Thursday Morning Wood: 17 Weeks

Last week, I started to feel better and lost my excuse to not do almost everything. I am no longer too tired to leave the house after 7:00 p.m., or too nauseous to pick up the dog's shit, or too queasy to eat anything that wasn't fried. In lard.

I loved having pregnancy as an excuse to fall asleep after work while Juniper climbed all over me, telling me about her friend Luther the owl, or instructing me to "get my butt off" her bed and read her a book. Now if I fall asleep on Juniper's bed after work while she plays, it's just because I'm lazy. I haven't had a migraine in over a month, though I had exactly fifteen from weeks 6 to 12. Though those migraines were horrible, they gave me the perfect excuse to close the door to our bedroom and sleep for hours during the middle of the day. I'm going to have to start hanging my clothes up again.

Now that I'm looking at all that in the rearview mirror, I finally feel comfortable writing about how horrible the first trimester was. This one was way worse than Juniper's first trimester, unless it's just that I forgot how awful hers was because I never wrote about it. Just in case I ever forget how every morning during the past few months I felt like my stomach was swirling with the bloated corpses of a dozen diseased rats, let me record it here: the first trimester of this pregnancy was absolute hell. At work, I spent my days running to the office bathroom past unsuspecting coworkers while trying to look like I wasn't in a hurry at all so that I could discreetly puke, all the time praying that no one would come in and hear me. At home, I was sleeping or wishing that I was sleeping.

I am so glad to be over that.

Now I'm at that stage where I don't have a single thing to bitch about. I can't yet complain about being big and uncomfortable. My clothes are tight and many of them don't fit at all, but that just means I get to dip into my fat pants from 3 years ago. I lugged the bin of old maternity clothes from the basement last night, and I'm still sneezing from the smell and dust. At one point, I called Dutch into our bedroom to marvel at a pair of gigantic gray, elastic-waisted pants. I don't think he remembered that I was ever that big. He assumed they were the bottom half of an elephant costume.

A few days ago, I resolved myself to enjoy this pregnancy. It is probably the last one I'll get to experience, and now that I'm not puking or scraping at my brain in agony, I want to savor it. I'm going to stop skipping ahead in the pregnancy books, and I'm trying not to think about how desperately I want to meet this baby. During my pregnancy with Juniper, I was consumed with the desire to just get it over with so that I could finally hold her and see her and know that she was okay. This time, I'm going to try to relax.

Last night I finally realized that the fluttering I felt low in my stomach every so often wasn't my imagination: it's the baby. There really is one in there.

I figure I do have one excuse left. If Dutch catches me sleeping while Juniper draws all over my face in permanent marker, I'll just tell him my body is storing up sleep for the long hard slog ahead of us.