Cha Cha Cha!

I wish this was gonna be about my most excellent Latin dance skills.  But sadly it is not.

Ever since Karen wrote the other day about her thoughts and feelings on the pregnancy body I have been keeping a mental checklist of thoughts on my own.  I really thought this go-round would be similar to my pregnancy with Em and that I’d find comfort in the fact that creepy weird pregnancy things that no one ever talks about would not sneak up on me.  I mean, I have done this before, right? Evidently that is not the case.

In the few short days I have been thinking about this I have come up with more than a few delightful side effects of pregnancy that have astounded me all over again.  Here they are in order of ascending grossness.

First sign of my struggle with the pregnancy body is that I stop looking in the mirror without my clothes on.  The only bathroom in our house with a shower is not large, but it does offer two fantastic features.  A window in the shower and a mirror that is not directly across from you.   The window means you don’t have to turn the lights on  in the morning, which I have always rather enjoyed and the mirror’s relationship to the bathtub means you do not have to actively avoid looking at your full-frontal naked self every morning when you get out of the shower.  This is always a perk, in my book, but even more so pregnant.  Consequently when Em and I hopped in the shower the other day after the swimming pool I was ill-prepared for her observation.

She is laughing. I am washing my hair.  Like a fool, I ask her “What?”

“Your boobs look like they have a chopped off hot dog sticking out of them.”

I’ll give that a minute to sink in.

Damn, kid.  She had ruined my illusion.  The illusion I had of myself with perfectly normal boobs.   I have seen enough boob both in real life and in umm… film and pictures to have a preferred boob style.  And let’s just say that hot dog nipples and enormous areolas nine shades darker than the skin tone surrounding them were not it.

How had I forgotten about this?  Sure, I have been gifted jugs a cup size larger than my normal of late, but in exchange I have had to trade in my perfectly normal nips (n squared, if you will) for this freak show.  And don’t get me started on the gigantic blue vein that should pop up any day now.

Moving on… in order of ascending grossness, you are both reminded and warned.    A week or so ago I realized I had an appointment with my midwife coming up and that I should probably remember to ask her if I can take a stool softener.  I know I can google it.  But I try to have one question.  It makes me feel like a “good patient” to have a question at each appointment.    Yes, I am that approval seeking.

While the constipation was unpleasant enough, it gets worse.   The fact that I had begun to envision the “ring of fire” that comes with a baby’s head crowning every time I tried to produce a dime sized turd was making me both worried and furious.  Worried that if these totally unsatisfying bowel movements were  making me cry and imagine the pain of labor that I’d never survive an actual unmedicated labor.  And furious that while I had been in the bathroom for upwards of twenty minutes the toilet still resembled a game of marbles.  One in which no one even brought a shooter.

So, I did the only thing I knew to do.  I drank a cup of real coffee.  And it was delicious.  And that morning’s drive to work was fabulous. I miss coffee.

Twenty  minutes after I got to my office I thought I was going to die.  I would be found dead. In the office bathroom.  A dent in the top of my head where it had caved in from the  sheer gravitational pull of the ferocious diarrhea I was experiencing.  Oh and my shirt would be ripped open.  Not (as you might expect) to give a sexy sort of Woman Ravaged on a Cover of A Romance Novel look (and you are supposed to have already forgotten about the hotdog nipples and the diarrhea in order for that imagery to be effective) but because I thought I was having a motherfucking heart attack and I needed to see if my heart was, in fact, beating on the outside of my chest from the caffeine.

Lesson learned.  While the coffee did produce the opposite effect of constipation, it was no more desirable.

Flash forward to the next day.  Same intestinal disaster. With the added bonus of vomiting.  I am coming up on day five of this good time.  This morning as I wretched in to a trash can and wondered if I might be able to get upstairs to the other bathroom before “the spirit” moved me again I looked down to the floor.    “Thumbs Up!” said the cheerful giraffe sticker Em had stuck to the floor.  I had no choice but to laugh.  Thumbs up, alright. Up my ass if I am gonna get anything done today besides sit around in the bathroom.

So, that’s the top three things I have forgotten about pregnancy so far.  Freak show hot dog nipples, constipation and it’s bitch of a sister diarrhea.

In other news, it’s Casual Friday for me.  Pigtails, flip-flops, my favorite crooked glasses and my boombox belt buckle.  While you may disapprove of my freaky nipple and poop talk, you have got to applaud my efforts at taking a picture of a belt buckle (that I can not see) with my phone.   For you.  I do it all for you.