"That Sucks"

It's a BOY!

We waited exactly 21 days after our ultrasound to finally find out the gender. My mom knew, and she kept the secret well. I know she was over-the-moon to finally share it. I also knew that should we pull some sort of prank - I was convinced she would make a "joke" cake that was yellow inside, then pull out the real cake right after. Instead, she just came across a photo of me as a teenager with a basketball under my shirt, posing on a car's hood. How did a woman that doesn't use the Internet find such a random photo from 8 years ago, you ask? Apparently, in a shoe box somewhere (I'm not kidding).

I can't describe the delight I feel over having a boy. I would have been just as delighted to have a girl, but I immediately wanted to scream it from the rooftops. I was really nervous to cut the cake, not only because we would finally find out the gender but also because of some social anxiety. I don't love being the center of attention in a room of 20, even if those 20 people are all friends and family. Turns out, it didn't matter one bit. Both Adam and I have no idea what anyone's reaction was. We were so in our own world for the next minute or so that I didn't even think to look around the room. Apparently my sister burst into tears on our video call. 

23 Weeks

There have been some big changes since we got that ultrasound, mainly that our little boy now kicks hard enough for others to see. I noticed it one day at work while I was taking a break from looking at my computer. I felt a few hard kicks, looked down, and happened to catch one at the right time. I was half giddy/half shocked to see my entire belly twitch. That means that dad-to-be can finally feel (and see!) the action. I not only feel twitches anymore, but hard and soft kicks, "flip turns" and weird butterfly sensations... sometimes all within a few minutes. 

I'm also fast approaching the uncomfortableness that is the third trimester. I try to walk to work (instead of taking the shuttle) from my car at least one direction each day, and one day this week I finally just felt like a winded manatee. I feared a deep breath would make my abdomen rip apart. We took a photo that night and I was blown away at how much my belly button seemed to have disappeared within the last three weeks. 

This lead to a discussion with one of my currently-pregnant girlfriends, which turned into a good ol' fashioned pregnant lady complaint session. The main gripe?

I don't want to hear how much worse my life is going to get.

It's only natural to try to relate to people, but for many pregnant women this means unsolicited advice/comments from just about everyone. Here are some examples:

"How are you doing today?" "Okay, pretty tried though. I feel like I'm dragging bricks around" "JUST WAIT UNTIL THE BABY IS BORN YOU DON'T KNOW TIRED YET"

"I feel huge today" "HA! Just wait until you're full term"

"Be right back, I have to pee... again, haha" "Just wait until the baby gets bigger, you'll pee your pants every time you laugh"

If I could give the world one piece of advice when dealing with pregnant women, it would be that they do not want to hear how much worse things are going to get. You think I don't know that my precious sleep will be obliterated once this baby arrives? I know I'm going to get bigger. I know my body will get more and more uncomfortable. 

I welcome any and all advice, unless it comes unprompted from strangers, don't get me wrong. But, no one on this earth, pregnant or not, shares their complaints/honest answers hoping to be told how much worse it will get. When someone has a cold, you don't say "just wait until 48 hours from when it's REALLY set it and you can't breathe and your throat hurts and your head feels like it's a balloon and you're so tired you want to cry through the entire work day". If someone told you that, you would probably give them the stink eye and wonder if you could punch them in the face without getting fired. However, when I share that I'm tired and someone tells me I don't even know the definition of tired yet, I have to just smile, nod, and write about it in a blog post later. They may be right, but that doesn't make them any less punch-able. 

Sometimes, it's best to just say, "I hear you. That sucks. (implied: let's commiserate about it, maybe I can give you some good advice or just lend an ear, and then we can all move on from it)". Trust me, most times pregnant women just want to get it off their chest and then go on with their day.

Take it from Parks and Rec:

Gestational Psychosis

20 Weeks

Ah, the midway point! Bully for me! Reaching the midpoint of my pregnancy made me simultaneously happy and horrified - a mix of "halfway there! Alright!" and "halfway there? HALFWAY THERE?! But I already feel huge..."

Everything is going perfectly according to our latest ultrasound. The baby is measuring ahead again, but not enough to change the due date. Again, I have mixed feelings of, "you go, little one!", and, "just don't let your head get bigger than average until after you exit my body." Adam had a freakin' field day during the scan (every five seconds he burst out with "WOW! LOOK! wait what is that? THE STOMACH?! HONEY DO YOU SEE THAT?!?!"). I laid there with more muted delight as I struggled to fight my persistent gag reflex. Turns out the vitamins I switched to were not something my nausea agreed with. I spent two days trying not to dry heave in the middle of a sentence.

In 20 more weeks I will be all...

For now, I am...

Mid-point update aside, I want to dive deeper into a phenomenon that had me laughing through a chapter in the book I'm currently reading: The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy. To be honest, I laugh through most of the chapters in that book. I refer to an affliction called gestational psychosis. It is real, it is dangerous, and it has its hold on me.

According to the book, some of the symptoms are characterized by phrases like "Diaper commercials make me weep", "I can't concentrate anymore", and "I want it, and I want it now!". I do believe Pampers has a secret agenda to enter the womb's of American women and flip the switch on their biological clock, then make them all cry uncontrollably when they finally are with child. 

My gestational psychosis has shown up in three ways: zero patience when my mind is set on something resulting in immediate irritability when it doesn't happen how I want it to, inability to use my brain in the simple ways I used to (I just stared at my keyboard trying to remember what the second thing on the list was, if you want an example), and crying at literally anything.

1. Drop in the patience-o-meter and resulting intense irritability

The older I get the less tolerance I have surrounding things I don't care for. For example, after years of dealing with roommates (some I adore, some drove me insane) and noisy neighbors, I have a shorter fuse when it comes to my personal domicile. During pregnancy, this "personal domicile" has shrunk from my home to my personal bubble. If I'm at all uncomfortable in any way, and you can guess how often that happens when growing a human, I have almost no control over my annoyance. For example, if I have a headache and things are just slightly too loud because, you know, it's Christmas, I will be sent into a downward spiral that sends me brooding and/or weeping to my bed. If I get a plan in my head for how I want the day to go and then it changes (for very normal reasons), then Lord help those around me (mainly Adam, bless his soul). 

2. Where is my mind?

I pride myself on being pretty sharp, mentally speaking, on skills such as planning, coordinating, logistics, foresight, forming articulate thoughts, etc. This has all gone out the window. I regularly read to Adam out loud, whether it's a funny passage in my book or something in an article, and lately I've struggled to do that as effortlessly as I used to. I seem to have lost the ability to foresee logistical pieces that used to come to me effortlessly. For example, yesterday we had to borrow my parents truck to pick up furniture. Adam was going to drop me off at my prenatal yoga class, go get the furniture, pick me up, then return the car. My parents wanted to know what time we would be back, I said "sometime before 1:00pm". In my mind, my yoga class got out at 12, Adam would pick me up a few minutes after noon and we would arrive at their house sometime before 1:00. What I totally spaced is the fact that the furniture wouldn't just levitate out of the truck bed and fly 10 miles north to our house, and that when we left our car keys with my mom we would need to take our house keys with us to regain entry into our own home. If you're sitting there thinking, "oh, please, I do this all the time", know that Adam is one of those people and I am the one in the relationship that thinks those things through, rarely making mistakes. I've heard it will only get worse. We're screwed. I just asked Adam if we were going to bring the brownies to my parents house, and what came out of my mouth was, "did you want to bring those cupcakes?".

3. Eye leakage

As with my tolerance for life's annoyances, my ability to control my tears has decreased as I've grown older. I almost never cried in young adulthood, but when I got to college I cried a lot. I cried because I didn't want to get out of bed and go to class when I had a chest cold. I cried because my downstairs neighbors had annoying music on at 3am on a Tuesday. Mostly tears of frustration, I guess, and not more than an average stressed out college student facing. Now, though? I cry at anything, everything, all the time. Here is a list of things I have cried about, and when I say "cried about" I mean full on weeping/breakdown, not just a controlled tear or two:

• The fact that I was too full after Thanksgiving dinner to eat a piece of pumpkin pie. I cried so hard that I almost threw up.
• I was tired but I had to go to the grocery store (twice).
• I wasn't sure what to get everyone for Christmas and I really wanted to get nice gifts. Again, almost threw up.
• I had a headache and people were being slightly too loud.
• I was tired and speaking quietly, Adam couldn't hear me and asked me to talk a little louder.
• The clasp broke on one of my favorite necklaces.
• I was hungry and dinner wasn't ready. Adam worked hard to somehow speed up the cooking time of turkey, then served dinner for me in bed. I wept uncontrollably through every bite, decided that the sausage he made looked better (he's allergic to turkey), and ended up eating most of the sausage and barely any turkey that had been the hold-up in the first place.
• The original cast of Star Wars did an acapella version of Star Wars theme songs on the Jimmy Fallon show. I just thought it was nice they got together and did that, and it must have been fun for them.

And those are just the most noteworthy ones. Advice to any girlfriends out there planning on having a baby one day: make sure you have a partner that has the patience and care to make it through these episodes with you and not make you think you're crazy while you cry yourself sick over a piece of pie. In my defense, my mom's pies are freakin' amazing. They are worth crying over.

The cure for gestational psychosis? The end of gestation.