Box of Baby Books

The nausea continues, but I’m making it through. I was telling Wes tonight that the pregnancy symptom that most resonates with me isn’t the nausea or breast tenderness or baby brain – it’s the smell factor. Everything is potent to my nose. Things that I would otherwise enjoy smelling or only be bothered by a little really smell strongly. I can’t stand being around a smoker – even when he or she isn’t smoking. The cafeteria food made me gag. Even Wes’s dinner tonight – the same thing I ate (at least some of) for lunch – made my stomach turn over. It’s amazing how true the pregnancy symptoms are. I don’t know why they surprise me. I guess it’s the whole sinking-in process.

I got a box of baby books today. There’s one about nutrition, two about fitness, one about baby gear, and another that’s a fun name book. I’ve paged through all of them already, but Wes really latched onto the name book. We talked about not discussing names until after the first trimester – the whole self-preservation thing – and we’re not exactly making lists, but we are talking about it. The book tells how popular the name is today, when its popularity peaked, what category of names it falls under, nicknames and variations, and good names for brothers and sisters that “go” – along with a little tidbit about when or why it became popular, what it conjures, and so forth. We looked up our names – and Lucy’s, of course – to see what they said. I have the #9 girl’s name! The most popular name 20-30 years ago was Jennifer, which is why it’s now the #1 name among pregnant women (including my sister-in-law, who is, to my knowledge, not currently pregnant but has two kids). We looked up one or two names that we’d talked about before we were even pregnant. It was fun. It’s not your ordinary name book, and that makes it neat. I definitely want kids’ names that kind of “go” together – like how mine and my siblings’ names seem to fit together.