First Trimester Recap (v. 2)
At this point, I’m well over halfway through this pregnancy, but with my first I really enjoyed keeping some notes from each trimester to look back on. It’s been especially fun and interesting this time because my experience has been so different from what I was familiar with from before. Here are a few thoughts on the first three months with this little boy:
Cravings:
So much ginger ale (I was pretty nauseated right off the bat).
Shirley temples with fancy cherries—not the bright red ones you get for sundaes.
Veggie sandwiches, sometimes with every veggie in the fridge and sometimes just cucumber. I’d use hummus instead of mayo, slice the veggies super thin, and hit it with some lemon juice and top with spinach. So good.
Hot white rice with cold raw veggies like cucumber, carrot, and cabbage; drizzled with yum yum sauce and some sriracha.
Ramen noodles with chicken broth
Panera cinnamon crunch bagels with so much cream cheese you have to eat it over the sink
Any savory bagel, preferably everything, with the same obscene amount of cream cheese
Cravings Continued, or Weird Things I Wanted for Breakfast:
Caesar salad
Taco Bell
Fried rice
Egg rolls (Rob stopped at a Panda Express in the middle of Tennessee on our road trip at like 11 AM because I absolutely had to have one)
Aversions:
Meat (especially chicken)
Eggs (unless it came on a biscuit)
Coffee around week 7, which is always sad. I usually switch to decaf for the first trimester but I end up not wanting coffee at all
Symptoms:
I was very crampy the first few weeks. I remember this slightly from my first pregnancy but it can really throw you for a loop, especially after you’ve experienced a miscarriage.
Felt like I was super bloated and started showing right away (a lot of this is because of my ab separation, which I never really managed to fix from my first pregnancy).
Pretty extreme fatigue—I took a nap every day when Sophie went down from 1:00-3:00 PM and sometimes it went by so fast I felt like I had only just blinked. Rob would take some Fridays off and I would often fall asleep on the playroom couch at 9:30 AM.
My boobs didn’t blow up right away like they did the first time, but around 6-7 weeks they definitely started hurting.
Around week 7 I started feeling nauseated all day long, and by week 9 I was throwing up every morning (I threw up for the first time at our Airbnb in Oklahoma City, which is a weird detail I probably won’t ever forget). This was by far the biggest difference for me—my first pregnancy definitely came with some nausea but I very rarely actually threw up, and it was never so severe that I had to sit still with my eyes closed to try to combat it.
Exercise:
I was going to CrossFit (we had class outdoors and spaced out so I felt comfortable with it as far as COVID safety goes) most mornings until we moved, which was around week 6. I definitely took it easy and used a training bar and was more focused on just moving my body regularly than crushing the workouts or lifting heavy.
During our two week road trip across the country, I walked as much as I could with Ender.
We ordered a Peleton which arrived in November and I was excited to use it but I was still so sick that I never rode it consistently until much later.
Most mornings in our new house I would walk Ender a few miles, but after a while even that felt like too much movement and it would make me feel so queasy. I streamed a barre class around week 8 and had to stop in the middle to puke, so I decided to take a break from exercise for a while.
Feelings/Other Stuff:
I got pregnant pretty easily after a miscarriage, which came with all kinds of emotions. It really didn’t feel real, and less than a week before we left California my doctor told me I could get blood work done twice to see if my pregnancy hormone levels were rising steadily, or I could wait a month and take another pregnancy test to confirm. I decided to skip the blood work because I thought it would make me too anxious, but I ended up taking a pregnancy test every week until we got to Charlotte. Seeing those two lines every weekend helped me accept that this was really happening, and that it was okay to be excited. (Even now at 23 weeks though, I still find myself holding my breath if I feel like he hasn’t kicked me enough lately. I don’t think we ever stop worrying, even after they are born.)
Planning a cross-country move with a toddler and a dog (who went to a 6 week training before we left) during a pandemic while pregnant felt like a lot.
When I was pregnant with Sophie, my skin was very inflamed around my chin and nose and I had a lot of acne; but this time my skin has stayed very normal. This was actually one of the things that made me wonder if we were having a boy this time. (Other than the relentless nausea, which I really only experienced for the first time with this pregnancy.)
Rob’s company gave parents a very generous amount of COVID-related family leave and having him off work most Fridays was absolutely a life saver. I was nervous to be pregnant with a toddler at home and I really did need help throughout the day, especially when I wasn’t feeling well. Even without the days off, just having him working from home really made a big difference. I’m so glad that’s our new normal.
So that’s everything on the first trimester! I’ll be back in a few months with another post after the second. I always love hearing about people’s symptoms and cravings and general experiences, so I hope you enjoy it too.
I am also much more aware of how it feels to have lost a pregnancy than I was after my first, so sharing about this new healthy one after a miscarriage sometimes feels a little uncomfortable for me. If you are going through that right now, I hope you know that it’s okay to ignore the things that make you feel worse and just take care of yourself however you need to. I’m sending you all so much love, even and especially if this post is one that you need to skip.