Half Baked (or, observations at 19w2d)

(For those of you still in the ttc trenches who don't want to hear about the goings on of a woman halfway through pregnancy, you might want to skip this one, though it certainly isn't a "woe is me" whine fest.  At least I hope not.)

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So I'm back in the classroom today, after roughly two months of generally sitting at a desk or laying on my couch reading for ~7 hrs at a stretch.  I'm not sure how much is the time away and how much is hitting the halfway mark in this pregnancy, but, wow, I was not prepared for how physical the teaching part of my job actually is.  First there was the ~5 minute walk from my car to the library, the climbing the stairs and the gathering of books, the walking back to my office with the books loaded up in my backpack.  Then there was the up and down the stairs and multiple trips back and forth to the copy machine down the hall (and have I mentioned it's 90 degrees and my building isn't air conditioned?), the walking back across campus (~15 minutes) to the building I teach in, going up to the second floor to find a bathroom and down to the first floor where the classroom actually is.  And then the 1 hr 15 minutes of me doing the Dr. Gwinne show.  All this is light compared to what my day is like during the academic year.  But apparently gaining 15 pounds and lugging around a fetus and all its support system makes the ordinary rather challenging. 

Ummm, can you say a whole shitload of contractions?  They started on the walk to the library and really haven't let up.  Three hours later my belly still feels like it's scrunched into a little ball of unhappiness.  I think that means it's time for both LG and me to go to bed.

This is a long way of saying I'm starting to feel--really, just starting--the physical toll that pregnancy takes on a body.  I haven't lost my sense of balance yet, or radically shifted my posture, or any of those kinds of things.  I sleep, most nights, pretty well.  What little nausea there was has been totally gone for weeks, and it hasn't really been replaced by heartburn (not much, anyway).  The hip/thigh pain I experienced for much of pregnancy with LG hasn't made its appearance (though I'm guessing it will in a few weeks).  So far, this has been an undeniably easy pregnancy, at least from the physical standpoint.  And now, welcome to the second half.

All this is fodder for discussion at my upcoming OB appointment.  Right now I'm feeling very blessed that I won't have to go in to work much past 27 weeks, as I've got that grant for the fall.  I'm hoping to make it that far without going on bedrest or anything.  I guess we'll see how this all plays out.

For now, I'm looking forward to a morning not teaching before I'm back in the classroom again.