So I think the ‘aches and pains’ part of this pregnancy has officially begun.  I managed – through judicious use of a pillow between my knees – to eradicate the thigh/groin pain of the early days.  However, my hands and feet and knees ache like I’m 80 and arthritic.  It’s worse in the morning, or when I first stand up, and it doesn’t yet interfere with my usual walk-everywhere M.O.  but it’s annoying, and I find myself trying to conceal my stiffness and achiness because, really, I’m not that huge yet – I’m SO going to need room to keep complaining (and getting sympathy) later on in this process when I’m really suffering.

I’m thinking this part might be from water retention?  My hands don’t hurt like everything I’ve read on carpal tunnel would indicate they would, they just ache when I move them.  And feel weak.  They don’t look swollen, but my feet, which also ache, look slightly more hobbity than usual – fat feet instead of weirdly wide gangly feet.  And my knees have always, intermittently, given me trouble, so if a joint’s going to complain about too much relaxin floating around in the old bod, it’s gonna be my knees.

But yesterday and today, I’m getting a weird pain in my back/hip/butt.   Right where my “butt dimple” is, actually.  It’s not pain or numbness “shooting down my leg”, so not sciatica?  It’s not agonizing – I can walk on it, and walking a lot yesterday helped, but it’s back again this morning.  It feels like the kind of pain one should be able to stretch out, but I can’t seem to find that perfect move that would instantly release the kink in my butt.

But otherwise?  Thor’s moving all the time.  Like middle-of-the-night all the time.  This is me, not complaining.

Not much else is going on.  I’m happily cross stitching like a fiend.  I’m looking forward to seeing neighbors/friends tomorrow whom we really haven’t seen to spend any time with since maybe January or so.  We get together with a whole crowd of Brooklyites for a foray to another part of the city for a restaurant meal we’ve none of us ever tried before.  It’s fun, usually, but I anticipate a lot of either outright, “OMG you’re PREGNANT!” exclamations, or conversely, a lot of sideways glances and significant stares in my presence.  Either one should be fun, because I’m perverse like that.

And the night after that is a birthday celebration at a swank restaurant in SOHO for the eldest SD.  The meal should be lovely, but I’m a bit stressed out about the dress-code.  My spring dresses don’t, um, fit.  And I tried on a dress yesterday and although it was adorable on the hangar, on me it just looked like a sack covering up a great big potato.  I did not buy it even though it would have been fun to stare at it in my closet.  Hope the maitre-d’ is understanding of the impossibility of wearing dressy clothes at 6 mos. pregnant.

But tonight’s a late night, and I’m already sleepy.  No excitement planned for the day to keep me awake, so I’ll have to content myself with hoping for visual evidence of Thor’s movement like he provided me with last night.  Damn, aches, pains, butt-kinks, and swollen feet aside, this part of pregnancy totally rocks.

Yeah, I said it.  I’m having a blast with this.