What Your Third Trimester Says About You
With perhaps morning sickness and pregnancy mask behind you, you’re looking down the road at birthing time. If your local cohort of neighborhood mommies/sisters/relatives has yet to start offering up birthing horror stories about their epidural that didn’t work or their friend so and so who tore clear up to her wahoo, fret not. That will will start. In the mean time, strangers are rubbing your tummy and veteran moms keep encouraging you to get to the spa. If only you had the energy!
If you have a hyperactive fetus who uses your cervix like a trampoline
Chances are you’re not sleeping all that much — or all that well. To sleep perchance to actually get through a dream without a harpooning pain through your lower half. Well-intentioned people who keep telling you to GET REST and RELAX are starting to seriously get on your last nerve. It’s not like you’re trying to stay awake all night watching “L Word” marathons. You’re just hoping a little sapphic infidelity will keep your unborn from doing somersaults.
(photo: France Trampoline)
If you’re hitting an exhaustion wall at five p.m. sharp
It could very well be all the sleep you’re not getting or the sheer reality that you’re growing a human, but come the afternoon you’re spent. The only thing that could rouse you from your afternoon naps are 1). ice cream 2). ice cream with chocolate sauce 3). those impromptu fetus gymnastics. In other fun news, you’re starting to give less of a flip about the fact that your MIL/SIL/frenemy has completely hijacked your baby shower. Chances are you’ll sleep through it anyway.
(photo: Dunc(an’t stand this new layout!))
If your back pain is making you rethink that whole maternity band business
Perhaps you scanned one or two of these items while putting together the baby shower registry. Perhaps someone close to you recommended that you put one or two on your list. And perhaps you looked at them and cackled with a cashmere onesie in your naive new mommy grasp. But now that your back is having to deal with the 20 to 30 pound weight gain and your coveted pregnancy glow has yet to arrive, you’ve been spending your sleepless nights visiting various mommy forums with ladies swearing by these contraptions. Somehow binding up your blossoming tummy wasn’t how you pictured your last glow-y months of motherhood.
(photo: Selbe B)
If you’ve realized that the anti-stretch mark cream you purchased isn’t doing jack
What’s this roadmap just to the left of your naval? Or perhaps this itchy patch of skin to the right? Why they are exactly what this fancy stretch mark cream that you resented spending so much on promised against. Here you thought you were being proactive by getting a jump on the one pregnancy symptom that your other mommy friends said they wished they had invested some time into: stretch mark prevention. Only to have that financial investment be about as useless as the moses baby basket you purchased on impulse. You have officially started Googling “after birth corsets.”
(photo: Herbolution)
If you’ve been slacking on your labor classes (i.e. not going)
You are already resigned to the fact that you have NOTHING to prove. Leave the birthing pools and natural labors to the medal winners because you just want to be pumped full of the closest whatever to welcome a healthy baby. You’re not looking to be the champion breastfeeder, or have the baby who starts spelling out of the womb, or plan world domination via the PTA. You’ve decided that you’re just going to wing this motherhood thing. One day at a time.
(photo: ika inggas)
If you’re already pissed that people are giving you “post-baby body” tips
Some of them may mean well but seriously, you’ve already been dealing with enough bodily changes. You’re just trying to keep one foot in front of the other with regard to this pregnancy timeline. And considering that you haven’t even decided on a crib yet, you may just have to figure out your “Post-Baby Body Fitness Regime” at another time. Like maybe after your baby gets here. CRAZY I KNOW.
(photo: Veronica Foale)
