this may seem obvious, but I never realized

sheep-herd
. . .
shepherd

Whoa.

dreams more boring than life

I dreamed last night that I was copying and pasting text from one document to another. I had spent a good amount of time doing that during the day, and it was tedious. At some point in my dreams last night, I also was doing the dishes. It was the worst.

20-ish weeks

Posting belly pics on the blog is one of those moments where the "When I'm pregnant, I don't think I'll do that" thought is thrown aside. I suppose there is a lot about pregnancy and motherhood that is like that.

To make my motivations clear, though, I'm posting this for the sake of documentation and comparison. So here I am in all my fat glory. Enjoy.

Also, I decided that starting next week (as I enter the second half of pregnancy), when people ask me how far along I am, I'm going to tell them 19 weeks instead of 21, since it is accurate in a sense (see my due-date post). I'm hoping in the process to convince myself as well as everyone else that I'm not so very advanced so no one gets too uppity. Which I don't imagine anyone would anyway, really, but you never know with these things.

Now on to tell BabyCenter I've regressed two weeks in gestation. This will help convince me, you see, because who can forget how far along they are with those blasted e-mails coming in once a week?

Chef Bernhard's Granola

I made some of this stuff, which has tons of nutty goodness. I'm excited to consume it.

oh, do you need to vomit?

After the discomfort has passed, I often look back on vomiting with some amusement. It makes for some awkward and hilarious moments that seem to be great fodder for the blog — the kind of thing that pregnancy should be rich with, really (I only wish I had great stories about crying over ridiculous things like nature documentaries, but my emotional breakdowns, though perhaps frequenter than usual, pretty well concern the same things they ever did.). If you are imagining me sitting on the bathroom floor thinking about blogging a few minutes after vomiting, then you'd be picturing my reality not too long ago. Does that make me more pathetic?

But enough with the metablogging and on to the good stuff. This morning, I had a milestone: I ate oatmeal without throwing it up. For some reason, feeding me oatmeal was a good way to go if you wanted to see me barf, but not this time. But lunch was a different story. Maybe it was the oatmeal that was getting its delayed vengeance, I don't know. I was almost done eating a burrito that Tim (husband to the invalid) had assembled for me when he looked over at me and said, "Wow, you've eaten almost the whole thing!"

This is what our lives have become: Tim producing foodstuffs for me to consume because I can't do so on my own effectively, and then praising me for eating when I do well with it, which is not usually. The number of times per day that Tim asks "What do you want to eat?" and I respond "I don't know" is actually quite astonishing. Unless it's junk like cookies and cinnamon rolls. I always feel good about those lately, which is strange, because I'm pretty sure the only thing I had going for me by way of physical fitness before this pregnancy started was eating mainly healthy food.

At the moment Tim commented on my progress, I was staring into space contemplating the possibility of vomiting, and he must know that look by now because he ran over and stuck out his hands in a cup shape in front of me, which I proceeded to dry heave over as he guided me toward the toilet.

I think one of my favorite vomiting experiences so far happened a couple of months ago when I had a morning doctor appointment and gulped a lot of water in an effort to pee in a cup (which is hard to do in the morning). Apparently gulping water that way is another pretty surefire way to get me to throw up. After my appointment, Tim and I went to the Corner Bakery Cafe (which is literally on the corner from our apartment, how apropos), and on the way out the door, the moment came. The grass was kind enough to receive my offering. Public puking is the best.

due dates are jacked

When people ask the question "When are you due?", I struggle to give a specific answer. Sometimes I'll say a specific date (arbitrarily chosen among the several I've been given—it changes with every ultrasound), sometimes I will say "early to mid-April," sometimes I will say, "The second week of April." Take your pick.

Before I became pregnant, I had no idea how due dates were determined. Now that I (somewhat) understand the process, I lack confidence in them entirely. Medical practitioners estimate your due date based on the first day of your last menstrual period (LMP) and add 280 days/40 weeks. Normally I wouldn't have any idea about this date when asked, but taking birth control then Clomid actually started and regulated my period, and I had to keep track of when I was bleeding because I based taking Clomid on that. So as a result, I actually have a fairly good idea of the first day of my last menstrual period, but there are even more variables once you've figured that out. Your fertility window, or when conception can actually occur,  is (depending on the length of your cycle) about a 10-day range beginning around 2 weeks after you start bleeding.

Given its impreciseness, it makes sense that no one would really be able to determine the exact date of conception. Instead, they use the date of LMP + 2 weeks, which means you get an extra 2 weeks of being pregnant when you're not actually (go you!). Remembering I've actually been pregnant for approximately 2 weeks less than I tell people sometimes makes me feel like I have forever left to go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pregnancy is longer than this ellipsis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The accepted method of due date (or as the ultrasound machine said, "estimated date of confinement," which is awful) determination gives a rather large window of error. Don't ask me how large of a window, because my math skills are poorly developed. But if my exact (estimated) due date (let's go with April 9 for now) comes and goes and Baby Rowan hasn't made an appearance, I'll try to remember that I need not be anxious because due dates are ±5 days anywho. Oh yeah, and let's not forget that the length of a "term" pregnancy varies ±2 weeks, too.

What I get out of all of this is simple: even if my pregnancy lasts a "normal" amount of time and I deliver "full-term" (which itself is highly unpredictable), I have NO IDEA when this baby is going to get here.

editing amusement

Being an editor provides me with the simple joy of asking humorous questions based on punctuation and word usage that less anal people might not wonder about. Example: "Emily's husband Aaron was not accustomed to dressing up for Halloween. . . . " (What about Emily's other husband(s)?)

Heh.