i noticed a couple of days ago that my pants were fitting funny. yesterday i realized it’s because my ass doesn’t seem to be as large as it was.

can that be true? i’m almost in my 8th month and my ass is actually *shrinking*? that’s just not in keeping with my world view. i mean, sure, i haven’t gained much weight in the past month or so and charlotte certainly has, but still, a smaller ass?

alas, i was wrong. as a previously pregnant co-worker pointed out, my ass wasn’t getting smaller. my hips were spreading and my ass was flattening out as it stretched to keep up.

lame.

(posty-post later?)

an absurd amount of stuff has happened in the last …two months?! that hasn’t really gotten documented here. no big worries, because most of it wasn’t baby-related. i have grown much bigger, but alas, there are very few pictures to document the growth. i promise i’ll get that done soon…i just don’t know when.

to catch you up to speed:

the first half of my second trimester was a breeze, like they say it can be some times. there was very little pain, random baby movements to make me feel contented and no baby-related drama. sure, my ankles/feet swelled up if i didn’t behave, but that was about it.

at the end of june, however (week 21ish and my 30th birthday), things changed almost overnight. bones started separating, making it awkward and painful to walk. my hands developed carpal tunnel syndrome, hurting when i typed and falling numb when i slept. my breasts, which had been behaving thus far, started leaking just enough to be a bit irritating, and speaking of leaking, that whole “bones separating” bit led to some other “leaks.”

at my 6 month checkup in early july, my doctor assured me that all of this was normal and gave me some helpful advice on how to deal with all of it. we also took another look at the the baby and it was officially declared a girl.

so, charlotte anne it is.

for a few days, i found this news quite unsettling. not that we were having a girl, but that knowing the child’s gender, assigning her an official name, made the entire person-creating process seem more real and more absurd. sure, i’m impressed with the fact that my body knows exactly how to make another human being without being told, and of course, i knew the whole time that a baby would eventually come out of me, but the fact that this person, this entity that is “charlotte anne” exists now and will never not exist and is unique among the world and such just sort of blew my mind. it still does. it’s hard to explain. everyone who’s tried to repeat it back to me (”so you’re saying….”) doesn’t quite express it in the way it makes me feel.

the last few weeks have been spent doing any number of things. we moved into our loft, filling it as best we could afford with new lofty furniture. we mourned the passing of ryan’s mother, who had been fighting stage 4 colon cancer for the last 3 years. we took on an almost entirely new (save me?) account/project management staff at work to help us scale. we picked up two house guests who will be living with us through september, and will hopefully still be in town for charlotte’s birth a month later. we registered for the bulk of charlotte’s new stuff, but will need a second trip to sort some things out and register at a second store.

all the stress, plus growing into the 3rd trimester (next week!) did a number on my stomach. early last week i started having some acid-related discomfort that i assumed would be tempered/resolved by doing the smaller-meals thing. i tried that, without altering my diet too much (i like the rich, spicy stuff which thusfar has not really been any trouble) and things seemed to be doing “okay.” friday night, however, things became unbearable and for the first time since being pregnant i threw up. a lot. a lot a lot. and a few sips of water were enough to almost send me back to the toilet.

after a call to the doctor on saturday morning, i spent the bulk of the day resting on the couch, nervously sipping on clear soda, munching on saltines all the while being extremely hungry and terribly thirsty. before going to bed (when i had upgraded to white bread), i still felt uneasy and anxious. too much too soon and i’d be right back where i’d started, which was not a place i wanted to be. today i feel much better, and am cautiously adding things like milk and slightly tastier bland things to my diet. there’s a bbq this afternoon that will try my willpower greatly. i have completely missed out on the fair-food from this weekend’s straussenfest, and this is the only fest with plate-sized potato pancakes covered in horseradish sauce. ah well, that’s not as tasty when you’re stone-cold sober anyway.

so that’s pretty much all there is to say right now. i’ve gotten “bored” with the books that tell me what pregnancy is like and am focusing more on breastfeeding and early baby/me care. those first 6 weeks post-birth? those sound like more of a doozy than anything i’ve faced or read about up till now.

i’ll try to check in again before too long.

well… yeah.

we don’t know.

after a 40 minute ultrasound, 20 minutes of which was sex-hunting (and boy did we hunt) the baby was pronounced as “probably a girl, but i’m not sure.” this isn’t the standard “we can only tell with 95% certainty it’s a girl” probably, either. the tike had it’s legs tucked up to it’s chest and it’s ankles crossed right over the important bits. no amount of attempting to jar them loose worked, and the technician was clearly a pro. at my next checkup, in a month or so, we’ll see if we can look again, even though there’s no ultrasound scheduled.

the baby, boy or girl, is healthy and well. all the bits and pieces were the right size, shape, etc, which is so thrilling most of me doesn’t care that we don’t know the gender. i’d much rather not know that than anything else that might not have been clear on the scan. the scan itself was pretty crazy. i’m a fan of technology, and this stuff is amazing. we even managed to snag a 4 minute video of the thing for showing to family and friends. as soon as we locate a vcr….

for now, i’m switching my pronoun to “she” as much as possible. partially because of the “probably” and partially to build the image of charlotte in my head as concretely as arthur is. we celebrated the news by buying a little outfit. unfortunately it had neither pink ruffles nor blue sailboats, but is still pretty dang cute.

the baby is about to take it’s first plane ride in the morning, so i’m going to get some sleep now.

subtitled: hiccough wars

so there’s definitely something inside of me. i realize this has been the case all along, but in the past week or so, the little flutters and maybe-kicks have transformed into very clear pokes. i think this kid has the hiccoughs all the time. i’ll get isolated movements occasionally, where it seems he’s just adjusting position or whatever, but more often than not, there will be distinct pulses, usually 3 or 4 in a row, evenly timed, and with no “movement” like he’s switching positions. what can that be other than hiccoughs? i manage to catch my own every so often and have been known to point at my stomach and say “hah! see how you like it, buddy!” apparently that’s a bit …disconcerting to whoever happens to be around me.

a few times they’ve been strong enough that they can be felt from the outside, and ryan was able feel it on friday. i’m not sure how he felt about it, but for me, it brought a new level of reality to the whole thing. it’s no longer “this thing that’s happening to me,” but something that’s officially happening to us. yes, yes, dealing with my hormones and diet drama and being part of purchases of maternity clothes and needing to slow down when we walk places and being woken up in the night when i’m uncomfortable or have to pee etc, etc, means that this pregnancy is most certainly happening to him as well. but still, now some of the cool-yet-freaky things are a part of his experience. i say yay to that.

tomorrow is our “big ultrasound” at the doctors. lots of checking out the baby to see if he’s healthy, taking video for us to share with others, and of course, to determine if i’ve been right about this “he” stuff, or if i need to do a very abrupt change in my perception.

and that’s going to be weird. it’s not that i want a boy as much as i have this really concrete image in my head about what this boy-baby will look like. if it turns out we’re having a girl, not only is my imagining way behind, but that boy-baby has to go away. granted, i may be so thrilled to see the little twerp, gender aside that it won’t really matter :)

i should be making some updates to the picture gallery tonight, too.

the fact that i’m pregnant has officially made it’s way into my subconscious. more often than not, if i’m in a dream i’m aware that i’m pregnant. recently, however, the baby has started to make an appearance.

the first dream was last weekend. we brought “the baby” to show my parents and some of their friends. the baby was a bit disfigured (because that’s how baby dreams go sometimes) but nobody seemed to notice. i had enough of a “this is a dream” awareness to decided to check the sex, to see if i could learn something. sadly, the baby was as disfigured “down there” as it was on it’s face, so i gained no subconscious insights that night.

last night i had a series of dreams (even between mid-night potty breaks) that seemed to either be testing me, or reassuring me that i knew what to do in general situations. there was a baby in the dream (actually, it was a puppy at first) but nobody really did anything to/for it until remembered that it needed to be done (feeding, changing, sleeping) or that i pointed out that something was wrong (no car seat, the baby was actually a puppy, etc). it made for a very bizarre set of dreams. i think the fact that it carried over to other dreams, when i would suddenly remember “wait, there’s a baby. where is it?” was what made it so odd.

so yeah. one of the sites that emails me regularly said that the hormones are probably going to start messing with my dreams. if this isn’t what “messed with” looks like, i’m not sure i want to know ;)

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!

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.