Second Trimester

Compared with my first pregnancy, I have hardly talked about this one at all on my blog! The curse of the second-born has already started!

Things are going really well here in the honeymoon trimester. The ugliness and despair of the first trimester is but a distant memory now, and the discomfort of the third trimester has not descended upon me yet. Life is good! The little baby inside of me is strong and moves quite frequently, especially after I eat sweets. :)

I started having braxton hicks contractions about a month ago. They became pretty frequent about two weeks ago and I started to get a little bit nervous, but they eventually faded away and now I only get like one a day. This is new to me because I never had a single contraction when I was pregnant with Conner until the day I went to the hospital in labor.

In some ways this pregnancy has been very similar to the last one, but in other ways it has been so different. They are similar in the fact that I am carrying the same way and have had no major complications. But the differences are what lead me to believe this baby is a girl.

First was the sickness...and not just the fact that I was more sick, but it was also a different type of sickness. When I was pregnant with Conner in the beginning, I would start to feel sick at about 5pm every day, and it would last until I went to bed. It was like a routine. Smells didn't bother me at all. This time around, I could smell everything and unfortunately everything absolutely disgusted me. My husband joked that I should take a part-time job as a luggage sniffer at the airport because he was so amazed at the things I could smell! Unfortunately to me it was more of a curse because anytime I smelled something bad, I would get sick. And the sickness was all day, not just at night. And now I gag whenever I brush my teeth, which didn't happen last time, and doesn't happen to me normally.

I crave completely different foods...this time around it's mexican food and seafood that I want most. Last time it was fruit and cheese.

My skin looks the best it has ever looked since before I hit puberty, whereas last time I was a greasy disgusting mess with a bumpy rash on my forehead.

This time I am constipated (like most pregnant women usually are), and last time I had almost the opposite problem! I think I preferred the opposite problem.

My boobs have already grown this pregnancy (don't get too excited, they are still small!), whereas last time they didn't grow at all until after the baby was born and my milk came in.

And last but not least, this pregnancy is most different because I already have a child to take care of. I don't get to spend hours sitting in my cubicle at work with my feet kicked up while people offer me food all day and ask me how I'm feeling. I don't often spend time thinking about what this baby will look like or worrying about all the things that can go wrong. In some ways, it is better to be a veteran and to know that in all likelihood everything will go just fine. To know that I will love my baby whatever he/she comes out looking like. To know that even if my child has a ginormous head, my body will more-or-less recover. And to know that no matter how difficult it is to bring home another infant and get into a routine, we will all eventually adjust and will forget what it's like not to have two of them around.

I just hope that this baby will know that I love him/her, even if his/her scrapbook has about half as many pictures as Conner's does! Which reminds me...I'm overdue for my 25 week belly picture. With Conner, I tried to take belly pictures every week...now I just shoot for once every five weeks. I guess I could just re-use the ones I took with him. My belly pretty much looks the same! ;)