Catching Up!

I have a distinct potbelly. It's very good that I'm done teaching this week, because I can no longer pass this off as dissertation weight gain.

In the midst of a ridiculously crazy week, I haven't had time to update, but I want to start keeping a weekly check-in for myself and the Bugbear. If we're going to look back at this and remember, I want to have stuff to remember.  Since we switch weeks on Wednesday, I'll aim for Wednesdays from here out, but in the meantime, here's what's happening.


How pregnant are you? 10 weeks and 3 days.

Relate this pregnancy to objects we tend to eat. My ute is roughly the size of a grapefruit, and Bugbear is the size of a kumquat (just over an inch from crown to rump).

Tell me some random stuff about the Bugbear. S/he has minute fingernails, toenails, and hair follicles, and teeny limbs are able to bend. Eyelids have met, closed, and fused shut. The creepy dinosaur tail is completely gone, and the spinal cord is visible through the skin. Bugbear is still more eerie looking than cute, with way wideset eyes, low but fully formed ears, a bulging forehead, and a head that's roughly 1/2 his/her total size right now (so if Bugbear is 2" long, 1" of that is head and 1" is body).

Tell me how you feel physically.  I feel good. I feel like I have this bizarrely out of shape gut pinned on my stomach, while the rest of me feels pretty much unchanged. Thankfully, I'm having very little nausea or dizziness any longer, touch wood still no morning (or afternoon or evening) sickness, and when I do verge on icky, a bite of candied ginger solves everything.
My migraines are still an issue. Before I was pregnant, if I wasn't on preventative medication, I'd have 15-20 a month, but medication knocked that down to 2-3 a month. I can't take my preventative meds or the drugs I used to take when I did get them, so there were some excruciatingly painful days for a while. Fortunately, I'm down to about one a week, and I can take codeine for the pain. It knocks me out completely, so it's not perfect, but it is livable.

What are you craving?  If I crave anything, it's salt. Sometimes lunch is carrots and crackers and hummus and brie. I'm eating more frequently, and find I'm still drinking lots more milk than usual, but I still don't have any one (or three) things that I just neeeeeeed. I do need more meat, and that sucks, but I'm getting accustomed to it, and look forward to this being a short-term change instead of a lifelong one. I do love that food just tastes so good. It's the upside to SuperNose.

Are you crazy emotional? I have my moments! I do anyway, but these are markedly more intense and ridiculous. I cry while reading books about giving birth. That kind of makes sense. It sounds like it might suck a bit. I cry at Brawny commercials, because I think that something so wasteful doesn't deserve to use the song "Lean on Me."
I also had a day where I cried at ice cream, phone calls, a card, the thought of taking a taxi, grading, the idea of hamburger, the dog whining, mold on a two week old roll I didn't know I'd forgotten to throw away, my yoga pants not fitting, my last two classes teaching college, an incompetent customer service person, the movie Pulp Fiction because I was so happy Uma Thurman wasn't dead, the introductory music to a yoga dvd, cheese, and carrots. Then I called my mom and cried about insurance, being so far away from my mom, and getting tears on my phone. Fortunately, that was only one day, and it hasn't happened again like that since.

Tell me how you feel otherwise. I'm adjusting. I am constantly weirded out by the fact that there's a little thing growing inside me that's going to be a person in 30 weeks. I'm trying to relish the next 8-10 weeks, when I'm not feeling it kick and move, because I think that's going to be very, very weird and unsettling. I look forward to being well adjusted to this and happy about it, but right now I'm just plain freaked out that there's a 1.25" thing in there, growing and sharing my nutrients and body. It's just weird.
I feel horribly guilty about feeling this way. When so many people wish they could be pregnant, how is it that I'm in this position and so ambivalent about it? Not that I'm under the delusion that life is fair, but this just seems particularly unfair to the many people I know who aren't pregnant.
I do look forward to telling everyone else in a few weeks. It's been so difficult to keep this a secret, especially when we know so many people will be happy for us. But I just want to be sure that we're really ready to have everyone know, and waiting until we're out of the first trimester just makes the most sense. I know that nothing is guaranteed, and we have a lifetime of new concerns and worries, but this is one we can deal with now by not making it completely public. The rest of the challenges, we'll take as they come.