Shades of blue

I've been looking over my posts and realized that I haven't said anything about the third trimester. I'm there! Who'da thunk it, huh? Still can't always even process the fact that I'm actually pregnant and here I am at 28 1/2 weeks.

I'm definitely back to being tired like in the first trimester. And as for the "2nd trimester burst of energy", I kinda rank that with other mythological beings like dragons and unicorns. The 2nd trimester could better be referred to as the "few months when you somewhat stay alert for the majority of the day." It's by no means a burst of energy, at least not for me. It's more like the trimester when you feel more like a regular human for a bit.

My head has been in a rough place these last couple weeks. I've been really tired and just generally stressed. While I'm so excited to meet our son, I'm beginning to have some anxiety about it. I had my first baby dream and it was definitely stress related. In the dream, he was in a sling but the sling was really like this deep duffle bag. And he was in the bottom of it, completely swaddled but the swaddle was wrapped all around his face. I was in a panic thinking he couldn't breathe and had died, but when I get him out of the duffle and the swaddle, he was just all red and sweaty. And in that moment of relief, I realized my baby was not cute at all. Doesn't that sound horrible? Like completely shallow? But in the dream, he didn't even look like a baby, he was like a little ugly man baby. Sorta like Danny Devito.

I'm also having a lot of money concerns but that's really not anything new. It's just that now those concerns are a little bigger because we will be a family of three instead of two. Pile on to that the fact that I don't get paid over the summer because I teach and well, I'm just really stressed. Every summer, I teach a summer program but obviously won't this season, so I'm worried. I squirrel away money where I can but it still worries me to no end. There are proactive steps I've taken to address the money issue. I tutor 3 hours per week to generate some extra income. I'm in school full-time earning my Masters' so that I will have a pay raise next year. But the problem is that doing those things while pregnant is exhausting and is making me even more stressed.

Finally, my school district is screwing me on my maternity leave, like completely illegally screwing me. My union is in the process of grieving this issue and my understanding is that if it does not get resolved, a federal lawsuit will be filed. Basically, the district is saying that, because I will not be in school in June to finish out the year and do not have enough sick days to cover me through the end of the year, they are not responsible for paying my health insurance for the summer. This goes against everything in our contract as well as the law in general, but my district has a tendency to do whatever they want and deal with those pesky details later on. So even though I will only be missing the last 4 1/2 weeks of the school year, they are requiring that I take a full 12 weeks of Family & Medical Leave time which will last me through July (assuming I can work up until my due date). Then I will be responsible for paying health insurance for the month of August for myself, my husband and the baby. The sooner I have to go out on maternity, the earlier my 12 weeks will be up and the more health insurance I will have to pay. Awesome, right? Hopefully, my union and district will resolve this before my maternity starts but I honestly am not hopeful at all. In the meantime, I need to suck it up and keep my mouth shut because I won't be tenured until next school year.

Where's my husband in all of this? I don't know really. Finances are a topic we generally struggle with communication wise and there's often a large wall between us on this issue. Sometimes, I think he doesn't talk about it because it stresses him out. But most of the time, I kinda think he just thinks it will all work out in the end because it always has in the past. I handle the finances and sometimes feel like he has too much faith in my to fix things that are not fixable without some major, major changes.

How could I forget? There have also been some major issues with my baby shower....family stuff that is too personal to explain on a blog. But the issues are driving a major wedge between me and my husband as well as making me pretty unenthusiastic about my shower. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely grateful that people I love are going to come together to celebrate the birth of our child and shower us with the many things needed to have a baby, but the stress of the other issues is just making me wish we had gobs of money so that we could just go buy what we need and forget about all of it. With the stress of everything else going on, the shower issues are just becoming too much to handle.

So that's where I'm at...stressed, tired and often teary. But still really grateful that I'm pregnant.