I'm at my Crab Station lately.

(Note of explanation: This is a local restaurant. We've never been there, but Dan and I thought the name was so funny that we appropriated it to mean "in a bad mood". So there ya go.)

I don't know what's wrong exactly. Probably a good dose of pregnancy hormones. This pregnancy is certainly not as thrilling and exciting as the first one was. That pregnancy was full of "wow, isn't this interesting!" moments. This one is just boring, which, hey, don't get me wrong..."boring" is better than oh, say, "dangerous", or "risky". I'll take boring any day as long as things are going well.

I don't remember being soooooooooo tired the first time around. I am freakin' exhausted pretty much all day long. I nap when I can, at least every other day for an hour or so. I go to bed early most of the time. I just feel wiped out. Sometimes I can't even stand up. I sit down on the kitchen floor or wherever I *was* standing, and just hang out until I feel like standing up again, or until I have to drag myself back up to go do something, whichever comes first.

At least I'm not sick anymore. The first trimester is officially over, and that's a good thing. But this tired thing is getting me down.

Conversely, as I get more and more tired, Julian seems to be losing the ability to sleep. I have never had such a hard time getting him to sleep before. I have to lay with him for an hour or so at naptime, and usually I pass out before he does. At night it takes *forever* for him to go to sleep, even when he's seemingly exhausted.

Yesterday he only had a short nap of less than an hour, and we were on the go all day long. He went to preschool in the morning for 3 hours, came home, took his mini-nap, then we went to the pool in the afternoon and he played hard there. He had a spasm of exhaustion around 7:00pm while we were still at the pool (too hot to go home yet, we're in the middle of a major heat wave), so we hurried home and then he launched into a big second wind.

At 8:30pm I went to go put him down, laid in bed with him, and he *still* wasn't sleeping at 10:00pm. I passed out briefly after trying every trick in the book to get him to sleep (nursing, reading, singing, holding, cuddling), woke up, looked at the clock, and then looked over to see two shining little eyes looking at me. Good grief! And I thought that I might get some child-free alone time with Dan that evening...apparently not.

I went back to sleep I guess, for lack of any other solution, and woke up around 10:50pm to find him finally asleep. But now I had spent my entire evening laying in bed with a non-sleeping child. Woohoo. At least I got to sleep a bit, but you know, I sort of wanted to take in a movie or have adult time/conversation or, you know, something besides just continue to vegetate/incubate. Instead I just switched over from his bed to my bed and that was about it.

Grrrr. And then I started thinking how THIS sucks right now, and what will we do with two kids to try to get to sleep? And then I started feeling sorry for myself, and depressed, and gloomy. Which is ridiculous, because we've had long stretches where Julian is really easy to get to sleep, and this is just a phase, and by the time the next baby comes along everything will be completely different yet again, so why even worry and try to predict?

I'm just bummed lately. This whole tiredness thing is getting me down. I can't seem to get much done. I keep spacing out on things with my business. I go to bed early and don't get to hang out with Dan very much at all. It's hot, which saps my energy even more. I have no patience and find myself snapping at Julian when he acts up. I worry about being able to handle two kids. I worry about getting my body back. But mostly, I just feel blah.

Everything is going well, really. At my last doctor visit, he said that things are pretty much "as perfect as perfect can be". So nothing to worry about there.

I think I just have trouble being less than 100%, it always makes me cranky. I like to be active and I like to get things done, and lately I just feel like a shapeless lump of meat with an ever-growing to-do list. I've been swimming, which is great, so at least I'm getting some exercise. So far that seems to be the only activity that I can do without keeling over. But then I have to put on a bathing suit, and whereas the last time around I felt like a ripe fertility goddess, this time around I just feel like a saggy blob with a big beer belly. Sigh.

Some tone has returned to my arms and legs from swimming, that's a good thing. I have triceps again. I hope that my energy comes back in this second trimester and I can exercise more and regain some muscle tone. I think that will help my mood as well.

I suspect that I'm just riding some kind of hormonal wave, but I hope it breaks soon.