First and foremost, my declaration: From this point forward, I will no longer call a baby inside of a uterus a “fetus.” The word, “fetus” is so impersonal. I don’t believe that my grandmother would have called her baby a “fetus” and so, therefore, in the tradition of my ancestors, neither will I.
On to more important matters….
This pregnancy might as well be my first as I cannot recall barely anything from the last (other than the adoring attention from John, my worried Mother, and the birth!). Was it in my 5th month that I experienced “no room in the stomach” department? Where does the food go when a baby has pushed everything north? If I eat, I truly have to “sit back and relax” as sitting forward is very difficult. Small meals are best, but what is considered a small meal? Obviously, 8 oz of soup combined with 8oz of hot tea and a slice of bread is too big. Thankfully, my baby is only the size of a kitten at the moment! My mother-in-law, Laura, has a friend who is pregnant with twins and each weigh in about 6 lbs! Fortunately, the woman herself is “big-boned” and about 6 feet tall, but still!! That’s 12 lbs. of just baby! She is due towards the end of January…I wonder if she is still teaching or if she is on maternity leave. Laura asks me if I am still working. The answer is yes, of course. There are pros and cons to working into my third trimester, and most of them aren’t worth mentioning…except that I am thankful that I am required to sit at a desk, especially after lunch. The files in the bottom cabinet have been moved up a drawer to accommodating my distaste for bending over…which is the next complication in a pregnancy that was never mentioned in the pregnancy books!
Bending over to pick up stuff up from the floor is a bit of a chore as well. Why objects think they have to fall to the floor instead of just floating in front of me within reach is beyond me. And to add to this difficult feat of bending over, I also have butter fingers. Yesterday Mari laughed as I dropped the same item twice. She called me “butter fingers.” One day while in the kitchen barefoot (and pregnant, like the ole’ cliché), I dropped a large glass casserole dish. John helped me over the broken glass and sweetly swept up the 10 year old possession. One moment it was in my hand as I was lifting it from the sink…the next it was all over the floor. Oddly, it was almost as if my brain told me to hold it, and the fingers ignored the command.
So if nothing else I should do in life, I will make a manual for health teachers to teach students about pregnancy. It is not enough to have the students carry around a sack of flour for a month. Let the kids “experience” pregnancy –before the infant comes! I would think that the experience of being pregnant would be a deterrent for teenage pregnancies.
There are good things about being pregnant, too. Shhh…we won’t tell the teenagers.
Recent Comments