I mean, literally, I think I can feel her kicking me in the butt parts. Apparently, the third trimester is a whole new ball game. So far, it sort of reminds me of the first trimester. My appetite is starting to wane again, I'm super tired, and everything makes me cry.
Between peeing every two hours, and random insomnia, I haven't been sleeping very well either. I guess it must be my body's way of training me for the interrupted sleep that will come with parenthood. It's probably a good thing too, considering that I have never been great at functioning without sleep. In fact, I'm known to cry when woken up too early.
For the past month or so I've been feeling fine despite the lack of sleep. It wasn't until the last week or two that things started to catch up with me. On those days I almost feel like I have the flu. My body aches, my head is a fog, and I have just about zero ambition. On days like that, getting the dishes done feels about as easy to accomplish as running a marathon.
I do still have good days though. Today, for example, my body randomly treated me to 12 hours of sleep, and I woke up super late but also super refreshed. The fog is gone from my brain, and the sluggishness is gone from my step. I feel like a normal person again, which is awfully nice. It seems like the bad bouts of preggo fatigue and hormone madness tend to coincide with major bump growth. Then a few days later, my body adjusts, and learns to live with the changes.
She is definitely getting bigger. I can now feel her parts poking into my own parts (and sometimes poking out of my belly!), and lately she's been manouvering herself into really weird places that make it impossible for me to choose my own position. I'm at the mercy of her whims, and find myself contorting my body to compensate for where she's decided to cram hers. Although I've been sharing my body with Babeleo for nearly eight months, this is the first time that I've started to really be aware of the fact that she has a say in what we do with it.
By the way, I've been using a lot of female pronouns in this post. That is thanks to my best friend, Melissa, and her recent visit to a psychic. Melissa saw this psychic back in the early days of my pregnancy. She asked her "Who is Mary?" and then guessed that I was pregnant, and delivered the cryptic message, "Tell her she needs to put her feet up." After that she went on to describe the color of her late brother's eyes in perfect detail and relay messages complete with inside jokes and family nicknames from Melissa's other late relatives. This lady is kind of mind blowing.
So Melissa called me last week and said "I am going to find out from the psychic what gender your baby is. Do you want to know?" At first I refused, thinking that a psychich prediction would only frustrate me further, but when she called back to tell me how her session went I crumbled. "Ok, tell me", I said.
In regards to gender, she said that the psychic wasn't 100% sure, but had a strong feeling that the baby is a girl. As for delivery, she said that she saw the baby coming fast, like through a shaft – (weird, I know). She also said that it would come close to the due date, but that I might not make it all the way there.
Here's the thing about psychics though – even if this lady is 100% real, she just parroted all of my own inner feelings and predictions. So either she and I are both psychic, or she's just picking up on the fears and inclinations that are already swimming around inside my own head. After all, the baby probably doesn't know what gender they are, or when they are coming either. So how would anyone know? Maybe I don't get how psychics work?
So really, we still have no idea whether the baby is a boy or a girl, and while I have had a weird feeling for a while now that the baby will come early, that feeling could just as easily be fear as intuition. I am starting to really regret not knowing the gender though. It's not that I want one more than the other, it's just that I feel this little person now, and I REALLY REALLY want to know more about them. I'm seriously considering coughing up $90 to visit the pregnancy imaging spa – as ridiculous as that is.
I mean, it's only natural to want to know who's tickling your sphincter, right?