Oy, Batman. You are kicking up a storm. It's definitely weird to be sitting in, say, a meeting or class at school and to suddenly yelp because a tiny foot has just whalloped my pelvic bone/intestines/spine/front of me, but it is really cool. I know that babies most often hang out on the right side of their mother, which I think feels right, but you have definitely been kicking (or punching, or reaching, or bonking, or whatever) more towards the bottom than the top. I have no idea if that's normal, or if even having a consistent "target" like that is normal, but I can almost always feel you doing something if I put my hands on the underside of my (now definitely and unavoidably baby-containing) bump. There are still definitely kicks upwards, but those are rare treats; they're hitting muscles that haven't already been tenderized. Even better than that is the fact that you react to things now; if I push my hand against wherever you were just kicking, you push back! I have the theory that you are going to have some sort of magically chill relationship with your Dad, because you always calm down and just roll around gently when he's talking and he can more or less just rest his hand somewhere near you to calm you into submission if you're going all Chuck Norris on me. Seriously: how cool is that shit?
Thankfully, most everyone around me finds my yelping, squirming, and belly-rubbing endearing and fascinating, but there is one particular Debbie Downer at work who looks at me with this almost disgusted glare, tries to smile to cover her discomfort, then rapidly informs me of how uncomfortable she would be in my position. This Debbie gets a uniquely "deer in headlights" expression any time anyone brings up anything even tangentially related to you, pregnancy, or even babies conceptually (no exaggeration: she gets woogly when people bring up any very young child, regardless of context). With eyes glazed open in weakly-deflected terror, she proceeds to share either a horror story of someone else's hideous pregnancy/birth/infant experience or some utterly irrelevant retelling of a traumatic event from her past.
While it is a little insulting to hear someone flip my excitement back onto itself with a comparison to some long-passed personal drama, Debbie's stories are pretty hilarious. (Sometimes you even kick when I'm trying to repress laughter.) A personal favorite of mine was when she described the experience of getting a "wicked huge" splinter on her leg sometime in college. Despite her roommate and other close friends all being nursing students, none of them could get the splinter out without Debbie flipping out and basically kicking them away. She was so traumatized by having something stuck under her skin that she now knows that having a baby inside her would just be too much to handle.
Let's review, shall we? Thigh + large splinter = uterus + baby. Okay then. That's not just an utterly callous comparison: that's HYSTERICAL!!!
I completely understand the reservations one might have about the physical sensation of pregnancy. I'm not going to sugar-coat; it's really effing weird. I wake up in the middle of the night because another human being is literally sucker-punching my internal organs, and I have to go buy special pants to accommodate the fact that someone has decided to take up residence in my midsection. Despite being a totally natural, normal human thing...it's really effing weird, right? Still, regardless of stinky-face-butt-head coworkers who try to outshine your awesomeness with their personal gripes, I'm still finding this so amazingly cool.
I think the world is probably lucky that Debbie Downer did not succumb to the overwhelming societal pressure to reproduce, because seriously, can you even imagine how messed up you would be as a child if a massive splinter and you were more or less equivalent to your mom? Or if your mom was always trying to one-up your stories with something dreadful and irrelevant?
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