Week 8

How you are feeling: Like death, which is remarkable considering you are carrying a life.         The thought of food makes you barf, and so does the absence of food. Your family trembles with fear every time you announce, “dinner is ready!” Their fear is understandable because food created by you is either:

1)  the product of when you thought you would get creative and throw together some of the weird things that have sounded vaguely appealing (olives and ketchup, anyone?)

or…

2)  you started throwing up about 2 minutes before the oven timer went off and when you threw up you also peed a little, so by the time you cleaned up and changed underwear**  the meatloaf had become a blackened brick of inedible crunch. ** you no longer use the word “panties”.  Pretty, dainty things are the reason you are going through this again.

Your family will do their best to take in enough nourishment to survive during this time, but you should help by making sure you have plenty of peanut butter and spoons on hand.

This week you find you are drooling even when you are awake, not because anything sounds yummy (no seriously, get that AWAY FROM ME.) but because you literally do not have the energy to swallow the extra saliva you are producing. In addition to spit, your body’s blood volume has increased 40-50% which can cause mind numbing headaches. If you find yourself drooling and forgetting your other children’s names, take heart! You are a sloppy mess, but your lil raspberry sized human is flourishing!

This week you may also be experiencing the oft entertaining phenomenon of the “walking farts”. This is a rarely discussed though common occurrence whereby a pregnant female biped will experience bouts of pressure relief with each footfall during her routine  course of hunting and gathering (trips to Target). This is an innocuous form of pressure relief and should never be confused with the toxic flatulence of male bipeds of advanced age. One way to easily distinguish between the two gaseous forms is observing the visage of the offender: is the human blushing with obvious embarrassment and wearing yoga pants? Or is the perpetrator grinning like a maniac and bald with a great deal of hair growing from nostrils and ears?

It is important in these moments that you do not lose your mind and start apologizing to the strangers on the aisle. You have kids! Maybe one or two of them are still wearing diapers…blame it on them. Trust me, your children will never remember that you did this and they are not verbal enough to deny it. This is why you had babies.

Let’s see, week 8 also means your family and friends are pointedly conversing exclusively with your belly wondering when you are going to acknowledge that you are either pregnant or that you have just completely given up on getting in shape and are hitting the bottle and the cupcakes pretty hard. Strangers are touching your doughy belly and asking you when you are due.