Now to take a break from our regularly-scheduled kvetching to bring you the reason why I find myself knocked up again.
Scene: Liam is getting his Sesame Street fix. Elmo’s topic of discussion this morning is “families.”
Liam: [Comes running over to give me a hug.] “Mama, you’re my family. I love you, Mama.”
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And that my friends, is the reason it’s all worth it.
Major flaw in nature’s procreation plan:Â late-pregnancy exhaustion due to hormones, inability to sleep due to sheer size and the loosening of joints that leads to hip-aches of unbelievable magnitude, and the seemingly never-ending energy required to bring a baby into the world followed by at least three months of serious sleep deprivation.
I’m pretty sure the whole system needs an overhaul.
You know what’s total and utter bunk? Ridiculousness at a whole new level? Full-on nonsense?
Doing what feels like the equivalent of 8 straight hours of ab workouts (daily) and still gaining 2 (sometimes 3 or 4) pounds per week.
Bunk. Ridiculousness. Nonsense.
Hooey.
There are plenty of odd pregnancy side-effects that you don’t learn about until you’re in the thick of things. My latest strange symptom is a numbness of the skin on my belly. It’s in a circular pattern radiating out from where my belly button used to be. It’s there not all, but most of the time and is invariably worse in the evenings after I’ve spent the afternoon contracting.
The strangest part? The strangest part is that apparently the skin on my belly had become quite dry and consequently very itchy, but I couldn’t tell what was happening because my skin was numb. When I would try to scratch the itch, I could only feel the scratching motion from the inside, if that makes sense. It’s kind of like when you have an itch in your ear canal that you can’t reach to scratch, but if you jiggle the side of your face you can sort of feel it on the inside. That probably makes no sense, but then that is no different from about 80% of my thoughts these days…
Anyways, the unscratchable itch has been making me nuts for days until last night when I was sitting on the bed resting and it occurred to me that my skin might actually be dry. Three cheers for body butter! If only all pregnancy symptoms were this easy to handle…
I had my first internal check this morning. After my pregnancy with Liam, where I remained “high, tight, and closed” through my 40 week appointment and was only a 1/2 centimeter (if that — the nurse said she was being generous) dilated even after my water broke, today’s numbers were encouraging. I know that there are lucky people who walk around dilated to 5 centimeters for weeks at a time, but for me, this was a real coup.
Stats:
Dilation: 1 centimeter
Effacement: 50%
Position:Â Head down and -3 station
Fingers crossed that my body figures out how to do this on its own this time!
I’m told I’m in the home stretch. I’m battling the feeling that almost every pregnant woman battles: the idea that this may never end and I might just be pregnant for the rest of my life. The fact that I’ve experienced this before and it resulted in a real, live baby doesn’t do anything to shake the feeling. What do I know, really? The fact that my midwives have assured me that I will not be allowed to go overdue this time doesn’t do anything to shake the feeling. What do they know, really? It’s just par for the course.
The other overwhelming issue over the past week is the sharp increase in frequency, duration, and discomfort of my Braxton Hicks contractions. I’m trying to tell myself that this is my body preparing itself for labor, but based on previous experiences, I can’t be sure that it’s not just my body putting me through hell for absolutely no reason. I’m still not convinced that my body actually knows how to go into labor on its own. For that matter, I’m not convinced that my body knows that milk production is important to the survival of the species. It’s abundantly clear that my body never got the memo that a pregnant woman doesn’t need to match the weight of your average linebacker in order to create a baby. My body knows nothing.
In addition to feeling like I’ll be pregnant forever and the almost constant contractions for no good reason, exhaustion is my only other major issue. I can’t be sure if that’s related to carrying around all this extra weight, doing so while caring for a toddler, traveling far too many miles in far too short a time span, waking up 25 times per night to turn over, or if it’s hormonally based. I guess it doesn’t matter, it just is.
Alright, enough with the kvetching, here are the pictures:
Week 36 in my pregnancy with Liam (These were taken after an unexpected trip to L&D after my blood pressure wasn’t where my doctor wanted it to be, so I’m going to refrain from making negative comments about the state of my being except to say: Wow. That was getting really impressive.)
This last shot was taken to commemorate the beginning of my doctor-ordered bedrest. Ugh.
Week 36 in this pregnancy with Baby Girl (This is what it looks like when I’ve reached the point that drying my hair is too exhausting an endeavor to undertake. One day I’ll stop being amazed by what a difference it makes to take those 5 minutes to blow it dry. For now I’m just too hot and too tired to care. I’m also still in awe of the comparison between my belly last time, when I thought there was no way for it to ever be any bigger, and this time. There’s a reason that my skin goes numb from being stretched to its absolute limit. At least this time I know I’ll never be this big again. Because after this is over? No. More. Children.)
That’s all she wrote (literally).
In case you were wondering: apparently a man’s need to sit on the toilet for long periods of time reading a newspaper/magazine/internet-connected electronic device is not learned over the years through social conditioning (i.e. it’s not nurture). Liam proves this every time he sits on the toilet to relieve his bowels.
Yes, I’m telling you that my 2.5 year old apparently needs to sit on the toilet (by himself, mind you — if you deign to even attempt to stay in the room with him he will, fairly politely, ask you to leave…not that this is a bad thing…) for inordinately long periods of time reading a magazine in order to poop.
Chalk this one up to nature.
I’m feeling the strong urge to nest. There is one flaw in this plan: I am simply too exhausted to actually do anything of consequence. Right now I’m trying to decide if this is the result of a cruel joke by Mother Nature (i.e. making a VERY pregnant woman feel the need — because this definitely goes far beyond any kind of want classification — to do something that is beyond her physical and mental capabilities, therefore making her slowly go insane) or a brilliant plan by the same Mother Nature to make fathers feel just the tiniest inkling of the pain and exhaustion that the mother is feeling as she runs him ragged cleaning, buying, installing, and just generally preparing the house and car for an addition to the family. I haven’t decided, but I do know that the fact that this is the first weekend in four weeks that we’ve been home isn’t helping the situation…
Fingers crossed that everyone lives to see the birth of Baby Girl Connolly. This is not a given.
All I wanted when I woke up this morning was a muffin and a cup of decaf coffee. If I’m being honest, I actually wanted caffeine in my coffee but baby, reflux, yadda, yadda, yadda, I digress. So after showering I decided to cook/bake something for the first time in weeks. I used a mix that only required water, so it wasn’t any sort of miracle, but for me these days it was a big deal. I got everything all ready to go in the muffin tins and had my back turned to the preheating stove when I started making coffee. That was the first mistake.
Never turn your back on my stove.
As my back was turned I began to smell, instead of freshly-baked muffins, something that smelled like charred bacon drippings. When I turned my head there was smoke pouring out of the vent. My first thought (as I’ve been well-trained by the crappiness that is my stove) was to turn on the whole house fan and open the window to avoid setting off the smoke detector. I did that and then dared to open the oven door where I found drippings of some sort pouring smoke from off of the easy-wipe pad that is supposed to help to avoid this very problem. Turns out that only works if you actually WIPE OFF THE PAD.
I am now sweating bullets (fan or no fan it’s HOT outside) and will sit down momentarily to eat my smoky orange-cranberry muffins and have my cup of decaf coffee while pooling in sweat in my sweltering kitchen, thus negating the shower I just took (also a major feat).
Is it January yet?
Here’s a random sampling of the pictures that came up on our camera card after we got home:
Family picture attempt:
Sand hole:
And, there goes Pok…
Spinning with Dad:
The next photo in Matt’s ongoing photography series entitled “Ridiculous Pictures of Shannon:”
Gran takes a turn with the camera while Matt and I spend some (much-needed and even-more-appreciated) solo time at the pool:
Sheer concentration:
That’s all I’ve got.