My Body Is Mocking Me

Today marks the official two-weeks-to-go point of this pregnancy, and I couldn’t be readier. When I got close to the end of my pregnancy with my son, I really didn’t know what to expect, and I was assuming that I wouldn’t deliver until my due date or even later, so I wasn’t really watching for signs at this point. I was actually very surprised to wake up a week and a half before my due date because my water had broken and I was having contractions. But with this baby, I’ve been convinced all along that I’ll go early, so I’ve been eagerly looking forward to any and every sign of impending delivery.

With my son, I wasn’t aware of when he turned head-down, it wasn’t obvious when he dropped, I had almost no Braxton-Hicks contractions, my cervix wasn’t dilated at my last doctor’s appointment, and my water broke right when my contractions started. I really didn’t have much advance warning at all. It was just BOOM! Heeeeeere’s labor! But with this pregnancy, I could tell you exactly the day that the baby turned and dropped. I’ve been having Braxton-Hicks for a number of weeks and today I’ve been having them all day long, about half an hour apart. (I know they're Braxton-Hicks because they're painless - whoever thought I'd be WISHING for pain??) And I was just over 1cm dilated at last Monday’s appointment. I think my body is mocking me for all my expectations.

My husband has been warning me all along not to get my hopes up for an early delivery. He’s kept reminding me that if I expect to go into labor two weeks early and I don’t, I’ll be horribly disappointed. Whenever I tell someone, “I have two weeks to go, but I think it will be less than a week,” he says, “It’ll probably be in three weeks.” And he’s probably right. Even if he isn’t right, he’s wise. Because that extra week will seem like an eternity. An eternity of acid reflux, full bladders, and waddling.

So I guess I’d better just suck it up and plan on being in one piece for three more weeks. You hear that, body? Three more weeks! I admit it! This baby isn’t coming early, it’s coming late! So I’ll just have to wait for it.

I just hope my body isn’t wise to reverse psychology.

Pregnancy and Food

No, this blog is not about what you think. Yes, many pregnant women are obsessed with food (either because they want it all the time or because they never want to see it again), but this obsession isn’t with food that you’re eating, it’s with the comparison of the size of a developing fetus and various food items.

One of the things that isn’t much different between when I was expecting Ryan and this pregnancy is that I love to look on the internet each week to see what stage the baby is at. And my favorite part is finding out how big Rutabaga is now – specifically, which food item the fetus is compared to every week. The majority of the items are fruits, but there is quite a variety of food products used, from seeds to fruits to vegetables to seafood. I’m not sure who decided that food should be the standard of comparison, but dozens of websites use the same standard. This week being week 12, I am told that Rutabaga is now the size of a lime. Last week s/he was the size of a fig. In fact, for your reading pleasure, here is the progression of fetal-food comparisons week by week, starting at 4 weeks: poppy seed, sesame seed, lentil, blueberry, kidney bean, grape, kumquat, fig, lime, shrimp, lemon, apple, avocado, turnip, bell pepper, “large heirloom tomato” (apparently just “tomato” would have been too vague), banana, carrot, spaghetti squash, mango, ear of corn, rutabaga (!!!! Really!!), English hothouse cucumber (again, “cucumber” would be too vague?), head of cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, butternut squash, head of cabbage, four navel oranges (apparently they ran out of appropriate vegetables – also, at this point they begin comparing weight rather than length), jicama, pineapple, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, Crenshaw melon, stalk of Swiss chard (and we’re back to length again, for some unknown reason), leek, mini watermelon (many expectant mothers would disagree with the word “mini” by this stage), pumpkin, and finally, baby. Whew!

I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry after reading that list! The only problem is that now I can’t bring myself to eat a butternut squash or a pumpkin or a jicama without thinking, “Hey, this reminds me of an X-week-old fetus!” and then promptly losing my appetite.

But I’ll admit that it is a lot more fun to picture a tiny baby as being the size of a grape rather than the dry “3/4 inches” or the even drier “1.6 cm”. I can’t picture a length without physically spreading my fingers that distance apart and looking at them, but tell me “apple” and I know exactly how big you mean. Any woman who’s ever asked a hairdresser to take off half an inch and ended up scalped understands that everyone’s concept of a measured length is different. But a kumquat is a kumquat is a kumquat. I suppose that food items are universal enough that everyone understands them and can easily picture them.

So I’ll just have to avoid eating bananas, carrots, mangos, and Chinese cabbage for a few months. I just hope that no-one ever compares the size of my baby to the size of a bowl of ice cream!

Hello, Baby Bump, I've Been Expecting You!

I’m naturally a relatively slender person, but I have no muscle tone at all so I’ve never had what would be called a flat tummy. The gentlest way to put it is that I have a “softly rounded belly”. It was true before my son was born and it was definitely true after he was born. I got back to my pre-baby weight pretty quickly, but my figure was not quite the same shape. So with this pregnancy, despite all the conventional wisdom that second pregnancies show earlier than first pregnancies, I have been approaching the end of my first trimester with no noticeable baby bump, just my usual “soft roundness”.

Until this morning. I got undressed to hop in the shower, caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, and thought, “Where did THAT come from? It wasn’t there yesterday!” There was definitely roundness, but it certainly wasn’t soft any more. I went from zero to baby bump in literally 24 hours.

Which means I’ve hit the stage that every pregnant woman dreads: the “Is she fat or is she pregnant?” stage. The stage where your regular clothes are too tight but maternity clothes are still ridiculous. The stage where you discover tricks like putting a rubber band around the button of your jeans, through the buttonhole, and back around the button to buy you another inch or two around the waist. The stage where you wear long sweaters and leave your pants unbuttoned. The stage where you dig out every blousy, empire-waisted top and oversized sweatshirt in your closet. The stage where you borrow your husband’s clothes. The stage where you live in low-slung yoga pants. THE FAT STAGE.

Fortunately, I have one pair of jeans that has always been somewhat generous in the waist and is still comfortable. Unfortunately, they’re white denim so I can’t pretend I’m wearing a new pair of jeans every day like I could if they were standard blue denim. Anyone who sees me every day knows I wore the same pair of pants yesterday. (Fortunately, my husband and my son are the only ones who see me every day and neither of them really cares if I wear the same jeans for a month.) Also, white is not the most practical for wearing several days in a row when one has a 15-month-old who’s just learning to use a spoon and a cup. So yoga pants to the rescue! At least I can alternate the two until there’s enough laundry for a load – and it’s convenient that one pair is light and one is dark so whichever load is full first, that’s the pair that gets washed that day.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very excited about my baby bump. As lousy as I feel when I’m pregnant, I’m delighted to look the part, and I love seeing physical evidence of the little life that’s growing inside me. I have several friends who have had babies in the past week or two, and seeing photos of them with their newborns makes me even more excited to go through the whole process again. I had wondered if going through it a second time would be less awe-inspiring, if I would be less amazed by each milestone because I’d seen and felt it before. But I’m still astonished at the miracle of procreation, and my heart still skips a beat or two at each new development.

Welcome, baby bump, I’ve been looking forward to seeing you!

What a Difference a Day Makes

Yesterday morning I got out of bed and wished I could turn around and crawl right back in. Or die. Either option was equally welcome. I was sick and tired and I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I thought I’d had terrible morning sickness when I was pregnant with my son but for the past three weeks I’ve hardly been able to function. On a good day I managed a shower (but had to lie down and rest before I had enough energy to get dressed). On a bad day (which was most of the time), I spent all day on the couch feeling sorry for myself. Fortunately the basement is baby-proofed enough that I could let Ryan run around and keep himself entertained while I “supervised” from the couch. When I didn’t have the energy to stop him from pulling all the videotapes off the shelf, I’d put him in his playpen for an hour or two to give myself a break. Sometimes I’d crawl in there with him and just lay on the floor watching him and chatting with him. The poor kid obviously sensed my distress and would periodically tug at my arm or my sweater (OK, let’s be honest: my nightgown) to get me to sit up. I felt like a horrible, neglectful mother, but it was all I could manage to keep him fed, changed, and safe.

But yesterday afternoon, all that changed. I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, and when I told her all my woes she gave me a prescription for Zofran. I had my doubts as to how helpful it would be, since my sickness was not only nausea but light-headedness, shakiness, and exhaustion, but I figured that even if it only took the edge off it would be a move in the right direction.

Oh, ye of little faith. Within an hour of taking the first pill (and it wasn’t even a whole pill, it was half a pill!), I felt like a new woman. Instead of lying miserably on the couch, I was sitting up. Instead of staring unhappily around the kitchen and being repulsed by the thought of food, I eagerly ate two servings of hearty soup. My husband and I were sitting in the study and for some reason I laughed at something, and he turned to me and said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh in weeks.” And I realized that he was right. I’d been trying to put a good face on things, but I didn’t realize how miserable I’d been (to myself and to those around me) until I was back to my old self again.

I did sleep late today, but when I got up I had breakfast, I took a shower (I didn’t even take a nap afterwards), I brushed my hair, I took Ryan shopping, I made myself real food for lunch, and then – wonder of wonders – I cooked dinner. I even tasted it while I was cooking it. And I’m even looking forward to eating it! I’m not ready to run a marathon or anything, but the fact that I’ve been upright for more than 8 hours in a row is nothing short of a miracle.

Only a little more than twenty-four hours ago, I was prepared to endure this pregnancy, to merely get through it - to enjoy it in theory but not in practice, so to speak. I am, of course, absolutely delighted to be expecting another child. This child was just as hoped-for, just as prayed-for, and just as longed-for as our first child. But the thought of feeling the way I did for nine more months (or even nine more hours!) was almost more than I could bear. But the relief and the joy of feeling healthy enough to truly enjoy and appreciate the miracle of another child growing inside me is almost more than I can bear in a good way.

What a difference a day makes.

Every Rutabaga Is Different

[The blog entry is dedicated fondly to my college advisor, Dr. Russ Camp, who taught me not only that every rutabaga is different, but who also taught me the "Linus Pauling Song", which is sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and includes the immortal lyrics, "Glory glory Linus Pauling, glory glory peptide bonding, glory glory polypeptides, that do the twist to form proteins, rah rah rah!" And a special shout-out to fellow alumni and now professors Dr. Craig Story and Dr. Dorothy Boorse, both of whom carry on in the tradition of Dr. Camp.]

When I was in college, one of my biology courses included a lab session in which we determined the enzyme content of a rutabaga. Each student was given a rutabaga to process and analyze. Naturally, at the end of the lab all the students compared their answers and immediately went into a panic because our results were all over the map. But the professor reassured us that we hadn’t necessarily screwed up the experiment; it was just that “every rutabaga is different.” And for the rest of our college careers, that phrase became our class motto. Any time something came out in a way we didn’t expect, we’d explain it by saying off-handedly, “Well, every rutabaga is different.”

I’ve been out of college for twenty years (gulp!), and I still catch myself using that phrase now and then. In fact, I’ve used it several times lately in reference to my second pregnancy. I find myself thinking, “By the time I was 9 weeks pregnant with Ryan, my pants were tight. Is something wrong with this pregnancy? No, it’s just that every rutabaga is different.” Or, “I never had trouble with food tasting funky with my last pregnancy, why do so many things taste weird this time? It must be because every rutabaga is different.”

I think the fact that symptoms can be so different from pregnancy to pregnancy is God’s way of preparing a mom for the fact that her children are likely to be completely different from each other, as well. My husband often found himself comparing our son’s development with that of his older daughter: “Rosemary used to squirm in the bathtub just like that!” or “Rosemary pulled herself up at the same age!” It bothered me sometimes, because I wanted to say to him, “He’s not Rosemary! He’s his own person!” But I realized that he was just recalling her childhood with all the joy and excitement with which we were both enjoying Ryan’s. And I have no doubt that I will do exactly the same thing with this new baby: “She’s squirming in the tub just like Ryan used to!” or “He’s pulling himself up just the same way Ryan did at that age!”

And I’ll just have to remind myself that this new baby isn’t Ryan, she’s her own person (or he’s his own person). After all, every rutabaga is different.