nothing to see here

I am still here, I swear, and I'm reading all of my usual favorite blogs. I wish I could say that I'm on vacation or taking a summer hiatus, but I've actually been working a lot since I last wrote. I'm teaching a summer class ("The Short Story," which has been a blast--9 students, all of whom are interested, talkative, and smart!) and am working with our university's Teaching and Learning Center to get ready to teach other new teachers about pedagogy. And on top of all that, I'm doing my regular administrative/faculty job of hiring adjunct instructors and helping to run our program.

This is all good, I guess, but I'm feeling pretty run down and am wishing I had a bit more time to rest and relax. I'm not sure what I'd be doing if I were relaxing. W is in daycare three days a week and on the other two days, I usually have my husband here with me and W. We play outside, we go for walks, and we watch a bit of Sesa.me Street. And even those "off" days wear me out. I mostly want to sit on the couch and do nothing other than snuggle with W, and he's not in a snuggly mood. He's in a run around the house and play kind of mood.

The biggest news is that I'm feeling ready--really ready--for this baby to come and there are still 7 weeks left (i'm 33 weeks pregnant as of tomorrow). I didn't feel this way the first time around, and what I've learned is that second pregnancies are physically harder in many ways. One, I started up 10 lbs higher than I did when I was pregnant with W. It may only be 10 lbs, but I feel much bigger and more stretched than I was before. Two, round ligament pains are WAY worse the second time around. As the midwife recently said, "it feels like a knife stabbing in your side, right?" Yes, yes it does. They're so bad I was crying a few weeks ago thinking that it was premature labor. Nope. Just ligament pain. Three, chasing a toddler around is next to impossible. I'm much more tired than I remember being last time, and my breathing is already way more labored than before. I seriously sound like I'm having an asthma attack most of the time. So even though I want her to stay in, keep baking until she's ready to come out, I've about had it with the discomfort. Working full time while I'm carrying all this weight and working so hard really sucks. There's just no way around it.

I'm still thrilled to be pregnant, to be relatively healthy, and to be headed into these last few weeks in a relatively good space, albeit a tired one. I suppose it's like running a marathon, not that I've ever done that, of course. This may be as close as I ever get to a marathon, in fact. But if this is a marathon, I must be in mile 17 or 18, right? I must be closing in on the end. Maybe I'm just hitting the dreaded "wall"?