🍉 Summer 2023: Slower but lovely

I crossed over into the third trimester of pregnancy last week. Pregnancy has made for a sleepier summer than I’d anticipated (quite literally, I’ve been sleeping 10-12 hours a night). I crave action and adventure but the slowness has given the summer a simple gentleness that’s lovely too.

🤰🏻The pregnancy - round 1 versus round 2
I am not someone who is good at or enjoys being pregnant. The first trimester was terrible — I was curled up in a ball half the time trying to hold down nausea and the other half the time gagging. [0] I asked JP why I wasn’t in such sorry shape last time. Gulp, he said it seemed like I was actually worse last time. I guess nature really wants us to reproduce because I remember it being miserable in theory but the details are all gone. They’re all faded out the way the memory of a vivid dream slips away a mere 5 minutes after waking up. This time must have been better because the number of actual times I puked was smaller. Unscientifically, I think I’m probably somewhere like 90th percentile bad-ness — no one I know in real life had worse symptoms than me but it’s not nearly as bad as anything I read online.

It’s hard for me to directly compare the second trimesters — last time, it was Seattle winter and COVID so there wasn’t much to do and I was in a steady state professional situation. This time we’re in the full bloom of summer post-covid. It’s still mildly unpleasant but in a physical rather than a chemical way that I find much easier to deal with. It’s like the difference between being sick versus taking a fall. The frustrating thing is how little energy I have compared to normal. The uplifting thing is that I think I’ve been able to enjoy life just as much.

I used to love running and hiking. Since that’s too tiring, I’ve been out biking and it sparks the same joy in my heart. I still like cooking but instead of epic quests making new exotic dishes with dozens of ingredients from scratch (no Peking ducks this summer), I go through the rotation of classic comfort foods I’ve mastered. We haven’t traveled at all this summer and shockingly it doesn’t bother me. My garden is doing extraordinarily well since I have no long absences. I thought wouldn’t it be nice to go on a safari (our friend Jane went on honeymoon in Tanzania) so I took Froggy to the zoo and we looked at some zebras and lions there. The doctor says traveling is plenty safe. I just find it such a hardship to be without all the creature comforts and routines of home. I need my giant body pillow with the room temperature dialed in just right to sleep and the down-stuffed sofa to nap on after eating. Oh yes, digesting is tiring so I need to eat small meals and rest after each meal.

If you asked the younger me, they’d insist I couldn’t possibly be happy with my present lifestyle. I am the exact person the younger me grew up to and I am authentically just as happy — I’d prefer to be more energetic but it doesn’t seem to decrease my enjoyment of life. [1] In a way, it’s like a trial run of being old. I feel better about getting older.

🐸 Froggy updates
Froggy is the cutest bestest Froggy that ever lived. Some recent Froggy highlights:

• Froggy is so heart-meltingly sweet. Anytime he has something good, he wants to share it with us now. When I picked him up from daycare last week, the teachers had just given him a chocolate-covered animal cracker. He’d eagerly gobbled up half but stopped and offered the other half for me. He is more generous than I was at that age — I have a vivid memory of being 3 years old and wondering if I could ever be a parent because my parents always saved the best food for me and I didn’t know if I’d be able to make such a big sacrifice for my kids.

• Froggy knows about the next baby and I’m so excited to see him be a big brother — he’ll point to my belly and say baby brother is in there! He’s really great with younger kids - he likes to read books to them. We went blueberry picking with a younger toddler and he spent picked a bunch of nice juicy blueberries and fed them to the other kid.

• Does Froggy have a secret girlfriend?! Every day after we pick up Froggy, I ask him what he did and who he played with. It’s the same cast of names with some occasional variations ex: Duckie, Koala, and Bear. I visited his daycare a bit longer for mothers day and one of the teachers asked me — oh does Froggy every talk about “Alice” (not the real name). And I was like “no he’s never mentioned Alice, are you Alice?” And she replied “Alice is his best friend. She’s the first person he greets when he gets to school and the first person he wants to play with after waking up from nap.” (GASP, he’s keeping secrets from us already!!!)

• Froggy is both brave and cautious at the same time. He faces hardship with stiff upper lip - he never cries after taking a fall. But if he’s had a bad experience with something, he’s got an elephant memory for that. Many months ago he took a bump going down a big slide and even now he’s very careful on all slides, even tiny ones.

• Is Froggy musical after all?? Is it nature or nurture?? Longtime readers may remember that my parents thought my musical ineptness (especially around rhythms) [2] came from lack of exposure to music as a youth so he was on a daily regime of musical marches to remedy this. Froggy likes to sing and make up lyrics to songs. Did you know that Old Macdonald also has a lion that went rawr rawr rawr rawr rawr. Uncle Andrew gifted him a piano keyboard that he likes to play. Froggy hasn’t figured out how to make the melodies but he does bang on the keys in tempo to accompany his singing.

• Froggy’s super abilities — JP’s mom came for a month and he picked up many new abilities at Nonna daycare. He learned to count to 14, recognize a good chunk of the alphabet, and started singing in public after signing with her. He used to be such a shy singer, first he would only sing solo in his bed (and we’d overhear on the babycam) and clam up as soon as he saw anyone. Then he’d sing with people he knew but not if he was being recorded. Now he’ll sing anytime he feels like it camera or not (but not on demand, only when he feel like it).

  • I find his Froggy logic so funny sometimes. The other day I overheard him on the babycam:
    Him: Sings some Old Macdonald
    Also him: ”No more OldMacdonald!!”
    Still just by himself in bed: Sings some more OldMacdonald
    Increasingly frustrated Froggy: “Nooooo, no more Old Macdonald. Old Macdonald yucky!!!”
    Him: Continues to sing OldMacdonald again…

  • He uses 5 to mean a lot even though he can count up to 20. If we’re at the park and it’s full of ducks and I ask him how many, he’ll proclaim 5. If I have a food he really likes and I ask how many pieces he’d like, also 5! I’m not sure if this is a thing all kids do but my mom did the same thing when she was a toddler too.

• Froggy’s restaurant - one of Froggy’s favorite games at the park is to open a little Froggy restaurant. He’ll ask us if we are hungry and offer us food such as rice and then he’ll go on a quest all over the park to find the right rock or bit of wood that’s the perfect “rice”. I’m very impressed by the range of foods he offers — today I got sushi (crab sushi), rice, mangos, very spicy meat, pepperoni pizza, a bok choy salad, and coconut water, all sourced from “the backyard” (aka the other side of the slide). The ever-courteous cook, he always checks “are you full?” before closing up shop.
  
  
  

🚴🏻‍♀️ What else I’ve been up to

The whole family’s gotten really into biking. Sometimes I’ll get into something or JP will get into something but if we both get into something, then it really spirals. He’s had his bike for years but never rode it. JP’s parents were visiting and I thought his mom might like to bike with him and Froggy so I found a cheap bike off FB marketplace. Since we had an extra bike lying around, I started biking and next thing you know we’re biking 2-3 times a week with Froggy in tow and I’ve upgraded to a carbon fiber race bike (ahem, I’m pregnant and need all the help I can get!!) I’ve gotten a lot better at biking and more in shape but it’s offset by becoming increasingly pregnant — for now, I’m still making gains but I’m super excited to become a speed demon after the birth. I am also excited to get some cute biking outfits — JP, stylish as always, looks like he could be in the Tour de France and I waddle around in size L bike shorts.

xoxo,
Kathy

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[0] OFC I tried all the little tricks like ginger, which are utterly useless. I’ve been blessed to have rarely been talked down to in my professional career but when I think of the old people of the gender who can never be pregnant who presume to tell me all my ills will be cured if I just ate some ginger…grrrrrrr…

[1] I am actually a bit surprised it doesn’t because with more energy, I can do more fun things each day but I guess that’s just not how brains work. I am not less happy overall but I am definitely displeased with not being able to do golf or wear all the cute golf outfits I bought last summer.

[2] Err, I’m 99% sure it’s actually because I didn’t practice with a metronome.