Saturday morning when I woke up and toddled down the hall to the bathroom, I was treated to a whole new feeling. A feeling experienced by beer-bellied men the world over and, I suppose, pregnant women past a certain point. As I sat down on the toilet to pee, eyes still not fully open to greet the day, I noticed a strange sensation on my thighs. Like nothing I’d ever felt before.
It was my stomach. Resting on them.
Now perhaps it’s my ergonomic office chair or the fact that I’ve trained myself over so many years as a writer to sit upright, but for whatever reason, to this day there is no thigh/belly contact when I sit at my desk. In fact, though obviously protruding while I hammer away at the keys, my bump floats high enough so as to almost forget that it’s there (if it weren’t for Dash’s hiccups or increasingly consistent acrobatics, that is). Call it mommy brain, call it wishful thinking, whatever the case it probably explains why I was so surprised by my circumference (and its intersection with my quads) on my morning pee run. Aside from the compulsion to run my hands under my belly and crane it up off my legs (and my fear that this must mean my thighs are about to start rubbing when I walk – like any second), I found myself questioning the elasticity of (my heretofore relatively petite) human body. If my mid-section and legs are already making contact with thirteen weeks to go, will my navel touch my knees by late-December? That’s when Dashiell is due and let’s be honest… If I stretch too much further, not only will I tip over on my way down the hall to the toilet, I’ll end up having to camp on the throne until my husband wakes up because I won’t be able to hoist myself up off it.
In other news, this weekend my cold returned, proving that my last post displayed far too much optimism for my own good. After a round of rather frightening heart palpitations Sunday night, I wound up in the doctor’s office hooked up to an ekg on Monday morning. Assured that everything is normal and my irregular heartbeat and shortness of breath are the results of a lingering severe cold, my nerves have subsided. That said, I’m still wondering… If I feel like this for the next three months (out of breath and like I’m being intermittently kicked in the heart in between jabs to every other area of my abdomen), how am I going to get the nursery done… or anything for that matter?
