Belly up

The pains seem to have stopped within the past hour or so, finally, after making a brief "are you paying attention" cameo on the right side of my body (which was probably round ligament pain; the sensation isn't overly dissimilar). They will probably image my ovaries at my next ultrasound just to see what it might have been--apparently, the corpus luteum that generates a lot of the hormones until the placenta fully develops sometimes doesn't disintegrate properly, just as it sometimes doesn't after a normal woman's cycle. And I'm just getting to the point where the placenta is fully formed. It's kind of neat, though: if that's the case, then Bunky definitely came from the left ovary; not something that bears any significance other than the "oh neat" factor.

This is more neat, though. When I lie flat on my back, I can feel my uterus under my belly fat, and I can feel it, ever so slightly, shift as the baby moves, externally. Not quite the same thing as feeling the baby move internally, so I can't call it quickening just yet, but it's going to happen soon.

And I'm *really* excited about that. On one of my crying jags back when I thought I wasn't going to have more children, I was so devastated that I wasn't ever going to feel that sensation again. And now that I'm going to, I wish I could record the sensation in something more tactile. I remember the feeling distinctly with Kieran, but I don't remember things like where I was, or how I reacted;  I wasn't as good at chronicling things back then (and what journals I did keep were incredibly depressed-sounding, which fits, when you look at my marriage of that time).

And I look so cute in some of these maternity clothes I could just yarf. Who knew? Weird side effect I'm digging: the fact that my upper arms have lost 2 solid inches, most of which since getting pregnant.I still mostly need 1x shirts to accommodate their girth (which looks freakish compared to my relatively trim forearms), but I can wear a size "large" if the arms have a loose cut to them.

Anyhow, enough babble, I guess. Sometimes I have to remind myself not to take the rest of the internet personally, in fact more so lately. A lot of times my rambling (and tweet-rambling) is just me thinking aloud, getting the brain flotsam out so that I can process everything else more clearly. And too often I forget that my brain-dump sometimes causes consternation among friends, and they want to help, and I get irritated when they want to try. Where does that fall on the things-I've-done-and-left-undone spectrum?

Because I miss Weight Watchers...

I've started using The Daily Plate at livestrong.com to track my food intake, because I had a lousy week on the road last week and gained a ton of weight in that week after hardly gaining anything the entire first trimester. Fortunately, it seems to have been a fluke and I didn't REALLY cross the 200 threshold again, but I'm definitely 198 now where I was 193.

The weird thing is that I've tried two different calculators to try and figure out what my appropriate caloric intake is. One said 2400 and the other said 3300, so I'm going to split the difference and go with 2800, which is what you get when you plug in 2500+300 anyway.