uggghhhhhh. I didn't leave the couch all day yesterday. so very sick. more sick than usual. it might have been because I spent saturday night at a party, was so hungry when I left that I made sean buy me a stauffer's mac and cheese salisbury steak microwave dinner, ate it, then watched autopsy on hbo until 4:30am. we got up around 10:30 and laid around, and as the morning turned to afternoon, I just got more and more sick. even eating didn't help. the only thing that felt good was sleeping. needless to say, I didn't sleep well last night (dreams about ghosts in my childhood house that moved all our clothes to different drawers and forced my mom to give our dog away) and now I'm not feeling so good this morning, either. and it's so nice out, it would have been great to take a walk yesterday. and today. but I don't think it will happen.

anyway, I finally removed the shirts and pants that don't fit from my drawers (hence that part of the dream.) I wore new maternity pants to the party saturday night. I felt a little silly, but no one knew they were maternity pants, so it wasn't so bad. I wore a maternity shirt, too, but it was one that didn't look big and tenty. or so I think, anyways. I just think it's too early for me to wear this stuff, but my mom says that if it fits, then I'm meant to wear it. nice advice.

anyway, since I'm now starting week 11, and week 12 (and the end of this horrid first trimester) is that much closer, I'm getting into better spirits. I just hope I'm not one of those people who stay sick through my whole pregnancy. if so, this would definitely be the last child I ever have. I am positive it wasn't this bad with trent. maybe that means we're having a girl.

I got some good news last week that has also lifted my spirits considerably. it made me infinitely more comfortable with things and excited. what is it? in due time, in due time.

sean starts his new job training today. he looked like a grown up when I blearily saw him through half closed eyes at 5am when he left for work. a crisp, new black polo shirt and boot cut khakis with new black boots. whatta man.

I cannot wait for these next 2 weeks to be over so that I can start feeling more alive again. this tiredness and infinite sickness have really taken their toll on me. someone told me that a cousin of hers got pregnant again shortly after having a child, and because she was so sick, she vowed never to have any more children. like I said, if I were sick throughout this time, this would be the last...and I gotta tell you, I'll be thinking twice before having another one even if the sickness abates when it's supposed to. but who knows. time enough for that later, when mother nature wipes my memory clean.

well, I just got back from the doctor's for my monthly checkup. first things first, I almost forgot to bring some pee with me, but remembered at the last minute. it was about 3 ounces, but apparently it was enough to test. all is okay with the urine. first up was weight check. wanna know how much I gained? nothing. I was SHOCKED. my pants don't lie, and I have exactly 3 pair that I can still wear, 1 of which is getting iffy. and everyone who has seen me and found out about my being pregnant has said "oh, I thought you looked a little more 'filled out' but I didn't want to assume." so that's a big ole mystery.

so the doctor tried to hear the baby's heartbeat, but we couldn't hear it. we could hear my heartbeat from the artery that leads into the uterus, so that's good, and he told me that sometimes that heartbeat is so loud that it drowns out the baby's. we tried for a while and didn't hear anything. so I'm still freaked out about the molar pregnancy. but I'm going to try to control myself until next month, where we hear the heartbeat AND get an ultrasound.

all the tests that I had to take last month were normal. no positive RH, no cystic fibrosis, no aids, no anemia, nothing weird or odd. so I am pretty good right now.

I can't get over the weight thing. it boggles the mind.

to celebrate, I'm eating a huge bowl of elbows and gravy. and I'm going to have a reese's peanut butter egg when I'm done. things are beginning to look up.

they weren't so rosy last night, however, when my nausea finally got the best of me after a meal of my most favorite food - mcdonald's cheeseburgers. up they finally came. so I am probably off cheeseburgers for a good long while, now. which is probably for the best.

I have another doctor's appointment tomorrow. I am hoping that I will get to hear the baby's heartbeat, but I'm not sure if they do that this time or not. someone recently told me about something called a "molar pregnancy" - which I read can be a partial or whole molar pregnancy. a partial is when a fertilized egg starts out as a baby, but can't be sustained (usually because there are too many chromosomes - the sperm brings 46 along instead of the 23 that complement the egg's 23 chromosomes.) a whole or complete or whatever is when a fertilized egg doesn't turn into a baby at all, but a weird mass of cells that look like a bunch of grapes. that usually happens when the sperm doesn't bring any chromosomes or the egg doesn't have any. so the whole or complete or whatever's cells can spread to other areas of the body (most likely the lungs) and are considered cancer, and treated with chemo. either way, with a molar pregnancy, you need a d&c and to wait til your hcg hormones are down to 0 for a year until you can get pregnant. anyways, I had never heard of it, now I know, and now I'm freaked out that I might have one of them. they usually find out when they try to find a heartbeat and can't hear one.

I know I'm going to feel better when I have some sort of real proof that there's a child in there, and when I stop feeling so sick all the time.

mother nature is so funny. I don't remember ANY of this with my first child. or any pain. it's like you just...forget. that is, until it happens again, and then you're like..oh yeah, that sucked.

on the plus side, my prenatal yoga (thank you, nicole) is making me feel more in shape and I enjoy getting out. sometimes, it's the only thing I get dressed for all week.

my belly is getting bigger and a bit more firm and round. just a bit though. apparently, when you have a second or third or whatever child, your body remembers what it went through before and starts loosening the muscles in your abdomen and letting your organs move around alot earlier than the first child, so you start showing earlier. I'm trying to convince myself that it's not fat, but I'll find out for sure tomorrow when I go to the doctor. I am thinking I gained about 10 lbs this past month. no lie. if the doctor tells me I'm gaining too much, then maybe you'll all believe that I am fat. ha. a lonely, forlorn ha.

so I figured out that the dream thing was because I was taking a nap during the day. I stopped doing that and I still wake up during the night knowing that I just had a dream, but not being scared out of my wits or remembering every detail. so that's good.

what's not as good is that the sickness has settled in. I wake up feeling okay, until I actually stand upright. that's when it starts. it only abates when I eat. so I'm eating a ton. and the sucky part is that I just FEEL sick, I don't GET sick. I wish I would, and get it freakin over with. so it ebbs and flows all day and all night now. I am in week 9, so in theory, I only have 3 more weeks of this - actually 4, since I'm just starting week 9. whatev.

in other news, I am fat. fat, fat, fat. and it ain't baby. it's gluttony. I fool myself into thinking that I should eat whatever I want because it's my body's way of saying I need that particular nutrient. and it's true sometimes - I crave yogurt, so I need the dairy and the calcium. I crave chocolate milk (I hate white milk, always have - my mom had to give me stawberry quik in my bottles as a baby because I refused to drink white milk) because I need the calcium and the vitamin d. I crave meat (and boy do I crave meat) because I need the protein and iron. so then it should follow that I crave the cadbury mini eggs because I need the...um...candy shell. and I crave velveeta shells and cheese because it has "cheese" in it. and I crave totino's pepperoni party pizza because it has all 4 food groups in it. meanwhile, I can only guess how many pounds I've put on. (and it will only be a guess, because I refuse to step on a scale. time enough for that at the doctor's office.) WTEWYE, aka the pregnancy bible, says you should only gain 3-6 pounds in your first trimester. I think I gained that in my first week.

there was this one girl at a job I used to work at that was very big. one might say slightly obese. anyways, she was out for a while and then one day she came back and there were balloons at her desk. I figured she might have had an illness or been in an accident or something. turns out the balloons said "it's a girl" - the woman was pregnant and I never even knew. we're all familiar with the typical shape of a pregnant woman, but honestly, this lady had rolls of fat and none of the rolls looked like baby. so this is my fear - I'll be 9 months pregnant, waddling around, and people will just be like "oh dear, what a fat woman."

then I get all freaked out because...should I really be worried about what I look like? as sean likes to say, I'm a "vessel" now, I should only be worried about making sure we don't have a pointy headed baby covered with fur, not my own figure. god, I wish I would throw up already, I feel so sick right now. anyways.

so the whole fat thing is because I think I am starting to show, which WTEWYE says shouldn't happen until the middle of month 4. I am at the beginning of month 3. so I am a fat cow. oh, thanks in advance to all of you who will write to me and say I'm not a fat cow. with all due respect, you're just trying to be nice, so be quiet. I'm fat. it's true.

anyways, I hate my job, I feel sick, I feel fat, I wish I were just bloated, I feel sick, I want some mac and cheese, I feel sick, and I like cadbury mini eggs. that's all for today.

Okay. I've decided not to take my prenatal vitamin so close to bedtime so I can stop with these dreams already.

Awful night. I felt sick all evening and really sick before bed. I woke up around 3:30 after the following extremely vivid dream:

I'm with my mom hanging out. I go to the bathroom and I am bleeding like crazy. Big clots and lots of blood. I start freaking out and I tell my mom and she tells me to call the doctor. As usual, my mom's not that concerned. I get the doctor's answering machine after forgetting the number a few times. I'm really frustrated that I can't work the phone right. The blood keeps coming. I start getting upset that I didn't connect more with this baby before I lost it, but then I think perhaps I didn't lose it yet and maybe I could just lay down and the bleeding would stop. So I lay down and try to call the doctor again. I get through and talk to a nurse who says that it's normal. I try to tell her that THIS isn't normal and I'm crying hysterically. I tell her to forget it, that I'm going to the hospital, but my mom starts driving and we're so close to the doctor's office that I tell her we'll just go there. I'm in the waiting room with lots of other people and I'm crying and freaking out and bleeding, bleeding, bleeding. The doctor finally comes out and talks to my mom, not to me. He says that it's okay because I was never really pregnant anyway. And my mom looks at me and says she's not going to tell people, she'll just say I lost the baby, so I don't look silly. She doesn't say this outright, but I know what she's thinking at that moment. Then I wake up.

It took me a good few minutes to realize that it was a dream, and that I didn't just come home and get in bed. When I did figure it out, I told sean about it, and then realized I was crying. I tried to go back to sleep but I felt too sick. I had a few dry heaves, then decided to go downstairs and get some crackers and water. I watched the end of mash and an episode of cops. I went back to bed only to have this very vivid dream:

I'm in a movie but I know it is also real. I'm in a german hospital surrounded by nazis. we're breaking out tonight though, because we know it's a matter of time before they start exterminating us because we're infirm. all the jews in the whole town are planning to rebel tonight. I help carry one of the bedridden outside, across the street, and up into a barn. the nazis are starting to fire at us. I'm up and inside. there's a woman at the foot of the steps with a billy club, she's just a civilian but she is helping the nazis find us. her head is shaved because they thought she was jewish but she convinced them that she's not and now she's after us. I have a suspicion that she is jewish but just trying to save herself. I kick her in the head and run back up the ladder. the barn is attached to a school and we're all so happy that we made it that we start celebrating. but it's a sad celebration because we know the nazis know where we are and it's only a matter of time before they do something awful to us. it's a movie and I know how it ends. some of us are in one of the classrooms dancing. out of the corner of my eye, I see a tall man with a gun outside the room. it looks sort of like one of us (but it could be another civilian who hates us) but I have to go to the bathroom. as I walk into the next room and leave all the people who are dancing, I realize that I forgot my purse. it takes me about 30 seconds to go back into the room to get it and in that time, the tall man has shot everyone in the room. I run into another room which turns out to be the office of the headmaster of the school. a woman runs in with me, another civilian. she holds a gun up to me but she's so scared that it is easy to get her to point it at her own temple instead of at me. then she just lets go of the gun. she tells me I can't be in here, that I'm contaminating the room. I know that if I don't kill her, she'll tell the tall man where I am. so I put the gun to her head and she gets on the floor. I'm trying to train the gun on her temple so I will only have to shoot her once. but her eyes keep multiplying and moving around her head - one second, she has three eyes and one is right on her temple. the tall man is coming though. so I just shoot her anyway. I can see through the door that they are blocking all the entrances and pumping in gas. she doesn't die when I shoot her so I have to do it again. and again. and again, this time right in the eye. she's still holding on. I'm crouched behind the coffee table by the couch and she's trying to clutch at the gun. the tall man is coming into the room. I am so afraid he's going to see me. the woman finally dies. the tall man moves on but now the gas is coming...and then I wake up.

I fell back to sleep after a few minutes of looking at things in my room (the light was starting to come in) and realizing it was a dream. I slept until 7 with no problems. I still feel sick this morning.

okay. background. baby is due to storm our house on october 23. so that makes me 7+ weeks. I feel queasy in the mornings and the evenings but have only actually thrown up once. heartburn is a problem. breakouts are a problem. last time I was pregnant, one day I woke up to a body full of hives - that hasn't happened yet. I was "allergic to being pregnant" - and that apparently means that the doctors weren't interested in telling me what was really up. I told my current doctor that and he looked at me like I was insane, so it must have been a pat-me-on-the-head kind of answer that the previous doctor told me.

I have had blood tests and urine tests to figure out stuff about this zygote, and haven't heard anything, so I am assuming no news is good news.

I have a tremendous amount of baggage left over from my first pregnancy that I am trying, rather unsucessfully, to sort out on my own. more than one person has suggested therapy. blogs are therapy, right?

things that I am concerned about right now, apart from the questions already listed, are that I had unreal expectations of what it was like for "normal" people who get pregnant and now that I am pregnant and like to consider myself "normal", and those expectations haven't been met, I am floundering a little. also, I am heavier now than I was at 9 months pregnant with my first son, so all the fantasies about me being carefree and cute in maternitywear are out the window. I'm going to be one of those women you see that you say "damn, I hope she gives birth soon, because she looks miserable and enormous."

oh, and the usual concerns about the baby being pointy headed, born with a defect, or born covered in fur..those kinds of things.

all in all, I'm just a big ball of worry with a tiny rice-sized bunch of cells with arm buds and a tail inside me.

hi. this is the first post in my blog. I hate the word blog. it's too much like blarg. big baby news today is that I am too fat to feel if my uterus is actually growing. the mood swings are coming fast and furious and today's lucky mood is...apprehension! some sample issues: how can I love a new baby as much as I love my son, will my baby be as smart as my son, can we afford a baby, how freakin fat am I actually going to wind up getting, and why some people have seemed less than thrilled and almost nonchalant upon hearing of our impending baby. and that's just this hour.