33 Weeks

 33 weeks along...only 7 weeks to go and it both feels like this is taking forever and like it's flying by. 

Oh yeah. And cal and I both caught covid this week. 

Sigh. 

You know what's weird? I know I have a crap ton of stuff on my plate to finish up so I can graduate and get things ready for the baby and everything, but why do I have such a hard time giving myself grace and forgiving myself for shortcomings? 

Like, I'm literally 33 weeks pregnant AND I have covid. I feel like sh*t. I have no energy. I also feel awful on top of the no energy. Yet I'm beating myself up for the unopened Amazon packages, for the unwashed dishes, for the lack of mental focus...and feeling like I'm a bad wife/person in general. 

If there were ever a time to cut myself some slack, it would be now, would it not? But I only have five days to complete my master's capstone project (when I got all my official instructions I only had two weeks). 

I need to change my...what's the word? Priorities? No. I need to set boundaries for myself and stick to them. For too long I have had the habit of taking on too much on my plate at once, and I also have issues that make it hard for me to cope with that. 

Like, I was raised to be a people-pleaser, by a people-pleaser. Who had serious anxiety issues and I suffered the brunt of them. So I never learned coping mechanisms. I had to figure them out on my own, and I didn't even get allowed to use them properly. 

Being pregnant has brought up a lot of thoughts about how I don't want to be anything like my parents when it comes to being a parent myself. Yes, they did their best with what they knew, but ugh, where do I even begin? They treated me like I was a parent to them. They made me their marriage counselor from the time I was less than ten years old. I grew up feeling like every time they argued, it was my fault somehow. My father relied on me WAY too much, from when I was a teenager I went grocery shopping, paid the bills, cashed his checks, listened to his marital problems and stresses and tried to give him advice (he would literally come home from work and talk to me instead of my mother about his day), I did the laundry...and I know some of these are life skills that a child needs to learn, but not in the way that I did. It got to the point where now that I'm married and have moved out, he is learning to do all this stuff on his own. He didn't even know how or where to go grocery shopping, or how much food cost. 

He would tell me story ideas over the dinner table, tell me to write them up, and send them to Warner Bro's as movie ideas, but how should a 15 year old know how to do that? What's to stop Warner Bro's from stealing the idea? Wouldn't it need a lawyer? Or a thousand other nuanced things? Where would I find their contact info/who to contact about story ideas? Who would read the contracts/do all the communication back and forth? It's not that simple. And then he would blame me for us not being rich - saying if I were to just have written down the story that he told me in fifteen minutes over dinner once - then we could be millionaires and own a house. 

But that's how his ideas always go. He gets a half-baked idea, tells it to me, and expects me to make it happen so that his dreams can come true. Always in something that I have zero interest in, too - so it would take away time from what I actually want to do with my life. 

Sigh. 

Anyway. My point is, I really don't want to be like them. I don't want to care what other people think, because really, how does that affect me? As long as I'm doing what's right, it doesn't matter. There will always be busybodies and nosy people and those who think they have a right to be super involved in your private life. Which they don't. 

That being said, my dad doesn't even have the right to be super involved in my life anymore. And I'm rather annoyed with him and rather annoyed with the fact that I still feel like I need to not disappoint him.

I have to enforce my boundaries.

And learn to give myself grace. 

I'm tired of typing...I think I'll get some rest. 

update

 The presentation went well! I had several people approach me randomly in the hotel after the fact to tell me they enjoyed it and would be checking out The Link. 'Tis awesome. 

And I'm so glad it's over. 

I think I've reached that point in my pregnancy where I'm over it. I'm always feeling full, yet I get hungry every 2 hours or so, I'm always thirsty, and there's no such thing as a comfortable position to sit in unless there are at least two pillows involved (same goes for lying in bed, except make that three pillows). 

Walking hurts (round ligament pains and a baby who likes to hang out in the "bottom of the barrel," as the midwife put it) and just adjusting myself in my chair or rolling over in bed gets me out of breath. I have to sleep in satin so that I can glide when I try to turn over, or else it's pain that feels like my groin is being torn in half. No, I'm not being dramatic. 

I'm ready to go to sleep for the night by 5-6pm (like utterly exhausted) and I'm frequently nauseous, probably because I always feel so overstuffed. I've discovered a ton of stretch marks on my hips and under my boobs (oh yeah, the boob soreness is returning, slowly but surely. Probably milk production). 

What else? I get up to pee at least three times a night, if not more. 

But on the bright side? I get to feel my little jellybean moving throughout the day and night. It's so cool and weird to think that there's a small person inside there...a person who is part me and part Cal. So weird. SO cool. 

We're finally starting to stock up on things that we need for the baby (with ten weeks left before my due date). We've got a crib, a car seat, and a glider (I feel like I may have mentioned this already), a breast pump, some nursing bras, a 5 pack of 0-3 month onesies and a going home outfit in both newborn and 0-3 month sizes. We've got bottles for when I have to go back to work and leave milk with Cal, we've got a couple of potential names (boy and girl names, because the gender will be a surprise) and a few swaddles/a blanket. 

I've asked Cal to assemble the glider when we get back from this trip, because the hotel room has an armchair that makes life infinitely better, lol. I need that at home, too. 

Once November 15th comes and goes, the completion discount on our registry will kick in and we'll be able to start buying some of the things that people haven't bought (because I'm paranoid that no one will buy stuff until it's almost too late - fine, maybe it's nesting kicking in) and we'll get it at a 15% discount. 

I'm thinking to go to Walmart and look at baby clothes there - I've discovered that things are quite cheap indeed at the mart of the wall. We need diapers and wipes, and a baby carrier. I'm still hoping someone will buy that off of the registry, though - that thing is like $80. 

A lot to still be done, but I'm starting to get excited now, and I'm also totally ready to not be uncomfortably pregnant anymore lol. It's only going to get more uncomfortable, unfortunately, leading up to labor as the most uncomfortable...and there's only ten weeks left. Yikes. 

But it'll be worth it... :)

Nervous

 So you know the drill, I usually write when my mind is too full and I'm stressed somehow. 

I've got a presentation coming up at a science research conference, and I feel utterly underprepared and like...just terrified of speaking in front of people. I keep telling myself it'll just be like improv, I'll go and talk and it'll be over with and it'll be a learning experience, but that's not helping. 

I'm anxious because I have to travel for it. It's in Virginia, and I'll be spending four days in a hotel and even though the presentation is literally 30 minutes out of 4 days...it feels like that's all I can think about. 

I'm anxious because I'm 29 weeks pregnant (I'll be 30 weeks on the day of the presentation) and I get out of breath easily - and I worry that I'll sound gaspy or raspy or that it'll make my presentation look bad. 

I worry that because my presentation is about the website that I run, that I'm not talking about anything important, it's basically just an advertisement, and I don't like that. 

I worry about leaving my cats here and them running out of water because my sister in law adopted a cat off the street and I think she doesn't give him water...because he comes upstairs several times a day to drink the water from our cats' dispenser. 

So I'm writing this post to do an exercise from CBT that my therapist taught me...you write what the worst case scenario is that you're worried about, and then you work your way down from 1000 to like, 50 in terms of anxiety. 

So. It feels like it's all I can think about and like it's the entire weekend. But really, it's 30 minutes, and I don't have to use up all of the time. 

I feel unprepared, like I won't have enough to say, or will forget what I'm supposed to say. But I have a speaking outline. I have a powerpoint presentation. And I'm not going to use notecards - that was a huge thing that was making this more difficult.

I'm worried about being short of breath during the presentation. But I've decided I'll let them know I'm pregnant from the start, and to expect that that might happen. I'm also going to build into my presentation notes times when I should pause and breathe. I'm also prepared to catch myself tensing up and I will relax my shoulders, hold onto the podium, and breathe. 

I'm worrying that my presentation isn't worthwhile enough, that the attendees won't get anything out of it. But I'm in complete control of what I say and what I offer them. They're going to be finding out about The Link, which is a resource for them to learn actionable tips to do better scicomm. They're going to be finding out that they can get experience creating content, and hopefully they'll feel inspired that they can contribute to making the science communication space a more diverse place. 

I feel a bit better now. 

I'm worried about the cats having enough water, but I'm going to block off the staircase so the other cat can't come upstairs while we're gone. 

I have an outfit planned out for the presentation, and I know what to expect that the environment will be like. 

I know that I should dress business professional, that it'll be 76 degrees that day, that there will be a podium with a mic and I can have my notes and my powerpoint on google drive, and that I should get to the room 15 minutes early. 

It's less than an hour out of the entire weekend. I've got this. It's less than one hour out of my entire life. 

When I'm done with it, I can completely focus on just grading (catching up with grading, technically) since I've been teaching a class this semester (oh yeah, I'm never doing that again), and prepping for maternity leave. 

We're at the finish line, now. 

I can do this.