Hostess with the Mostess

Ok, so call me crazy, but sometimes I miss being pregnant. I know you are thinking, "Woman, you have a 2 month old baby and 2 other kids! You are busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest -- get thee to a nunnery!" But I still do miss it -- sometimes it's intense in a phantom-limb kind of way and other times it's wistful and faint as a sigh.
That's not to say that I want to be pregnant again right now or even if I'm sure that I want to have any more children, but the memory of the sheer physical act of being pregnant haunts me. I tend to be hyper-analytical of every thought that flits through my mind -- well, maybe not every thought. I mean, how much thought can you give to, say, Paris Hilton's absurdly meteoric rise to fame without becoming bitterly cynical? But I digress . . .
I've been really blessed with great pregnancies -- not without their aches and pains, but remarkably uncomplicated in any major way. And since I am addicted to all the labor and delivery shows on Discovery Health Network, and my hubby actually delivers babies, I know just about all the really terrible things that can go wrong -- and that makes me incredibly thankful. I always tell my husband that I would have been a great asset to him in an Ice Age - able to pop out healthy kids and nicely insulated with a layer of fat to keep me going. He usually just shakes his head at me and smiles in his calm, non-judgmental way.
It's just that I feel so productive, in the truest sense of the word. It makes me feel like I'm really good at something -- silly, I know, since I don't really have any control over most of the gestation process. And since the first two came well past their due dates, (Baby Girl wasn't given the chance, I was induced on my due date) and the Boy would crawl back in right now if he could, I like to imagine that I made a good, comfy home for them from the very beginning. I loved the taut, solid roundness of my belly and the special, secret feeling of just knowing life.
(And let's not forget to mention the fact that I don't have to suck in my stomach when I am pregnant, even after eating a couple (handfuls) of Oreos. Oh, how I miss that . . .)

But I know that I am certainly not prepared for another pregnancy, and the truth is that Baby Girl may be the last (although I never say never). And I seem to have my fair share of troubles after the children make their entrance. No matter how many vitamins I take and how much exercise I do, I've learned that I can pretty much count on wrangling with some kind of post-partum depression, thank you very much Tom Cruise -- but that is for another post (can't wait for that one, right?)
For now, I will just have to look fondly (and surreptiously) at other round bellies and try to remember.