Third Trimester!

This post is all about pregnancy

I’m now 31 weeks. I can’t believe it!

I’m getting bigger, which is probably a good thing, but it’s totally bizarre. I always envied those pregnant bellies, but now that I have one, it’s a much stranger sensation that I would have imagined. I didn’t fully anticipate the discomfort – feeling like my skin is being stretched to its limit, that I’m running out of room. It isn’t horrible – just kind of odd. I started writing a post a few weeks ago when I was seriously uncomfortable, but I didn’t finish it. My tailbone/pubic bones literally felt like they were breaking in two, and I think I woke up every night for almost two months with intense hip pain. For whatever reason, both have vanished (although the tailbone thing returns if I’m not careful), even though my stomach is substantially larger.

I love imagining what our little girl will be like – what she’ll look like, and what kind of temperament she’ll have. It’s kind of surreal – knowing there’s this tiny baby moving around inside me (and what is she doing in there, exactly?), but knowing almost nothing about her. The whole thing is kind of scary. I’m not super scared about labor – it’s kind of intimidating, but it’s a finite event. I am scared, though, about being a parent. It’s scary to not know how I’ll react or feel once she’s here. I try to imagine it, but I know that until she’s here, I really can’t.

Sometimes I feel like I spent so long dealing with infertility that over time, I just stopped imagining what it would be like to actually have a child. I mean, I thought about it, but I stopped imagining. It’s hard to all of a sudden switch gears and imagine being a parent now. I would guess that a lot of people spend their pregnancy imagining and preparing for it, but I spent the first half of it just trying to believe that things were really going to work out. It’s STILL hard to believe, but at 31 weeks, odds are looking up.