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- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Three Things Thursday
I'm 23 weeks along, past the halfway point in the pregnancy, and the changes are getting pretty noticeable! The Truck is kicking lots, still swimming around in all directions but taking up more space than before. I have been offered a seat or two on on the bus (not in the morning lol, everyone sleeps or pretends to be asleep and can take no notice of pregnant commuters, plus my coat makes it less obvious), and my family was delighted to see my bump in real life at Thanksgiving dinner.
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Thoughts
I have been sort of in a blogging rut lately, thinking lots but not wanting to blog it, or having ideas for posts and then never writing them because they are too simple or self-centered or who would want to read that?
The thing is – nobody is dragging you to read this here blog :P So if you’re here it’s because you want to be, and I can just take a rest from all the analysis and introspection (it’s easy to get lost in there!).
One thing that kept getting me stuck was how much pregnancy to blog about – I’m going to let that one go starting now. First of all, I loooove reading pregnant people’s blogs! Obviously not everything is about pregnancy all the time, but growing a baby is a big life-changing, self-changing, relationships-changing, perspective-changing… basically it’s a nuke. So instead of denying to myself that the fallout is reaching all kinds of areas of my life and mind, I am going to stop censoring myself from posting what I’m thinking about because it’s too much about me and/or my baby. It’s my blog! Welcome to the Alyssa show. Here we think a little too much, laugh a little too hard and always include the second o in too.
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
Our prenatal class started this week, and I am so excited! We got a list of classes in our area from the midwives, and I scoped them out only to find that on a two-sided page of options there was one class that I hoped would be a good fit (financially, philosophically, and geographically). After attending the first class, I think I was right, and I am really looking forward to the next 5 weeks :)
The woman leading our class, Shannon, is a doula (a professional birth attendant), and let me tell you this woman is passionate about birth! I think we were all pretty amazed as she described (with the help of a doll and a pink knit uterus lol) the stages of labour, what is happening in the body and how babies are active participants in the birth process. For example, were you aware that during a contraction the top of the uterus (fundus) tightens and pushes down on the baby, and the baby reflexively straightens its legs to push itself down against the cervix/down the birth canal. Apparently there have been cases of pregnant women in comas who have delivered babies without waking up – the body and the baby work together to make birth happen. Mind blown.
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Thoughts
This summer at my parents' house I learned about personality typing through the Enneagram, and my mind was blown. The day after Matt arrived to join me on vacation, I sat him down at the kitchen table and made him do all the tests to find out what number he was. He was pretty skeptical until he got to the test for his type, and then his mind was blown too. We and my parents all spent hours talking about our types, how we think, what makes us upset, how all those different factors collide when we are doing life together.
Read more: When the Advice we Don't Want is the Advice we Need
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
Life has been busy, but not in a very bloggable way. I keep getting more pregnant though, which is always bloggable, right? So here's a quick update as I near the end of my fifth (!!!) month of pregnancy.
Here is the bump at 17 weeks, about to go out to dinner with Matt! My book said the baby would double its weight between weeks 17 and 20...
But my belly definitely started to pop before then. This is 19 weeks, rocking my maternity jeans!
And here's 20 weeks - half way to full term!
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
This week I am inspired by the mad alliteration of Thursday the thirteenth to share three thrifty strategies I plan to put into play this Fall to lessen our living expenses. With a year of maternity leave coming up in 2013, Matt and I are preparing to lose a major portion of my income. Ideally we will fit our cost of living into his paycheques so that my maternity benefits can go to savings or debt and so going back to work can be an option rather than a necessity for me. I'm glad we're starting to plan now so we have a good number of months to sort things out and adapt as we need to!
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
The Summer I had radiation treatment for thyroid cancer, I yelled at my grandmother over a card game.
To be fair, I have always hated UNO.
After the primeval shriek, storming out of the kitchen and bursting into tears in my bedroom, my dad came in and sat on my bed to tell me that he took the fall for my outburst, told my grandma that I was upset with him and that's why I'd gone bananas. I really appreciated that - I still do; it is a gleaming, gold-star parenting moment that stands out so much in my memory. My dad also told me that I was probably stressed about my upcoming radiation and that was okay, and in that moment I realized it was true - I was scared.
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Thoughts
Matt and I watched a movie called Brooklyn's Finest this weekend, and I was really impacted by one short scene that I've now been thinking about for days. The movie tells the stories of 3 Brooklyn cops and the circumstances that lead to them all crossing paths at a spectacularly violent crime scene, and early in the film one of the cops goes to confession. He is a practicing Catholic, but it is clear through the movie that he is really struggling with his faith. He wants to believe, but he is incredibly discouraged and frustrated, and it seems that every solution he tries ends in failure. In the confessional he tells his priest that he has done something bad, but it was to a really bad person. When the priest invites him to pray for forgiveness, this cop snarls, "I don't want God's forgiveness, I want his help!"
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
I guess I should post something so the end of my NFP mini-series doesn't sit there for weeks scaring off any strangers who wander by. I'm 24 years old today! It's pretty good, especially since I spent the last few weeks (months?) feeling like/thinking I was 24 already. It's embarrassing, as an adult, to have to correct yourself on the rare occasion someone asks your age.
It has been a laid-back birthday - I have the day off work and have been alternately taking it easy and catching up on chores after our two-night camping trip that ended yesterday (with a rain storm. Adventures!). Currently I am starving and about to get dinner started so we can hopefully clean up in time for some friends to come over for cake this evening. I am EXTREMELY hungry, which hits about 40 seconds after normal hungry, but I am resisting the urge to collapse and weep on the floor until Matt gets home because this weekend my doctor started me on a higher dose for my thyroid and it. is. magical. I cannot share a list of all the wonderful changes this new dose has wrought in my life, for many of them are very personal and this IS the internet. But the very most wonderful change is feeling like a human being and not a sock that someone played shoeless soccer in before it got run over by a bicycle. It turns out that pregnant ladies are supposed to feel slightly less fatigued in the second trimester, which I missed out on because I have no thyroid.
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- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: pregnancy
[Part III - Making a Baby]
Don't worry - there aren't too many details in this one! ;)
If you've been following along, you've read about my terrible experience on the Pill when I first got married and about the delight of discovering FAM. Let me emphasize how very great FAM was for us as a couple - we were not longer terrified of my horrific and senseless emotional crises, and we were communicating tons about whatever magic estrogen and progesterone were working in my body.