Carlson Kid 2.0

I'm not a big fan of bump pics but it seems silly to write posts about carrying a baby and not include a snap here and there.

13.5 weeks.

In the time it took me to take this photo Watson knocked something over (my vanity made me oblivious but I heard it) and Toby took a wash cloth and dropped it in the toilet.

This pregnancy has been different and not different than my pregnancy with Toby. Here's a few equal comparisons:

-Morning Sickness. Among all the lovely side effects that come with growing a person I'd have to say this is my least favorite. With Toby my most embarrassing fond morning sickness moment was when I came home from school early, made a b-line for the bathroom and proceeded to dry heave for twenty minutes. Luckily I've never thrown up from morning sickness (vomit-free since '93!), but instead I'm blessed with the classiest of gagging/heaving sounds. Eventually Derek was brave enough to peek in on me and found me lying on the bathroom floor. When he asked me if I wanted to take a nap in bed, I told him I was concerned about staying close to the toilet. He left and came back with a pillow and blanket; I slept on the bathroom floor for an hour.
This time the worst was when I sat on the kitchen floor with a bucket and gagged away while Derek entertained Toby. With Toby's pregnancy the nausea lasted from about 6 weeks until around 14 weeks. We'll hit the 14 week mark this coming week so I'm crossing my fingers/toes/eyes/legs/arms and any other crossable item that the queasies will soon come to an end.

-Fatigue. Okay so this one is a little hard for me to distinguish because obviously being pregnant makes a person tired, I mean it's just hard. But having the added bonus of already being sleep-deprived for over a year from taking care of the first child, and then having to chase around said first child seems to all but wear me down to the nubs of my feet. Thank you Netflix gods for endless hours of "Daniel Tigers Neighborhood" and "Curious George".

Oh sure, everyone tells you to sleep when the older one is napping, which I did for a while, but that seemed to make me sleep horribly at night. Also napping didn't address the piles of laundry and dirty dishes and photos that need to be edited. So now I just move slowly at everything I do and somehow very little gets accomplished; I like to make myself feel better by justifying that "very little" is better than nothing.

-Sensitive Nose. Let's just say that changing Toby's stink bombs is nothing short of a form of torture for me, and it has crossed my mind once or ten times to just let his butt rot until Derek comes home but the responsible parent in me always wins; what a goody goody. In November Derek and I shot a wedding together and one of the locations was a gorgeous Japanese garden complete with ponds containing fish and the heavenly fishy smell. I was not amused.

-Food Aversions. With Toby I developed an aversion to Indian food which was a real bummer because my non-pregnant self loves Indian food something fierce. Those blasted hormones do funny things to the body; literally the day that Toby was born I ate Indian food for dinner as if nothing had ever happened.
This time fish makes me gag, and a couple weeks ago after making enough to feed a small army we learned that I don't want to have anything to do with quinoa.

There have been a few things that are different this time around.

-Indigestion. I had this with Toby but not as early. We found out that I was pregnant pretty early and the biggest indicator was that everything I ate made my stomach hurt. The heartburn has recently shown up. Awesome.

-Bleeding. Sorry to gross out those of you with a wobbly constitution, but it happens. I had some mild bleeding for a couple weeks earlier in the beginning, but I wasn't too worried since I did have some mild spotting with Toby. I just figured it was implantation bleeding. It went away, but then at about 9 weeks it came back and it was much heavier. It freaked the daylights out of me, considering how my last pregnancy turned out. I may have been a little okay fine a lot hysterical, but I really didn't want to relive that experience. Thankfully after a weekend on couch rest enforced by Derek and my mom, the bleeding slowed down and we got in for an ultrasound. At 10 weeks Baby C. had a good heartbeat and appeared to be practicing the moves to "Thriller".

Bust a move, baby.

The bleeding slowed but it hasn't gone away. We don't know what's causing it, but the guess right now is that it's a hematoma. It should heal itself and everything should be fine, but of course we're praying for everything to go smoothly.

So all in all things are going well. We should be able to find out if it's a boy or girl by the end of January. When I was pregnant with Toby, Derek and I just knew that he was a boy, so it was kind of anticlimactic when they told us at the ultrasound that "it's a boy". This time we have no inclination either way. It's probably 18 months of fatigue throwing off our gender predicting spidey senses. If I'm guessing based on symptoms, I'd guess boy. My mom and sister-in-law have predicted girl. There's a fifty fifty chance that any of us could be right, so, yeah.

We'll just have to wait and see. Baby Carlson is set to come around June 17thish.