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).
