As the past couple of weeks have gotten colder, and up in the mountains, the aspens have plugged into some electric source and lit up the forests with a sunny farewell to summer, I'm saying goodbye to my first trimester of pregnancy and hello to my second.
It's one of my favorite times of year. I pull out old sweaters, add another blanket to the bed, and find opportunities to walk through fallen leaves, and at the same time, I'm heaving a great sigh of relief that I've surmounted my first hurdle: the first 13 weeks pregnancy, the first nine weeks of the school year, and the stiffling heat of a Denver Public School in the last weeks of summer - without air conditioning.
And did I mention we're having a baby?
A spring baby. He or she is due the beginning of April - April 1st, to be exact. We discovered our new family member the last week of July, and since then we've been following the produce section, in awe as - week by week - the baby grows at a vegetable-in-a-Colorado-summer pace. At first, the size of a poppy seed, and the next week, the size of a sesame. In just seven days, the size of a lentil, and in seven more, the size of a blueberry. By week eight, he or she was the size of a raspberry, and by week nine, the size of a grape. On week 10, the exotic proportions of a kumquat, and on week 11, the length of a fig. By the next week, we had reached the size of a plum, and by the next, the size of a peach.
Now, our spring baby is the size of a large lemon. With a thumb to suck and feet to kick, I tell people who look at my flat belly in suspicion that our spring baby has all of its little parts. We got to see them when we had an ultrasound at week nine. We found ourselves particularly drawn to the part that beats - a little heart that gallops at 162 beats per minute.
You might think that I've been asked a hundred questions, but in fact, there have been hardly any. Apparently, people have babies all the time. Apparently, that's how we all got here. Even so, I'm completely floored by everything that's happening, and I treat each new symptom like some encrypted message from our spring baby whom I haven't quite met, but at the same time is sharing things with me like my food, my abdominal cavity, my energy... I'm fascinated and completely preoccupied - even if I look just the same.
And those encrypted messages have been suitably life-altering. Just now, I'm coming out of an exhausted stupor that gloriously coincided with my first nine weeks of teaching at a new and very demanding school. Each night when I came home from work, I would collapse on my bed and commence with an internal struggle that usually ended with me half-assedly pulling on my workout clothes and lugging my tired self a whole three or four miles. Afterward, I plead invalid status and sat on my duff as Joshua cooked all of my meals.
Headaches and nausea - though unpleasant - were constant reminders of my new status. All of a sudden, the woman who has never been picky, who loves vegetables and salty things in particular became a woman revolted by a long list of things, but most tragically, all of the things that came out of our beautiful (and by beautiful, I mean revolting) garden. Tomatoes made my stomach churn. I still shudder if I even hear the word, "squash." Steamed greens are about as appetizing as used kitty litter, and don't even talk to me about turnips. For the past six or seven weeks, I have only been appetized by yoghurt, berries, granola, and fruit. Oh, and I like sweet baked things. I know. SUPER nutritious for the growing fetus.
But I seem to be coming out of the worst of it, and even when I've felt pretty horrible, I wanted to feel horrible if that's what being pregnant meant. I like that my whole world has changed. Joshua asked me (a while ago, before the answer became stupidly obvious) if there was any way that I could
not know that I was pregnant. I laughed. If I didn't know I was pregnant, I would probably think I was dying. Not to be melodramatic or anything :)
