Mrs. Baggins and the Pregnancy Hunger Monster

“A normal hobbit day might include breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, lunch, tea, dinner and supper.” – wisegeek.com, lifted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy books

Just call me Bilbo.  I was trapped in a staff meeting this morning for 2.5 hours with no snacks.  It was life threatening, for me and my coworkers.  My Plant Manager laughed at my rumbling tummy and asked if I was going to make it; then the IT Manager asked how many fingers he was holding up, so I bit one of them off.  That’ll teach him.

I’ve been hungry before, described myself as starving even, but I have never been the kind of person for whom hunger was an emergency.  Now, at this point in my life/pregnancy, I’m thinking of having a refrigerator converted into a backpack that I can carry with me everywhere.  It’ll serve a second purpose of evening out the weight load on my spine, which will straighten back up and I won’t have sore knees anymore and it will be just Win-Win for every body part.

To add to my distraction during this staff meeting, the imp was throwing stuffed animals around in my abdomen again.  I’m sure he does this all day, but the only time I notice is when I’m sitting still, not talking, and not really focused on anything.  This tells you about how involved our staff meetings are.**  My belly extends from boobs to pelvis, but movements would indicate that he occupies only the lower quarter – so I don’t know what’s up in the rest of this enormous middle.  I suppose all the internal organs had to go somewhere to make room for him, and it seems they all decided to travel upwards and party with my esophagus, and who can blame them cuz that’s where all the food is (if my heartburn and indigestion are any indication).

In other news, I was (sort of) in the Durham paper today.  Here’s a quote from the beginning of the article:

"BLAH County Health Department officials are teaming with the BLAH County Health Department, the state’s Division of Public Health and the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources to investigate a case of food contamination one official calls the worse she’s seen in her decade-long career. <INTERJECTION – I THINK SHE MEANS "WORST"> Seventy-three people reported getting sick last weekend after eating at a luncheon Nov. 30 held in conjunction with the opening of BLAH’s new plant . . ."

Everybody at work is all excited about it and running up to me with it, and they’re all "YOU’RE IN THE PAPER!!" and I’m all, "Gee, that’s, uh, great," and they’re all "SEE LOOK IT’S THE PAPER YOU’RE IN IT."  I guess I’m sort of in it, being one of the seventy-three people mentioned, but I was really hoping they’d mention something specific about me, like "Seventy-three people reported getting sick, including one woman who was pregnant and had to schedule an emergency trip to her physician to assure the safety of her fragile unborn child."  Now that is drama, that is the spotlight, that is me in the paper, ya’ll.  But no, no mention made of my doctor visit saga.  Sniff.  If one has to suffer the indignity of one’s diarr – er – "evacuation" discussed in a newspaper, one should at least get some dramatic mileage out of it.  Elizabeth Dole gets a mention, and she didn’t even stick around to eat. 

Well, it’s been lovely chatting with you all, but it’s been over an hour since I last ate something and I need both hands to amend that.  Have a lovely weekend. 

**To be fair, they are very useful meetings and we do get things accomplished and we have them only rarely, but still I end up with the same mentality that I often do in a play: other people talking, blah blah, MY LINES MY LINES MY LINES, blah blah other guys blah.