I have a cold, which seems to be required both in the post-holiday let-down and in the third trimester of pregnancy. Because, with an increasingly less-tiny human being crowding out unimportant things like MY LUNGS, it’s important to have additional factors making it nearly impossible to breathe. Or sleep.  I’ve coughed so much that I seem to have pulled a muscle.

I’m getting sciatic pain. It feels like someone is constantly tickling the back my knee, and not in a good way AT ALL, thanks to Restless Leg Syndrome.  I have heartburn. I’m completely winded by a single flight (or even half a flight) of stairs.

I am the fashionista’s worst nightmare of a pregnant woman and a stay-at-home-mom, all wrapped up in a big pair of yoga pants.  Seriously, this is my typical uniform: t-shirt with tank underneath, sweatpants. Sometimes, trade yoga pants for sweatpants. Sometimes add a sweatshirt.  If I need to be moderately presentable, I put on a pair of jeans and a maternity wrap top, but I’m still going to wear my worn-out running shoes (if I can reach them to tie them), because the other shoes I have are getting tight.

And, no, I don’t think I’ve yet managed to shower today. Wanna make something of it?

But you want to know something? It turns out that whole “carrying multiples” thing really WAS a lot harder than average, even in my complication-free pregnancy.  It turns out I actually don’t hate pregnancy nearly as much as I thought I did.

I have heartburn, yes, but nowhere near as constant and awful as last time.  I can still make out my ankles, nothing approaching the terrifying Hobbit-feet I had developed by this time 3.5 years ago.  I can still wear my wedding rings and feel my fingertips, no carpal tunnel. I’m tired, sure, but I’m also taking care of a pair of preschoolers instead of sitting on the couch and ordering takeout every night.

I like the fact that I’m pregnant-not-just-fat enough that strangers dare to ask me when I’m due.  I love feeling the baby moving around in my belly, that special thing that’s just between me and her.  This time has flown by, it’s unbelievable to me that there’s (at most) about two months left until I meet this little girl face-to-face.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t “glow.” This is not my all-time favorite state of being.  I will be ready for pregnancy to be over, ready get my body back to normal-ish.  Ready to figure out a newborn and see how she fits into our family.

But I’m trying to step back from the complaints and enjoy the special-ness of pregnancy while I have it.  If M is to be believed, and I certainly think he is, I won’t be doing any of this again.  And that’s alright.  But I need to slow down and appreciate it while it’s here.

Even if I can’t sleep.

As an aside, do you have any idea how hard it is to get a self-portrait belly shot in a house with minimal natural light and only a single, crappy full-length-ish mirror stored in a closet somewhere?  Not freaking easy! I attempted the self-timer-and-tripod a few weeks ago with crappy results, and can’t find my remote anywhere, and never remember to ask M to take a picture on the weekends.  Ah well.

As of last weekend, I suddenly feel like being pregnant is really catching up with me.

Oh sure, I’ve been moving a bit slower for a while.  While I’m still dragging myself to Spinning (three times this week, BOOYAH), I do it at a much lower intensity. Walking up the stairs has gotten me winded for a while.  But other than that, this pregnancy has proven significantly less intense and less horrifically uncomfortable than my last one.

That does not, however, mean that I am immune to the limitations I experienced three and a half years ago.

The belly has grown and become more prominent in just the last few weeks.  Suddenly I’m bumping into things that I previously slid past.  In yoga, I noticed I had to modify my poses a lot more to make room for the belly (three cheers for prenatal yoga, man, where they know what this is about…).

Last Saturday and Sunday, I was surprised to find that I apparently overdid it.  Saturday was my first day back at Spinning after vacation, and I was going even slower than I had before.  In the afternoon, a friend and I went crib shopping (our old ones were recalled, so I had vouchers for new ones), and then stopped to pick up a couple of grocery necessities.  Between all the standing and walking, and the carrying a gallon of milk and a bag of groceries, the belly was noticeably heavy and tight, and I had to spend half an hour zonked out in a chair with a bottle of water when I got home.  Same thing Sunday after a run-of-the-mill grocery store outing.

All week, in fact, a spinning class would all but knock me out for the rest of the day, and a trip to the grocery store required rest and water when I got home.  The belly feels heavy, maybe a little tight, with those Braxton Hicks contractions staging their comeback.

During my last pregnancy, it was this feeling that had me stopping a lot of things. I stopped going to the grocery store, stopped carrying the laundry to the basement.  This time… well, I’m not trying to be Superwoman. I’m trying to take it easy and slow down.  But I also do not want to stop if I don’t actually have to.  I want to keep moving and exercising, even if I have to take lots of breaks and go slower than ever. Abandoning groceries and laundry seems a lot less realistic than it was when I used to be at an office all day instead of here at home, still responsible for two three-year-olds and keeping our house moving.

This second time around is a different ballgame, in ways both good and meh.  I’m obviously less stressed out, calmer, which is both a second-time effect and a singleton-pregnancy-after-twins one.  However, a major difference between now and the last time is that, with your first pregnancy, you sort of have the luxury of letting everything revolve around your pregnant self.  Sure, obviously you have to keep going to work and all of that.  But when you get home, you can sit on your butt, order take-out (again), have your husband do the laundry when the weekend rolls around.

When you’ve already got older kids, especially when you’re a stay-at-home mom, you can only let so many of those things slide.  The kids still need to eat a reasonable dinner. There’s twice as much laundry to be done. Activities and playdates just keep on coming.  Life keeps on going.  It can be exhausting, but having already been through the experience of having my world stop and take a long time to get moving again, it’s actually kind of nice that having older kids forces you to continue moving forward.