According to the 26-week email update, my baby now weighs about a pound and a half. So according to my calculations, my baby bump consists of 1.5 pounds baby, 18.5 pounds Peanut Butter Snickers (the best snack on the planet). Yes, that means I have gained 20 pounds already. I almost choked at the doctor’s office when I stepped on the scale. And then fainted when the doctor said that was right on track, and that I should gain about 15 more.
This weight gain thing has been a little hard for me to adjust to. I have always been pretty small…I’m 5’1″ and my weight is usually somewhere between 95 (around bathing suit season) and 100 pounds (around the holidays). There were the times where I ballooned up to 105 lbs in college when I was drinking beer and eating pizza every meal, and then the time I dropped down to 90-92 pounds while I was planning the wedding and I was too stressed to eat, but for the most part it’s stayed pretty constant.
I was 99 pounds when I got pregnant in September, and I feel like I started gaining weight right away because I had to stop skipping meals. I had to have something in my stomach at all times, or the nausea was almost unbearable. I admit that I did not have the healthiest relationship with food prior to my pregnancy, and I would often skip meals or drastically cut calories for a quick way to lose weight, even if the only person who thought that I needed to lose weight was me. When I was in the midst of my Skeletor phase, as Stuart called it, during the wedding planning, I started keeping a calorie counting diary online. I had to stop that because it was becoming a dangerous game…how few calories could I eat each day? I put some weight back on after the wedding, but I still liked having a prominent collarbone and hip bones.
Then I got pregnant, and the hip bones were the first to go. The valley between them gradually rounded until I couldn’t hide it anymore. Or button my pants. I resisted buying maternity clothes for the longest time. I’d loop a hair elastic through the buttonhole on my jeans and use that as an extender, and then I used a BellaBand to hide the fact that I could no longer even zip my jeans anymore. When I finally made the switch to maternity jeans, I couldn’t believe that I’d waited so long. They are so comfortable! I don’t know if I want to go back to ever having to zip up my jeans again!
I’m kind of enjoying the baby bump now that I feel like it is obvious that I am pregnant, and not just chubby. Random people are starting to comment on it, and so far I have resisted the urge to mess with them by saying, “What baby?” Now I am only worried about after the baby is born. Right now it’s easier to accept the weight gain because I know there is a baby in there, but after delivery it’ll just be fat, and I am worried about how I am going to react to that, given my past issues with food. I guess the only thing I can do for the moment is just be glad that I have a supportive husband who tells me almost every day that he thinks I look good and that he likes me more curvy, and just hope that the sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn will distract me from my stomach. And wear this.
