Sunday, October 22, 2006

Pregnant Curling - not as easy as it sounds

For some reason, blogger has been freezing me out for days and not letting me log in. Perhaps it knew I was dog tired and my brain didn't work and all the stuff I wrote this week was crap, and was therefore sparing all of you from my addle-brained meanderings. But they let me in today, so I'm posting what I wrote on Thursday 'cause it was actually not that bad.


Last night, I went curling. Yep, I went curling pregnant! And boy, was that hard! Curling is my favorite sport in the whole world. If I was a gazillionaire, I would spend my days practicing at the rink, put together a team and win the Scott Tournament of Hearts every year, then head off to the Olympics every four years and beat Dordy Nordby's team out of the gold every time. Of course, I'm not nearly good enough to do that NOW. This is just my dream. (And why I would have to spend every day at the rink practicing). For now, I will settle for a regular spot with someone's team in the local Wednesday night Ladies League.

But I've gotten a little off topic. I was going to Skip for a Ladies team this year, but then I got pregnant and the team kinda fell apart. So, my boss' fiance (who put the team together) found another team and they needed a spare for the night so I jumped at the chance. I figured, how much harder could pregnant curling be? A LOT harder, as it turns out. Sweeping was okay, mostly because I learned to do it in the stone ages and prefer to sweep old style. All I had to do was get a little lower and spread-eagle a little more to make room for the bump and it was no problem at all.

But throwing the rock -- that was a different story. I have this pre-shot routine that involves bending down really low in the hack and lining up the rock exactly where I want to throw it so I can use muscle memory to always be on the broom. But I can't bend anymore. Even a little bit. I had to stay sitting up straight in the hack and guess as to where the rock needed to go. Anything that had to go to either side of the house I did a pretty good job of hitting the broom -- but anything in the middle and I was hooped. I couldn't reach over my tummy! And in the middle of making one shot in the fifth end, just as I was coming out of the hack I got a charlie-horse in my calf and fell over. I have not fallen since I was learning to curl in grade 8! (Don't worry, I was only about 5 inches off the ground and I fell on my butt so baby was fine).

At the end the very nice people who I was curling with were humoring me and telling me how good I was, but I think secretly they are worried about me coming back again next week. Oh well. I had a ton of fun, and that's all that counts really. And I absolutely LOVE hanging out with the boss' fiance. If I had more time in my schedule and she had more time in hers, I think we would spend a lot more time together. That's one of the reasons I was so sad to see our Wednesday night team fall apart. How else do you make new friends when you're 32? Oh well, there's always next year . . .…

2 comments:

Cindy said...

Wow, curling when pregnant! I can't even do it normally. Glad to hear you had fun!

Anonymous said...

So now I want to see a pic of pregnant Denice curling!!!