What goes up must come down...or not

Go to your local book store and you'll find a plethora of books that tell you all about being pregnant. What they don't tell you much about is what to expect AFTER the alien leaves your body. All those hormones that do crazy things to your body as they spike also do crazy things as they come back down.

People tell you that your hair gets thicker or grows faster when you're pregnant, but it actually just falls out less so it seems thicker and longer. What they don't tell you is that after you give birth all of that hair falls out. All at once. I'm pretty sure that by the end of the month I'll be bald at the rate my hair is falling out. 9 months of extra hair is a lot of hair as it turns out.

The out of whack hormones keep those crazy mood swings coming for awhile and your skin will probably go bonkers too. Other weirdness for the c-section crowd is the lack of feeling around the incision. My nurse said her's stayed numb for a year. It's very strange to itch and then not be able to feel it when you scratch.

While the hormones come down, the weight doesn't. 3 weeks after the kiddo was born, I had dropped 25 pounds. The general consensus seems to be that it took about 9 months to put the weight on and that it takes about 9 months to take it off. The first bit came off so fast (and no, I didn't have a 25 pound baby) that I was SURE that everyone must be wrong and that I'd be back down to pre-pregnancy weight in no time. Now almost 12 weeks in and I'm pretty sure I'm not all that far off the 3 week number. Everyone was not wrong. Damn.