The second time around

So many friends and family who live far away or whom I don't often see have sent Passover and Easter wishes lately, many of them asking how the pregnancy is going and how I'm feeling.

The short answer is, I'm feeling fine. I don't have any nausea anymore, and aside from some pregnancy-related hypersensitivity in my teeth (I'm going to the dentist tomorrow), I don't feel uncomfortable or cumbersome (yet) at all. My belly is starting to pooch, but other than my boobs getting a little bigger (oy!), I haven't really gained weight anywhere else and my clothes mostly fit and all is well.

The long answer is, it's alot more exhausting to be pregnant and work a full-time job and take care of a toddler, as compared to when I went through it the first time. Particularly when that first time, I was living in Hawaii and working from home and had a super-flexible schedule, so I could nap when I wanted and hang out at my desk in a tank top and pajama bottoms. And every afternoon, Jason would come home from work and we would go to the beach for an hour or so. He would surf and I would sit in the sun and read a book. So in addition to having a rocking tan, I was plowing through 3 or 4 library books a week, sleeping as much as I needed to, and generally feeling pretty relaxed. Life definitely didn't suck.

And it's not that life now sucks -- far from it -- but I'm tired all the time. Zeke hasn't slept through the night since we arrived in Colorado. At first I thought it was the climate -- I was waking up completely parched in the middle of the night, and so was he -- but it was also the temperature. If he woke up after 4 or 5 in the morning (after going to bed at 7:30 or 8), I would get up and give him a bottle, and then bring him into my room and let him sleep the rest of the night snuggled up between Jason and me.

But sometimes he would wake up at 1 or 2 in the morning, and I just wasn't willing to let him off the hook that early. So he would stand up in his crib and cry for awhile, and eventually he would lie back down and go to sleep.

And I realized that he hasn't learned how to pull the covers back up over himself once he's gotten out from under them. So he'll go back to sleep, but then he'll wake up in a couple of hours, freezing.  I'll bring him into bed with me and curl my body around him, as he presses his ice-cold hands and feet against me to warm up. So then I feel mean letting him cry.

Not to mention that regardless of whether or not I go to him when he cries during the night, I wake up. So I'm tired all the time, because I never, never get a decent night's sleep.

All I can say is, thank God for Jason. Because when Zeke starts tugging on my hand because he wants to go downstairs and play with his trucks, or go to the park and run around and go down the slide and swing on the swings, I don't always have the energy. And I feel inadequate as a parent. So Jason has picked up an enormous amount of slack, willing to run around with him until they're both exhausted.

So on the one hand, the pregnancy is going fine. But on the other, I'm tired, and I don't have the time anymore to just lounge around and relax in the sun to my heart's content. It's much harder this time around.