By Ashley Logan, BCB Pregnant Blogger
35 Weeks
Feeling: Enormous
There’s a time in pregnancy when dropping a pen on the ground is soul crushing. It directly coincides with the development of an attractive gait that can only be compared to a waddle. I have five weeks to go and that time for me is now. My movement is obstructed and my body is no longer my own. And it’s written all over my puffy face.

Don’t get me wrong. After our early labor scares, I am so beyond happy that we reached our big milestone of 35 weeks. Not to say that all things aside I am not feeling the throws of the final stretch.

The baby dropped from high up in my rib cage to a few inches above my belly button. While that means I can once again stuff my face to my heart’s content, and take a walk without losing my breath, it means that I cannot go more than 20 minutes without having to pee so bad I can taste it.
Speaking of walking…sometimes this simple task puts so much pressure on my nether region that I think that the baby is going to emerge. What used to be a casual walk around the block with my first born Barclay the Dog, now feels like a total crapshoot. Which brings it all full circle, back to that sexy, sexy waddle.
Waddling is now how I get around. So effective is my prego movement that strangers stop and stare, no doubt wondering if I am about to pop. And when I waddle my big belly to bed, I better have about 2,000 pillows to prop up each of my sides, head and feet. When I wake up in the middle of the night because I have to go so, so bad, all I want is a pulley system to hoist myself out of our knock-off Tempur–Pedic® that I have now grown to hate. I shuffle to the bathroom, try not to wake up my husband, then heave myself back into bed with the force of a breaching whale.
Nothing these days is happening very lightly—probably because I am hauling around at least 20 lbs worth of visible water weight, which is causing my feet to look like Flintstone era loaves of bread. So bad is the swelling, in fact, that when I went to get a pedicure and requested an upgrade, she told me it wouldn’t be worth it because they couldn’t pull my pants far enough up my leg. (“You could have worn leggings,” she said. Jerk.) While part of that experience was definitely pregnancy shaming on her part, she had every reason to want to limit our time together.
That particular experience inspired me to invest in a pair of Birkenstocks—kicking myself for not holding onto my pair from 1998—because they have the adjustable top straps. While I could squeeze them on my feet, unlike my flip flops, they still looked a bit unsightly. But at least the sales guy assured me we could tighten them up once the swelling went down (“Those will go down, right?” he asked innocently.).

Pregnancy is awesome, but it’s not always beautiful.
All in all, there is some seriously weird stuff happening to my body. But looking on the bright side, we are so close to the end and getting to meet this little girl who will not stop kicking, no matter what time day or night.
 
#35weeksandcounting