Two part post

Part one:

I was so pleased this morning – the contractions really seemed to have subsided; I didn’t have any yesterday until after noon, and this morning only one. So I sent my mom and sis an email saying how happy I was, and that maybe they were dying down and would go away completely.

I really really should have known better.

This afternoon, of course, they started right back up again. And they’re feeling the same way they did on the Wednesday afternoon before I was admitted to the hospital – not every contraction, but about every fourth one I feel low in my uterus, rather than just at the top. I left work early and have been at home on the couch since, but I’m still getting them. I do have a doctor’s appointment in the am, so I’ll wait for that unless they start getting more painful. But I really was hoping that things were settling down in there. Alas.

Part two:

This part is about my sadness that some things with my pregnancy are not going as I had imagined / hoped. If you’re not in a place where you can read something like this, please don’t. I wrote this a few days ago, and I am feeling mostly better, but still a bit… wistful I guess is the best way to describe it.

Let me also preface this by saying that I am incredibly grateful to be pregnant right now, with meeting Phred just around the corner. I am fully aware of what an incredible gift this is, and what a special time in my life (and M’s too).

There are, however, some things that I was looking forward to about being pregnant that just haven’t materialized, or haven’t worked the way I wanted them too, and it all hit me last week.

I was washing dishes, and my back started hurting. The first back pains I’ve had this entire pregnancy. I feel like it’s all because I can’t exercise, I can’t lift weights like I was – I had been feeling so strong and healthy and good about myself and how my body was handling this pregnancy, and now I just feel like crap. I know that exercising makes the contractions worse, and of course I don’t want that, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t miss it terribly.

That (and, I think the Norah Jones CD that I was listening to – not really a good idea if you’re already feeling sad and melancholy) made me start thinking about some of the other things I feel like I’m missing out on.

The whole increased sex drive in the second trimester? What a joke! In my case, that is a complete load of baloney. I’ve never had a terribly active one to begin with, and now it’s gone from, oh I’d say a 2 on a scale of 1-10 (1 = no sex drive, 10 = nymphomaniac) to about a zero. Maybe even a negative number. And that makes me sad, because I was looking forward to being able to share that with M.

I also have never been one to dream. Or at least to remember them. And I was looking forward to all the wild and wacky dreams of pregnancy. That hasn’t come to pass either. I had the one dream during my 2ww that I knew I was pregnant because my nipples were bleeding – since then, nada.

I don’t know how much of these previous two are old wives tales, versus things that most people really do experience. But regardless, I was looking forward to both!

I think the thing that makes me saddest (in fact I know this is what most upsets me because when M and I were talking about it last week I started absolutely bawling) is that because Phred is breech and my placenta is on the front of my uterus, it is extremely rare that Phred’s movements can be seen or felt from the outside. M has felt her a few times, but we don’t get to play with her like so many other people have described. So it makes me really sad that I have this amazingly cool thing going on inside me, and I can’t share it with the person most important to me in the whole world like I want to. He said that he doesn’t feel left out, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.