December 17th, 2003

I thought I should mention that the pregnancy seems to be going fairly well right now. I’m over being sick all the time. I still have occasional bouts of nausea, but they’re few and far between. I’m enjoying eating as the holidays deserve, more or less guilt-free. I know I’m supposed to have the attitude of eating only healthy things and that the whole eating for two thing is a myth, but it’s nice to eat whatever I feel like eating and not feel sick and to relish food again. I’m sure I’ll be traveling into tiny portion heartburn land soon enough as the baby squeezes my stomach into half its size, so I’m going to enjoy the fact that my ability to eat a lot of really good food seems to coincide with fatty fat season.

The baby is having regular movement periods. Two to three times a day I can feel turning, kicks, movement. I try to get Kurt to feel the baby moving, but whenever I put his hand on my belly the baby stills. Kurt reminded me, I had forgotten, that Sophia used to do the same thing. Again, just like with Sophia, the movements are usually very gentle, and they make me think of turning and shifting and swimming – not really of kicks and punches. The notable exception is the first movement I felt, which I neglected to say anything about because I was in the midst of November madness then. It was November 16, and I was sitting in bed with the laptop. I was writing. Suddenly I felt like I had been punched in the solar plexus. I was short of breath and smarting from pain. The realization of pain was followed quickly by the awareness that this was all occurring internally and that the baby was moving! Quickening, they call it, and I became aware of it sooner this time around, one day into week 18, than last time around. That’s common for second pregnancies, apparently.

It’s also common, from what I read, for your body to recognize what’s happening to it and for everything to come into place more quickly. I was sicker this time, so I didn’t have earlier weight gain, but my center of gravity shifted more quickly, I started walking with a waddle a lot sooner and I could feel the looseness in my hips and joints almost immediately. In fact, all my limbs feel a little bit like rubber bands. They seem to streeeeeeeetch infinitely, way more than they did prior to my getting pregnant, but there’s a point where they just seem to snap as well, and it seems sudden and painful when they do.

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