Second trimester: marry me?

Oh, you guys. Second trimester. How I adore thee.

Hands down my favorite part about life right now is food. FOOOOOOOD. I love food again! I love ALL food! All the time! And I can eat ALL OF IT! No more nausea, no more white bread sandwiches. I am eating a giant salad right now with a scoop of.. well, pretty much everything Whole Foods offered at the salad bar, all piled into one gorgeous messy pile of nutrients that I will cram down my facehole with unabashed glee.

The only downside to this (I mean, aside from my sudden ability to put on like 15 pounds in a week if I don't reign myself in) is that I am equally thrilled to eat a pile of lettuce with beets and bleu cheese - the major players in my current lunch - as I am to scarf down 2 or 3 poptarts at any given time. And despite my mom's exhortations that I should be eating everything I want at all times to make up for the weight loss in 1st tri, I sort of doubt the baby requires 200% of its daily corn syrup and saturated fat serving every time I pass the vending machine at work. At least there are chickpeas in this salad to balance it out...?

I also enjoy the fact that at 16 weeks, I have a nice pronounced baby bump. This is highly surreal for me, partly because it's not quite big enough for other people to assume that the belly is not 100% poptart-related. A lot of the time even I will catch myself wondering how I let myself get this big before remembering it's because there's a HUMAN IN ME, and then I push wonderingly on my wee bump, which is now hard to the touch underneath the skin.

This week the baby is the size of an avocado. This is blowing my mind. Avocados are pretty darn sizeable. Of course, my avocado baby only weighs like 3.5 ounces, so it's a pretty insubstantial avocado. But it's a nearly-weightless avocado with limbs and eyes and a spine, which I legitimately cannot fathom when I think too hard about it. I've started playing piano regularly again, so the baby can be exposed to music as soon as it can hear sounds outside my belly. And also because I honestly believe I experience music internally at a fundamental level when I play, not just aurally, and I want the baby to experience that too.

Overall, I'm glad the 2nd tri is letting me actually focus on the fact that there is a baby in there, as opposed to needing to spend the vast majority of my physical, mental, and emotional energy on trying not to die. (I mean yes, obviously I was not going to die in first tri, At least not after the OHSS resolved. But man was it a slog to get through every day for a while there.)

Now I just need the rest of my life to allow me to take some time to bond with my baby bump, because WOW am I trying to see how much I can cram into one year. My job has sort of exploded into flames - huge change in senior management; my (very awesome, personal friend) boss quit; they are not replacing him so I am currently doing both my job and a VP level position; ps haha ask me if they're compensating me for this in any way yet HAHA - annnd we also just bought a house. Which we're closing on in 4 weeks. Which is great! But also takes up jussst a teensy amount of energy and time and brainspace to deal with. Thankfully Chris is handling like 99.9999% of everything financing-related and mostly just brings me papers to sign when appropriate, because I totally cannot handle it at the moment.

As a result of all that, though, I have done exactly zero prep for this kiddo (...and it's also why I've been almost completely MIA online). I haven't started researching baby gear, looked into furniture, read any baby books, you name it. I keep telling people she'll be lucky if she gets a name before she gets here.

Oh yeah. That's the other thing. We found out it's a she. :)