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It's second trimester here -- the website tells me that at 14 weeks, baby is 3.5 inches, from head to toe the size of an 8oz filet mignon -- and I'm alive again. Alive! My nausea has mostly vanished, and my energy has mostly returned. Yesterday I had moments where I could even forget that I was pregnant, if it weren't that clothes fit oddly. I'm in that brief sweet spot between morning sickness and when The Vein starts acting up. This means walking, leaving the house, stretching, as much exercise as I can manage -- any physical activity to counteract the two months I've just spent as a sedentary lump, atrophying and packing on the avoirdupois.

So far I am holding that avoirdupois barely below the Number of Dread. My goal, though this may be ambitious, is to try to stave off tipping the scale until the third trimester. This doesn't involve some dangerous diet plan. I'm trying to avoid sugar and other empty calories, sure, but my main goal is to Move. Even the the most basic quantity of exercise does measureable amounts of good. Anyway, I have a motivating factor -- to avoid bed rest as long as possible. The month I spent in bed with William was good for my blood pressure, I guess, but it had effects that lingered even three years later. God preserve me from round two.

I haven't felt kicks or flutters, but being a grand multipara, I know the feeling of barely shifting gravity and pressure in the midsection which means a tiny thing is swimming. Although most of my pretty obvious stomach is fat and the strange displacement of internal organs, there is a legitimate bulge of baby there. So I'm the good days of feeling okay and not just looking fat, and I'm trying not to waste my time.