Pregnancy: It's awful

Some women like being pregnant, or so I’m told. These women are clearly insane. OK, yes, I suppose it is possible that these women experience pregnancy differently than I do; perhaps the women who like being pregnant don’t have toddlers who want to “cough inna toilet” before bed, just like Mommy, but, Lord, I hate being pregnant. I mostly hate it during the worst symptoms of the first trimester, which lasts approximately 18 weeks, so don’t fall for those lies the pregnancy books tell you. No, this time there will be no flinging of pregnancy books across the room when I open them, weak from vomiting, only to read, “You’ve finally entered the second trimester, so by now you should be feeling better! The nausea is just about gone, you probably have a burst of energy, and rainbows have started streaming out of your butt!” (I might be paraphrasing slightly.) No, this time I will not fling them across the room because this time, I am not reading them. Take that, pregnancy books!

I did look up a symptom in the Mayo Clinic Guide, though. (The Mayo Clinic Guide to Pregnancy is way better that What to Expect, for those who are curious. What to Expect is a little judgmental for my taste.) I wanted to know if extra saliva really is a pregnancy thing. Of course it is. It’s called “ptyalism.” Pregnancy is SO WEIRD. Seriously, you could tell me that some women experience “superdigitism,” the spontaneous growth of an eleventh finger, and I would believe you. It’s not much weirder than extra spit.

In other news, the sciatica has already started even though that’s not supposed to hit till the third trimester. So, you know, woot.

But it’s not ALL terrible. The nausea with this pregnancy is WAAAAAAY better than it was with Jack, for example. So if this were my first pregnancy, I’d probably be feeling a lot sorrier for myself than I do, but I remember how it was. In fact, I hit fourteen weeks yesterday (they moved my due date back down to June 17 for some reason), and I seem to have already reached the stage where I throw up once in the morning before breakfast and then go about my day, a stage I didn’t hit until week nineteen or so with Jack. And let me tell you, I can TOTALLY DEAL with throwing up once in the morning before breakfast, especially when you consider that with Jack, I was eating nothing but Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, yogurt, and jello for the entirety of the fourteenth week because they don’t hurt when thrown up. So, yeah. This is better.

Even better, I unmistakably felt the baby move today. I am pretty sure I felt the baby move before, but of course, it feels so much like gas, one can never be certain. Still, who’s going to tell me I didn’t? But today was not gas. Nope, there’s a baby in there, alive and fluttering. And that part is pretty cool.