Before being pregnant myself, I thought of pregnant women as beautiful. As these benevolent looking beauties, swelling with mothering floweriness. Seriously.

But sexy and beautiful are not the same thing. You can be pretty without striking thoughts of wild romps in the hay into anyone's eyes. So felt I about pregnancy.

Plus, everyone envisions pregnancy as being about the 5-6 month mark. But you don't just one day look like you swallowed a basketball. There's an awkward stage or two to get there, where you don't look pregnant, you just look fat... or something.

And during that stage of awkwardness, I was shocked the first time I felt it. My stomach touched my husband's stomach during sex.

I thought I would not have to worry about weird feelings about sex until the time when it just doesn't work well to have sex in any position but spooning (also a myth.) Either that, or the thought had occurred to me that the baby might move during sex and completely take the wind out of my sails (that luckily never happened.)

There are, of course, body images to contend with when you're pregnant. Its a weird thing to have your body take on a brand new shape. Especially when you've gotten used to the shape its in for the past 10 or 15 years and most women, let's face it, aren't completely comfortable with that shape. And I had thought of all this. Heard about this. Read about this.

But the stomachs touching. Yuck.

Here's some thoughts I have on how to continue to enjoy sex if you feel like its not going so well. There's the obvious stuff: talk to your partner and share your feelings about your body. Buy clothes/makeup/shoes/purses something that makes you feel feminine and good about you. Thrift is no excuse, thrift stores exist to solve that one. Those are the obvious things.

Shit no one tells you, you might feel better if you've seen a preggo porno.

There I said it.

Not sure about you, but I have sexy images in my head that play at times during sex. I couldn't figure out how to sit in my preggo body and participate in any mental images of what was sexy. I needed an outside image to help me along. So I watched some pornos. If it works, don't question it. It gave me a mental construct of a sexy pregnant woman.

I'm not saying my husband and I took off on porno grade sexual escapades after this. But I was able to orgasm again. I have no science to back this, but it seems intuitively true to me that you should have lots of orgasms during pregnancy. Orgasms cause your uterus to contract and it seems likely that it helps keep your uterus healthy and strong during pregnancy so that in labor it will be able to contract easily the way it should. Again, I have no science behind this, but I'd call for an orgasm a day during pregnancy and say it sure can't hurt.