Unbelievably, I just keep getting huger. It is all in the belly. And the boobs. (With perhaps an honorable mention going to my ass.)

I had a 35-week check-up appointment and it was delightfully uneventful. That is, aside from the doctor “reassuring” me that now that I’m at 35 weeks, if I were to go into labor they wouldn’t do anything to stop it—I could just have that baby right now and everything would be peachy. Of course I was thinking, “like HELL you wouldn’t stop it; this baby is NOT allowed out until January 1st and that’s final.” (I’m practicing for when the kid is 16 and wants permission to go to a college party or something.)

[Kind of amazing I can still stand upright.]

The Morning Ritual

Around 8ish, I wake up with the most bothersome and jabby hip aches. I lie for a moment, try the usual stretching, slinging my leg over the side of the bed, folding my knee pillow in half for added height, squeezing my eyes shut tighter in hopes of miraculously falling back to sleep because what, it has GOT to be like 5am—look how dark it is outside still. Of course, nothing helps for more than .5 seconds and so I grumble and roll over, the bed creaking and bulging and complaining about the additional 20 pounds it has been forced to deal with these past few weeks, poke at Joshua to get him into a better knee-rest position, and try it on that side for a while. Miraculously, the hip pain goes away. For around 20 seconds. And then it comes back. So, I grudgingly get up out of bed; I have to pee anyway. Joshua, who manages to sleep through all this (I think) mumbles incoherently and rolls over to take up the spot I just vacated and the bed sighs a big relief.

I put on a robe and trudge into the kitchen for first breakfast—usually plain yogurt with muesli and wheat germ (sounds gross doesn’t it? I like the stuff—especially with just a, ahem, tad of maple syrup on it)—and plant myself on the couch with this and a large glass of water and see what is going on in the world. Around this time, the baby wakes up and starts slithering around, pressing her back against one side of my belly and her feet out the side. Poke poke! Good morning Baby!

Her movements have changed considerably in the last few weeks. She is bigger and can’t do flips like she used to. The pokes are less sharp sudden jabs and more like slow stretches that can be felt (and seen) on both sides of my body as she stems across (she’s going to be a great off-width crack climber). Her head is crammed right up into my bladder, a big bouncy pillow that unhappily bears the full weight of the contents of The Belly. Her back lies either on my right or left side and she floats upside-down with her butt hovering up in the air somewhere just south of my ribcage; she shifts from one side or the other depending upon, something. Gravity maybe? It is really easy to feel exactly where she is these days and lately I’ve been able to chase a foot around with my finger when she kicks it against the outside. She gets the hiccups about the same time every day.

The nearest I can come to explaining what a such movement inside your body feels like is this: you know when you tilt the screen of a laptop and press too hard on the back of the LCD panel so that it makes this eerie shadowy distortion on the front of the screen? The shadowy distortion—THAT’S what it feels like.

I finished my baby quilt and it looks pretty damned good I think. I started out with an old robe that has a somewhat Japanesey print thinking I would just supplement with a few other patterns. I ordered a few pieces of material from a cool site in Japan that has all these neat kimono fabrics and then decided that my robe didn’t really match after all. Another time. The shiny greenish fabric border is Vietnamese silk, the edging and back are navy-colored flannel, dimensions are 42×52 inches.

[Just some close-ups so you can see the fabric patterns better.]

I started out also with a “simple” sketch of randomly sized blocks that I thought would make things easy and give me a wide margin of error. But somehow it ended up involving all sorts of math and precise measurements and a LOT of little rectangles. Here is the original sketch and subsequent notation as I progressed.

Getting bigger. Literally every morning I catch sight of myself en route to the bathroom for the first of my daily 587636 trips and just have to say, “DAMN!!” Ironically, I “measure small” from the outside; however, an ultrasound at 31.5 weeks decided that the baby was actually just over average for gestational size (4lbs 3oz) and everything was just peachy in there. Where the baby is keeping herself is anyone’s guess but I definitely feel squiggly movement all over in every part of my abdominal cavity, including inside of my iliac crests. It makes me wonder what was there before? And where the hell is it now?!

One thing that the ultrasound lady did was a bit of gratuitous zooming in and out of the face (the ultrasound is a planar view so you either see cheeks/chin/forehead but a cut-off nose and blank eyesockets, or eyelids and freaky skeletal facial structure, etc.). That was a trip; she’s definitely human—no doubt about it—as opposed to say, cephalopod. Her face looked like an old-fashioned doll in a fuzzy old black and white photograph.

In other exciting pregnancy-related news, I finally broke down and bought ‘real’ maternity pants. The rubber band through the buttonhole thing was simply not cutting it anymore. They are super hot (perhaps you can tell from the photo) and come only in size Too Big or Too Short. The elastic waistband is the kicker—if you are so inclined, you can actually wear it pulled up to your ribcage. Major nerdery, I’m telling you.

I’m thirty weeks now and look pregnant enough to have my first stranger, a cashier in one of the local shops, ask me when I was due. Of course, she had been recently pregnant herself so was unusually perceptive as to what such a large protruding anterior growth might possibly mean, but still, it was a milestone of sorts. My apartment neighbors still have yet to get a good look at me up close and I aim to keep it that way; of course, I run the risk that when I do start appearing with an actual air-breathing baby, they’ll probably think I stole it and call the cops. I’ll have to track down the shopgirl to vouch for me.

The closer I get to the magical date of January 1st (the day insurance starts! What? Does January 1st mean anything else? I can’t remember…), the more anxious I get. By the time the date rolls around I’ll probably undergo such a complete full-body relax and exhale that my lungs will collapse and the baby will slip right down out of me onto the floor. I’ll be in Trader Joes or something and people will seriously freak out.

The third trimester seems to be when all the unpleasant symptoms of pregnancy rear their ugly heads and I am right on schedule. (1) Monday morning of my 28th week, my back was suddenly all achy. I grumped around for a few days before walking to Fred Meyer to buy a hot pad and let me tell you, I LOVE that thing. Hot pads are the cat’s ass. My back, now two weeks later, actually feels better. Man, I’m turning it on right now! (2) Recent hyperproduction of relaxin in my body means my very skeleton is now held together by sheer will, or possibly peer pressure. I’m all … floppy. Sleeping on one side for more than five minutes results in a sensation that my hips have dislocated. Double ick. So I roll over (and make Joshua roll over too because his body forms a convenient scaffolding system for my body’s limb support) and give it another go for five minutes. Repeat. And again. Nobody sleeps. We nap a lot lately. (3) Stretching hurts! One of my abdominal scars has so much nerve damage I can’t feel anything anywhere in the vicinity but the other scar remains fully functional, nerve-wise, and hurts like a sonofabitch as the belly looms ever northward. I’m sure my round ligaments will start in next. (4) Restless leg syndrome! GAH! (5) Charley horses!! AAACK!

One fascinating development of pregnancy is blood. There is a lot more blood in my body than there used to be. The books all say so, something like 25-40% more. And I can feel it. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips and palms whenever I put my hands down by my sides or lay them on anything at all (kaBOOM kaBOOM kaBOOM). I feel my temples pulsing against my eyeballs. No wonder mosquitoes are especially attracted to pregnant women, we’re bursting with bloody goodness and there is SO MUCH SURFACE AREA to choose from.

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