Your stomach starts growling and instead of it being right below your sternum, it's strangely somewhere several inches to the right, behind your ribs.
Your belly is now the easiest place to feel your pulse (thank you increased blood volume flowing to that area...)
You can go to the bathroom at any given moment of the day (or night)
Every time you meet someone new (or see the end credits of a movie) you have a discussion about whether this new name would fit your child
Your back hurts when you lie on your back, your hips hurt when you lie on your side, and... well... you just can't lie on your stomach.
You are suddenly the most important person in the discussion of where to go for dinner :) :) :)
You feel like an alien in your own body (not that all the goings on are bad/uncomfortable... they're just way different than what you're accustomed to!) - thanks, Mom, for that analogy - I haven't heard a better one yet!
As far as going to the bathroom, I learned that there's a magical stage in pregnancy when the nurse asks, "can you leave a urine sample?" and the answer is "yes!" no matter when you last went. Unfortunately, it's followed by the stage where you can no longer see the cup you're aiming at and since you only have a thimble's worth of bladder capacity it becomes a "maybe" again.
ReplyDeleteAnd, after both births I've been thrilled to sleep on my stomach again that first night. Unfortunately it's soon followed by milk coming in and accompanying tenderness that makes stomach-sleeping impossible again for a while -- at least for me.