Pregnancy in review

Since I’m getting pretty close to the end here, I decided to make a list of the things that surprised me (and those that didn’t) during my pregnancy because I’ll never remember them all later.  I read approximately 7000 pages of pregnancy books before getting pregnant, so I thought that I had a fairly good idea of what I was getting myself into - I was right and I was wrong.  This list might evolve over the next week if I think of more things to add....

Things that were far worse than I expected:

• Oh, the drool!  Copious amounts, coating my hair, face, pillow, and clothing any and every time I lost consciousness.  Pretty disgusting, and definitely not normal.
• Back pain - I did nothing with my life but ice my broken lower back, twice a day at least, for the last four months of pregnancy.   Yup, four months.  Primates are not optimally designed to be both bipedal and pregnant.
• Nasal “congestion” - not real congestion, as there was nothing in there!  But my nasal passages were super swollen (because of fluid in the surrounding tissue, I guess), so I couldn’t breathe well for several months.  It has gotten worse as I have gotten closer to delivery - and this may have exacerbated the drooling issue.
• Fatigue - unbelievable.  Magical pregnancy unicorns talk about how energized they feel all the time, but I simply felt like I’ve spent the last nine months ripping massive bong hits every night before sleeping about 2 hours per day.  Maybe in a cardboard box under a bridge.  Foggy, tired, miserable, and incapable of forming complete sentences.
• Morning sickness - I’ve written plenty about this already, but suffice it to say that I was unprepared.
• Toxic farts - yep, I went there.  I had no idea that it could ever be that bad....they’ve taken my marriage to a whole new level.
• Totally bizarre and vivid dreams - I do remember seeing this briefly mentioned in some pregnancy books, but definitely not overly highlighted.  However, I've had totally crazy dreams nearly every night for the entire pregnancy.  For example, last night I dreamed that I went scuba diving - in Norway - in a bikini at 39 weeks...and then husband wouldn't let me take the bus home from the dive site because he thought the baseball players riding the bus (wtf?) would be too rowdy on a Friday night, so we had to walk.  Decode that, Freud.

Things that were good surprises:

• Increased balance during yoga!  I knew I would get a bit more flexible - and I did - but my (simple) balance poses were much improved as well.  Maybe just because I’m heavier, it’s harder to tip me over?
• No heartburn!  I have no idea why I remained unscathed.
• No stretch marks - um, yeah, how on earth did this happen?!?  I’m covered in stretch marks from puberty on my hips and boobs, both of which grew way less then than my belly did now.  So it’s not that I wasn’t genetically predisposed to them because I’ve got plenty, thank you very much.  I have to chalk this one up to the hundreds of dollars that I spent on fancy British moisturizers during this pregnancy and how religious I was about application twice per day.  They say that potions don’t work in the fight against stretch marks, but I’m living proof that they can help!  Maybe stretch marks will show up in this last week of pregnancy, or maybe they’re "there" and I just can’t see them until after birth (although my puberty ones were the traditional purple until they faded over the years to silver, not some kind of mythical “cryptic” stretch marks that defied identification for a while), but in any case, my current state is vastly different than I would have expected.
• No hormonal outbursts/crying for no reason - maybe husband would disagree about this, but other than a slight increase in bitchiness and some lowering of my already sketchy patience threshold, I’ve been pretty normal.  I still cry at Hallmark commercials, but I did that before.

Things that were approximately what I expected:

• Swollen feet and ankles - pretty typical.
• Awkwardness and lack of grace - I’m not the most nimble person anyway, so just keep my pregnant ass out of the china shop.
• Difficulty sleeping right at the very end - you have to pee every 2 hours and rolling over is like turning the Titanic.  You’re just not going to sleep through the night, so it is what it is.
• No weird cravings - not saying that this isn’t a real thing for a lot of women, just that this isn’t really my personality type, so I didn’t think I would be too affected.  I wasn’t.
• How excited I am :)  Yep, I cannot wait to meet our little girl!  Soon!

I’ll try to update again on Monday after my next midwife appointment, which will be 39(!) weeks.  Hopefully, my mom will be coming with me, yay!  My midwife offered to strip my membranes last week to help things along, but I politely declined since I think that it’s still awfully early - baby is still baking!  I might revisit that decision at 41 weeks, but not until then.

Since our family members all filled out prediction sheets about the birth date, weight, and length of the baby, husband and I are talking about writing an R script to make a 3D plot to show - in multidimensional space - how close each person got to the real data once she’s born.  I’ve got some snakes to take care of today, but the script sounds fun, so I might work on it a bit.  If any blog readers who aren’t family and didn’t get a sheet want to make any predictions now, we’ll add you to the data frame :)  Post your guesses in the comments here!