My last post here was in July. I was packing up for Aífe and I to go on a big schlep to England, via the Netherlands, so that I could participate in a conference on animal ethics and to enjoy a big, summer schlepping adventure with my best friend. I was pretty excited, and intended to blog about our journey in great detail. And now it has been eight months without a word. What happened? 

What happened is that exactly two weeks after that last post, I discovered I was pregnant. Which means I was already pregnant when I set off on the big schlep with my heavy suitcase and kitty in tow. I didn’t know that though. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for a few months, but we’d had no luck in my previous cycles, and there was absolutely no sign that anything was different about this one. After a few months of getting down over the negative results, I’d decided to stop worrying myself, to stop thinking about getting pregnant, and focus on the adventure at hand.  

So while I was completely exhausted from the moment we set off on  our trip, I assumed my fatigue was easily explained by an intense schedule, a lack of sleep, an excess of baggage, and carrying a twelve pound cat around all day in an unexpected and unrelenting heat wave. Those were valid reasons to be tired. But in our last days in England, it finally dawned on me to take a test, and I discovered that there was another reason for my unrelenting weariness; I’d been carrying a stowaway the whole time. A stowaway not much bigger than a poppy seed, yet already triggering an astonishing cascade of changes throughout my whole body… and about to trigger a lot of changes throughout my life.

I am now over thirty-eight weeks pregnant. My due date is April Fool’s Day, but all the books and apps I look at tell me to be ready to go into labor at any second. And so, now that the end is nigh, I’d like to share my experience of trying to combine pregnancy and cat-schlepping. 

Long story short: they don’t mix very well at all.