There’s a whole lot cooking in that bod of yours while baby has set up shop in your tummy.  Not only are you growing a tiny human with skin, fingernails, genitals and all, but your body is going through massive amounts of changes that it may not feel particularly congenial towards.  Dealing with all that stress, the old temple is bound to spring a leak here or there.  In my first pregnancy, I started to feel a little crampy and noticed some very light spotting.  This alarmed me of course, and I contacted my doctor right away.  She assured me it was very common, but I fretted every minute until my appointment when she checked me out and gave me the thumbs up.   But by my second pregnancy, after I had already suffered a loss with a miscarriage earlier that year, every hiccup or twitch was cause for concern.  I found the miscarriage really stole the innocence and lightness of pregnancy from me, and each trimester became a marathon of what-if’s and I-hope-it’s-nots.  It was only after each baby was freshly extracted from my uterus and wailing on my belly that I was able to heave a sigh of relief that everything really was going to be okay.  But then the burden of fretting about the pregnancy morphed into the horror of, “What the hell am I going to do with this screaming purple bundle?”

Here’s some great advice, easy for me to say and impossible for you to do:  Don’t worry.  Stuff is inevitably going to happen to freak you out, and nine times out of ten it’s nothing to be concerned about.  Talk amongst your friends whom have experienced childbirth and guaranteed they’re all going to have a story of something fishy that caused them concern – then turned out to be nothing to worry.  So make like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and RELAX.  Or do something to take your mind of any worries and do what I did, get a kitten.

Now that I had been living in a cat-free house for several months, I started the campaign for a kitten.  It had been years since I had had a one, as Darby and Whiskey luckily had such long lives.  Mike thought it would be too much for me to handle with a three-year-old, a big swollen belly and a much lower patience tolerance, but I as far as I’m concerned a house isn’t a home unless you have to fish cat hairs out of your soup.

Enter the spitball of black kitten-ness that is Maggie Angola Jezebel Jade.  She turned our household on its ear with her energy and impressive commitment to non-stop mischievousness.  A plant perched atop a shelf?  A perfect opportunity to push it off and watch the large radius the dirt sprayed over.  A plastic hamper?  Just the thing to rhythmically drum her paws against, making a loud thumpa-thumpa-thumpa noise (preferably at 3:30 in the morning).  A Christmas tree with a shiny star on top?  Just the thing for seeing how many swats it will take to have Mom’s favourite glass ornament fall to the ground and shatter in a million pieces on the carpet.  But there is also one other thing that Maggie’s really good at.  Providing endless hours of entertainment for Tyler, an area that I can be sorely lacking in when I’m pregnant.  It’s hard to tell who’s having more fun as the both race from the kitchen to the living room for the 308^th time in a day.  Only Maggie will last through the duration of a four-hour train-playing session, just as fascinated with Thomas, Edward and Harold as Tyler is when the trains whiz around the track.  They both love bugs, hate baths and are afraid of the smoke alarm.  And best of all, Maggie was just the thing to keep Tyler entertained when mom needed, “Just another 20 minutes,” of sitting on the couch and watching The View.