Tag Archives: pregnancy

How it started

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It first started with a conversation with Steph McN. I think she had a newborn at the time, and we were talking about the timing of having a baby at a certain point in the year. Somehow, we came to the conclusion that May is the best month to have a baby. This was before Jason and I had decided for sure that we wanted to have any offspring, but I was well on my way to being convinced.

So, a few years later, when Jason and I started talking I started bringing up babies, Jason and I went through the same list of timing. Being hugely pregnant in the dead of summer or winter means being overly hot, or unwieldy on ice. Having a newborn in the middle of winter seemed hard, to keep them warm enough when bathing their tiny bodies.

Really, if one could just manage to start pregnancy in August, you’d not be huge until spring, the baby would be born in May, and you’d have all summer to forget to put socks on them.

My friend Kelly lent me the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which is both a How To, but also a How Not To Make Babies book. At the time, I was interested in the Not Babies part, but the whole point is that you can generally pinpoint when you’re ovulating (charting your morning temperature is part of this), so you can either avoid it or aim for it. I am an embracer of technology, and also a librarian. This means that I immediately downloaded an app for my iPhone that let me chart my temp every morning (ah, data collection) and showed it to me on a graph.

Son of a vondruke, it worked. My temp would spike. So, I kept data from January-August. It was fun (for a librarian), and by the time we hit August, I was fairly sure I knew when it was baby-making time.

So that’s what we aimed for. I remember telling my brother about the baby plan, and after his initial reaction of ‘ooh, gross’ he mused that most animals have their babies in spring, so the logic was sound to him.

So, that’s how we ended up pregnant exactly when we wanted to. This is how I will explain to my child where babies come from: logic, technology, and two people who love each other very,very much.

Also sex.

Unwarned belly patting: don’t do it (unless its me)

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I’m almost 14 weeks pregnant, and I’ve only really been showing for the past two. Already, there have been three accounts of people patting or rubbing my abdomen without asking. From what I hear, this is common. Strangers on the train will put their hands on my expanded middle.

For me, this is not a big deal. It’s not that I don’t have personal space, it’s that my bubble includes everyone else.

For others, I can imagine this would be startling at the very least, and bring on atavistic rage at the most.

I do find this incredibly interesting, from a sociological perspective. Our culture seems to celebrate pregnant women, which I assume is a celebration that we haven’t become inept at procreation. Pregnancy is also a temporary state, so unless you troll maternity wards, you don’t tend to have a steady stream of pregnant women in your life. It’s powerful that growing a baby is something gives everyone else the go-ahead to cross the don’t-touch-strangers-in-the-midsection boundary.

Just so you know, I’m totally willing to let anyone touch my belly. I wonder if that will change as the baby (and I) get larger, and I start to get that mama animal, primal thing. I’ll let you know.