First of all, sorry to hear that you ended up cancelling the trip to Greece! You'd mentioned that planned trip in the weekly chat I think, and I was hoping that things would be good enough so that you could go.
As far as being annoyed at the comments/questions--is it annoying because it makes you feel like you should be feeling something that you're not or that you're missing out on something that other people are experiencing, or that THEY (the people who asked you) think that? Feel free to say if I'm way off base here.
As far as feeling the presence of the baby--I believe that this is possible, and that certainly the farther you get along in a pregnancy the better sense you get of your individual baby. Some of this is just a matter of habits--does the baby move a lot? Does it react a lot to stimuli? When does it tend to sleep/wake up? As a midwife, more than once a baby has gotten hiccups at some point in the first hours/day postpartum, and the mom has laughed and looked at the clock and said, "Yep, it's one o'clock! He always gets the hiccups at about this time every night!" So as the pregnancy goes on and the baby gets bigger and more apparent, just about everybody will have SOME sense of the baby! I think when this happens varies greatly from person to person.
I've poked a lot of pregnant bellies and sometimes prenatally or during birth I've gotten a really strong sense of the baby's spirit or personality or temperment, and sometimes, zippo! So I really think that some of this depends on the sensitivity of a person, but I think a lot of it really depends on the individual baby (hey, some people just have stronger personalities than others, why wouldn't that be true with a baby in-utero too?) Whether you believe in a soul or spirit AT ALL is a highly individual spiritual/religious/philosophical matter, and when the spirit/soul enters the body and the fetus becomes a "person" is also highly controversial and different religions teach radically different things about this--obviously G-Dubya's branch of Christianity teaches that at the moment of conception, it's a person. The American Sikh's believe that the soul enters the body 120 days after conception. Judaism teaches that the baby becomes a person 8 days after birth. Anyway, it's a highly individual and personal matter of belief, which, come to think of it, could also be why you are finding the question so annoying--maybe their assumption is at odds with your own beliefs?
Away from the philosophy and onto the personal--I'm going to be 18 weeks in a couple of days, and I am not having any great spiritual revelations about my baby! I have started feeling movement, and I can tell that (s)he apparently likes lying sideways behind and facing my bladder, and poking it with hands and feet from time to time! I am experiencing the baby as somewhat distinct and separate from myself at this point as it gets bigger and is making itself more obvious! The one spiritual thing I can say is that I have the idea that the baby is a girl, although I very well may be wrong, and the perfect girl name for this particular baby came to me out of thin air at 5 weeks, although I'd never even heard the name to my knowledge and it turns out it's a Hindu name! (DH is Indian.)
So there's my novel! :LOL If it makes you feel any better, I'm suspecting that I'm letting things bother me too much too and perhaps overreacting a bit, as I've been annoyed and enraged by a number of people this week, including my mother, DH, and one of my closest friends!
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