All pregnancy, all the time

I've gotten a lot of pregnancy advice along the lines of "you need rest, don't worry if the house is a mess, it's important to nap". You don't have to tell me twice, I've been ignoring messes since '83. I'm feeling wide awake right now, so I'll just take that to mean "don't worry if the house is a mess, just write a blog post about pregnancy".

I'll start out with a confession. I swore if and when I ever got pregnant (I was being a little dramatic when I swore this) that my blog wouldn't turn in to all pregnancy, all the time. Or even part of the time. We were very lucky to get pregnant quickly. I say quickly because that's what my doctor told me, and I love her (she let me come in without an appointment this week just to hear the heartbeat!) and believe everything she says, plus, you know, went to medical school and all that. And we were/are lucky. But at the time, six months did not feel quick at all. In fact, I got a serious case of pregnancy envy, and had to unsubscribe from every single pregnant blogger, twitter account, and even quit Facebook entirely. Although to be fair, Facebook was and still is annoying for quite a variety of reasons.

Around that time was when I made that grand proclamation to myself. But now here we are, and it's basically impossible to follow. First of all, my life is pretty boring. I'm not hob-nobbing with celebrities or flying around the world, or even really running much. Blogging about pregnancy is pretty redundant and done to death, but it's really all I have right now, other than finding good brownie recipes. Second, it's really, really exciting and essentially takes over all of your thoughts, so it's really hard to write a post where it doesn't worm its way in.

So that's where I am. But I still promise to never include a pregnancy based question at the end, because those really depressed me, like "ok, great, still not pregnant and I can't even f#$%ing comment on this blog".

I'm going to go ahead and make a statement that might make be unpopular, and might also come back to bite me, but here it is. So far, I've really loved being pregnant. I am honestly thankful every single day that I am, and I'm not even going to qualify that with some sort of sarcastic joke. I'll admit to finding myself wishing time away so September can get here sooner and we can meet the baby, but I'm trying to learn patience and enjoy the process, and sleep.

Here's some things that have surprised me so far, 17 weeks into this journey.

1. That show "I didn't know I was pregnant" might not be made up.
I've never actually watched it, but I have had someone tell me in real life this happened to her. Granted I'm less than halfway through, but I could definitely apply to be a contestant if I hadn't taken the at home pregnancy test. Sure, there's a few signs (most notably, hating coffee), especially if I focus on common symptoms and really look for stuff. But nothing that couldn't be explained away easily. Overall, life is pretty much business as usual, just without (much) caffeine and booze.

2. The anxiety
I'm no stranger to this, so the feeling itself is far from surprising. But what I'm anxious about is nothing like I expected. I live in terror of doctors, medical procedures, needles, etc. I always thought that I would instantly be terrified of the giving birth thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I will be, just not yet. I had no idea how long the wait was from the double line to the delivery room, or how much could go wrong in between. Currently, most of my anxiety is focused on just getting to that point, although I'm trying to keep it in check.

3. I feel like I'm getting punked. A lot.
Supposedly this will go away in time, but as stated above, when there's nothing really pointing to the fact that a life is growing inside you, apart from those wonderful fleeting moments at the doctor's office when you can hear the heartbeat, it's hard to actually believe it. I probably took about 20 pregnancy tests the first week I found out, all positive, and still was pretty sure this was a cruel joke. (To be fair, I took about 100 in 2013 that were all negative. I wish that was an exaggeration, but they come in packs of 50 on amazon).

4. Stranger danger
Even though I'm not 100% convinced that this is all going to go down, I still have heart palpitations at the thought of handing the baby over to daycare in January. 2015. Almost a year away.

5. Stuff I thought would happen when I get huge is happening now
I still maintain #1, because like I said, this is all stuff I could rationalize some other way. But I thought things like the bed feeling way too small, running feeling nearly impossible/being out of breath a lot, and constant peeing would be like....month 8. Maybe 7, since I'm short. But no, now. My friend pointed out that even if nothing is happening on the outside, my organs are actually being smushed. So that explains it well enough for me.

6. Pregnancy brain - it's real
I scoffed because right away Eric started mocking me with that every time I made some sort of typical human error. But then one day, I almost failed....at ordering a sub at Wegmans. Like, communicating my order was just too hard for me. Then a rep at Verizon tried to explain this new billing program we could enroll in. She wrote out all the math and drew diagrams. And I was like this:



Finally, I was walking down the hall and decided to stop in a coworker's room for some chocolate. I forgot. I didn't remember until like 7pm that night. I FORGOT TO GET CHOCOLATE.

This week: sh!t is getting real. I'm flying through stuff on my spring break checklist (the stuff I can do from the couch, anyway). I got dates for childbirth/newborn classes, got some bloodwork done, scheduled two daycare visits (by far the scariest thing), joined amazon moms, ordered some baby care books, read a really long article that compares various strollers and car seats and cribs, etc, and got a haircut (unrelated but fun). If anyone has any advice on books that tell you something along the lines of "how the hell do I keep a newborn alive", please share.

What's the most terrifying thing you have done lately? It still shocks me that on that list, getting bloodwork done wasn't #1. #sobrave