How Goes the Pregnancy?

This is pretty much everyone’s favorite question when they see me. How are you doing? How’s the baby? Fine, fine, fine, all good. And it really is, overall. But in case you’re interested in the long version, here it is:

1. No internal heater. When people hear that you’re going to be super pregnant in the summer, they say, “Oh, that’s rough, you’re going to be so overheated!” When they hear it will be winter, they say, “Awesome, at least you’ll have an internal heater.” I have never experienced this phenomenon. In fact, I have felt generally colder during my two winter pregnancies, and even when I was massive in the muggy, new-to-me Maryland heat, I didn’t feel like it was any worse than when I wasn’t pregnant. I was expressing this to Brice, and he said, “You do have an internal baby heater. It’s just broken.” Well, that explains it then.

2. Emotional hostage. Here’s how I said this to the world of Facebook: “The baby has apparently taken my hormones and emotional regulation abilities hostage.” In practice this means that I am crying over some really dumb stuff lately. Like when my shower towel is too stinky. Or when I think about a story that I was going to write but didn’t. Or, you know, when I slightly overcook the grilled cheese sandwiches. (Even dumber stuff too, like fuzzy socks or the girls’ cute fashions, etc.) And then of course I also bawl over the not-dumb stuff, like when I’m tired and the girls have made a massive mess in their bedroom ten minutes after we’d just cleaned it up beautifully. Or when I am hungry but queasy and I can’t think of what to cook. Or when I’m stressing out about what it’s going to be like to have four kids. Which leads me to numbers 3 and 4 . . .

3. Nausea. So, I spent about a month and half feeling pretty decent most of the time. A couple bouts of queasiness here and there, but overall pretty great. And also not yet super uncomfortable, and also not super tired anymore. Of course, every time I started gloating about how I was feeling, I had a massive patch of vomiting (keeping me nice and humble!), but overall, I was doing well. Well, it seems we’re back to some fairly frequent queasiness again (though it is still low-grade and really nothing compared to women who actually have difficult pregnancies). And guess what are the two main things that help? Eating and lying down. As in, as long as I’m eating food, I feel fine. As soon as I stop, not so much. And then, after I eat, if I lie down for ten minutes or so, I feel better. So between these and just, you know, being pregnant, I’m pretty much going to explode into whale proportions.

Also, as of yesterday, it had been quite nearly a month since I had thrown up. And then came this month’s stomach bug, which has so far gotten four of the five of us. I can’t really tell, though, if my throwing up was because of 1: being sick; 2: pregnancy; or 3: having to clean up someone else’s vomit (honestly, Brice is the designated cleaner-upper in our house—for which he should be sainted—because I can’t stand it at all).

4. Four kids, plus labor and newborn stage and all that jazz. This should probably be broken down into two items, and I could actually write a whole blog post about it, but you’d get bored. So here’s the summary: Coriel’s labor: really hard. Addra’s: really easy. Koa’s: pretty hard. I’m freaking out that baby #4 will be more inclined to take after Coriel and Koa. But even if he’s not, “really easy” was still quite painful during the process. And then the newborn stage is insanely difficult for me (and when I say “newborn,” I mean “first two years at least”). I have, by and large, been not thinking about it all. Because every time I do, I become a major watering pot. I told Brice the other day that there should be a disorder called “pre-traumatic stress syndrome.” His response was, “Yeah, it’s called anxiety.” Which I guess is sort of true, but whatever it’s called, I’ve got a lot of stress and/or terror about labor/babyhood and then just plain being able to manage four kids.

At which point, someone reading this is thinking, “Well, then, you shouldn’t have had the fourth kid.” And my explanation may be hard to understand if you don’t believe in God the way that I do—because both Brice and I feel strongly that this was the right decision for our family, a prompting from God, even though it may be hard. So here’s a different way to look at it. Even if you don’t believe that God speaks directly to individuals to help and guide them, have you ever done something that you thought was hard and scary but you did it anyway because you felt like it would be a good thing? Maybe it was a job application, a college application, asking a specific person on a date, moving across country, training for a marathon. In so many of these cases, we take the plunge even if we don’t feel ready, even if we’re not sure we can handle it, because we believe it’s the best choice. And so here we all are, with me both pregnant and also freaking out. Because the bottom line is that even though I don’t feel ready, even though I’m pretty much terrified, I believe it’s the right choice and that when we make good, hard decisions, God makes it possible for us to do what is required.

5. Baby names—eek! It has already been pointed out to us from several sources (my sister K being the first) that if we name #4 a name that starts with E, our children will spell out CAKE. Now, I’m sure you can guess that this is the most important consideration in finding a baby name. Who doesn’t want their children to spell out a delicious dessert? So we’ve had quite a few E suggestions. Which is good, because at the rate we’re going, we’ll have to look through approximately a billion names to find two that we can sort of agree on. This baby had just better help us when he gets here, because so far the naming process is tough.

And that, my friends and foo, is how the pregnancy is really going. Thanks for asking! :)