The Perils of Peeing While Pregnant

In my dreams ... if I could sleep long enough to have any.

I woke up in the middle of the night ... on my back. I hate that, because anybody who's ever been pregnant knows that you're supposed to sleep on your left side. Sleeping on your back apparently hinders, like, the flow of blood and oxygen and other stuff to the baby. So when I realized I was on my back, I felt a pang of guilt and envisioned poor Corbin all glazy-eyed and slack-jawed dealing with developmental issues because his selfish back-sleeping mother deprived him of vital nutrients in utero.

After the guilt washed sufficiently over me, I realized I had to pee. But the thing is, I'm pretty big. And sleeping in a too-small bed with a big husband and a toddler who sleeps sideways and a cat or two and an occasional Labrador retriever and a pug who, despite being a small breed, sure can pin down the covers like nobody's business.

Yeah, I've got too many animals, shut up.

Anyway, when you're sleeping under those particular conditions, getting up to pee becomes a bit of a challenge. I mean, when your belly is the size of a beach ball and the heft of a bowling ball, just getting up is hard enough. It didn't help that there was a cat laying on my hair.

Once that problem was remedied, I still had to get out of bed. And I was still on my back. So I looped my hands around my right thigh for leverage and sort of rocked back and forth until I could sit up. (Think of how a turtle would get up if it were lying on its shell. You know, if a turtle could actually get up from that position unassisted.)

When I stood up, I felt a little dizzy - I guess from all that horrible horrible back-sleeping (for shame!). So I wavered around in the dark for a minute, stumbling my way toward the bathroom, tripping over a scooter and some sort of helmet and all the other crap I was too lazy to pick up last night. The baby had slid into his normal position (head or whatever part firmly planted in my bladder) which intensified the need to pee by, like, infinity. And holding your pee in is terrible when you're trying to get to a toilet and can't make it immediately. So I waddled across the floor with my knees buckled, trying to maneuver around whatever obstacles were lurking in the darkness, praying that I could reach the bathroom without a leak ... or worse.

Miraculously, I made it to the toilet without falling over or pissing myself. When I did, I was immediately accosted by cats. I don't know what it is, but I guarantee if you're wandering around my house in the middle of the night, you'll have a cat prancing around your feet like you're wearing a nightie made of fish fillets. They come out of nowhere. So on my way out of the bathroom, instead of waddling around with buckled knees, I was shuffling so as not to step on anyone.

I managed to creep back to the bed, but it was dark, and it takes my eyes like eight thousand hours to adjust to the darkness, and plus I didn't have my contacts in and y'all know how blind I am without my corrective vision. I couldn't just lay down in the bed ... ohhhhh no. Because when you vacate a spot in my bed, it fills up immediately - kind of like a footprint in really gloppy mud or sand, you know, the kind that goes away a few seconds after you leave it? I couldn't risk laying on someone because at this point I would totally squish them.

I fumbled for my phone, but couldn't feel it. Luckily it was on the charger so all I had to do was grope along the cord, starting at the wall. Turns out, the phone had somehow fallen behind the bed. So I slid my hands into the crack between the bed and the wall, huffing and puffing and searching. Disconnected the phone. Turned it on. Shined the light on the bed to assess the situation. Sure enough, Coby (the toddler) had scooted over into my spot, Thurman (the cat) was on my pillow like he wasn't just winding around my feet five seconds ago, Destiny (the pug) was laying on the covers, and Curtis (the husband) had thrust his elbow over into the spot where Coby was supposed to be.

Ugh.

So I shooed away the cat, and shoved the pug to the center of the bed, and heaved Curtis's dead-weight elbow back onto his side, and scooted Coby back into the center (pleasepleasepleasedon'tlethimwakeup) and fluffed my cat-indented pillow and retrieved the pillow that I keep between my knees and finally, finally, hefted myself back into the bed.

By that time, I was wide awake. So since I had my phone in my hand, I went ahead and checked Facebook, which made it worse. And by the time I finished looking at Facebook and could think about going back to sleep, Curtis was snoring like a freight train - I swear the bed was vibrating from the sound. So I ended up laying there awake for like an hour.

But at least I didn't have to pee.