20 weeks and I am easily annoyed

20 weeks feels awesome. I get mad when all the pregnancy trackers are congratulating me on being halfway through. I thought about this with W and I still believe that I will celebrate that milestone at 22 weeks.

I'm feeling pretty good, although my body is still very aware that something is different. My back hurts if I sit or stand for too long. I pee all the time. I don't remember the aches being this bad last time, but I am 3 years older and approaching my mid-thirties... I feel my belly stretching and getting bigger too.

I've had two birth dreams already. Both of them resulted in a girl. One of them had us deciding on a middle name. That middle name sounded great in my dream. I was pleased when I woke up. Then I said it to myself and it sounded terrible. We haven't talking about names at all, but we still have our girl name from W. We like the first name, but we were never satisfied with the middle name. We need to work on that.

I guess it's no surprise that this pregnancy is harder than the first one. I don't get to spend my evenings doing whatever and my weekends are always filled with constant activity (unless I plan a day to stay home). A stay-home day doesn't mean I get to relax, though. I'm cleaning and chasing W all over the place. I'm lucky he's such a good kid, but he can be a handful. All I want to do it sit. That works really well when he wants me to read to him (but then I get sleepy). 

My patience with him used to be awesome. I could sit with him while he sat on the stairs and talked about everything EXCEPT going down the stairs. I can't do that now. I think it's a combination of me having a  shorter fuse and him being almost three. He is throwing full tantrums when he doesn't get his way and it makes me crazy. Twice in the past week, I have had to put him in his car seat while he is screaming and twisting and shouting and kicking. It's hard (physically) and I feel totally worn out over it. But I don't have an alternative. I have to go to work, I can't explain that to a 2 year old when he is crying. We've done basically the same routine since he was 10 weeks old. It's no surprise. I feel like my only option is to stick to my guns and let him know that a fit isn't going to change my plans. He also gets mad at home sometimes before dinner, but those are easier to deal with. He can scream all he wants, but I'm not changing our dinner menu to include fruit snacks. He will usually come around on that one and start eating after a while. I just have to ride that out (without wine!). I KNOW what his triggers are - tired and/or hungry. But I can't force him to eat a snack every day when we get home. I can only offer it over and over. I can't force him to take a nap on the weekends, I can only provide a restful environment. At daycare, he will sometimes fall asleep after 1.5 hours of them making him lay on the cot - sometimes. I don't have the patience for that. We actually do better on busy weekends when we spend time in the car. He'll fall asleep about 50% of the time on long rides... although we've been to parties 1.5 hours from home and have driven back without him ever even blinking. So I have a non-napper that gets super mad sometimes when he's tired. I still think I have it pretty easy.

I've been trying to prepare for the later weeks by not picking him up anymore, which can result in him lying limp on the floor because he doesn't want to walk to the bathroom. That's getting better, though. I haven't had to drag him in weeks.

My point is that I think this is going to get worse before it gets better. And I think we're going to have an interesting transition with the new baby. We have a doll that we want to give him so we can talk about the changes that are coming. I wanted to give it to him on Sunday, but we had a rough day. I'll see how he does this evening.