Completely Unexciting Pregnancy Update

Tags

babies, first trimester, morning sickness, pregnancy

This is the worst part of pregnancy.

Worse than the third trimester, sweating, swollen, 8 pound bag of snakes under your ribs part of pregnancy.

This.

It is the worst.

Reasons:

1. Boring.

You don’t look pregnant, and you aren’t supposed to yammer about it to everyone you meet, but you walk around thinking “ARGHSDFHDUSI I’M PREGNANT.”

Meanwhile, your baby isn’t doing cute and interesting things like developing ears, sucking its thumb and peeing inside you.

Instead, it’s a tiny little non-cute seamonkey the size of a blueberry who doesn’t even have EYES yet. An EYELESS, non-cute seamonkey that is lucky if it even has a heartbeat yet.

And every time a pregnancy book compares my baby to a fruit I get an uncomfortable mental image of popping it in my mouth.

Anyway, it’s certainly far too early to get excited and start buying tiny pieces of clothing. It doesn’t even feel real yet.

2. Morning sickness.

I thought I might escape it this time, because for the first couple weeks I felt fine and I was like “HA, THEY WERE RIGHT, EVERY PREGNANCY IS DIFFERENT!” but now it’s starting, and that means the weight gain has started.

That’s right. Weight gain. Because when I have morning sickness, the only thing that staves it off is snacking on easy-to-digest, salty, starchy things like… pretzels. Which means I end up eating half a bag of pretzels and subsequently gain weight. I was totally NOT gaining weight until the nausea started and now I’ve already gained 2 pounds.

And then there’s the world of regret that I live in when I decide, to, say, eat fish and chips for lunch and then spend the next 12 hours feeling like I have the flu, having that restless sleep where you keep dozing off then waking up nauseous.

And then, you can’t call in sick because there’s no point because this “flu” is going to last for MONTHS AND MONTHS.

3. Gratitude.

And as boring and nauseating as the whole thing is, you feel like a jerk if you complain, because you’re in the could-end-in-a-miscarriage-any-second part of pregnancy, the part of pregnancy that is so iffy that people don’t even like to tell other people that they are pregnant in case they have to have the awkward “yeah, I’m not, any more, actually…” conversation with people.

I had a night of severe cramping and it scared the crap out of me. I kept checking my underwear for spotting. I wrapped a magic bag around my middle and hoped for the best, and it passed, and the morning sickness arrived.

And I was grateful. To be nauseous.

Seriously, the worst part of pregnancy.

Motherhood is clearly just AWESOME

Tags

morning sickness, motherhood, pregnancy, worry

“I gotta tell you, Carol, you’re not selling me on this whole pregnancy thing,” my friend has told me several times recently.

For some reason, my stories about belly button rashes, nausea, inexplicable food preferences, painful feet and so on, don’t seem to be making her eager to repeat my experiences.

That feeling was probably reinforced this morning when I recounted in graphic detail my humiliating moment at the Skytrain station today, when I spewed a large puddle of vomitus (it sounds less gross when I add an “us” to the “vomit”, don’tcha think?) on the pavement, which everyone had to step around while studiously pretending it wasn’t there (wouldn’t want to embarrass the pregnant girl who splatters our walkways with vomit, would we?).

But for all that, I do actually like being pregnant. I like getting to know my son as he wriggles a little bit less subtly with each day that goes by (Corinne, I’m beginning to feel the snake-sensation you referred to). Some days I find it hard to believe there’s actually a person in there, and other days I feel a gush of affection for him that is hard to explain when my only proof of his existence is a wriggling bag of snakes in my abdomen.

I worry that I’m not doing well enough, though. Not eating well enough (like at lunch, when all I dared eat after the Skytrain Incident was New York Fries poutine, and only half of a small one at that), not playing him enough music, not singing to him enough, not looking at peaceful scenery enough. I don’t want to miss my own pregnancy, and sometimes I worry that my nightmare is coming true.

I really hope that my boss doesn’t extend my contract. As much as it will suck to be out of work three months before I am due, it would be nice to concentrate on resting, feeling peaceful (so the cortisol from my anxiety doesn’t turn him into a stress mess), and nesting (baseboards in the house would be nice, for example). But if he offers me more time, I’ll have to take it. Money is money.

On the other hand, I am strongly hopeful that I will never have the following conversation with my son, overheard on the bus home today:

Boy: “PLEASE can I have lego?”

Mother: “No, that’s why I bought you Lego VIDEO GAMES, so that I wouldn’t have to help you build stuff.”

(because apparently interacting with your son on a project that would teach him creativity and mechanical skills is an undesirable thing. See how much I’m learning?)

Boy: “You don’t have to help me.”

Mother: “Sit down.”

Boy: “YOU ARE BUYING ME LEGO.”

I could give you some vomit, too. Would you like that?

Tags

blood tests, first trimester, morning sickness

I went in this morning for bloodwork – you know, the usual – Hcg, rubella titre, HIV (so they know whether or not I can bleed on them in the hospital when I give birth)… and glucose.

Is it just me or is it cruel to make someone in the first trimester fast for 10 whole hours and then suck 33 mL of blood out of them?

That’s right. 33 mL. Now, I realize that this is just a drop in the bucket bloodwise, and that I would have much more taken out of me at, say, a blood donor clinic. But still, when you’re sitting there, feeling all gross and nauseous and low blood sugar, looking at seven massive vacutainers waiting to be filled, it’s daunting.

I felt gross for the rest of the day. It has become very clear to me that my “no morning sickness” luck goes entirely out the window if I go more than a few hours without eating. A snack at night, and breakfast in the morning, and I feel fine. But on weekends, when I sleep in, or days like today when I can’t eat because that’s how the vampires like it… I  do NOT feel good.

Uggh.