Sitting on the laboratory set of CBS' "CSI: Miami," currently airing its 9th season on Sundays, Emily Procter, 42, who plays CSI Calleigh Duquesne, wonders if the experience of
having her first baby, due in mid-December, will be all that unfamiliar.
"It's funny," she tells Zap2it, munching on cake from the show's 200th-episode party earlier in the day, "I'll be curious to see how different it is from Season One of an hour-long drama, because you don't sleep in Season One.
"I remember walking around in a stupor and thinking, 'This is what it must be like to be a new parent.' Because you're sleeping three, four hours a night. You're on your feet; you have to be on. You're getting up when it's dark and coming home when it's dark.
"I'll be curious to see how different it is. Everybody's like, 'Are you ready to get up at five o'clock in the morning?' I'm like, 'I get up at five o'clock in the morning now. Yeah, I'm ready.'"
Now that her pregnancy is in its final trimester, Procter has been dealing with some practical problems.
"It's the wildest thing," she says, looking down at her belly. "You really think this can't stretch any more, and then it does. Then it does. It's like being a bug on its back. You get into a position where you think, 'I can't get up. I really can't get up.'
"Your middle doesn't work. It used to be people could pull me from the side, now they've got
to come from the front, because even off to the side, all I do is topple over."
While Procter is pregnant, Duquesne is not, and the actress likes it that way.
"We had talked about it," she says, " and I was really advocating for it being written in. Now, I have to say, it was the absolute right decision, and I love it. I don't work nearly the hours that I did. I sit down a lot."
Because she's not in the field processing evidence, Procter does a lot of scenes in which she's talking to witnesses or suspects, and that has challenges of its own.
"I'm having that problem with my memory," she says, "that sometimes pregnancy brings on. I'm looking at people, and I'm thinking, 'God, I hope they say something that triggers what I'm supposed to ask them next.'
"I think I take a lot of long, extra pauses, where I stare meaningfully at people and go, 'Hmmm.' I'm really seething this season. It's about the seethe and trying to remember what I'm supposed
to say."
Asked whether she ever feels left out of the action, Procter says, "I think initially my ego was bruised a little bit, because I'm like, 'I'm not out there with everyone.' I got over it. My third day of sleep when people were just stumbling around, I'm like, 'I don't have to be here.'"
Apparently, Procter had an early alert for pregnancy from an unusual source.
"I'd had a dream that I was pregnant," Procter says, "and I got up in the middle of the night and took a pregnancy test. It was a bizarre thing. A nurse was in my dream, and she said, 'You're pregnant.' I said, 'Oh, no, I'm not pregnant.' She said, 'Yes, you are.' I said, 'How come nobody's told me?' She said, 'It's too soon.'
"I woke up, and I thought, 'That's a very strange dream.' I happened to have a pregnancy test, and I went and took it, and it was positive. And I thought, 'I'm so glad I took that, because we work with smoke ...'
"It had been a couple of weeks, but I thought, 'I don't know what's up, but something's up. I'm not going to worry about it, because I know I'm not pregnant.' And, I was."
Fortunately for Procter, she's not having to spend a lot of her time shopping for the baby.
"My mom," she says, "for all my teasing her about saving everything, she saved all my clothes, so I have a ton of clothes. And I have a couple of friends who sent me giant boxes of hand-me-downs."
SheKnows: What parts of your childhood, or how you were raised, do you seek to replicate as a mother yourself?