Twenty-One Weeks

When I went to my monthly check up last week, the nurse asked me if I had any swelling. “No,” I said. “Just a little in my fingers.” I was thankful that I didn’t experience any in my legs. In prenatal yoga, I had seen many of my fellow pregnant classmates with really swollen ankles. I have been lucky to be blessed with nice legs, which I inherited from my mother. To this day, my mother’s legs can double for a 20-year-old’s.

Yesterday morning, as I was selecting which shoes to wear to work, one pair that I tried on seemed tighter than usual. “Great,” I thought to myself, “My feet are swollen.” Then last night, I had a really hard time with my knee socks. They left dark welts in my calves. When I took them off — to my horror — the interior part of my ankles had disappeared. Yes, enveloped by a mass of swollen flesh, I no longer have inner ankles. I lay on the bed and cried while the hub tried to console me. “They’re not cankles!” he said. But it didn’t matter. The ankles I have always known were now gone. I didn’t think this could happen to me since I’m pregnant in the winter. I had heard it gets bad in the summer. Will my ankles return? I sure hope so.

Overall, I feel pretty good. I guess this is as “normal” as I’ll ever get. The nausea is now completely gone and I haven’t experienced heartburn. Sometimes, if I eat a big meal, my stomach feels extremely bloated as if it’s a water balloon about to burst. I’m still not sleeping as well as I’d like, but I guess I said bye-bye to that once I got pregnant. My dreams have been really strange lately. I don’t remember all of them, but I wake up thinking how strange they are. Last night, I dreamt about a shop that had all the Canadian/Montreal snacks that I miss, like Jos Louis and May West.

Babywise, he’s been kicking and moving a lot. If I’m in a position he doesn’t like, he lets me know. The hub has missed several of these movements; the baby seems to always stop just as the hub puts his hand on my belly. But last night, the baby was unusually active right before bed. I was lying down with my legs up in the hopes of saving my ankles, and he was moving like crazy. I called the hub over and he finally got to feel his son give one strong kick. The hub was really happy and amazed. (And, I think, proud.)

This past weekend, we went to look at some baby clothes. Definitely not as fun as shopping for girls. For the first time ever, I wasn’t that excited about shopping. I let the hub select most of the clothes because apparently, I kept picking “cute” not “cool” clothes for his son to wear.

Speaking of clothes, I previously mentioned that I kept about 5% of the maternity clothes my sister gave me, which were mostly tops. Today, I decided to wear one of the tops that I kept. Except the first one I tried on made me look like a balloon. It looked like a mini-dress. So I went for a second top. This one was the same. I can’t imagine how my sister wore these tops. She’s shorter than me and they must’ve been down close to her knees! Well, I guess I’ll toss these into the “donation” pile.

We haven’t done much preparation for the baby yet. There are days when I get anxious about it because suddenly it’s February and February’s a short month. Then there are other days when I feel like we’ll figure it all out eventually and it’s not the end of the world if everything isn’t perfect — as long as our little son is and that’s really what matters.