So, I
missed writing a blog in the month of October.
To be fair, it’s been an incredibly busy month, and I have a legitimate
excuse that’s been keeping me distracted.
I’m 16 weeks pregnant. Yup – I’ve told most of my friends and family,
but I wanted to avoid a massive Facebook announcement, as I’m feeling
overwhelmed enough as it is, what with this wonderful unplanned surprise and
all.
Also this
month – bought a car, went to visit family in Houston, and got engaged. So…I legitimately don’t even know where to
begin to try to recap the onslaught of emotions, stresses and changes that have
happened in the last short period of time!
The bottom
line is, I’m feeling happy – although if someone were to have told me a year
ago that within a year I’d be pregnant and engaged I would have laughed them
out of town. Everything has happened very
quickly, and in the moments of downtime, I try to savor the small joys of what
life is bringing me these days.
I have met the one – I always had read that
when you know, you just know, and that’s exactly how I feel about Augusto, so
even though in an ideal, planning-ahead scenario, we would have waited to start
a family, in the end, I am thrilled to have found myself in this situation with
him. He has been incredibly supportive throughout this whole process – I keep
telling him to remember that I’m not normally like this (cranky, tired,
bloated, nauseous etc), because he has now known me as a pregnant woman longer
than the total time we were together before I got pregnant.
I had to
quickly realize how skewed my view of pregnancy was before this – I had a
vision of me blissfully going through my entire pregnancy with the only changes
being a growing stomach. This is not at
all the case. I had really never
considered the massive changes the female body undergoes in order to create an
entire new human being. My first
symptoms of pregnancy were the boobs – definitely the boobs – they were
incredibly painful for the first 3 months (and still kind of are). I changed from being a well-endowed woman who
can shop anywhere to being laughed out of Honduran shops because the size of
bra I wanted doesn’t exist in this country. (Thank God everything is bigger in
Texas! I was able to get my shopping done while I was in Houston) I also learned about the joys of the pregnant
woman’s digestive system –it slows down, I mean sloooowww, almost to a complete
halt, which creates lots of time for fermentation and gas. Oh yay.
The
weirdest part of pregnancy so far for me has been the food aversions and
cravings – suddenly foods and drinks that I love (fish, eggs, fruit juice, chamomile
tea) completely disgust me, and other food that never featured heavily in my
diet: kidney beans (I literally ate beans every day for a month) and bagels (it
took me a month to find the one store in Tegucigalpa that carries bagels) are
now the only thing I want, again and again and again.
I have been
lucky, I haven’t thrown up once. Well
technically I did just once, while I was cleaning the fridge, but to be fair
there were some really nasty mysterious no-longer-recognizable containers of
food to be thrown out.
I can still
uncomfortably squeeze myself into my regular clothes, but it’s getting pretty
evident that I’m actually pregnant – not just fat as a few of my coworkers and
workshop participants have suggested. (Bluntness about one’s physical appearance
here is very accepted – telling someone they look like they’ve gained weight
isn’t considered offensive, even though I definitely feel offended).
So, there
you have it folks – I am going to be staying in Honduras for the foreseeable
future, until Augusto and I (and baby) figure out where life is going to take
us next. This blog was originally going
to be about my year in Honduras – well, now, it’s looking like it’s going to be
about my life in Honduras for the next few years!
