monday, January 24, 2011

19 weeks



The kid is making itself very, very known via a series of acrobatics every night after 9pm. It's not discernible to outside observers or touchers, but it is very, very distracting to me.

We have our first ultrasound tomorrow and I'm so excited that it's best if I don't focus on it, because otherwise nothing will get done today.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Forbidden love

It's not often that I have cravings for the things I'm not supposed to have, but I am almost in tears because I am craving a cold turkey sandwich from the deli up the street. Cold thick-sliced turkey, mustard, shredded lettuce, on whole wheat bread.

I mean, my craving for beer continues unabated, but the sudden craving for deli turkey is overwhelming and unbearable.

Friday, January 7, 2011

News flash!

I've been asked by Persephone Magazine (an online feminist magazine) to do a weekly column for them about my pregnancy experience, both individually and through my personal feminist lens. Every Friday at 5:30PM EST, a new one goes up!

Here's my introductory piece.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

15 weeks, 6 days



We went to our second prenatal on 12/30 and heard the heartbeat again-- 140 BPM. I got a referral for our first ultrasound, and I'll book that appointment for our 19th week (approximately the week of January 19). I also asked for, and received, a referral for prenatal massage due to the pain I've been experiencing. I finally looked at the referral sheet closely tonight-- my beloved, perfect, AMAZING midwife prescribed me 30 massages! And insurance covers them! Or at least some of them, I am going to call Regence tomorrow and find out how many are covered so I can start scheduling them.

I can't believe we're almost at 16 weeks already, I went maternity clothes hunting again today and was pretty disappointed by the selections at Old Navy (do they just think pregnant women on budgets deserve to be ugly?) and Target (I do not need a mustard-colored shirt with a tiny boob pocket, thanks). I picked up some yoga pants which fit comfortably and will be absolute saviors, because my three pairs of regular yoga pants have become too uncomfortable to wear.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Merry Christmas from the family




I'm off to the 11pm service at Eastshore tonight, and Josh is off to play World of Warcraft, and Houdini is off to lick herself until she gets confused and licks her bed for five minutes before falling asleep, and Zoe is off to sulk that the dog is still around. It's been a pretty intense year for us: I got my BA, we ran our first 5K, I started graduate school, we moved to Ballard, we had a legendary party (apologies to the neighbors!), and I got pregnant. I really can't wait for next year.

I asked Josh what he was hoping for with regards to the kid, and he laid this bit of wisdom on me which I think is a pretty solid baseline for baby expectations: "I just want them to be healthy and have no compulsion to kill and eat people."

Merry Christmas!

Sunday, December 19, 2010

I'm sorry, your WHAT is spreading?

People lie about pregnancy. Sure, they tell you that you'll get nauseated by the sight of chicken, that you'll be tired and emotional and you'll tear up at the end of Elf for no good reason, but they don't tell you about the secret insidious scourge of pregnancy: relaxin.

Relaxin is a hormone your body makes anyway, but during pregnancy it's produced at 10x the normal rate. This means that your joints loosen up. This is good in some aspects: your pelvis isn't a single solid fortress, it's many parts jointed together and relaxin allows them to spread apart to prepare for birth (commonly referred to as your pelvic floor spreading), and it means that your back can recalibrate to your uterus spreading and pushing against your spine. On the bad side, relaxin contributes to the legendary pregnancy foot growth (I am willing to commit blood sacrifice if my feet won't grow-- they're already a size 11!), and as it is produced, the spreading it triggers in joints can be painful.

In my case, my pelvis has been aching from the spreading. I've been combating this with a lot of careful applications of heat and Tylenol, as well as a lot of lying around. If I drive for more than ten minutes, it's painful. If I stand for more than five minutes, it's painful. My back hurts as well, so when we go to our monthly prenatal appointment on the 30th, I'll speak with my midwife about getting a prescription for recurrent prenatal massages.

On the more "fun" side of pregnancy, I bought my first maternity jeans this week. I didn't think I really needed them, but they are SO much more comfortable than the "non-pregnancy jeans and Belly Band" combination I was rocking, and quite frankly, they're cuter than some of my non-pregnancy jeans. They also made me realize that yes, there is a bump there, however tiny, and it is growing even as my weight isn't changing. It still doesn't quite feel real yet, but I know that will change eventually.

I did live on the wild side this week: I had a cobb salad with blue cheese at the Soundsations holiday reunion dinner, and I had a small scoop of home-made champagne-grapefruit sorbet at a friend's holiday party (Becca made it and it was DIVINE, especially with raspberry topping). And before you clutch your pearls, the champagne is cooked down before it's rendered into sorbet.

In non-pregnancy news, I turned in my last final for the quarter on the 13th, and I've spent the week cleaning, napping, watching movies, and catching up on my fun reading. My goal is to finish the Wheel of Time books by the end of the year, which is no small feat: each hardcover averages about 800 pages and I'm halfway through the third-to-last one (there are a total of 13 titles in the series and I started the first one in January of this year, with breaks in between the books). I'm also trying to blow through the stash of trashy romances I've built up over the years from thrift store visits and free box finds, because some friends and I are starting a great/awful romance trading circle and I want to have some legitimately good and some legitimately horrible titles to get into circulation. I also want to finally go through my DVR-- I still haven't watched the last five episodes of Mad Men!

We're almost done with Christmas shopping-- thank goodness for the internet and Amazon, which have for the most part kept me out of malls and firmly in the grasp of sanity.

I'm sure I'll be posting more later, especially once I get the office cleaned to my liking and pictures uploaded so you can see our darling idiots being their darling idiot selves (I mean the cat and dog, obviously).

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

“So I decided to become a midwife… I wanted to deliver a thousand babies. And as each one arrives, especially the little girls, I’ll be there first to whisper into her tender little ear: REBEL! REBEL!”

-Emma Goldman