People sometimes ask us if we have taken any classes to prepare for childbirth, so I tell them about the all-day childbirth class we attended a couple of weeks ago. They want to know if it was helpful, and I tell them it was because it forced Faithful Reader to give me back massages and it also taught him more respect for the physical difficulties arising from pregnancy. One of the things the teacher said is that the cardiovascular strain of pregnancy is equivalent to climbing a small mountain every day. It has become a running joke in our house. Any time I feel tired or don’t want to do something, I say, “Hey, I climbed a mountain today!”
This is not to say Faithful Reader hasn’t been a supportive hubby. He has been, but he has a terrible fear of encouraging my laziness. He also has an inherent dislike for babying me. I think it’s because he doesn’t want to set up expectations. I can understand that, but I do deserve a little babying from time to time, especially now, when I’m starting to experience some of the real downsides to having a baby.
Yup, I’m now well and truly into the third trimester. The once cute little beach-ball belly has grown to more of a boulder size and it weighs on me. I feel tired, hot, swollen. The warming temperatures haven’t helped. We went from brutally cold temperatures to sadistically hot ones, all within the same month. According to our weather monitor, the temperature topped 95 degrees this week. I fear that Spring will once again give us the slip and her sister, Summer, will visit early and hit hard.
To take my mind off the discomfort, I sometimes try to imagine how the baby looks as he floats around in my belly. There’s a website that does week-by-week pregnancy descriptions and they like to use fruits and veggies as comparisons to give you an idea of how big your baby is. Some of them are quite funny. My favorite was 26 weeks, when our baby was supposedly the length of an English hothouse cucumber. Last week, he was as heavy as 4 navel oranges. Isn’t that sweet? This week he’s jicama-sized. Yeah, my son is like a jicama. Anyone know what a jicama is?