my pregnancy rant

I don't usually complain much about my pregnancy, I've been having a excellent 32 weeks. But today... today I just want to moan all day long. So here it goes:

I realize pregnancy dramatically changes your body, but acknowledging it and actually going through it are two different realities: no woman is prepared for an unrecognizable body.

I have also perfected the very well known yoga position of "tying shoe lace forward fold" it's supposed to be very good for the lower back! 

Pregnancy insomnia is another one of those incomprehensible symptoms: I don't want to prep for the upcoming sleep deprived months! I want to sleep as much as I can. Today I woke up at 3:36am and couldn't fall back to sleep no matter how many sheep I counted! I got up twice, had breakfast at 6am and finally fell asleep on a reclining chair at around 7:30 right before Pedro got up for work. 

I've always had good skin complexion on my face, but pregnancy hormones have made it red and with rash-like pimples. No matter how many layers of foundation I put on, my face is still red. 

Acid reflux is something I had no idea what it was until my belly started growing and creating pressure on my stomach. Lately, I can't bend down or eat anything without feeling an intense burn up my neck. 

I am a sleep-on-my-belly type of person, so spending months rotating between left and right side does not amuse me. Thank you Michael for my snoogle, don't know how I would sleep without it!

My breasts are growing to proportions I never thought I'd have... then they leak colostrum! Not sexy. 

Oh and then there's constipation and bloating and bleeding gums and spider veins. Fun, right? 

On the upside, we found out today she has turned head down! That's good news! 

DIY: how to fix a broken USB pen drive

All the work I've been doing in Portugal for the book editorial was all very nicely stored in a pen drive. And only a pen drive. I've been meaning to back it up for a while, but kept on postponing it. I had the pen hanging from my computer until this weekend when the USB connector broke off from the card shaped holder were the data is stored! So basically I had all my work stored in a chip that wasn't accessible! This is where I panicked, serious panicking! I had gone to Portugal for 3 weeks in January to finish off my work and now I couldn't retrieve it!

Naturally I called Pedro. With little expectation of fixing it ourselves, I called IT repair companies for quotes: between 100$ and 550$ to fix the pen and retrieve the data! 

Since we do believe in doing it ourselves, Pedro got home from work and dismantled the whole thing. What need to be done was rewire the pen to a new USB connector. To do so he need to cut up a USB cord exposing the wires, figure out the order of the wire color scheme (black, green, white, red) so not to burn the chip, somehow establish a solid connection and then hook it to the PC and pray it worked! 

Instead of soldering the wires to the chip, as all the tutorials he had watched required, he connected the wires with tape! After long periods of holding my breath, we hooked it up to my laptop and then we heard the beautiful sound of an device activating! This is when I copy/paste all the files to my desktop and sighed in relief. Lesson learned: always backup files!

Oh and did I mention how amazing my husband is!? 

my mother said NO

Before being pregnant I thought that the single thing I would be concerned about would be labor and all the horror stories that come with it. Surprisingly, I'm very relaxed about it and welcome it as a natural process. After all, women have been doing it for millions of years! I'm not special. 

What has truly worried me is the responsibility of educating another human being. This is what keeps my up at night (this and pregnancy insomnia!). I look upon my own upbringing and how it largely shaped the person I am today.  

Now this is the part where one generation mocks the other. 

We bought some books to read up on child development and education, just to get an idea of what to except. One such book is "When to say no to a child" by Robert Langis. When I was in Portugal, my mother saw me reading it and immediately called my dad and both started teasing me about it! You see, my parents both have the basic portuguese education and both were raised in a time of real hardship. And when it came to raising my sisters and I, they didn't buy books on child education or watch videos on how to change diapers, they followed their instincts and knew what they would do different. 

My mother said to me: "You don't need to read a book on how to say no, just remember how we raised you: we said NO to you all the time!"

This is so true. Loving parents say no more often then they say yes.