Such a discouraging title this week for somebody who is 22 weeks pregnant...You'd think I'd be beginning to get myself together considering we are more than half way done with this pregnancy! Since my last post at 16 weeks, I've accepted that this is really happening. There is a forreal baby inside me right now, tumbling around (probably because there is a laptop on top of him; I'm sure it's a big no-no on the list of things to NOT do while pregnant, but hey, I won that award weeks ago according to my daily newsletter from What to Expect While You're Expecting.)
I have been feeling SO good this trimester! I'm sleeping, eating, have energy, eating, my skin looks PHENOMENAL, eating more, and have basically grown to the point where I can no longer see my nether regions. To give you a better picture (not of my nether regions, get your mind outta the gutter!), while I get dressed in the mornings, Mike comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my belly while quoting one of our Top 5 favorite movies of all time, Airplane, "And Kristin's gettinnnnggg LARRRGGERRRR".
The first few times was rather humorous. Now if looks could kill, my kid would be fatherless.
One symptom I'm experiencing a little early is frequent urination. I had this somewhat in the first trimester, but as things are shifting, my blatter takes a daily beating. There is a rap song that gets played on every Gatorade commerical ever created and at every basketball game played that goes like, "All I do is win, win, win, no matter what!" All I hear every hour in my head is, "All I do is pee, pee, pee, no matter what!". #pregnancyproblems
Let's talk about the daily newsletters I mentioned. I'm a little concerned about the words "fit" and "pregnancy". Especially when used in the same sentence. What is this trend and how did it get started? WHO. DID. THIS. I've been proud of myself for trying to walk at least 5 times a week for about 30 minutes. I sleep well and I feel better afterwards, but during...Holy Christmas cookies. Last summer I was running miles and this summer I can't walk from the porch to the driveway without shortness of breath. I can't walk across my classroom to the trashcan without having to take a break. How are these women running and lifting and doing this insanity?! All I can give them is props because the only way I'm going to improve my regimen (and lack thereof) is if I walk a mile with a team of doctors riding in a van behind me with proper oxygen equipment on standby.
Also, who in the name of Santa came up with sizing your baby each week to produce? Last week, I was at a spaghetti squash. The week before I was a papaya. What are these things? Do they even grow here? I had to Google Image them to reference the size of my daggone baby. Why can't they reference foods most Americans will understand? "This week your baby is the size of a Lay's Snack Pack bag of BBQ chips" or "This week your baby is the size of an apple turnover from McDonald's". I finally just had to find an actual ruler to visualize the actual size of the baby using the measurements. If I had to resort to using math skills, then it's officially time to change the produce equivalents, you pregnancy expert people.
Last weekend we decided to go to Babies R Us to make our baby registry. There were tears. There were talks of divorce. There were feelings of helplessness. Mike and I are pretty intelligent people, but when you put two intelligent people in a world where they know nothing about their surroundings, tensions will rise. We might as well have landed in Bangkok.
I'm the oldest of seven grandchildren so I remember how to change diapers and how to hold babies and how to feed them. But the youngest grandchild is now in high school and I'm 29. It's been a few days. Now, you can't use powder on babies? WHAT? They have wipe-warmers? WHAT?! There are bottle warmers so you won't burn your wrist while checking milk temperatures. WHERE AM I? Is this real life? There were carriers and strollers and carriers that went with strollers and carriers that you could buy in addition to matching strollers that already had carriers. It was as if someone took apart every part to my car and left them in my driveway then told me to rebuild it. Total shock and confusion. I plan to breastfeed (I think, o.O) so we went down the bottle aisle. Insanity, I tell you. Pure insanity. There were 7,000 types of bottles. 8,000 types of nipples. Accessory kits. Starter kits. Kits for kits for kits that I don't even know the purpose for.
I just wanted to channel Prissy and scream "I DON'T KNOW NOTHIN' BOUT BIRTHIN' NO BABIES, MISS SCARLETT!!!!!!!!!!!!" right in the middle of the crib aisle when I found out you do in fact have to purchase the mattress separately from the bed. Help. Me.
Meanwhile, there are these moms that kept showing up on the same aisle as me either with their children or with bellies much further along than me. They all looked like they knew what they were doing, going directly towards an item with confidence. I'm standing with glazed-over eyes in a state of shock while Mike is taking 25 pictures of this ridiculous Batman car seat, so I started to shoot daggers at the expert mommies with my eyes that said, "How dare you be more pregnant than me?" or "My kid will be way cuter than your kid!". Green with envy, it turns out, is not my color.
We pretty much spent two full hours in the store and added 300 items to a list. Of the 300 items, I'm confident I know how to use 10 of them. Maybe. I can already hear my son in his Mikey from Look Who's Talking voice saying, "Mommy, that wipe is too cold on my bum! Why were you so cheap to not buy the wipe warmer?" And me with my frequent response, "Son, your bum may be cold for 30 seconds, BUT DID YOU DIE?" I'll go ahead and join that hashtag chain (#butdidyoudie) because I feel like it'll be a mantra at the Peebles Family Household.
We've worked for years to get to this point. We both want children so we can teach them and take them places and mold them into the best versions of ourselves. But you start that when they are toddlers. It's like 3 years I have to keep this kid alive for until I start to know what I'm supposed to do! We went to war with infertility and we won, but it's like an entire war about to start all over again. I'm the walking-talking professor for knowing what to do to get pregnant, but when it comes to knowing what to do when he actually gets here, I might as well be the stoner drop-out guy from college that was in all of your classes but you never understood why he was there and how he managed.
I'm praying all these people are correct in the assumption that things will come naturally to me once he gets here. If not, I'll go ahead and work up a schedule and sign-up sheet for my readers that have been there, done that and are willing to come and change my kid's diapers. But preferably without powder and with the use of a diaper warmer, because, DUH. Everybody knows that...
