Party of Four?

hi there! remember me? i’m making a baby!

i haven’t updated in over a month because…. um… well some non-baby stuff happened that sort of pulled my focus.

as far as the baby goes, we went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago and heard the heartbeat, which went a long, loooooooong way to alleviate some of my fears about the progesterone. i was worried that the drug might be preventing a natural miscarriage (ie: that nothing was growing anymore). so that was cool.

almost all my first-trimester symptoms faded away once i crossed the line. the only things that are going on this trimester are nose-related (allergies, sinus headaches, etc). a normal person might celebrate that, but i’m anything but normal. pre-heartbeat i was worried about the drugs, and the heartbeat-related confidence has started to fade for no good reason other than i’m me.

you see, my belly popped out a few weeks ago and then hasn’t really grown since then. and while pregnant friends have felt movement around week 14 or 15, i was cruising into week 16 with nary a flutter. or at least anything that i was remotely confident was a flutter.

until yesterday.

well, sunday. maybe a few days before. but yesterday was the first day i felt two very distinct moments of poking that were not connected to anything i ate.

so what does it feel like?

like indigestion only without indigestion. bubbling, gurgling, or whatever you want to call it. it’s like you ate something that disagreed with you and you can feel it moving as it goes all the way through your system. only it doesn’t move it just sort of appears in a place you don’t exactly thing there’s digestive organs and then it is gone.

i’m sure there are random flutters, but those are indistinguishable from any other twitching in my belly so i don’t have enough confidence to count them. part of me looks forward to feeling more and to have a more frequent reminder that yes i’m pregnant and yes everything’s still going okay. part of me is freaked out that there’s a thing inside of me that is big enough to poke at me and is only going to get much, much bigger before it’s “done.”

and then there will be a baby!

i’m finding it a bit surreal that i’m “celebrating” mother’s day not just as a well-wisher this year.

so hi.

i promise to post a “regular” update and put up some pictures soon, but life’s been sort of … beyond … these past couple of weeks so i’m behind.

instead, you’re gonna get a taste of what it’s like to be crazy-hormonal with the crying and stuff.

today we took a slight detour to target to pick up some random stuff. on our way to the maternity “section” (in my opinion, 3 little racks does not a section make), was the children’s clothing section. a little onesie with “i (heart) daddy” on it threatened to completely destroy me. i was able to escape with just a few tears/sobs. most of this was due to the very, very recent passing of my own father, but still. it wasn’t like it said “i (heart) grandpa”. i tried not to blame the hormones but…

after i’d recovered fairly well and we were almost out the door, we passed by the card section. “gee, i guess we should get cards for our moms, huh? and maybe one for my grandmother since we’re going to see them, too.”

omg the weeping. from realizing that i could get “new grandma” cards for the moms, to recalling how i was going to tell my parents by simply giving them a card and signing it “twerp jr.” (what my dad did for mom’s day when she was pregnant with me…only w/out the “jr”), to seeing all the “happy new mom to you” cards, i just couldn’t keep it together. random tears and sniffling followed me all the way to the register when i realized that i needed kleenex (i have a cold something fierce). when i realized it was “too late” to get kleenex, i almost started crying again. fortunately, a more logical head prevailed, but ryan almost had to force me to go get some. it turns out you can go through the checkout lines more than once if you need to, especially if you’ve got someone on the other side to watch your stuff.

who knew? certainly not crazy hormonal me.