The Quickening

I’m still not 100% convinced, but yesterday morning in the pre-dawn silence, I was lying in bed concentrating very hard on my uterus, and I’m pretty sure I felt the baby moving.

Cool, eh?

It was that indistinct, barely-there sort of flutter that I once read described as similar to the flick of a goldfish’s tail.

I’d thought maybe I’d felt it a few times before, but then the bubbling feeling passed its way down my digestive tract and I realized what I had been feeling was indeed gas from the previous night’s guacamole and refried beans.

But this time, the movement was more fluttery and less, er, bubbly, and it stayed in one place for the few minutes that I indulged in just lying there feeling it. It’s a long way from those seismic tremors that will visibly shake my whole belly in three or four months, but it’s a start, and I love love love being able to feel the baby move. It’s my hands-down favourite part of being pregnant. That, and the whole excuse for being centre of the universe for nine months. Ahem.

But I got to thinking… don’t you think it’s rather, um, undignified that the poor fetus in utero so closely resembles so many of our less savoury bodily movements? I mean, the baby’s first kicks feel like gas, and I clearly remember being astonished when pushing Tristan out how much birthing a baby feels like the world’s largest bowel movement.

So much for the romanticism of pregnancy and childbirth!

By the way, there seems to be a rash of pregnancies where I work. Last count there were five of us all due between March and May, and most of them are first-timers. I know at least a few of them read the blog, so it will be fun to share our horror-stories honest accounts of pregnancy and childbirth with them in mind over the next little while.

Speaking of being pregnant, I’ve been trying to think of a more clever category name for my pregnancy-related posts than “a little bit pregnant.” For one thing, a woman who births 9 lbs and 10 lbs babies and who has switched to maternity clothes by the 15th week is hardly a “little bit” pregnant – especially with the sky-high beta numbers I had. And then of course, the name is also dangerously close to a rather well-known somebody else’s blog.

So speak, bloggy friends. Today is “name that label” day. What should I call my pregnancy posts?

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