Drinks for everyone!

The one thing I've noticed since becoming pregnant is how engrained drinking is in our social lives. I don't mean drinking in the college-chug-a-bunch-of beers-and-do-shots kinda way. I mean, drinking wine at barbeques with friends, lingering over dinner and a nice bottle of wine with your S.O., going winetasting on sunny summer weekends. It almost sounds too Gatsby-ish, but it's kinda true in this town. Almost every social event we normally attend includes, centrally most of the time, some kind of wine drinking. So when you can't drink anymore, it really changes both your social life and your experience of your former social self. Very bizarre.

Since I've been lucky enough not to experience any 'morning' sickness, I still really want to drink and it totally sucks because I really really can't. Over the last few weeks, M and I have been a bit MIA socially. At first we worried about how we'd "cover" for me not drinking without having to tell people that I'm preggers. But we've actually lucked out because a couple of our social engagements have (miraculously) not had wine as the focal point and most of our big wine-centric events were pre-conception (or right after, but before I knew of course). However, now that we are re-emerging a bit, but still haven't told people, manuevering around the non-drinking thing has become quite bothersome, mostly because I still want to drink! I can sniff someone else's wine and maybe have a taste... but damn.. that's almost worse.

At one of the more recent social events, a clam bake at a yacht club (and I only mention those two things because they are both major drinking events & places in my experience), I also got to see what I'm like without a few in me. I gotta say, I think the experience for both me and our friends was quite different. In fact, B's husband even said to us all, "it's too bad your funnest friend is pregnant!" Hm. At first I was like, ok, that's kind of a compliment. But it also made me feel like I'm less fun now that I can't drink. Even though B & F, as well as M all drank, and I'm sure they enjoyed the evening just fine, I couldn't help but wonder whether I really am less fun when I can't drink.

So after chatting about it with M, I've decided that I (and by default he) are going to start branching out and doing things we haven't normally done so much in the past that are [1] fun and [2] don't focus on drinking. Cuz I gotta say, being around a bunch of folks who can and are drinking, when you can't.... ain't so much fun. We're hoping that by fronting the movement our friends will start joining in. We'll see though.

My other thought as of late is that I wish I had a girlfriend going through this same thing with me. Not like in a "misery loves company" kinda way... but rather to be around someone who wants to do the same kinds of things and will start experiencing these radical changes at the same-ish time. Once I started thinking about it, I don't really have many friends who even have kids (I can count 3, but 2 live very far away and all 3 have tons of friends who have kids), let alone who are particularly close to being pregnant right now. So it's a bit lonely here in Bun-in-the-oven-ville.

Not to be a total downer! This is a great thing to be doing and I'm super excited that we'll have a new family member (homegrown nonetheless) here in 7-ish months. All very cool. But sometimes being a cool kid isn't all that.