Category: Postcards from my uterus

• I was never entirely sure, during my first two pregnancies, whether I was carrying like a watermelon or like a basketball. I always suspected I was vaguely more watermelonish. This time, the belly is definitely higher and more out in front – aha, basketball.
• In light of the above, I have now reached a point in this pregnancy where there is more belly suspended out in space than cradled in the not-insignificant cavity created by my pelvic bones.
• The Player to be Named Later seems to have an especially strong relationship with gravity.
• He also never. stops. moving. In fact, I love this, as it’s like having my own little party going on all day long. There is nothing better than sitting in a boring meeting at work feeling him thumping happily and stretching this way and that. It’s like having a private conversation that favours nobody but me.
• I have been telling myself that this constant activity in utero is a sign of a placid, mellow baby. Please do not disabuse me of this notion.
• I have also reached a point where the baby and I are engaged in an endless battle over territory. He thinks the owns the place, and is oblivious to my claim that I was here first.
• Despite the fact of having clearly and unmistakably seen this baby’s exterior plumbing components, and having the male gender confirmed by the ultrasound tech, because of the differences in the way I am carrying this one and the fact that the dream never actually dies, I occasionally wonder if maybe I wasn’t seeing an index finger instead of, you know, a penis.
• I’m very glad that I had a low-lying placenta early in this pregnancy, which necessitated one more ultrasound next week. Just so I can be sure, once and for all, that he is in fact a he.
• The belly, obvious as it is, comes in very handy and I am not at all shy about milking it for all it’s worth.
• I’m all about the “expectant mother” parking spots.
• A few mornings a week, I get on a bus that is standing room only, and someone has always given up their seat for me.
• While I feel mildly guilty about turfing someone else from their seat for the 40 minute ride, I haven’t yet declined.
• On the other hand, I’m getting annoyed about what I can’t do. I shovelled the driveway the other night after we had 10 cm of wet snow fall. In retrospect, that wasn’t such a great idea, but I clearly remember shovelling the driveway throughout both my previous pregnancies and am getting tired of asking people to do stuff for me.
• I still have a little more than 10 weeks to go.
• This seems, in theory, like a very long time. However, with Beloved’s birthday, a conference in Toronto, Christmas and potentially Simon’s birthday in the interim, I’m thinking it’s really not going to seem like very long at all.
• While I’m looking forward to his arrival, I’m content to keep him tucked in here for a while yet. No diapers, no feedings, and two arms free seems like a fair trade off for comfortable sitting, lying or walking. For now.

It’s beginning to occur to me that after this pregnancy is over, we’ll have a baby to show for our efforts. A baby! A whole new person. I don’t know why it’s so easy to overlook that in these middling stages of pregnancy… denial, anyone?

Been a while, I think, since I’ve posted an update on the Player to be Named Later. Things have been progressing unremarkably, which is exactly what I would have wanted. I’m now officially in the third trimester, with just 11 weeks left until my due date.

You’ll be happy to hear (as I lick chocolate chip muffin crumbs from my fingertips) that I did not, in fact, fail my recent glucose test. Yay! I did score less than perfect on my iron test, though, so I’ll be boosting that with an herbal iron supplement recommended by my midwife. I’m not really surprised on this one. I’ve had problems with anemia on and off through the years.

Although I feel positively ginormous, I’m more or less right on track as far as the fundal height measurement goes at 30 cm. The midwife did rather judiciously allow, however, that I have some extra “tissue” around my stomach. Er, yes, thanks for that, I’m well aware of the extra padding. I’ve gained a rather alarming 30 lbs so far, so it looks like I’ll put on more than the 40 lbs I gained with each of the boys. Sigh.

The Player to be Named Later is an extremely active little thing (that’s a sign of a placid baby, right? please?) and the boys have both had a chance to feel him moving. Tristan especially seems entranced by this and likes to lay with his cheek against my belly waiting for movement.

Simon has come a long way from his insistence that “but I don’t want a baby brother!” as well. I picked him up from nursery school the other day and he told me he had made many paintings that day, one for Mommy and one for Daddy, one for Tristan, one for Katie (the dog) and Tiny (the cat) and one for his new baby brother. It’s only one of the ways the boys seem to have fully integrated the idea of their future baby brother into the family already – how adorable is that?

And remember that maternity t-shirt from Lee? Best! Maternity Shirt! Ever!! The boys absolutely LOVE when I wear it.

It’s the face over the belly they love. I tell them that the baby is bald like Tristan was, with a curlicue just like Simon’s curls, so he’s just like the best of both of them. Tristan drew a picture of himself and me riding a camel with our lightsabers (!) the other day, and he made sure to point out that he’d drawn me wearing my “baby face” t-shirt.

I only hope they adapt as well to the actual baby as they have to the idea of the baby. Baby! Can you believe it, there’s actually another baby coming at the end of all of this!

I’m getting a little worried. I’m only six months (technically, 27 and a half weeks) pregnant, and by all accounts, I’m friggin’ huge. No, really? Huge. Huge, like people ask me when I’m due and when I say “February” they go through this disbelief-shock-pity series of expressions and ask me if I’m sure there’s only one in there. Like, my own postal code huge. Like, I’ll soon have a gravitational pull equivalent to Pluto huge.

No doubt, my inherent lack of willpower has been a contributing factor, as has been my willingness to play fast and loose with the definition of “good nutrition.” And the fact that while I didn’t suffer overt morning sickness, I did feel like crap on toast for the first four months of this pregnancy, during which time I heavily self-medicated with my twin addictions to Coke Classic and potato chips. On the good side, I’ve compensated by continuing my weekly visits to the gym; on the bad side, a rather painful recurrence of my latent patello-femoral syndrome (translation: ouchy knee) has made me more sedentary than I would otherwise been.

All that to say, I’m huge. Don’t believe me? Ask my regular evening commute bus driver. I really quite like him and the personable way he greets every passenger with a smile. Last week, he used that “lower the bus” thingee for what I thought was a person getting on behind me. The next day, when I was the only person at the stop, I realized he was lowering the bus FOR ME. Either he thought I was too big to haul my ass up the step, or he feared my extra weight might blow the tires if he didn’t release some pneumatic pressure to account for my extra bulk coming on board. No joke. Huge.

This morning, as you read this, I’ll be going for my gestational diabetes glucose test. No one-hour screening test for me, though. Due to two overt “risk factors” (the fact that I am prone to large babies in the first place, and our old friend “advanced maternal age”) I get to skip the screening test and go straight to the no-messing-around test. First I have to fast for eight hours – and right now you should be snickering, because the only thing more cranky than a pregnant woman is a pregnant woman on a fast, especially if that pregnant woman on a fast is ME – and then I have to go in for a blood draw, drink some sugary concoction with a strong resemblance to orange pop, and then hang around for two hours metabolizing it before they can take another blood sample. Fun times!!

So it will be well after 10 am before I can have any food – or, gasp! coffee – after having fasted since bedtime the night before. And what do you want to bet the boys will continue to not adapt to the lack of daylight savings, leaving me awake and with neither food nor caffeine in my system for up to five hours or more? Oh, the myriad joys of pregnancy. (And you know I wouldn’t trade it for the world!)

Ahem. Only three days left to vote – hint, hint.

I once had a friend who was a self-confessed mean drunk. “I just don’t get it,” he said to me one day. “Whenever I drink, everybody else turns into an asshole.”

I can relate to this right now. I simply don’t understand why, every time I hit the third trimester of pregnancy, everybody and everything is suddenly so bloody irritating.

You certainly wouldn’t be thinking that it might just possibly be me, are you? ARE YOU?

Okay, so I admit it, it is me. I’m well aware of the fact, in some logical corner of my brain, that I seem to be lacking any sort of reserve of patience right now. Unfortunately, that small, lonely voice of intellectual acknowledgement gets drowned out when screaming banshee woman takes over and throws a temper tantrum because we’ve run out of mustard and nobody bothered to tell me.

The worst part is that if you were drawing a graph that delineates my relative irritability throughout the day, you’d see that it peaks in the same two places each day, which, coincidentally or not, usually match the times of greatest contact with my family: the hour between after-work and dinnertime, and the boys’ bedtime.

I try, I really do try, not to snap at the boys. I don’t want to be crazy-ranting-mother who goes off the deep end just because the kids have been asked to brush their teeth eleventy-hundred million times and instead are chasing the cat around the house. It’s not their fault I’m pregnant, and unlike their darling father who has learned to either do his best to placate me or get the hell out of the way when I’m in a mood, they don’t get why I’ve gone ’round the bend or that it’s (oh please, let it be) only temporary.

We were in the grocery store the other day, itself the font of much irritability, and I found myself being that woman, the one who speaks to her children in a barely controlled growl easily overheard by people standing nearby, who says incredibly helpful things like, “I brought you out here to get you a nice treat of cheese strings and you repay my kindness by goofing around and not listening to me and why can’t you just stand there and be good for two minutes because I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE!” What was actually pissing me off was the slow-moving self-scan line and the people who cut in front of me and the fact that I was tired at the end of a long day; the beneficiaries of this build-up and overflow of crankiness was, unforgivably, the boys.

I’ve apologized to both Beloved and the boys after particularly heinous displays of crank, and explained to the boys that everybody has bad days sometimes, but I want to work harder at preventing flare-ups of temper. What is it about this stage of pregnancy that makes my fuse so short anyway? You can only blame the hormones and the sleep-deprivation for so much, ya know? The good side, I suppose, is that while the periods of pique are sometimes intense and rather unpredictable, they are usually short-lived, rather like a summer storm.

I’d welcome your thoughts. Is this something common to all pregnant women, or just an amplification of my own occasional temper issues? What can I do to either amplify the tiny voice of reason that says, “Um, excuse me, you’ve just teetered off the edge of testy and into the abyss of ranting lunatic” or learn to step back from the cliff in the first place?

It’s not like I didn’t brace for it. After all, I’ve been pregnant a few times over the last six or seven years, so I know what to expect. I was walking into Loblaws when I felt it coming on, and I even paused and braced for it. It didn’t help.

I sneezed, and to my utter dismay, I squirted.

What the hell? I’m barely six months pregnant, and I didn’t even have a full bladder. I’ve even been doing my kegels.

Speaking of kegels, after birthing 9 lbs and 10 lbs of boy, I take my kegels very seriously. If I didn’t, I imagine my uterus may end up dangling somewhere between my knees by the time I whelp this one. I remember from our prenatal classes, way back when I was pregnant with Tristan, that the nurse said you should find an activity that you do every day and use that activity as a reminder to do your kegels. I could have maybe chosen when I’m standing in my private kitchen making dinner, maybe chosen my private bathroom while brushing my teeth, but no. For every single pregnancy, you know where the only place is that I can remember to do my kegels? At the bus stop. The Rideau Centre bus stop, that is, the one with a minimum of 75 people standing cheek-by-jowl waiting for one of the 6000 buses that pass by during rush hour.

I’m sure the occasional bystander must wonder about the well-rounded woman staring off into the middle distance with a look on her face not unlike she is passing a rather large bowel movement as she stands waiting for the bus. I’m just glad I am (usually) able to keep the grunting under control as I work those muscles.

Gah, sometimes I think pregnancy is just one long series of ever-increasing indignities so by the time you’re propped up on the table with your feet in the stirrups and a roomful of strangers staring at your hoo-ha, you simply don’t care anymore.

Ah well, I suppose there’s irony somewhere in the fact that after a long and arduous road to success, Simon is now perfectly potty trained… and I no longer am.

I’ve been noodling a post in my head for some time now about how sick I am getting of the Rideau Centre. For those of you unfamiliar with Ottawa, it’s the largest shopping mall in the city, and I traverse it daily from my bus stop to my office and back again. And then, of course, the magnetic draw of the food court pulls me back in a few more times a week. In the nearly three years since the end of my last maternity leave, I must have passed through that damn mall more than 2500 times. I’m truly and fully sick of it.

But the mall must have been listening to these unfavourable thoughts percolating through my brain, because yesterday, the Rideau Centre took a pre-emptive strike. One minute I was getting off the escalator and striding purposefully past Club Monaco toward the bus stop, and the next minute my right knee and outstretched hands were slamming forcefully into the tile floor. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to lock my elbows, or else I would have ended up in belly-flopping on the ground. I was so shocked by the impact that I actually held the pose for what seemed like quite a long time as I ran various mental system diagnostics to make sure all the parts were still functioning. My first thought, of course, was for the baby, but although it was a jarring landing, my knee and shoulders took the brunt of it and I was reassured to feel the baby moving just a few minutes later.

But the part that really surprises me is that not one person even looked at me, let alone stopped to see if I was okay. We’re talking the Rideau Centre in midafternoon – it makes Grand Central Station look deserted – and here’s an obviously pregnant woman on her hands and knees, tote bag splayed out at her side… and nobody did so much as a double-take. So I wobbled back to my feet and lurched on toward the bus stop, determined not to miss my bus despite my throbbing knee. (This morning, it’s sporting a lovely purple bruise most of the size of my palm… and wouldn’t you know it, that’s the same knee that’s been aching with a pregnancy-induced recurrence of my latent patello-femoral syndrome. Ouch.)

Damn Rideau Centre. Of all the things I’ll be happiest to leave behind on a year of maternity leave, it’s at the top of the list.

Speaking of pregnant, and further to the post earlier this week about cool photos at 21 weeks gestation, I was looking for something entirely different when I stumbled across a story from earlier this year about a baby who was born at 21w6d – and survived. And by the wickedest of chances, the day I found this article I too was – you guessed it – 21w6d gestation. I keep thinking of the baby I’m percolating as some lime-sized amorphous blob at this point, but sheesh, that’s a real baby I’ve got growing in there, and aside from the fact that he’s white and she’s black, I’m guessing he probably looks a whole lot like this right about now.

Click to embiggen. Photo courtesy of UK Daily Mail.

So while I found that story both touching and reassuring, I found the story (hat tip to the lovely Brown Eyed Bex, for sending it to me – haha not so funny, Bex!) of the Russian woman who just popped out a 17 lbs baby girl (!!!) a little more worrisome. You have to click through to the article, just to look at the photos!!

Seriously! Seventeen pounds! I mean, I’ve always been absurdly proud of having birthed my 9 lbs and 10 lbs boys, and have joked that I’d better not continue the pattern this time around… but SEVENTEEN pounds? And it’s her TWELFTH baby, no less. The mind boggles. But the part of the article that truly chilled my heart was where she said to the reporter, “I ate everything, we don’t have the money for special foods so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes.”

Um. Potatoes? Check. Noodles? Check. Tomatoes? Like they’re going out of friggin’ style. (Check.)

Yikes!

The ultrasound appointment went very well this morning. Beloved was teaching and couldn’t make it, but my lovely Mom accompanied me. She was there for Simon’s big reveal, too. What a great thing to be able to share with Granny!

Baby was sleepy, not moving around too much. The technician knew I was squirrelly to find out the gender so that was her first stop, but Baby’s legs were tightly clenched together. She did a few more measurements, and exclaimed with delight about how healthy all of Baby’s parts are. The organs, the spine, the brain stem, the heart – they all look perfect. The placenta is on the low side and near the cervix, but nothing to yet be concerned about.

And then she scanned back up to Baby’s bits and Baby’s legs were splayed wide open. Turns out just like Tristan and Simon, this Baby is an exhibitionist after all. No doubt about it, for the next five months or so I have a penis.

It’s a boy!!!