Yesterday morning I felt pretty good about this pregnancy thing. No new weird symptoms, no horrible pains, lots of baby kicking and the ability to still wear all three pairs of maternity jeans.

At some point between breakfast and dinner, my stomach exploded. Gone is my happy twitching baby bump, replaced by a giant lung-squeezing bowling ball full of angry monkeys intent on making me wet my pants. I swear in less than 12 hours I have become the stereotypical enormous, waddling, hand-on-the-back pregnant woman who can’t finish a glass of water without running to the bathroom. My belly button is two seconds away from becoming an outie. “Pregnant or just fat?” could only be asked by the most oblivious of insensitive idiots. My secret thoughts about wanting to stay pregnant forever (It’s not so bad! The baby is so easy this way! I’m not one of those women who end up begging to be induced so they don’t suffer one more day!) are long gone. Not only can I no longer get my stretchy-waistband jeans buttoned, I can barely put them on without falling over.  I’ll take a picture for your enjoyment and mocking later.

I discovered at birthing class last night that my lack of lung function makes me kind of light headed, especially when people use words like “episiotomy” and “catheter” and “umbilical prolapse”. I don’t think the animation of the epidural or c-section helped either, but by that point I had closed my eyes and was practicing some of those relaxation breathing techniques the teacher has been encouraging us to try. I’m not normally such a wimp about medical stuff (I am in fact watching a House marathon right now) but since this medical stuff is directly related to both my baby and my delicate lady parts I was in serious danger of passing out, right there in Conference Room B.

And we didn’t get a Fetal Fun Fact – instead we got a Labor Fun Fact, but since my brain was too busy trying to understand the juxtaposition of the words “labor” and “fun” I don’t remember what it was. Probably something really awesome like “If you don’t already have an epidural in place, the doctor does the episiotomy without any pain relief! Don’t worry, you probably won’t feel it because of all the other pain!”