July 07, 2004
The first baby dreams
Perhaps induced by my renewed confidence in my pregnancy (see the previous post), I had a couple of baby dreams last night. Unfortunately, they didn't reflect too well on my mommy skills.
In the first one, the baby was maybe 3 or 4 days old. It was a beautiful little boy. I kept wanting to call him Ben or Benjamin, but I knew that wasn't my baby's name, but Steve and Christina's. I didn't know how to breastfeed the poor baby, so I was talking to a (male) nurse about it. At that point I realized it had been three or four DAYS and I hadn't fed my baby anything except right after his birth when he got a little mushy stuff from a tin that resembled the soft kittenfood we used to buy.
The nurse was quite disgusted with me, but under his tutelage I was able to get the baby to latch on and begin to feed. It was so sweet! Then it got really weird.
About a 2" wide section of the skin on my breast (from nipple up towards my neck) changed appearance. It started to take on a pattern like a miniature section of wood flooring. I questioned this oddity and the nurse got all excited. He told me that meant the baby was getting milk through "the third hole in the nipple." See, a nipple doesn't have just one opening, but several. In reality, the baby feeds through them all at once. In my dream, I guess just one hole at a time opened up, and based upon the skin change, you could tell which one.
Weird. Very very weird.
The second dream was more of a continuation that began after I woke up a little then fell back asleep. In this one, the baby was still a beautiful little boy, but he was a little bit older, to where he could hold up his own head. I was at a park or something with my parents. I thought the baby might be hungry, so I tried to breastfeed him but he didn't want to eat, so I wrapped his blanket around him a little more snugly, then laid him belly-down on the grass. My mom said something (I don't remember what), and that made me realize I didn't have a diaper bag with me or ANY sort of baby gear.
Despite the fact that I appeared to be quite neglectful of baby's necessities, I woke up this morning smiling and happy, remembering the overwhelming love I felt for the little boy.
Paranoia and reassurance
Even though the morning sickness has continued to make me miserable most days, I'd become slightly paranoid that I was no longer pregnant. That something weird had happened, like the baby had just evaporated, and the nausea was all psychosomatic. That maybe the hardness just above my pelvic bone wasn't my growing uterus, but wishful thinking.
I had another week and a half to go before my next prenatal appointment, but I decided I couldn't wait any longer.
Last night, I stopped by a drugstore and picked up a pregnancy test. I used one a few hours later and felt rather comforted by the positive result.
Silly behaviour, I know, but I couldn't help it. I'm at that stage where there isn't really anything tangible to my pregnancy except for the tummy problems, so it was reassuring to have an impartial test say, "yes, you crazy woman, you are still pregnant."