I feel I have finally come to terms with my changing body shape and am learning to take all that comes with it in stride… even the increasing difficulty of simple tasks like putting on socks and shoes, which now requires some sort of stabilization crutch like a nearby dresser, chair, or husband.

Our dog Max, however, is still adjusting.  His favorite resting place is slowly shrinking.  

He’s learned that he can no longer bound across the room and onto my lap or jump up and push me with his paws as soon as I walk in the door, which were probably good habits to break anyway, but now as soon as the poor guy finds a comfortable position to nap that also accommodates baby’s space, he has to reevaluate a week or so later as I continue growing. Or should I say, as the baby continues growing.

If Max does encroach a little too closely, baby responds with a swift kick.  Not even out of the womb and he’s already defending his space.  Of course, this battle for my lap has resulted in a few new napping positions you see below:

And, my personal favorite, the “Forget it, I’ll sit with dad.”

In the adult world, Halloween has become a holiday of revealing costumes and crazy parties, where women usually go as the “sexy version” of an otherwise scary creature, cute animal or occupation.  Sexy nurses, cats, witches, even zombies roam the night, and while in previous years I’ve never really fully embraced the “sexy version” culture, you’d be hard-pressed to find any costume in a store that doesn’t.  One walk through Party City and I realized this year would be a great one to go home-made, and even embrace the complete opposite.  So I transformed into the least sexy and “the most harmless thing.  Something that could never ever possibly destroy us.”  Mr. Stay Puft.

 

Drew went along as a Ghostbuster and the costumes went over very well!  We even carved the Ghostbusters logo into our pumpkin.  I had looked through a few maternity-inspired costumes online (bun in the oven, zombie babies, skeleton t-shirts complete with a skeleton of the fetus.) I wanted something that showcased the baby bump without creeping me out, so when Drew suggested a Ghostbuster and the marshmallow man as a joke, it quickly became a reality! We got a lot of compliments at his co-worker’s party from the sexy witches.  

With the main furniture in place, our little nest looks impressive and almost complete in photos, provided I take said photo while balancing on top of a pile of junk in the opposite corner of the room.  It’s a work in progress.

*A quick product endorsement* The wall decal is from http://www.popdecors.com.  You can order custom colors, they’re easy to apply, removable, and ship very quickly!

Maybe it’s too early to start bragging about our baby who hasn’t arrived yet, but in his 24th week of gestation I’m already convinced that he will be a fantastic athlete.  Why?  Because the little guy has the energy level of a marathon runner, and it seems he’s already training around the clock.

It all started while I was watching an episode of Glee, (don’t judge) and I felt powerful kicks every time the characters sang their own rendition of a Beatles song.  I couldn’t tell if the kicks were in protest to the diminishment of music legends, or dance moves to a catchy beat.  I tested the next morning with a real Beatles song and got the same response!  Unfortunately, to mine and my husband’s disappointment, he did not react the same way to Michael Jackson.  We’re still running periodic tests.  

Ever since then, the activity level has sky-rocketed.  Often times I wake up at 4a.m. to realize my belly is dancing, and not in the veil and jingly scarf sort of way.  I have found a few things that seem to be triggers.  So far, they are: going to sleep, waking up, eating, drinking, music, laughing, Max laying on my lap, attending important meetings, watching zombie movies, and prenatal appointments.

Drew and I had our second parenting class this week, which also includes checking our own vitals.  We took my blood pressure, weight, and Drew gets to check the baby’s heartbeat with a Doppler (my favorite part!) As soon as he found the familiar “womwomwom” of the heartbeat, it was interrupted by a loud “WOMP!” and the biggest kick I think I’ve ever felt.  The machine hadn’t had time to register the heart rate, so he tried again.  “womwomwomWOMP!” And again.  

Three big kick later, we finally registered a heart rate of 150bpm, and a baby with impressive aim!

A runner, a dancer, a soccer player? I guess we’ll have to wait a little while longer to find out.

Shortly after we found out we were expecting, Drew and I joined a gym.  I have no idea why the timing worked out that way and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person so confused as to spend money on a membership to a gym while embarking on my first pregnancy, but the food in the cafe was good and the machines were so new and shiny and there was a water slide.  

Unfortunately water slides are discouraged during pregnancy… but swimming is highly encouraged!  That became my exercise of choice.  Maybe it’s the low-impact, or the cool temperature, or the fact that gravity isn’t pushing a growing baby into the rest of my organs, but being in the pool feels great.  As an added bonus, the bigger I get the more buoyant I become, so my swimming is actually easier and faster than it was in the beginning.  I swim for about 30 minutes two or three times a week.  I admit, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for just having the energy to get out of bed in the morning.  Then, I met a woman swimming in the lane next to me who noticed I was pregnant. 

“How far along?  I’m three weeks from my due date!” she said.

I looked down and realized she was probably one good butterfly stroke away from going into labor in the pool, and as she told me about swimming an hour a day, my pride faded.

Then, she told me this was her seventh.  Pride restored!  She’s obviously a professional by now, on the same level as the women who compete in the Pregnant Olympics, and for all I know she could’ve been on performance-enhancing drugs.  Those prenatal vitamins consist of a cocktail of substances with all sorts of interesting side-effects.   I could develop fins and gills in the next few months too. 

Either way, I’m proud to say our gym membership is not going to waste.  And they have childcare, so eventually I’ll be able to take advantage of that water slide.

Though research has produced mixed results, I’m going to come right out on the side of those who support the theory that “pregnancy brain” is a legitimate scientific phenomenon, not only because its existence makes me feel better about my absent-mindedness, but also because it just took about 5 attempts for me to spell the word “phenomenon.” 

In recent weeks, the ups and downs of emotional instability seemed to have leveled out, but they’ve been replaced with bouts of temporary amnesia and flat out IQ loss.  I wake up in the morning and open the refrigerator to look for a box of cereal.  On a good day I eat that cereal with milk rather than soaked in orange juice.  A couple of weeks ago I tried playing it safe with some oatmeal, but the bowl didn’t make it out of the microwave before I forgot about it and drove to work. 

I’m afraid in some cases, my work is suffering as well.  I’ve forgotten assignments or finished them twice before realizing they were already done.  I tried posting content to a website by typing it into the Google search bar, and went so far as to call a co-worker for assistance before realizing why that approach wouldn’t work.  I spent 20 minutes designing an animated graphic that I promptly deleted without saving or exporting.  At that point, I wasn’t even surprised or upset.  It was almost time to go home, so I cut my losses and hoped that the part of my brain that knew how to operate a car would still be intact for at least the next 15 minutes.

I’m not sure how long this “pregnancy brain” is supposed to last, or how long I’ll be able to use it as an excuse for my recent hopeless inattention to detail.  Earlier on in my pregnancy I tried to get into my gym using my Starbucks Gold Member card.  Just the other day a restaurant server chased me down in the parking lot because I’d forgotten to sign my bill.  I’m going to assume that this condition typically lasts the entire duration of pregnancy and perhaps a few months after the baby is born, at which point “pregnancy brain” will be re-termed “sleep deprivation.”

I started to consider hiring some sort of personal assistant to help me out.  Someone to follow me around turning off ovens, locking doors and picking up my purse from the back of restaurant chairs, (or the counter of the hair salon where I almost left it yesterday.)  Then, I realized this person already exists.  His name is Drew.

When Drew and I adopted our dog Max from the shelter in February,  friends and family members reacted with a smile, many commenting that he would be good practice for a baby.  We’re certain Max will make an excellent older brother for our son, especially after seeing the way he interacts with our niece, who I’m sure Max knows in his head as “the wobbly one who drops food.”  He loves people and children (probably because of their sticky fingers) and has a great temperament,  but a bad habit of eating just about everything except his own dog food.

This habit got the best of him and us last week, when Drew and I had to make a late-night run to the store to buy more candy mix for the cake pops I was making for our gender reveal party.  We made the mistake of leaving a bowl of bright pink melted candy on the counter.  When we got home the bowl was shattered on the floor and our dog was throwing up a bright pink substance all over the house.  Drew cleaned as I googled things like, “how to get red kool-aide stains out of a beige carpet.” The answer- you don’t.

Eventually, Max’s stomach calmed down and we assumed the worst was over.  We were wrong.  

More than a day and a half after he’d eaten what we thought was just candy, Max coughed up a chunk of the porcelain bowl about a half-inch long.  I stared at the pool of vomit and broken bowl in the middle of my living room, shocked.  I looked at my dog.  He stared back, relieved.  It was 6 a.m. I loaded him into the car with some blankets and drove to the emergency vet.

We waited for about a half hour next to a Golden Retriever who had transmission fluid for breakfast, and went in for X-rays.  Luckily, the piece he coughed up was the largest piece of bowl in his bowel.  The vet said the rest would pass, and we were told to keep a close eye on Max and everything that came out of him for the next several days.  Seeing as how most of what came out of him required me to mop the floor, we had no choice but to bear witness to every aspect of my poor dog’s dysfunctional digestive system until it returned to normal.  Thankfully, Max is all better now and my kitchen floors are sparkling from more mopping than I think I’ve done since we moved in.  

I know when we have our baby boy, I’ll get used to cleaning just about everything.  I’m sure there will be more early mornings, late nights, more mopping.  He’ll get sick, he’ll eat things that aren’t food, he’ll probably even stick them up his nose.  We’ll spend even more on him than a $400 vet bill.  Maybe Max is doing us a favor, prepping us for what’s to come.  Right now he’s sitting next to my desk chair playing with his stuffed bunny and I can tell you truthfully he’s so cute I won’t even remember all that mopping a few weeks from now.  That’s what I’m taking away from this experience.

And if you’d like a $400 cake pop, there are still a couple of leftovers in the fridge.  Max can tell you, they’re delicious.

We’re officially halfway to having our baby, and we are celebrating every milestone of this incredible journey.  That’s why Drew and I decided to put our own impatience aside when it came time to learn the sex of the baby, and reveal the result with our friends and family at a gender reveal party!

Even though we had our anatomy ultrasound appointment Wednesday afternoon, one photo remained sealed in an envelope until Saturday morning. With the help of our poker-faced brother-in-law, we were able to let him hold onto the temptation and assist with the presentation, which we revealed at the party and live on the web for friends and family back East and overseas:

It’s going to be a baby boy!  

We both had a feeling that the little one who recently started kicking me had the feet of a… soccer star, maybe?  In terms of health, HE is still doing very well at 14oz with a heart rate of 148bpm.  Here’s his latest photo:

And, we’re one more month along, so here’s my latest photo:

While I am not good at science, I have always considered myself a scientific person.  When encountered with a question I don’t know the answer to, I trust logic, do my research and ask the experts.  I believe in things I can see and hear.  In fact, the first words that came out of my mouth when I saw the first images of our baby and heard its heartbeat were, “Now it’s real.” It wasn’t until I could see hard evidence that I truly believed what was happening inside me. 

But this morning as I was getting dressed, I looked down and realized something.  I do not know where the spleen is located.  I couldn’t point it out on a diagram.  Nor could I tell you where the kidneys are, or why the left and right sides of the brain are different.  To my mother’s dismay I never paid attention in biology, and learned most of what I know about anatomy from this guy:

 Despite that, I have still managed to create tiny working replicas of every vital organ in the human body and put them exactly in the right place.  Some may call it science, but to me right now it just feels like more.  Today, I started believing in miracles.

I know this means every mother who ever existed has experienced a miracle.  There are billions of them in the world, so that must make them less special. But does it?  I think about all of the couples who struggle with infertility or for whatever reason simply can’t conceive.  All of the people out there who have to wait so long or fight uphill battles or work so hard to be able to enjoy parenthood.  Here I am, dumbfounded by the process, thankful that building a person doesn’t require an engineering degree.

I’m sure that most mothers think of their children as miracles. And I will be no different.

Being the shutterbugs that we are, we equipped ourselves with cameras and toured the City by the Bay for the first time.  Here’s a short video of some of our favorite highlights:

While at Fisherman’s Warf, Drew and I stumbled on an arcade full of vintage games dating back as far as the 1930’s.  It was one of my favorite parts of our trip:

We’ve never been big on structured tours or heavy itineraries when it comes to our Labor Day Weekend trips.  I love the simplicity of exploring a new place without knowing what to expect around the corner.  A camera, a little cash, and comfortable shoes are all we need.