Week 15

Bartok is the size of a naval orange!! And is bouncing and kicking and swatting around but I can't feel it. I wish I could - it's so encouraging to have some kind of a response from the child living inside of you. Since Mother's Day, I've been thinking about how Shamus and I are parents now even though our bun is still in the oven. The baby is obviously more affected by me at this point, but Shamus plays his part. There's plenty of asking how the baby is, touching the belly, and talking about the baby as an active member of our family. I'm sure that every parent has said, "Is the baby making you sick?" Granted, that was asked by my husband while I was sitting on the couch recovering from breakfast. I'm sure it will come up again during a diaper change, spit-up incident, and a moment of breathlessness from the pungent odor of a baby toot.
Anyway, while thinking about this whole "my child is depending on me for food, love, and shelter" thing got me feeling a bit lazy and foolish. I started out doing great, reading and learning and taking notes and filing them in my nerdy school binder. By nerdy I mean ridiculously awesome! It even has dividers for 5 major pregnancy topics! But now, I'm immune to such lines as "stay away from soft cheese because of listeriosis, a rare but horrible infection that can cause miscarriage". Why? Because almost every woman that is reading this and almost every woman that is related to you ate soft cheese during pregnancy. And none of them had a problem. And soft cheeses are DE-LISH!!
But Karen, you may be saying, it's foolish to ignore new developments in research that can directly affect the health of your child! I agree. I'm working on the whole "foolishness" issue. Let me prevent some worrying - God's actually doing the work. I've been busy being lazy. After 4 weeks, I just started reading about pregnancy again to refresh myself on how I'm supposed to be taking care of myself and Bartok. Not only that, but God sends little sticky notes by way of others. I got an email the other day from a good friend: "Hello, future mom! Are you doing special exercises yet?" Well I hadn't done any before that but now it's on my daily schedule and I did several that day. And that's God doin' his thing, taking care of me and Bartok. And yes, Standing is an exercise now that I'm pregnant. Is standing so much to ask?? :) Don't worry. I'll be standing as soon as I finish this entry and I'll even try tucking my buttocks!
I got another message about my habits recently. I ate 2 pieces of KFC and some potato salad and I felt like my body was trying to digest a live chicken running around my insides with it's head cut off. So Bartok doesn't like fried food. Good to know!
Time for me to have a little snack and head to bed... hopefully my recovery time will be short. Recovering is the new thing my body does... instead of digesting. Pregnancy will rock your world.. even if you've already got it rockin!