What it’s Like to Be Preggo In 500 Words

For those of you expecting warm, fuzzy feelings, go someplace else.

Being pregnant is like having a small, quiet parasite living in your stomach. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep in anymore (nature calls) and you get an intimate appreciation of what your food looks like after it’s decided that your stomach is a stupid place to be, and it now craves open air.

They call this the first trimester.

The good things: You can’t scoop cat litter anymore because the bacteria will kill you (mild exaggeration, don’t be alarmed, fellow preggos), so this is no longer your job. You don’t need an excuse to find the smell of toast disgusting when someone fails at using the break room toaster oven. You get to buy really nice fruit (we’re talking fresh cut pineapple and berries) and nobody complains that you are wasting money. Of course, you will probably not keep that pineapple in your stomach, but it’s pretty nice going down.

The better things:They’ve invented pasteurized everything. So, you can still eat feta cheese, which means Greek salads aren’t dead to you for 9 months. They’ve invented lollipops just for you. You get real close with your doctors, because they introduce you to your ovaries with the ultrasound machine. Your husband gets really extra nice, and that sack around your belly? It’s not fat! It’s BABYJUICE.

Finally, people get absurdly happy when you share your news. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty nice to make people absurdly happy with absolutely no effort on your part at all. I wish everyone took all my news like that.

I’d say “I went to the store.” And then you’d say, “You went to the store!? I went to the store once!” And someone else would chime in, “I own a store! Stores are the best, just wait ‘til you go to another one.” And people would email you all the time with advice like, “The green store is more fun than the red store. You should totally try the green store. We all love stores.”

Of course, by that point in their lives, no one remembers that the store made them puke 12 times a day, and forced them to give blood every 2 weeks. To be fair, it’s possible that this isn’t normal, and my physicians group is made up of highly educated vampires.

Anyway, welcome to the news. I hope it has made you ridiculously happy. I hope that you jump up and down, at least once, if not with general delight in all things baby, in delight that you will never know your toilet as well as I now know mine.

It’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun when it’s born – I’m going to teach it secondary and tertiary colors instead of rainbow order, and the ABCs backwards, and then watch all the other kindergarten kids’ minds break when I send it to school. That’s what YOU get, children of traditional thinkers.

Muahahahaha.