Pregnant Women are Smug

The funniest blog I know of right now is The Bloggess. The lady who does that blog posted this link via twitter and I thought I would share it with you, because I've watched it about 10 times and it still makes me laugh. (BTW, there are a couple of lines you might not want blaring from your cubicle at work, so be forewarned.)

Pregnant Tootling

Last night while waiting in the check-out line at Walmart, I farted, completely against my will. I wasn't actively trying to stop it because, to be completely honest, I didn't know it was coming. It just hapened. If you have ever been, lived with, or spent a great deal of time with a pregnant lady, this will not completely shock you. If you think pregnancy is all glowing complexion and the beauty of new life, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but there are stinky parts too.

Pregnant or not, if you happen to accidentally fart around people, it's embarrassing. The times that this has happened to me, I play dumb. I act like nothing happened and hope I'm the only one who hear/smelled anything. Sometimes I might be right, other times people might just be polite enough to ignore it and vacate the area. Very few times will people actually call you out on this in public situations. Last night when this happened to me, there wasn't a noise to worry about, and there wasn't a room-clearing stink, but let's just said my fart added a certain aroma to the area around me. I was the last one in line, so I only had to worry about the people directly in front of me, which happened to be a mom and her son. He was about 6 years old and they were sort of joking around and talking about this and that. A few moments after I noticed the smell, the mom leaned over and whispered something to her son. Kids at that age don't always understand that when you whisper something too them, it's because you don't want the people around you to know what you're talking about, so instead of whispering anything back, he replied to whatever she said with "It wasn't me!" The mom motioned for the boy to keep his voice down, then whispered something again, to which the boy replied in the same volume, "Mom, I didn't do it!!" At this point, I could no longer pretend my tootling had gone unnoticed, but I certainly wasn't going to fess up either when I had a perfectly good scapegoat standing right there! This was the end of the mom's conversation with the boy over the topic, so I just minded my own business and pretended nothing happened.

I was telling this story to my mom later that night and we agreed that there is a definite pecking order when it comes to blame for farting. As far as I'm concerned, if a stink is discovered in the room, and someone makes mention of it, the order of blame goes as such: dogs -> young boys -> grown men -> old people -> women. I'm not saying this is the most likely order for finding out who the actual offender is, I'm just saying this is the order in which blame should be assigned. If you were to chart this progression of blame, I'm not sure where pregnant women fall, but I am pretty sure that if you were plotting actual guilt, we're probably pretty close to the top.

If I'm not back in 30 minutes....keep waiting.

Why am I posting a picture of a half-assembled crib? Because to get any further with the pieces they sent us, we would have to add "duct tape" to the list of required tools. The piece they sent us that was labeled as the front left leg is actually a mutant combination of a couple of different pieces, the result of which is not useful anywhere in the assembly.

They company had a form especially for this purpose in their instructions, so I emailed them a request for a replacement piece and am waiting to hear back. They were supposed to contact me within 48 hours of when I sent the email. That means I expect to hear back from them in the next 30 minutes or else...I guess my pizza is free. I don't know.

Jeans crisis resolved

I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats waiting to find out how the Old Navy jeans fit. Well, I won't torture you any longer! I'd ordered two pairs of the same size, but in a different waist. One has a full panel waist that goes clear up over my belly and the other pair just has a thick elastic band at the top. The pair with the full panel fit fine, but the other ones are too snug in the waist, so I'm going to reorder those in a different size and also get another pair of the full panel ones in a different wash. When those come in, I'll keep whichever pair fits better and send the rest back. That'll leave me with two pairs of jeans that will hopefully fit all the way through until after the baby is born. Unless, of course, I gain too much weight in places besides my belly. I gained 5 pounds last month, which isn't unreasonable, but I know it wasn't all baby. Some of it was just Otis Spunkmeyer "muffins" and Funyuns.

Belly Band or Tube Top? Either way, I'm a winner!

Four months into my pregnancy, and I'm finally starting to show! It's more or less obvious depending on what shirt I'm wearing, but my pants can definitely tell. Some of them are refusing to be worn at all. In fact, I wore the same pair of jeans to work all last week because they were the only ones I was remotely comfortable in. When I mentioned this to a friend who just had a baby, she told me about "belly bands". I had never heard of such a thing, so I won't assume that you have either. It's essentially a spandex tube top that's meant to be worn around your waist. It allows you to wear your regular pants unbuttoned, then pull the spandex down over the top so that no one can tell they're not buttoned and they don't tend to fall down. Then you just wear whatever shirt you want and the belly band just looks like a stylish layer.

I tend to be dubious of things like this. Especially things that obviously cost a great deal more to buy than they do to make. But I did find a cheap version at Target, so I'm going to give it a try. It it lets me put off buying maternity jeans for a little longer, it'll be worth it. I figure, at the very worst, I've got a new tube top!

Pregnancy has a way of complicating things. I mean it's a wonderful, beautiful thing, and the miracle of life, blah blah blah. But there is also the inability to stay up past 9pm or button my pants. And when I started getting a cold a week ago, there was the complication of what I could or couldn't take for it. Now, I'm not one to take medication for the duration of a cold, but I do like to sleep at night, so I checked the reference sheet from my doctor on pregnancy do's and don'ts. According to that, I can take Sudafed and some version of Robitussin. Armed with that knowledge I headed off to the pharmacy.

There is an episode of Everyone Hates Chris where he talks about his mom always buying generic versions of food. When it shows the things she's buying, everything is in a plain white package with black lettering telling you what knock-off item you're about to purchase. I wish my pharmacy had a section like that with just one kind of Sudafed. Instead, I was forced to choose between about 6 different kinds of name brand and generic Sudafeds. Some were just for congestion while others covered the whole spectrum of symptoms. Each one had the same active ingredient for congestion though, and the pain relievers were always Tylenol, so I figured it didn't matter too much which one I picked. But just to be sure, I asked the pharmacist whether the box I had was safe to take during pregnancy. She took a look at it, checked a list somewhere, and directed me to the kind of Sudafed that you have to buy from behind the pharmacy counter. I hadn't even considered this option, and when I got it, I realized that it had an entirely different active ingredient than the other Sudafeds. As it turns out, this other ingredient is what used to be the ingredient of choice for congestion, but now it's the ingredient of choice for making meth. But there is a generic, so I just had to show my driver's license and pay $1.50.

Always curious about things like this, the first thing I did when I got home was google the difference between the new Sudafed and the old Sudafed, especially as it applies to pregnancy. I'm sure it drives doctors and nurses crazy when people start any medical question with "I was reading on the internet...." but I would rather look something up on WebMD than leave a message for my nurse every time some odd question pops in my head. And what I found was that there isn't a consensus on what kind of Sudafed pregnant women. So I just did what I should have done to begin with and called my doctor's office for some clarification. The answer I got was that I shouldn't be taking the one the pharmacist gave me because there was a risk of increased heart rate.

So I'm back at square one and still can't stop coughing. I would have trusted either the nurse or the pharmacist if I'd only been able to get advice from one of them, but when they contradicted each other, I just decided not to take sides. Besides, cold medicine doesn't really help get rid of the cold, it just makes you feel better, right? So I'm just put on my big girl panties and dealt with it. When it comes to colds, I'd rather not medication anyway. When it comes time for an epidural....well, that'll be another story!

I've always heard that during a certain phase of their pregnancy, women have a "glow" about them. It's discussed as though it were a beautiful aura that comes over you as a representation of the sublime miracle of life. Then when I got pregnant, I found out that one of the main causes of this perceived glow is the increased amount of oil that your body is producing. So instead of making me glow, it's making me break out. Yay for pregnancy!