Top 5 indignities of last month of pregnancy

5. Peeing a million times in the middle of the night. Or at least three to four. I'm not so big and heavy that I have to wake up Anil and have him physically push me out of bed, but I do have to strategically maneuver so as to not strain an ab (or what used to be ab) muscle here or there. I'm using my arms a lot, like doing a one-arm push up to get my upper body to go vertical. Then I can use whatever is still functional of my core from there to heft myself out of bed, or at least sort of roll over the side. I've stopped going to the gym because I consider my existence a workout at this point.

4. Either with the drop and change in shape or just from getting bigger (probably both), I'm getting belly drafts when I walk outside! And the other day in Target too. I don't wear my jeans with the bands that go over my belly anymore; I mostly stick to yoga pants or stretchy pants that sit on my hips and rest under my belly in front. When I walk, my shirt starts to ride up a little bit, and my jacket doesn't go as low as it used to, so I get this arctic blast of air on my belly when I'm outside.

3. I'm obnoxiously starving like I was in my first trimester (thankfully not simultaneously nauseous this time though). My stomach is still squished so will only hold a limited amount of food at one time, and when I eat that limited amount, I feel really full and inflated. Then I go from that level of discomfort to completely starving an hour or so later, usually at like 9 p.m., when I don't feel like eating real food any more. It's like this gnawing, unpleasant hunger too--not the kind where you actually want to eat; staying full just feels like a chore.

2. We went to Target last week to get all of the postpartum supplies that I might need, including a big pack of maxi pads. I've been told to stock up on them since it takes about six weeks for your uterus to fully contract and you tend to, well, leak (to put it nicely), in the mean time. So there I am with this hugely pregnant belly, giant green pack of Always pads in hand, and this teenage girl looks from my belly to the pads in total confusion.

1. I'm psyching myself out about every pain or tightening that I feel. I'm supposed to be feeling Braxton Hicks contractions by this point, but I can never tell. I'll feel like my belly is tight, but it also feels like it's just her stretching and/or sticking her butt up and out. [She does this thing at night where she rolls completely to my right side and just stays there, so my belly bulges out to the right in a really disconcerting way. I tried to take a picture, but whoa, talk about disconcerting--a close up of my belly is not what anyone needs to see right now.] I feel crampier than usual, but that's most likely because my internal organs are squished in unknowable places. With this in mind, I keep thinking of this hilarious story that I ready on Dooce.com last year. Heather Armstrong, of Salt Lake City, Utah, writes an irreverent, funny, and honest blog that she recently turned into a book about her first experience with pregnancy and new parenthood (the book is called It Sucked Then I Cried, in case that gives you some insight into what I mean by irreverent, funny, and honest), and this vignette (if you can use such a fancy word to describe such an un-fancy situation) was in the book too. When she's waiting to go into labor with her first daughter, she feels what she thinks are contractions, and her husband times them. Then she realizes that she just has to go to the bathroom. I think it's worth it to read the whole story in her words, but here is my favorite line, one that's been ringing in my ears as I lay in bed digesting Indian food or brownies, telling myself that I'm really not having contractions:

Sunday, 11:00 PM
Jon is still trying to reconcile the fact that he wasted three precious hours of his life timing poop labor.