Oh, you guys.

Though only a few people comment on the actual blog, I often get emails and facebook messages from would-be commenters.  The responses to the post below were hysterical.  My favorite came from Kelli, who said if the British would just loosen their grip on the newest season of Downton Abbey, we would not all be forced to sift through the dredges of cable tv.  So true.

I keep thinking about pregnancy-related things, and telling them to you in my head, then realizing a week or two later I never actually got around to typing any of it.  The same thing happens with friends and phone calls.  I keep meaning to call friends, and realizing two weeks later I still haven't picked up the phone.  Sorry about that.

So.  Want to hear how things are going?

Several of my friends get really sick when they are pregnant.  Poor Ella throws up day and night for the first half of every single pregnancy, and right now she is miserably sick again with #6.  Other Facebook friends have just had babies, and were sick the entire nine months.  The idea of that is so, so miserable.  I'm almost embarrassed to tell you guys that I have never once been sick because of pregnancy.  In fact, this time around, the opposite is true.

Food has never tasted so good in my life.

Usually I have reasonable cravings.  With Asher I craved cold cold cold water, and lemon yogurt.  With Emmy, it was milk and spinach.  With Silas, I ate a salad and baked potato nearly every night for the last three months.  Beef, or cheese, or boiled eggs, or cucumbers - foods that have always been perfectly respectable to eat en masse when pregnant.

This time?  It is ridiculous.  In fact, the cravings actually began before I even realized I was pregnant.  Pad thai, hummus, green beans and cornbread, Jamie's cheesy potato casserole, crinkle fries ... most recently it has been the smell of a barbecue restaurant.  It doesn't even matter what I eat there (or if I eat at all) - I just want to sit and smell it.

It's out of control.  My hips can back me up on that.

I go to the doctor on Wednesday, and I really hate the thought of stepping on the scale.  Although it helps to remember the whole reason they watch your weight so closely is that I am SUPPOSED to gain weight right now.  It also helps to know that I always lose it, but still.  Gaining is never quite as fun as it seems like it should be.  Between the over-the-top cravings and the fact that I've been pregnant a lot in the past few years, cashiers started asking when I was due at 15 weeks.  15 weeks!  You can either be cute-pregnant or bless-your-heart pregnant, and I'm just a few crinkle fries away from bless-your-heart already.  And I still have a long way to go.

But!  Wednesday I have a doctor's appointment, THE doctor's appointment, where we get to see a little heart and brain and lungs.  And, of course, find out the sex of the baby.  It will be fun to know who we're having, and to start making preparations (if it's a girl I need bedding but no clothes - a boy needs clothes but no bedding).  Mostly, though, I am anxious to see that little spine and brain and heart.   Maybe it's because I work in Early Intervention, or maybe it's because of the blessing/curse of the world of mommy blogs and NICU babies, but a healthy full-term baby always seems like an impossible miracle to me.  An average, unremarkable 20-week ultrasound is one of the assurances that maybe, just maybe, we will be blessed with a completely uneventful birth experience again.  Until then, it always seems too good to be true.

Once we see our hopefully perfectly ordinary baby, I should be close to announcing a name.  There is a boy name set in stone, and a girl half-name that hasn't quite gelled yet.  Actually I love the boy name so much that I keep trying to think of feminine alternatives that might be suitable for a little girl.  Either way, in a few days we'll see my little bulge who loves the smell of barbecue on that dark screen.  After that, the fun begins.

Stay tuned.