On Being Pregnant: Whoa...

Currently I am 17 weeks and 6 days pregnant… whoa.

And it has been a journey getting here. A hell of a journey. And I don’t use “hell” lightly. But I’ll get to that in another post.

First off, just being pregnant is the weirdest thing ever. I have spent my entire life not being pregnant. Other people get pregnant. Grownups get pregnant. People who get pregnant get pregnant. And now suddenly, I’m pregnant. When and how did that happen?

I mean, I know how. But this identity change has been surreal. I am a person who is pregnant. IS pregnant. There is currently a human growing inside of me. It has arms and legs (well, now it does. Before, it had paddles), and a heart, and a brain, and a spine.

And it MOVES! Only in the last day or two have I been pretty sure (notice, not positive) that I’ve been feeling a baby. It feels like gas—which I have become even more accustomed to—but different, because I usually don’t fart afterward. And it often comes on when I move or scrunch, thereby compressing my uterus, and giving the little one less room. And this baby will tell me it’s not happy! I like it already. It’s got sass :)

Apart from the severe pregnancy nausea I’ve had since week 6, and, quite honestly, many pregnancy symptoms confirming I was pregnant (including a positive pregnancy test), I had a hard time completely believing I was pregnant. I just kept thinking, “this can’t be real, because it would be too weird and crazy if I were pregnant.” And we were trying to get pregnant, so I’m not sure why I was so slow on the uptake.

It finally felt real at the first ultrasound at 11 weeks. I have seen plenty of ultrasound photos. I am surrounded by baby-making machines on Facebook, at church, at work… baby pictures in-utero are everywhere. So when I got to the doctor’s office with Brock, I expected the baby not to move, to just be stationary, like all of the screen-shots I had seen of hard-to-interpret baby pictures with dark, fuzzy backdrops. Babies in the womb didn’t move until much later in my mind, apparently.

But it MOVED! It moved… and it spun around, and it did a flip. And we have the cutest picture of it doing a hand-stand and showing us its butt. And when I saw it move, I knew I was pregnant, and that that baby was real, and alive, and mine, and Brock’s. And I cried, and I fell in love.

This baby is so loved already by both Brock and I. Our families and friends are excited for us, and we are so happy and look forward to meeting our new, little love.

Life is weird and awesome and beautiful.

And I’m pregnant… whoa.