Dear Pregnancy,
I want you to know that as much as I still love you, I’m not in love with you anymore. I feel like the honeymoon phase of the second trimester is over, and I’m ready to move on and try new things. Don’t worry pregnancy, it’s not you...it’s me.
Okay, that’s a lie. It’s totally you!
Who do you think you are anyway? In the second trimester of our relationship you used to give me a blissful glow and a cute manageable little bump that people would admire and compliment. And now? In the third trimester of our relationship you've turned my belly into something best admired behind glass at a freak show. To top it off, you give me a bouquet of hemorrhoids with a card that says “sorry I’ve been such a pain in the ass.”
Well guess what? You can stop being sorry, and you can give me my energy and sleep back! Those were just on loan! You can also stop laughing at me as I waddle away from you and take breathing breaks on the stairs. I’m huffing and puffing because I’m mad at you! It has nothing to do with the extra 23 pounds I’m carrying around.
Oh, and while we’re at it—I’ve always wanted cankles anyway. All the cool girls have them.
So suck it.
But you know what? This trimester hasn’t been a huge waste of my time. While you’ve been trying your best to make me miserable I’ve been busy doing other important things. Like learning a new language. Yeah, that’s right. I’m now preg-lingual. Look at all of the words I now know the meaning of (that I never would have known before):
-VBAC
And there are so many others, I just can’t think of them right now. Are you jealous? You should be.
So despite your best efforts to bring me down, and make me bitter—I’m still smiling! When people ask me how I’m doing, I say “great!” because it’s mostly true, most of the time.
Oh, and one other major important thing we’re forgetting here, Pregnancy...
“I’M CREATING HUMAN LIFE!”
With all of your annoying symptoms aside, I would still go through it all over again. So I guess this isn’t goodbye Pregnancy, it’s “see you later.” I’m sick of you right now, and I feel like you should probably see other people. But please come back in another couple of years, and we can try dating again for another ten months.
xoxo
Yours truly,
Jen Warman
I loved my second trimester. If I could high-five my second trimester, I would. We’d probably even have a secret hand-shake that ended with a fist pump. In fact, I wish I could take my second trimester on a date, that’s how much I loved my second trimester. Except we wouldn’t be able to have wine, and that would suck. But at least we could slow dance, and hold each other fondly—gazing into one another’s eyes...
*Insert happy-second-trimester-slow-dance dream sequence here*
I could finally tell everyone that I was pregnant and not just getting fat! I could now publicly justify the soft little ponch that was developing (though looking back—I realize I looked completely the same. At the time, I thought it was so obvious!!)
It was also an amazing feeling to tell all of my friends and family members the news. At first it felt like I was spilling the beans on a dirty little secret. You try to hide it for so long, that when you finally say it out loud, you feel like a 12-year-old who’s testing the swear-word boundaries by saying “shit” (in context) in front of a group of adults for the first time.
“I saw it Mom! The neighbour’s dog...(hesitate) shit on our front lawn.”
And amazingly, no one slaps you in the face or washes your mouth out with soap!
Not that anyone should do that for announcing a pregnancy but...you get the connection I’m trying to make here!
Anyway—in addition to sharing the good news, I also started to feel the fuzzy ginger-ale bubble-like movements of the baby for the first time around 16-17 weeks (which is pretty early). I was ecstatic! No more boob-poking to confirm my pregnancy, I could now rely on actually feeling the baby move. Amazing!
At around 18 weeks, there were tiny little “punches” that I could feel on the inside and the outside. I had been grabbing my husband’s hand his mid-conversation for the past week and placing it on my belly in hopes that he’d feel a punch. Finally, my hand-vulturing (new word) paid off and he got to feel the baby move too!
Baby moving and blissful glow aside, I should probably also share with you a few of the not-so-awesome parts of my second trimester (otherwise you’ll hate me and think I’m a freak of nature!) So here they are:
1) My pre-pregnancy jeans stopped fitting, and I started to feel like a cow on some mornings. My husband would “moo” at me in response to my favourite question “Do I look fat?” (mocking me of course, because he insisted I still looked fabulous. If he were being serious, I would have punched him in the face)
2) I had a few hormonal outrages—one that included throwing a container of half eaten yogurt aggressively into the sink, having it explode all over the kitchen wall.
3) I got a few hemorrhoids. Fun times. I haven’t even pushed the freaking baby out yet. *sigh*
4) And last but not least, nearing the end of my second trimester my hips started to ache (from shifting and opening up). Just call me Granny Jen as I clench my hips and moan, “I gots the bad hips!”
And...that was my second trimester—in a nutshell. What have your second trimester experiences been like? I look forward to hearing them!
Now stay tuned, because we’re almost up to-date as my next blog will take us into present day: The Third Trimester...
Alright Yummy Mummies, jump into your hot-tub-time-machines, and let me take you back to my first trimester...
The First Trimester:
To be completely honest (and other newly pregnant moms, please don’t hate me) I had a pretty great first trimester. I only vomited once, and I was actually proud of it. “Guess what honey? I just puked!” It felt like a rite of passage. I took a big red pen and checked “vomiting” off of my to-be-expected-during-the-first-trimester list. I’m joking, I didn’t have a list (not a physical one anyway) but it did feel good to finally understand what it felt like to vomit due to being pregnant, and not from having the stomach flu or being hung-over. It was a 100% authentic “I’m growing a human being” related puking incident. And damnit, I was proud!
Morning-sickness aside, I found the first trimester to be pretty surreal. For the most part, I hadn’t told anyone that I was pregnant yet. Except my husband. And my best-friend. And my parents. And my husband’s parents. And my other five closest girlfriends...
Okay, admittedly, it was hard to keep it a secret. But I had to, I just had to. What if something went wrong? What if I had to un-tell people about the baby? That would just be awful...
So every day, I woke up in a state of disbelief. “Am I still pregnant?” I’d poke my boobs really hard. Were they still sore? Did that still hurt? What about that? Or that? My husband would walk in on my boob-poking sessions and ask, “What are you doing?”
“I’m making sure I’m still pregnant.” Pff. Clearly!
Before having my first ultrasound, I found it very hard to believe that a little mini-me was being created. It blew my mind. I’d read about being seven weeks pregnant “The heart and brain are becoming more complicated, the eyelid folds are forming, the tip of the nose is present...” and I would just stare at my belly in awe. I would google images of what a baby looks like at 9, 10, and 11 weeks pregnant just so I could better imagine what was happening. I derived a lot of pleasure from the various food size comparisons you can find online “My baby is now the size of a raspberry!”
There was so much going on in my body, but I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t see it, I just had to believe in it. I guess that’s what it means to have faith... (Cue George Michael’s “Faith” chorus)
Though to be honest, it wasn’t until our first ultra-sound at nine weeks that I could breathe a sigh of relief. I saw our big headed alien baby on the monitor, and my eyes filled with tears. You could see the heart beating, and the outline of its spine. It was now the size of a green olive and I was already head-over-heels. And I don’t even like olives normally. But man-oh-man did I ever LOVE this one!
This love carried me through the first trimester, as I excitedly anticipated the next landmark stage of pregnancy: feeling the baby move!
** After my last post, I had many friends on Facebook share with me their "how I found out I was pregnant" stories. So I'll ask you ladies—how did you find your first trimester? Were you really sick? Did you even know you were pregnant? I'd love to hear what your experiences have been like!
xx
Jen
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