Baby's First Trampoline

Trampolines were always sort of a mixed bag of fun for me growing up. On the one hand, they looked fun - no denying that. You could bounce up high, do tricks like flips, and generally have a good time. On the other hand, once you were actually on the trampoline, suddenly the tricks seemed too scary to try out yourself - after all, you could land on your head or flip off if you misjudged the flip - and the monotony of going up and down lost its thrill pretty quickly. Plus once, when I was little, I was bouncing on a trampoline and really had to pee, but there were other people bouncing on the trampoline, too, and I couldn't get off of it, and I ended up wetting my pants a little. Yup.

Well, apparently I have now become something of a human trampoline for my little baby-to-be, and again, I have to say...mixed bag. On the one hand, every little bounce and kick and flip lets me know that she's in there and that she's doing well. That's very reassuring and reminds me that soon she'll be a real person that I can actually look at and play with and care for. On the other hand, she has a tendency to bounce on things that I wish she would avoid. Like my stomach. Or my bladder. Some of that naseau from the first trimester is doing an encore performance, and I have to pee all the time - or at least my bladder thinks I do. Nothing like wasting a toilet flush - not to mention the trip to the bathroom itself - for 1/2 an ounce of urine only to feel like I'm about to burst not 5 minutes later. And it doesn't matter that my brain knows that I don't really have to go - the bladder has lost all reason and will not be denied. And this girls is not afraid to do flips on her mommy trampoline. It was super cute the first time I felt her kick, and even cuter the first time I saw it (I would stare at my belly for 30 minutes just to see it bounce one time), but the cuteness gets called into question when my belly visibly distorts and wobbles during a meeting, making it look as though cirque du soleil were rehearsing a new act in my uterus. Plus, something that people forget to tell you is that the baby doesn't just kick your belly - she kicks in any direction she feels like kicking. It was quite a shock the first time she aimed a low kick right into my intestines - she's not even born and already she's kicking my ass.

So maybe someday I'll be more excited about trampolines. For now, they're not my favorite things in the world, but hey - at least one of us is having fun.