It’s official: if I stand up straight and look right down, I can’t see my feet…
It’s interesting to note the things that you so often take for granted when you can’t do them for some reason. My fencing coach, Ro, had a nasty bike accident several weeks ago and can’t use his right arm while his shoulder heals. So not only are sleeping and getting dressed and showering difficult, so are things like teeth-brushing and signing checks.
For me, the big chunk of body that has materialized at belly-level has made bending over difficult and uncomfortable. So things like picking up a dropped piece of paper or doing many of the stretches that I rely on to keep my back and leg muscles happy are becoming undoable. On Friday I spent a bunch of hours cleaning up my field plots. This involved looking through patches of vegetation, locating colored plastic toothpicks (harder than you might imagine), and removing them. I’ve gotten used to squatting instead of bending to get down to the ground, and was delighted when Saturday morning my quads were sore, but my back wasn’t any more sore than usual. It’s probably the best exercise my legs have gotten in months, and certainly in weeks. I’ve been taking prenatal water aerobics, which helps with core muscles and with stretching, but doesn’t really challenge leg muscles accustomed to fencing lunges.
Meanwhile, Ben and I have started taking birth classes at the hospital where I plan to deliver. So far we’ve had two evening classes of a couple hours each, and they’ve been rather entertaining. There are about 5-6 other mothers and usually their partners who come to class and a bunch of them are real characters. Our instructor, Veronica, is the calm, reassuring sort of person you would expect; when she announced early on in the first class that this was a “safe space” and people could say what they thought, one mother-to-be exclaimed, “you mean we don’t have to pretend we’re loving every minute of pregnancy? Thank God!” Another woman quizzed the rest of us on how we’d gotten our partners to come to class; “I told him if I was the only one here by myself he was sleeping in the basement,” she said. “Looks like it’s basement for him tonight.” (He did show up to the second class.)
