Sippin' a drink and feelin' fine

Well, sipping a chocolate milk. That's as wild and crazy as it gets these days.

I hit 15 weeks on the weekend and I have to say, for the most part? Pregnancy doesn't really feel like anything anymore. For the first 12 weeks I fought debilitating exhaustion and constant lowgrade nausea. My morning sickness wasn't confined to morning; it was all day, every day. I'm grateful for the fact that I never actually puked - very, very grateful - but I simply didn't expect the exhaustion to carry quite the wallop it did. I not only couldn't stay awake, I simply couldn't function. Thinking was an enormous task. Hauling my ass off the couch to move to another room was a job that required several hours' preparation. Cooking supper? Forget it. We ate more takeout in T1 than we did the rest of the last year combined. (Note to self: send Husband on cooking classes prior to baby's arrival. Refuse to live on takeout while fumbling through immediate post-birth haze and I'll be damned if I have to cook too. On educational list: spaghetti sauce, chili, M&M meat shop frozen entrees that are so easy the dog could cook them. Shouldn't be too complex. Expect only minor shock damage to kitchen.)

Now that those have subsided, the only real pregnancy symptom that feels like any kind of "symptom" is the belly bloat. The belly kind of feels a bit out of control, it has to be said. It's not really more than a bump yet, but I feel it all the time, the weight starting to pull my body, send my center of gravity slightly off balance, making previously easy tasks like lacing up shoes something now somewhat uncomfortable. And the thing is, while it feels like constant bloat, it's not. It's baby. Slowly taking over my abdomen. Like some kind of alien. Seriously, that's messed up. For the next six months my internal organs will fight a losing battle for real estate against a fetal human being. And then after winning this battle, this human will decide that it's had enough and emerge violently through my vagina (which has done nothing to offend it as far as I know) and demand access to my breasts. Talk about biological imperative.

But that's all yet to come. All I know is, this year taught me a valuable lesson: exactly how necessary alcohol is as a holiday lubricant. I had no idea how much I relied on my Christmas crutch of 4 bottles Pinot Grigio until I was deprived of them.