Musings

women are nicer to other women when they're pregnant.

its true! think about it & listen to this... i've had more random, strange women smile at me, hold doors open for me, call me "dear" and "sweetheart" than ever before in my life. its like i've been admitted to a secret social club i never knew existed, the social club of pregnancy & motherhood. from a social perspective its very interesting. a baby belly = acceptance. who knew? i wonder if its because i'm officially "off the market" & not in danger of stealing any of their husbands or boyfriends. i wonder if they feel an instant "bond" with me b/c they've been through it too. i wonder if its the "mother hen" syndrome where older, wiser women feel protective & caring toward younger, new mothers because they didn't get the same support themselves, or possibly because they did & they're just passing it along. i really can't say. a study of this magnitude would entail lots of personal interviews, questions, research... things i just don't have time for right now. but i might in the future. so i'm writing this note to remind myself to study this.

pregnant women are invisible to men

as they should be from a sexual perspective. but still... is it wrong of me to wonder why they see right through me? i had a woman hold a door open for me this weekend while i got stuck holding a door open for a group of guys who would loud, rude & shovey. i am now obviously physically pregnant (in that my belly is sticking out to here) & i had to wonder "wtf is this about??" & not one of them said thank you. i felt invisible. i felt disgusted. i felt... probably a lot more than i should have bothered feeling since no one noticed the slight but me.
but still...
why did that happen?
is it because, as a soon-to-be-mother i am also off the market sexually (see the above paragraph) & therefore i am hands-off to all members of the male variety?
is it because, as a soon-to-be mother i am seen as nothing more than a vessel for a life form?
is it because, as a soon-to-be mother i am seen as someone who is incapable of being anything but a mother?

are these not the lamest questions in the world? i can't even come up with good questions to TRY & explain this strange behavior.

all i know is, women & men are treating me differently when all i really want is to be treated exactly as i was before.

20 weeks & gassy

oh yeah you read that right. 20 weeks & gassy baby. like all the time, little burps leaking out in the middle of meetings, in the middle of phone conversations, in the middle of hugging people - i'm so sorry for burping into your hair Meg! could i be more disgusting? probably! only time will tell ...

passed the 20 week mark yesterday which puts us into week 21. our little boy is growing like a week. i feel him moving around all the time, squirming, kicking, head butting me, punching my bladder (which is so much fun i can't even put it into words! it feels like having a UTI but w/o the pain, just the need to "pee right this second" but then a dribble comes out)

we went shopping for cribs last weekend & found one thats cute & cheap. score! its just your standard run of the mill crib, nothing fancy-dancy. we also received a bunch of baby stuff from my boss which was so nice of her. i brought home the bassinet, bouncy chair, play mat & bunches of toys yesterday & "oooed" and "ahhed" all over them b/c they're SO ADORABLE.

i think we have the baby's room color picked out, but would love some help. here are my color choices so far:


Dark Grey + Acid Green



Dove Grey + Robin Egg Blue



Chocolate + Pea Green








OR a mix of these colors.... i'm leaning away from the chocolate because our living room is already chocolate, cocoa & turquoise... & his furniture will be light wood like this:



Please leave your suggestions!! i have the urge to decorate!

Half Way point!

19 weeks completed, or in my 20th week of gestation, which is the half way point & it feels really good to reach this milestone knowing that from here on out we're counting down instead of up. does that even make sense? it does to me...

Strange Symptom #1 - Burning Belly Button
about 2 days ago i started to feel like someone had traced a red hot poker over & around my belly button. every book & ever pregnant person warns you that your belly button is going to to change from an innie to an outtie (unless you already have an outtie), but they don't tell you that while its happening your belly button is going to HURT LIKE HELL. not just little stabbing pains here & there, but full on "don't touch me!" pains. i started noticing that my once extremely-inny-belly button was now not such an innie. at least on the bottom half of the belly button. today i woke up to a half innie/half outtie & i'm seeing parts of my belly button i never knew existed. the deep, dark recesses of the button. one cool thing about it is how it feels to the touch. that skin from the innie has been so sheltered for so many years (in my case almost 30) that it is SUPER SOFT like a newborn baby's. lately i find myself fingering it absentmindedly. i'm sure that doesn't make me look crazy at all :/

Strange Symptom #2 - Fat Ankles
yep this is just too true to ignore, all my strappy heels are being done up on a looser hole.

Strange Symptom #3 - Unbenditis
this i noticed also 2 days ago when i tried to do up the strappy heels referenced above. i could reach my shoes, but just. gone are the days when i could just bend over & put my shoes on like a normal person. come are the days that i have to sit in a chair, while sticking my leg up on another chair or the table (like a contortionist) & reach, reach, reach down to my feet. its not this big lump of a baby is bendable. it can't contract itself to give me room to reach. husband & i knew we were going to have a problem when i got home from work & he had to take my shoes off for me. which isn't really a bad thing b/c now i have a great excuse to go to BOGO & get a bunch of snappy flats

Its a...

BOY!!

we saw his little winky last night; it was sooo cute. he weighs around 11 ounces & has all of his appendages (which was a relief). he was feeling his face & was pretty quiet - a couple of times i thought he was sleeping but the technician said he was just inactive at that moment. i think my bladder was too full. after i went the loo he seemed to have more room & squirmed a lot more.

i can't believe we got our boy! we're so lucky :)

What have you read? Stolen ..

Well, the worst has come true - at least in my mothers eyes. She was always paranoid that i would take a spill down our stairs but i said "don't worry nothing like that will ever happen" & technically it didn't. i did not fall down our stairs - i fell down the condo's stairs this morning on my way to clean off the car from work. i shredded my nylons, banged up my knee, elebow, arm & hip. i also completely freaked out b/c i half landed on my stomach. i cried so hard i had to re-do my makeup before we left for work.

That, coupled with our 3D gender determination ultrasound in about 3 hours has be really edgy right now. so while on my break at work, in an attempt to get my mind off my horrendous fall down the stairs & impending 3D ultrasound i decided to post this:

You are supposed to bold the books that you've read... the list was "borrowed" from another girls blog i found on my sister kim's blog. it was such a fun idea i couldn't pass it up & it took maybe 3 minutes to go through.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austin)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien) The Silmarillion
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Restaurant at the End of The Universe
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 1/2
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)Rumble Fish
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Gender & Aunty!

i'm an aunt! carey had her baby on thursday at 5:30 pm. a little girl named Svea. she is adorable. we got to spend visiting hours with them last night at the hospital & i held her twice. she's about 7 pounds, 11 ounces, she's really really long & very thin. she has the biggest head of hair & its styled into a mini Hawk so she looks like a little punk. i fell in love immediately & wanted to take her away to my house & keep her forever. it just made me so much more excited to be having our own in just over 4 months.

we got really lucky & landed a 3D ultrasound with the only clinic that offers them in ottawa & its on monday! we should be able to find out the gender of our own baby then :) we're very excited. also b/c we'll get a CDrom of the entire visit that we can share with our family (; ; ; ;) we'll compress the file & post it here & on our wedding website

everyone do us the a favor this weekend & send us some positive karma that the kid's legs aren't crossed on monday!

18 weeks

well we did it. we're one week away from the half way mark (remember 18 weeks is completed, so we're in our 19th week of gestation) its a huge milestone that brings us 3 weeks away from the gender ultrasound

on a completely unrelated note, my sister just posted a review about a Method product she picked up the store to clean. we've been using Method products for a while, but i never realized they were environmentally friendly, i always just assumed they were the in-house Shoppers brand b/c they were considerably cheaper than other products, but always smelled & worked just as well.

after visiting their website i'm suitably impressed. this write-up details how their "wipes" work (think the same wipes as Clorox that everyone uses on their counters)

"No rubber gloves required. In fact , we're against cleaning with rubber gloves. A powerful method for getting rid of grimy soils without using harsh toxic chemicals, go naked wipes are convenient, biodegradable and contain zero dyes + zero perfumes. Perfect for people with a sensitivity to fragrances or dye allergens."

what really impresses me is "no toxic chemicals" and "biodegradable" and "zero dyes". digging a little deeper into their website i found a whole laundry section just for BABIES. which is thrilling. i am going to encourage everyone to look into this company b/c its making a splash all over the news, its affordable, its wrapped up in a sexy little package (both marketing & appearance) & shouldn't we all be doing our part? really? after all, we're in the 21st century, its time to stop living like we're all pretending we can't see how much our environment is crying.

Turkey & SIL's bigger belly

for thanksgiving we spent the evening with the feagan clan & i did something i haven't been able to do since christmas dinner over 4 months ago ... are you ready for it? i - ate - meat & it didn't taste terrible!

so i guess its true when 'they' say that a starving pregnant woman really will eat anything.

carey, shaun sister, is over a week past her due date. i was feeling very proud showing off my belly at dinner (& my outfit which highlighed my belly) until carey showed up at dinner. her belly is so much better than mine. its at least twice the size & depth & she looks just amazing. it made my belly feel inadequate. i look tiny compared to her belly. standing next to her was like glimpsing into my own future, i can only hope i don't go 2 weeks over my due date too. OUCH. thats rough.

17 weeks, 3 days

this is probably the best post i've been ever able to write on the subject of prenancy.

i don't hate being pregnant anymore :)

i am starting to love it. i had read in lots of books that once women started to show & started to feel the baby move that the pregnancy finally started to feel "real" & once that happened a lot of negative feelings or impulses just drained away. i never thought i'd be one of the lucky ones to share this feeling b/c of how i'm about 60% dark & gloomy while 40% light & airy. so i just never thought i'd fall into that category (truthfully i always worried i'd be the one in a million new mom's to birth their child, take a good hard look at it, then regect the poor little thing)

i know i spoke to many of you, my friends & family, about how women i know (mostly online, b/c, lets face it, most of my good friends just aren't "here" yet) have described pregnancy as "miraculous" or as being "a gift from god" & that i thought it was just a bunch of CRAP since i didn't feel very miraculous or gift-ful. how i was annoyed all the time & bitter that i couldn't live my old life & how i was starting to feel resentful that i just wanted my old body back.

somehow, somewhere, someone must've heard my plea. i don't really know who or what to accredit it to or for. probably just good old science since scientifically its TIME to start feeling the baby; & while i've felt the baby in the past this was just different.

it was like the baby was reaching out to me saturday morning. like it was trying to get my attention. because it was so early, because the sun was streaming in around the edges of the blinds, because DH was still sleeping soundly, because my pillow felt that exact right mix betwen soft & cool on my cheek, because it was a holiday, because it was just time.

because it wanted to wake me up by conducting slow, languid, sommersaults that made my tummy contract & my breath catch in my throat. because for the first time i really FELT like this was my child & it was growing inside me; & maybe, just a little bit, because i was the only person able to feel it, so it felt like a secret, a very special secret life.

whatever it was, thank you. i really needed to feel this way.

16 weeks, 6 days

great news! we got our IPS results back last night & they are "normal" which means we're not having a baby with downs or spina bifida or another physical disability. now, these tests don't rule out mental disabilities so its not the dr.'s fault if, once the baby is born, it develops severe autism or ADD or dislexia or tourettes (shudders, just for writing that now it will) ... that kind of thing just isn't knowable yet. but at least we can rule out physical (for now). our dr. did warn us that until we can see more in the ultrasounds we won't be able to rule out heart problems or missing limbs or scary diseases like having the stomach on the outside instead of the inside.

anyway... i'm taking this news for what its worth & feeling in a very celebratory mood!

the not so good news (and not bad by any means) is that my iron is really low. normal ranges are between 5-300 (whatever that means, i'm not a dr. so don't ask me) and mine is 11. which explains why i've been feeling tired all the time no matter how much sleep i get. she put me on iron pills, which i'm going to pick up tonight after work & that should hopefully correct the problem. my other levels (hemoglobin, blood pressure, etc.) are all w/in normal range.

on a more personal note, my boobs are killing me. i have developed little tiny stretch marks on the underside that look like broken blood vessels. while tiny, i've never had stretch marks on my boobs before so its a bit depressing to look in the mirror & see that every morning.

whats also depressing is the BATHROOM SCALE b/c i think its lying to me. the dr's office scale - which is WHACK - says i weigh in at 142. is that a joke? did i really just write that for the whole world to see? 142!!! YUCK!! but my own scale says 139. so of course as i'm getting on the scale at the dr. i'm loudly bragging about how "good" i've been & how "proud" she'll be of me when she sees i've only put on ONE pound since my last weigh in (btw being preggo can really make you feel like a wrestler sometimes w/ the weigh in's) - then the scale blows WAY up & i feel like a tool for being so braggy.

anyway we go for our gender ultrasound in 4 weeks!!!

16 weeks, 4 days

Belly shot for my sister kim who lives far away :) It looks like i'm arching my back, but i'm not.. at least thats how it is all the time now. Its allllll belly.

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