Queasiness is Gone! December 20, 2009

I noticed yesterday that I haven’t felt at all queasy in the past couple of days! Hooray!

I’m Ready! December 15, 2009

So I’m what – 12 or 13 weeks along now? (It’s actually 12 weeks 4 days according to my admittedly shaky estimation based on a guess about when I ovulated, and 13 weeks 2 days based on my last menstrual period.) That means I am getting very close to the second-trimester relief I am counting on!

So here I am, second trimester, ready and waiting!

I will say that this first trimester has been easier in one major way than during my previous pregnancy. I’m tired a lot of the time, but not sobbing on a regular basis from exhaustion.

But I’ve also been kind of queasy a lot of the time and I am just uninterested in a lot of foods. Also, a lot of foods don’t like me and they make me gassy and constipated. The temporary cure I’ve found is ginger ale, which makes me burp and that helps a bit. But I’m sort of hoping these digestive issues go away during the next trimester.

They will, won’t they?!

But mostly I’m just looking to regain some energy. I’m trying to be especially productive at work, but it’s hard when I always feel like I’m dragging. In the past week, I’ve actually felt more tired than I have been previously, so things seems to be going in the wrong direction. I’ve associated the new tiredness with an increase in my belly size, so I’m assuming that there’s some real growth going on in there, whether it’s of the baby itself or my uterus/placenta/whatever.

In the meantime, here I sit with my ginger ale. Waiting…

First Heartbeat December 14, 2009

Okay, enough suspense. We heard the heartbeat!

My husband and son came to the appointment, and I think my son was pretty confused about what was going on. When I was lying down and the doctor was rubbing the Doppler on my belly, he kept saying “Mommy sleeping. Mommy sleeping. …”

It was really a relief to hear the heartbeat and has suddenly made this pregnancy seem not only real, but normal. I’ve since told a couple more friends about it (over dinner that night) and when I told them, I didn’t feel like I was making up an elaborate lie or even that I was telling them “too early”. (I guess 12 weeks (or whatever) isn’t really too early to tell people, is it?)

I’ve also now broken out my maternity clothes, though this really has a lot less to do with being pregnant and more to do with the weather. I have so few warm winter clothes, but I do have some maternity sweaters from two years ago. I figured they would be huge on me, but I tried them on and it surprised me how well they fit. They are just a bit long, which is actually great because they keep me warmer that way, and I don’t think they are any longer than the current style of sweaters. I can’t believe I didn’t wear them all last year!

I didn’t even bother to try on my maternity jeans because I clearly don’t need them yet. But it’s reassuring to have them out now and ready to go, so that whenever I do need them I don’t have to dig into piles of clothes that are stored away.

As for weight gain this trimester, I’m at 7 pounds. And as I pointed out at the doctor, that’s with my boots on. She was very kind and suggested that my boots weigh “at least a pound”. I don’t remember how that compares with my last pregnancy, but I have a sense that it is less weight gain. I actually did think I’d gained less than 7 lbs in the past couple of months, because as I’ve said, I’m still wearing my regular jeans. But thinking about it now, my size smaller pants are not just tight, but actually uncomfortable to wear, so I guess I should have known I’d probably gained more than 3 or 4 pounds.

Not that I’m worrying about this! I’m just musing outloud.

Looking for Symptoms (Admist all the Symptoms) December 9, 2009

Last night I went to sleep when I was putting my 21-month old son to bed. Our current routine is to read a book together and then lie together on a bed in his room until he falls asleep and then I move him to the crib and, in theory, leave. But ever since I got pregnant, I’ve been falling asleep with him and staying there for hours. (I used to do that before I was pregnant, but would usually wake back up within half an hour and then get back up again.) It’s been really nice to be going to bed so early and I love being able to cuddle with him so long. I also love that, so far, it hasn’t seem to make him need to sleep with me all night long. Once I transfer him to the crib, he’s good there for the rest of the night. (Though sometimes he needs recuddling in the morning and that will allow him to go back to sleep for a couple more hours back in the crib.)

So last night I slept with him until about 1:30. I tried to move to my own bed, but was having some digestive issues that needed to clear themselves, and once that was done with, I decided I was hungry so I had a bowl of Heart Start cereal and some ginger ale. It was almost an hour later when I finally went to bed.

Lying in bed, my stomach felt pretty calm. Almost too calm, I thought. “Maybe I’m not really pregnant?!”, I started thinking to myself. I think it’s the combination of still comfortably wearing my regular jeans and not having even heard a heartbeat yet that made me question the possibility that maybe this pregnancy ended and I hadn’t noticed. So I started going through a mental list of things that would be strange if I weren’t still pregnant.

• Wouldn’t I have gotten my period or have had some signs of a miscarriage?
• Would I still be utterly uninterested in most foods other than pasta, egg drop soup, cereal, sushi, ginger ale, and grapefruit juice? Except for the sushi, which I love, all of the other things are just things I like but probably wouldn’t eat all day long for three months straight.
• Would I have teared up at the end of The Royal Tenenbaums last night? Who knows? Maybe?! I have no idea whether it was legitimately a tear-jerker or not.
• Would I be wanting to go to bed at 10 and struggling to get up at 7? Maybe, I like lots of sleep even though I didn’t used to get it.
• And wait, didn’t my small bras start feeling too tight?
• And didn’t I already set aside one pair of a smaller size pants that I can no longer squish myself into? Maybe I shouldn’t have been wearing them before, but they are just painful now. So what if I’m still wearing my larger pants with a belt – they have lots of room in them so it makes sense that I could still be wearing them.

So it’s not a lock tight case, but I think it’s suggestive that I’m still pregnant. It’s particularly the food issues that convince me, though the lack of a period or a miscarriage strikes me as reasonably suggestive too.

But instead of lying there in bed last night thinking about all of this, I really should have just convinced myself to fall asleep and wait less than 24 hours because I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon at 4 pm. And given that I’m 11 or 12 weeks along, I should probably expect my doctor to check for a heartbeat, right?!

A month gone by (and with it, practically the whole first trimester) December 6, 2009

What?! It’s December already? And I’m 11 or 12 weeks pregnant at this point – craziness!

I have yet to even hear a heartbeat yet, which I’m sure is my own fault for not having gone back to the doctor since the last time. I’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had time to make a phone call, much less actually go to an appointment. But I have finally managed to schedule my appointment at the hospital for the consultation for VBAC counseling and AMA counseling (because I’ve crossed over the 35 year old threshold!). It took forever to find an appropriate time to call discretely from work and manage to catch the intake nurse, and then I still had to call back to get an actual appointment. So January 4th is when I’ll go. And I’ll get an ultrasound too.

In the meantime, I’ve almost been questioning if I’m really pregnant. It’s not because I’ve been symptomless – certainly not – but just because I haven’t had any official medical confirmation that I’m pregnant ever since my first visit, the same morning that I took my own pregnancy test at home and already knew that I was pregnant. So I’m definitely looking forward to this ultrasound and consultation next month.

I guess another reason I keep wondering if I’m pregnant is because I’m still wearing all of my regular clothes. Last time I was busting out of my pants at 8-9 weeks, and I thought second pregnancies were supposed to show even earlier. Then again, last time I was so incredibly hungry all the time and I craved red meat and orange juice – and so I had lots and lots of both. This time I am queasy (maybe not fully nauseous, but it’s still enough to be annoying and have me on the couch moaning every couple of days) and, if anything, less hungry than usual. And I’m definitely not craving red meat.

What I have been craving is relatively plain things: pasta with tomato sauce, egg drop soup, hard boiled eggs, ginger ale, and sushi. About the ginger ale – I think the carbonation in it allows me to burp and that is such a relief. About the sushi. Hm. I should say that I love sushi so much that it’s practically a “fact” about me and everyone knows it. But with my first pregnancy, I was very cautious about everything and only had one piece of sushi the whole time. (This was at a very good sushi restaurant in Brazil, and it was part of a larger plate of sushi that my husband was eating while I was having udon noodle soup.) I read up all on the risks of everything, and although sushi was admittedly something I considered borderline, I didn’t want to chance anything going wrong that would be my fault!

Once when I was complaining about missing sushi, someone told me that by the second or third child I wouldn’t be so strict and I would be doing crack. Well, I assume she was exaggerating, but it’s true that I have lifted the sushi ban this time around. From what I’ve read (and I can dig up sources if anyone is interested), the main problem with sushi is that there is a possibility of it harboring listeria if it hasn’t been stored properly, but that the risk of listeria is greater in foods like deli meats and even lox. I am not really sure what the difference is, but I’m guessing it has something to do with sushi being stored at colder temperatures or that maybe fish is a worse host for listeria (though that doesn’t explain why lox is of greater concern). Actually now that I think about it, I think it would be worth me taking the time to cull my sources and post a coherent argument. I will save that for a later post though!

I have more to say, but it’s time for bed and although I’m not flat out exhausted this pregnancy, I’m still pretty tired! So I’ll save the remaining stories for next time.