Forty Weeks - Part I

Ms. Titswiggle has had a busy year and hasn't had time to write. What has she been up to, you ask? Many, many things and in order to tell them all to you, I’m going to have to go back almost a year to the beginning of Ms. T’s latest adventure: Motherhood. Now, clearly, in order to tell this story, I can’t simply start by sharing with you the magical stories of the giggling, spit bubble-blowing baby that I now know and love. I have to start at the beginning of the journey (well, maybe not the very beginning because, that, quite frankly, is none of your business). But I feel you must travel, as I did, through the many months of preparation to arrive at where I happily am today. So, without further ado, we must flashback to a period of time I now fondly think of as the days of whine and woe-ses.

One Saturday morning, about two weeks after a vacation Mr. T and I had taken up to the great white North to visit family, we saw a little pink line appear on a plastic stick and so begins our story. The first two weeks of my pregnancy were glorious. I walked around smiling with my little secret growing inside me. Then, at about week six, something terrible started to happen. I discovered that morning sickness is a lie. That it does not confine itself to morning and can hit at any time of the day or night. And when it would hit, I would gag. Here are some of the things that could stop me in my tracks, turn my face cold and clammy, force saliva to gather in my mouth and start my chest heaving:

Brushing my teeth.
The smell of coffee.
The taste of coffee.
Someone spitting on the sidewalk.
A dog doing his business.
A dog’s owner picking up said business.
Garbage day.
An old piece of discarded food.
Someone asking me: “how are you doing?”
Perfume.
Cigarette smoke.
Garlic.
The colour brown.
The television.
The radio.
Heat.
Cold.
Thirst.

Just about anything could set me off and, thankfully, most of the time I would just gag helplessly for a while and then regain control. Other times, actually, it’s better if I don’t talk about those other times. At about this point, it occurred to me that forty weeks is an awfully long time.