Post potentially full of too much TMI

I’ve been waffling a bit in a should-I-shouldn’t-I kinda way about making a post about this whole pregnancy thing, and the baby thing, and all those things. Usually, I try to stay away from anything *too* personal, I mean this is a personal blog, so everything in it is personal by definition… But it’s also public and the public doesn’t need to really know about every time I clip my toenails.

But pregnancy makes people chatty (or maybe it’s just me; I’m not too social, twitter notwithstanding, so I’m not on any of the “mommy-boards” or anything like that) and it’s come up tangentially in a few conversations, so I figure what the hell.

This may be TMI, it may be boring, it may be something y’all want to skip because hey, way more of me than you want. And that’s totally cool, I don’t blame you a bit.

Shit people don’t tell you about before you get pregnant

1.  Everyone knows about morning sickness. I think most people probably think that morning sickness is the way people first discover they’re pregnant. And for some, that may be true– but there’s a whole load of other potential symptoms that they don’t mention.  First, morning sickness is a misnomer. It’s not some magical thing where you wake up with a hangover every morning, and are fine by lunchtime. It hits everyone different and doesn’t hit everyone at all. Just as likely are the “post meal sickness” the “wake up in the middle of the night sickness” and “the all day sickness” And joy of joys, you can shuffle through all the above during the first trimester! Second, you know your old buddy PMS? Sore breasts, crampy belly, irritability? Yeah, those are symptoms too. So are exhaustion, and weird taste changes. Related:

2.  It’s not just cravings for pickles and icecream. I mean, you may be craving that combination, I don’t know. Supposedly, icecream is the #1 craving among pregnant women (I don’t know how they figure that, Ben and Jerry were two of my best buds before I got pregnant.) The part the don’t mention is your sense of taste actually changes. Foods you used to love taste like shit (grilled asparagus turned to burnt peat moss to me, not that I know how that tastes, but it tastes like burning peat smells) and foods you used to dislike suddenly are the best things ever (I could write epic poetry to my current love of red bell pepper.) You can also taste things stronger; I’ve become hyper aware of the amount of salt and sugar in foods, too much and it’s completely overpowering, also my love of spicy foods has been thwarted by my super-sensitive mouth and lips. Little bit of heat, and boy do I feel it.

3.  Keeping with the food theme, you’re not always going to be more-hungry. You’ve got a baby in there, stuff is being rearranged. The amount you can actually eat in any given meal shrinks dramatically as the pregnancy progresses.  All those jokes about pregnant ladies eating four servings of everything? I call shenanigans. My average portion size has shrunk (though portion control was always a problem for me to begin with.) What I do notice is I’m hungry more often. If we’re in the middle of something and whatever meal is late, I know it. My stomach reminds me constantly, to the point where all I can think about is food and how hungry I am.

4.  Speaking of shuffling, your insides shuffle. Specifically, everything in your abdomen gets pushed UP by baby. Your belly starts feeling like it’s getting big way before you’d expect it to. Like, month 2-3, you’ll start getting bigger between the belly button and the ribs. Baby goes up before baby goes out.

5.  Your boobs don’t stop growing, like, ever. Don’t be dumb like me and try to put off buying bras until they’ve stabilized. They don’t. Go to the store, go up the cup size, grow into them. (Or, if you live in Charlottesville, get talked into the balconette bra, cause if you’re gonna be overflowing anyway, you might as well overflow up with shelf/wench boobs and killer cleavage and take advantage of it while it lasts.) Seriously, you’re going to gain ~1 lb. in each.

6.  Also, you can start producing in the second trimester. Yes, 4-6 months before anyone’s gonna be turning to your boobs as a source of nourishment, you can start needing to worry about the big wet spots on the front of your shirts. (Related– Dear boobs, I hate you so much. You suck. No love, me.)

7.  Stretch marks itch. And you’re going to get them. Your belly button is going to itch. And it’s not ever ever ever going to stop. (More specifically, it’s not gonna stop until you stop growing.)

8.  Every part of your body is going to be working overtime. Your nails will grow like crazy, and get super-stronger. Your hair will do the same. This is awesome if you want to grow your hair out, less good if you like getting manicures (well, less good for the pocket book as you’ll constantly need retouches). Also, all your mucus membranes are going CRAZY doing dress rehearsals to… er… grease the way. Unfortunately, your body doesn’t recognize the difference between the mucus membranes that NEED the extra greasing and the ones that don’t…  Like… your sinuses. It’s like the worst nasal congestion/allergies of your life, and like everything else, it doesn’t stop until baby comes.

9.  You know that feeling when your eyelid starts twitching like crazy, and it’s aggravating and completely in-your-focus noticeable but you can’t do anything with it? That’s what your belly feels like once the baby starts really moving. My mom and mother-in-law talked about flutterings and butterflies and bubbles… maybe that’s what they got, I got elbows and kung fu.

10.  Baby shit’s expensive. No, no, no, I know that’s obvious, but hear me out… Baby needs shit you wouldn’t normally even think of, especially cause you need such a variety of it. Find a guide. Check out consumer reports and factory/governmental recalls, and buy everything used that you can. Babies grow so fast, you can usually count on SOMEONE you or a close family member knows (or hell, a close family member) that you can inherit clothes from.

11.  You need to make a lot of decisions early. Who’s your pediatrician going to be? Set up a pre-birth appointment so you can meet each other, and they’ll have your expected delivery date so they won’t be surprised going “who’s this” when the hospital calls them and says they have a patient once you’ve given birth. Are you going to learn the gender? Are you going to circumsize? Are you going to breast- or bottle-feed? What are you going to do about schooling? Church? Sports? The arts?

12.  Baby likes to sit on your hips. And when baby sits on your hips, baby sits on the veins and nerve bundles going to your hip and leg. And when baby sits on those veins and nerve bundles, you lose all control of your hip and some control of your leg, meaning you can very easily end up on the ground. You’ve got a LOT of blood in your body, it’s not the “get up too fast and fall because all the blood rushed out of my head” it’s “get up too fast and fall because my leg doesn’t work”  It’s about as fun as it sounds.

13.  I would think of a 13 but I’m hungry and distracted.

RL post

So, tomorrow is the busy day of busy days. We have our 22-week ultrasound at 9, which for those following along from home is the “big one.” You know, the one where they tell you “oh it’s a {fill in the blank here}” if you want. Well, to be specific, it’s the one where we hope kung-fu baby is modest and doesn’t go flashing it’s crotch at the camera cause we don’t want to know.

I’m not entirely counting on it. Baby has proven itself quite adept at doing exactly what is not wanted at that moment. (I swear, it’s gonna be a boy.)

But, gender issues aside, I’ll hopefully be able to fend off ravening future-grandmas with new pictures. Since every time I talk to my mom, she only wants to talk about the baby.

Though, that’s somewhat understandable her wanting good/happy news. Stuff in California isn’t going so great. My grandfather, who is in his mid-80s, was just diagnosed with prostate cancer. It’s aggressive, which is bad, but it hasn’t spread, it was caught early, and he’s totally healthy otherwise, which is all good. He’s expected to make a full recovery, but he’s going to be in the middle of his radiation treatment when the baby is born. And I’d just convinced them to come out this summer, too.

I know it’s selfish, but once I heard he WAS expected to make a full recovery, that’s the part that gets me worst.

Also, my uncle has just been admitted into the hospital. He finally let my grandparents call an ambulance for him to deal with the slow suicide he’s been committing over the past two years since his wife died. He may weigh 80lb.

I’m really really worried for my grandmother, with all these things happening almost at once.

So, I don’t really mind my mom only wanting to talk about the baby. I hope tomorrow there are new picture(s) I can show her.

The rest of tomorrow, we’ll be at the new house doing all the final inspections. Not much to say there, really, just that we’ll totally be running around like crazy trying to get everything together. That and I hate moving..

More on MMOs

(OHAI GUYZ. I MADE A POST.)

So, as mentioned MUCH earlier (like… nearly a year ago-earlier) two of the big MMOs in our sights were GW2 and SWTOR.  Oh, I suppose to be more specific, the fact that GW2 and SWTOR had been in our sights, but GW2 was quickly falling off the radar, as far as personal preferences go.  GW2 was just sounding more and more like not the kind of game I wanted to play.  SWTOR won by default, with David’s devotion to everything Bioware and Star Wars (except the prequels… we don’t talk about those) overwhelming the more distant “that seems kinda interesting” feelings I had toward GW.  GW appearing to become more and more the type of game neither of us wanted to play was really the nail in the coffin.

SWTOR became our new hope.  (u c wut i did thar?)  Both Bioware and LucasArts were stingy with information, close mouthed and doling it out in minute drops.  We even ended up resubscribing to WoW, since we’d been goofing off on some other F2P games, but finding them less-fun than the Blizzard Behemoth. We even had high hopes for Cataclysm, dropping the money and getting about a months worth of playtime in it before (re-)discovering that WoW just doesn’t do it for us anymore.

As is also probably obvious from another recent post of mine, I discovered Rift. I didn’t go into it with any real expectations… Over the summer, David and I had gotten into the habit of signing up for any betas/F2Ps that looked even remotely interesting. And the soul system of Rift was definitely interesting enough to get a beta key and spend some quality time with the downloader. I certainly didn’t intend to enjoy it as much as I did. And suddenly, my Rift-raves started to sound a lot like David’s devotion to SWTOR.  There was once again two games on our potential horizon.

Granted, the likelihood of being able to start Rift much before SWTOR’s release (since they’re aiming for sometime this year) is a bit iffy due to a total MMO hiatus until end of summer due to baby.  It just puts them on more even footing. And while Rift appeals to me for the aspects of it, it also appeals because it’s a known quantity, which due to the secrecy surrounding SWTOR, you can’t say about the Other Game.

But I’ve still been keeping track. I watch MMO news/blog sites, and SWTOR is still in the running for Next Big Thing, with all the supposition and commentary you’d expect to find when people are left to their own devices to interpret vague developer comments.

Well, I’ve been watching those vague developer comments, and…  I’m not really liking where it SEEMS like it’s going.

First off, I may not share David’s love for them, but I have a lot of respect for Bioware. They make some great games. I also grew up on Star Wars, though my devotion to the franchise is… not terribly devoted.  David loves both, with a love matched only by his love of good chocolate and weird beers.

Just to get that out there before I start.  Ahem.

Okay, so.  Bioware has stated that they want to use SWTOR to put the RPG back in MMORPGs. But I’m worried that they’re going to make an awesome subscription-based RPG, that misses the whole MMO boat.  There’s not a lot of detail as to what they actually mean by their comment, beyond some mentions of the class quests. Well, this sets me to worrying… What is the primary function of the RPG? You, playing a pivotal character. A hero. When you think of RPGs, you think of heroes. MMOs lend themselves much more to adventurers than heroes. The bar is lower. The club is more open. It’s more “reasonable” to see multiple high-level characters running around.  To poke at the RPG aspect, it doesn’t ruin your immersion, which seeing a 100 other people who are heroes Just Like You would do in a traditional RPG. Playing a hero works in a single player game. You’re the only one awesome enough to be controlled by someone NOT the computer, after all.  MMOs require it to work in a setting surrounded by other people.

Also, Bioware wants to focus more on the class quest lines. Now, I have NO IDEA how important these will be, or how much time they’ll take up. But it’s pretty likely that all the real pivotal moments of gameplay for your character, the real character development, will come from these class quests. Well, guess what? Unless you want to create a party of all Jedi Knights, you’re going to be looking at a lot of time soloing, or potentially helping your buddy through run around and kill stuff quests that you can’t actually participate in yourself.  (Have I mentioned recently that I don’t solo? Cause I don’t.)

I’m also REALLY worried about the crews. I mean, think about it. You have minions. These minions do all your crafting/gathering/professioning, leaving you to be awesome. They also interact with you, have deep and meaningful quests and storylines, and can even be romanced.

Why would you want to play with other players? I mean really… You could have SnarkyRobotDPS backing you up and providing witty commentary tailored to your current progress on his storyline… or you could have IMAJEDILOL and his endless piles of leetspeek.

Is SWTOR a MMO? I’ve forgotten.

(Special thanks to Larry Everett at Massively, who made a post summing up/sharing all my concerns.  He probably does a MUCH better job putting them together than I do, and you all should read it.)