I had so many blogs written before Christmas to do with getting back on track and resolutions, all ready to go, and then just before Christmas found out that my husband and I are expecting our first baby, and all those ideas went out of the window. So now that I'm (quite a bit) past the tricky first trimester I thought I would write a little bit about my experiences with those first 12-13 weeks.
I feel incredibly lucky to have not suffered terribly with 'morning sickness' - although anyone will tell you that the 'sickness' can occur any time of the day and is certainly not confined to the morning. And although I think I am one of the lucky ones (in that I only threw up once, at home, in the evening) I did have terrible nausea from about week 7 up to week 13-ish. It felt pretty much like a constant hangover. I was also very, very fatigued (as in falling asleep as soon as I'd eaten my evening meal). I could only stomach foods like pizza, bread, chips - not the healthiest of meals, but I only ate what I could stomach and even then could only handle small portions at a time. Vegetables were off the menu and still kind of are, and even though the only thing that made me feel better was eating, anything I did eat would go down OK and then would make me feel a bit 'delicate' for the next couple of hours, though I was very pleased to keep it all down, bar the one incident.
This all meant that I had to eat ginger oat biscuits while getting ready for work of a morning to halt the nausea, eat chips and gravy for lunch because I could smell it and the smell didn't make me feel sick, and try and force a smoothie down when I could just to get some vegetables in my system. Luckily I could still eat fruit and would often crave it so I managed to eat a good fruit salad a day for the vitamins. But carbs, they were my main friend and I now have a food full of freezer foods (fish fingers, chicken burgers, potato waffles) that were just about all I could eat and now no longer feel like - pregnancy probs.
But, as I said, I feel really, really lucky, and having heard about other people's experiences, so far, I've come off lightly. I'm not sure how much weight I've put on, I only get weighed when I go to the midwife, and although I couldn't fit in to my usual jeans (damn button just wouldn't fasten) at about week 12 I only started to get a proper bump at week 19-20. Comparing myself to other people just was making me nervous but lots of people I speak to say they didn't show until their 20-something week. I have a rounded, hard-ish feeling bump that starts from my mid torso so I know it's developing, it's just happened rather slowly, and can just look like a little food baby at times - it also looks bigger or smaller depending on the time of day, how I'm sitting/standing and how much I've eaten.
At about 13 weeks I started working out again, I'd done nothing from about week 6 when I found out, other than walking quite a lot so it's been nice to get back in to the gym although not doing anywhere near the amount I was - a 10 minute uphill treadmill walk, a 30 minute mat based workout routine with very light weights (focusing on legs, arms and back) and a good stretch is the new order of the day, and then I follow that with 20 lengths in the pool (taking it nice and easy). And, boy, do I sleep after that! It's amazing how much easier it is to feel out of breath and hot these days, so I make sure to drink plenty of water before and after any workout, even if it means extra trips to the bathroom.
I've managed to keep up with work, a few people have even said that if I hadn't told people they probably still wouldn't have guessed, because nothing has changed. My job is desk based so it's not strenuous but believe me I am tired at the end of the day - pregnancy hasn't affected the way I work or my capacity to work, it just takes a little more out of me mentally at the end of the day.
And in all honesty, that is about all I've experienced. I can't stress just how sick I felt for 6-7 weeks but I really do feel for anyone who has severe morning sickness, I can't even imagine how hard it must be to deal with. And I'm finding it funny how I, and I'm sure countless other women, wish their whole lives for flatter stomachs and at this time I'm wishing for my belly to grow! So for now I'll slather myself in stretch mark oil and try and get vegetables back in to my diet as much as possible!
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