Is this weird?

I swear I’m going crazy.

For the past four or five days I think I’ve been feeling fetal movement. Except—I’m only 10 weeks along! How is that even possible?

During my last pregnancy I got a little paranoid about fetal movement. I found all these Web sites that said, “By week 16, you should be feeling movement,” and I panicked because I hadn’t felt it yet. I started noticing movement around week 18 or so, however, so I breathed a sigh of relief. (Little did I know—ha ha.)

People say you feel movement earlier in subsequent pregnancies because you know what to look for. I think that’s a lot of bullshit—I was very attuned to my body around the beginning of the second trimester last time and if there had been anything, I would have noticed it. I think the real reason women feel movement earlier in subsequent pregnancies is because our bodies are different and our uterus has expanded more quickly.

But I never expected to feel something quite this early. It makes me wonder if I’m imagining it. I would describe the sensation as feeling like someone’s moving a hand through a lot of liquid (which he/she probably is). It feels like my upper stomach is growling, only it’s not. Those are the exact same descriptions I would have given last time, only this time it’s more subtle.

I must admit I feel weird that my body is treating this gestation as a second pregnancy (fetal movement, earlier “popping out,” etc.). Whenever you Google “second pregnancy,” you find all these chat rooms in which women who already have a child at home are talking about their symptoms. My child from my first pregnancy isn’t in my arms; he’s in heaven. I feel like I sort of got cheated out of a “first pregnancy.”

Well, hopefully other people won’t treat me like a newbie, either, once they find out.