baybeasts

Pregnancy is doing strange things to bean.

She told me today that she is getting randomly teary. When there’s something sad on TV, while I’m on the phone to someone else talking about B1, when I’m reading to her from the newspaper about the Labour party leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard… We’re not even rabid Labour supporters (though we do think Julia Gillard is a bit of alright, in a pointy kind of way).

Bean’s sense of smell has blossomed into a superpower. She can smell things a good minute or two before I register them, and odours that I sort of notice but don’t think anything of send her into gales of loud comments about how much said odour reeks. Luckily my temples apparently still smell good.

And then there’s the sickness. I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It’s more like all-day-needing your girlfriend to prepare all the food because the kitchen stinks-needing to lie on the couch with the doona pulled right up to your eyes-sickness. It’s ok for me - it means I get to watch lots of tv and work furiously on my B# wardrobe. (I’m currently making yet another hat - next I need to make more teensy-weensy jumpers and vests because of B1 being due in winter and all - I just can’t help myself…)

There haven’t really been any wacky food cravings, apart from a need to put tomato sauce on almost everything. This is a good sign - it means we are eating a fairly balanced diet (lacking only in sugar and salt?). But the sickness is interfering quite severely with her appetite, and the thought of particular foods at particular times provokes a very athletic contortion of her usually lovely face. Of course, which foods are ‘in’ and which are ‘out’ at any one time is completely unpredictable, so I am unable to avoid regular distortion of her features. I hope the wind doesn’t change.

It’s all feeling a bit surreal really. I hold the image of the little heartbeat winking at us clear and steady in my mind, but still it is hard to believe that inside bean’s tummy is a little lump of a mini-baby (a kind of ugly lump if visembryo is to be believed). Despite all the symptoms and the ultrasound and the collection of pregnancy tests with strong second lines, there is still a part of me that feels like it is all a dream - too good to be true, too good not to be. I know that, as with all big change, reality will creep up on me, and one day it will just be the way the world is - bean’s tummy will be big and I’ll be able to poke at a lump of foot through her skin and feel it kick back. And one day soon after that there will be a whole other tiny person in our house, in our family. I can’t wait.