Baby Bumps: From Party Girl to Proud Mama, and all the Messy Milestones Along the Way

by Polizzi, Nicole

  During the first trimester, I ate for five. The wild hunger dipped around month four. But did I scale back? No way! Food was my comfort when I felt otherwise miserable. I had to eat more for the baby’s sake. My pregnancy apps said you only needed to increase your intake by 300 calories per day—the equivalent of a banana and some milk. I tried to stick to that and not give in to the-round-the-clock ice cream cravings. Three hundred calories got eaten up pretty fast. By the third trimester, my stomach was so squished by my growing uterus, I could only eat small amounts at a time. I still managed to down a lot of brownies. My number one food craving was for watermelon. I ate tons of it. Maybe that explained my gas pains.

  I couldn’t exercise. I could barely muster the energy to go up a flight of stairs. If a woman can work out her whole pregnancy, props to her. My ass stayed on the couch.

  In the early months, I didn’t look pregnant. I looked bloated like I went to Burger King for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. Before long, my body started doing alien, abnormal things. It wasn’t recognizable to me. I got a line down my belly, and not from a bronzer accident. My nipples got as big as jellyfish, and turned dark. My boobs sagged like saddlebags. My face got round and puffy. I had zits all over my face and chest. Cellulite was a new thing for me. If I squeezed my leg, I could see cottage cheese. I hate cottage cheese.

  When I started to show about month five, I was ecstatic to look pregnant. Finally, I had a bump! But by month six, I couldn’t see my vagina anymore. That was when shit got real. Some parts got fat, and some just retained water like a ShamWow. For the first time in my life, I had cankles. My fingers were like Vienna sausages. I had always loved my slim legs and hands. My rings got so tight, I took most of them off. Not my engagement ring, though. That sucker is staying on, even if it cuts my finger off.

  My body grew by the hour. I started missing the days when I just looked like a fat ass. I thought I couldn’t possibly get any wider. And then I did, again and again. My belly button turned inside out. By the end of my pregnancy, I was as big around as I am tall. At a certain point, I stopped looking in the mirror naked. The fat and bloat weren’t here to stay. I knew that. But I still didn’t like to see it. I threw on my blouses and oversize t-shirts in bright colors, flat ironed my hair, put on makeup, and hoped I looked okay.

  I made the rookie mistake of trying to hide all of my emotions about this issue during the filming of Snooki & JWOWW and Jersey Shore. Once or twice, I slipped and complained, because there was only so much I could take. I tried to button my lips about feeling fat. I didn’t want to seem like a needy pregnant bitch, or to be obsessed about my weight. But after a time, I realized, Hello! I AM a pregnant, needy bitch. People could plainly see that I was a blimp. Not complaining about the most obvious, horrible symptom of the experience—transforming into a whale before everyone’s eyes—would have been weird and wrong. It was a fact of creating life. I couldn’t hide my emotions any more than my belly.

  So much is made in the media about celebrity pregnancy weight gain. Some women have been mocked cruelly for it. Tabloid monitoring of how fast women lose the baby weight is practically a blood sport. If you weren’t on the cover of In Touch in a bikini within two months of giving birth to talk about your salsa workout, you were a fat, lazy loser. Just look at how Jessica Simpson and Kim Kardashian were tracked and criticized in the media. Awful! Worrying about weight gain made the nine months even harder. The one bright spot of pregnancy was eating whatever you wanted. Being afraid or depressed about getting fat—and criticized for it—destroyed even that joy.

  Like whales traveling in a pod, I really liked hanging with other pregnant ladies. We understood each other. We were our own species. When I returned to the skinny, partying, drinking chicks in bandage dresses, I felt pissed off. Jealousy of other women only hit hard when Jionni noticed them.

  Warning: Do not watch movies with your man that feature young, hot, , non-pregnant girls who show their boobs and ass. One movie night we decided to watch Piranha. Worst decision ever. It turned out to be 90 minutes of skinny girls in bikinis on Spring Break, drinking, making out, and getting eaten by killer fish. I stared at Jionni, checking for the faintest sign he was into them. “Stop looking at me. I’m just watching the movie!” he said with his tongue practically hanging out. The last thing I need was to see my man mesmerized by hot bitches while I was sitting right next to him, enormous on the sofa. I thought, Kill me now. Or, better, Kill him. So my pregnant psycho ass started screaming, “GO BE WITH THEM THEN!” That escalated into a huge fight. He slept on the couch while I cried myself to sleep. I thought I’d never look skinny and sexy again. Welp, WRONGO. I got my body back. Eat that, Piranha bitches.

  It still isn’t safe to go back into the water. After that night, we avoided that particular aggravation and watched The Three Stooges and other movies starring fat old men.

  It wasn’t until late in the pregnancy that I fully accepted what was happening. I just let it sink in that there was no other choice. The last thing a pregnant woman needs to stress about is weight. She should just eat healthy and try to remain calm and comfortable. She has every right to enjoy eating what she loves and taking a mental break from the battle to be slim. It got a lot better for me when I let all that go. It was like flicking a switch and deciding not to freak out. I was lending my body to my baby for several months. When it was over, I’d lose the weight. I’d done it before, and I would do it again. Until then, I’d enjoy the brownies. If Jionni offered to make me a grilled cheese sandwich and slice up a watermelon for me, I let him. In fact, the only time I didn’t cry or yell at him was when he brought me food.

  In all, I gained 44 pounds. Not a lot for a regular size woman, but I was 105 pounds to start. I’d put on about 40 percent of my overall body weight. Proportionally, if I’d weighed 150 to start and gained 40 percent, I would have been 210 at the end. In those last weeks, I was so beyond giving a shit about my weight. I was gaining a child. Who cared about pounds?

  I was so at ease with my shape, Jionni and I made a plaster cast of my belly and boobs. He wet the plaster strips and smoothed them over my body. I had to wait forever for it to dry. And then, it was a memento of just how ginormous I was. I tried it on the other day, five months postpartum. It was like a whole other person was on top of me. We’re going to save it and break it out of the attic one day when Lorenzo is sixteen. I can see it now. He’ll invite his girlfriend over, and I’ll say, “Wanna see the cast of my boobs when I was pregnant with Lorenzo?”

  He’ll be so embarrassed! Hehe.

  Chapter 12

  Super Mommy

  Every pregnant lady is a superhero for what she goes through. She’s brave and courageous, with incredible strength to haul her belly around. With great pregnancy comes great responsibility—and great powers. I definitely gained some Super Mommy skills. (Transforming into a Hindenburg was not one of them. That was not super.)

  For the most part, having preggers powers was pretty cool. The only one I was not into was . . .

  Super Smell. It was like I was bitten by a radioactive basset hound. I could sniff out a French fry within ten miles, and zero in on it like a blip on a radar screen. French fry, dead ahead! I knew if Jionni sneaked upstairs for a shot, which he did sometimes for stress relief, as soon as he uncapped the bottle. The smell of vodka on him was so strong, it was like he took a bath in it. If I was within two hundred feet of a garbage can, I could smell it and detected what was inside—coffee grinds, check, eggshells, check, used condoms, ECCCH! And then I could visualize myself gagging into it. Even normal, nice scents like the ocean or suntan lotion that I’d otherwise enjoy became overpowering. The whole world reeked! I have no idea how dogs can get through their lives like this. A pregnant dog? How does she survive? Super smell for me was just disgusting. I warded off the grossness by dabbing Snooki perfume under my nostrils throughout the day.

  Okay, on to the super powers I loved.

  Super Balance. I’m going to reveal
my secret power source during my pregnancy: my Jeffrey Campbells. I got a lot of shit for wearing heels. Critics said that the so-called ankle-breakers were dangerous because I might fall down and hurt the baby. But unless I fell down a flight of stairs and ruptured the placenta, my tumbling the five feet from standing upright in heels to landing on my fat ass was not going to hurt the baby. The uterus muscles and amniotic fluid were like a baby bomb shelter, keeping him nice and safe in there. Plus, I’ve been living in heels since I was a teenager. I was steadier in six-inch heels than in flats. I guess I was living down a reputation for falling down drunk. But I wasn’t drunk when pregnant. I was one thousand percent sober. And when I was sober, I was as stable as Mount Everest.

  In fact, when my belly got big, my balance was even better. It was like Lorenzo was my inner stabilizer. A couple of times, I did teeter. It seemed like Lorenzo was there to catch me and keep me from falling. The one and only time I stumbled and had to take a knee during my entire nine months of pregnancy? I was wearing platform flats!

  Super Dreams. Apparently, most preggers ladies have vivid dreams. It’s due to hormones (bitches!) and having to wake up every five minutes to run to the bathroom holding your crotch. If you wake up in the middle of a dream, you remember the colors and details more clearly. When I was two months along and had only just found out, I dreamed I was nine months pregnant and hadn’t gained any weight. Texting Dr. Freud! Some dreams are wish fulfillment. Jionni and I were at the W Hotel in New York. My mom was there, too. She whipped out a huge syringe and injected me to induce labor. Instantly, I got terrible contractions. The pain woke me up. In real life, I wasn’t having false labor or anything scary. It was gas. Thanks, ass.

  My dreams got scarier as the pregnancy progressed. In one of my nightmares, I was on my phone in the jungle. Lions and tigers were sitting all around me. I adore all animals, especially felines. But these weren’t cuddly, fluffy house cats. They were vicious monsters with teeth dripping blood and spit. They were also on their phones, tweeting with their claws that they were going to eat me. I read that dreaming of animals is common during the second trimester. But usually, they are bunnies and puppies, cute fur balls that represented the helpless innocence of a little baby. How to interpret my dream about being fresh meat for savage beasts?

  “The jungle could be your crazy life in public,” Jionni said. “The lions and tigers are the pressures and fears that it might eat you alive.”

  “Or maybe I just fell asleep watching Animal Planet,” I said.

  The classic third-trimester dream is about actually giving birth. It is the subconscious way of getting ready for what is to come. Your subconscious’ shows you the trailer of your birth movie. My doctor told me that scary birth dreams are a way of mentally preparing for anything. Your sleeping mind is addressing all those fears that you might not be able to talk or think about when you are awake.

  By that theory, I was really well prepared to give birth! I had a dream that I squeezed out a baby, but it wasn’t Lorenzo. It was a Chucky doll. He came out of my vagina covered in blood. His doll head turned 360 degrees on a wooden neck, and he looked at me like he wanted to kill me. The nurses put him on my chest. He smiled with razor sharp teeth. I threw him off the bed, screaming in total panic. Then the Chucky newborn did a somersault in mid-air, landed on his feet, ran toward the bed, jumped back on my chest and went for my jugular. He might’ve scooped up the placenta along the way and gobbled that down, too. So creepy.

  One more third-trimester dream: I was driving down the Garden State Parkway in my tricked out Range Rover (with the pinkwashed wheels and grill). I thought of it as my New Mommy Car, because it was as big and safe as a tank. I was doing eighty, enjoying the drive. Then the trunk popped open, and all the stuff in the back went flying out on the highway, including a hundred pairs of leopard print shoes, which got run over by the oncoming traffic.

  “You’re in the New Mommy Car, and all your old stuff gets tossed out the door,” said Jionni about that one. “Pretty obvious, Nicole.”

  “A reminder to always double check the trunk?”

  Just kidding! I knew what he meant. Leopard shoes represented the old me, the party girl. The car was my new life as a proud mama. There just wasn’t room in my new life for all the old baggage. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to leave that stuff behind on the Garden State Parkway of Life. Well, not everything, I hoped. Moms can still rock leopard heels! I kept mine, and after a few weeks postpartum when I wasn’t so swollen anymore, they fit my feet, and my new life, just fine.

  Super Psychic Ability. I only got a few glimmers of mind-reading during my pregnancy. Each time, it was, honest to shit, the most amazing experience of the entire nine months. I read Lorenzo’s mind. He talked to me with his brain waves. He told me what music he wanted to listen to, and what he wanted me to eat. He asked for watermelon a lot, so the kid had a real sweet tooth. I felt like we had silent conversations about how we couldn’t wait to meet each other.

  When he was born, and we looked each other in the eye, it was like I already knew him. Call me crazy, but it seemed like he recognized me, too.

  Chapter 13

  Does the Crib Come in Leopard Print?

  When the final season of Jersey Shore wrapped, I returned to our apartment in Jionni’s parents’ basement. I was nearly eight months pregnant. Filming had been emotionally bumpy, especially at the end. We were all sad to say goodbye. It was truly the end of an era for MTV, and also for me personally. For one thing, I was no longer a professional fuck up. In just over a month, I would be a responsible mom.

  I could finally start preparing for Lorenzo’s arrival. I thought I could do it full time, but something came up. Snooki & JWOWW Season One aired while we were filming Jersey Shore. It was a hit. The producers decided to start shooting Season Two right away. One of the first days of shooting was at my baby shower. Most of the stuff I registered for came in, along with a ton of other gifts. (Thanks so much, everyone!) My fave was a motorcycle rocking horse and Gucci baby booties. The boxes and baby supplies were crammed into a spare bedroom at the house while we fixed up the basement.

  It was an open space that we divided into different “rooms.” In one corner, we put our bed. In the opposite corner, we intended to put Lorenzo’s crib. It was currently occupied by a pool table. Another corner would be the living room with a couch and TV. The last was already a kitchenette with a table and chairs. Next to the kitchen was a bar. Now that I wasn’t drinking, I was going to live ten feet from an open bar. Kewl. We’d have to move a lot of furniture down there, and clear out decades’ worth of stored junk that had to be hauled up the stairs.

  Not by me, duh. I was huge and pregnant.

  Jionni and I went shopping for a crib at Bellini in Short Hills. The crib was super important. It would be where my baby would sleep. Sleep was a top three favorite activity of mine, and my bed was my little island. I took my bedding—duvet, pillows, and sheets—with me wherever I went. My son would probably (hopefully) be a good sleeper, too. To make sure of it, I wanted to get him the Cadillac of cribs.

  We chose the Debby design with a mahogany finish, plus the Domani changing table, dresser, and armoire, also in mahogany. They were dark and masculine, and would match the hardwood floors. The design was classy. For a touch of gaudiness, I chose bling-bling rhinestone drawer pulls. We also ordered a cream-colored shag rug so Lorenzo would have a soft landing when he learned to crawl.

  I had a bit of a snit at the store when the saleswoman said the name of one of the crib designs, “Jessica,” and Jionni repeated it in a sexy voice. Like he had the hots for some girl named Jessica. He thought he was being funny. So not. It really pissed me off. Fortunately (for him), we were in a public place.

  The pool table had to go to make room for the crib. Jionni dismantled it with a friend. I focused on setting up my bathroom and our “bedroom.” Before I could tackle all the baby stuff, I had to get our parts of the apartment livable first. My urge to make a nic
e place for Lorenzo’s arrival wasn’t typical “nesting.” We didn’t live in a tree. We lived underground. We were “lairing,” making a cozy, safe cave for our little family.

  If Jionni approved, I would have done up Lorenzo’s space in leopard print, ceiling to carpet. But he thought that was too girlie for a boy. Jionni loves sports. He really wanted Lorenzo to be an athletic kid like his daddy, so we did a very classic sports theme with balls on the walls (literally), along with huge stuffed animals for a jungle feel. I got my animal print fix with a custom-designed leopard print baby blanket and crib bumper.

  I started to feel physically horrible around this time (graphic details in the next chapter). The heartburn and gas were intense. I could barely stand up, let alone decorate. Until the crib and furniture arrived, there wasn’t much else to do. Cameras were in position all over the house, filming me sitting around, moping, twiddling my thumbs, feeling like crap.

  If only I could’ve done more. Getting everything in order is how soon-to-be moms distract themselves toward the end. During my downtime without stuff to do, I started thinking about the fact that soon, I was going to push a bowling ball out of my vagina. At the last sonogram, we learned Lorenzo was already six pounds. I still had four weeks to go.

  I was torn between fear of giving birth and a desperate longing to meet my baby. The sonogram images blew my mind. I could see myself in his face. Not only was Lorenzo my first child, but he was also my first blood relative. I mean, the first blood relative I would actually know. I was adopted in Chile when I was six months old. My parents Andy and Helen have been awesome parents, just beyond loving and caring. They are so great, I’ve never really cared what happened back in Chile, who my bio parents are, and why they gave me up. I have asked Mom if she knows anything about them, but she has always changed the subject. I don’t push. It obviously upsets her. I know some adopted kids feel a hole in their soul that only info about their birth parents can fill. Not me. The first six months of my life might be an interesting story. I just don’t need or want to know it.