My pregnancy experience was unbelievably awesome, fun, and totally the best. I really lucked out, and I have no clue to what I owe this amazing luck to, but I have a feeling I will be owing some major foot rubs or car detailing to someone to pay it back. I never got sick once. (Yes, hate me now. You can take some joy in the fact that everything I own is now covered in poop, spit up, and baby boogers and that I haven't slept more than three hours at a time in five and a half months. Admit it, you are jealous of my rockstar life style. I feel like I'm Mick Jagger, only the dark circles aren't drug induced my version of a trashed hotel room is what my home has become. But back to babies.) Im doing this in two parts. This part is about the leading up to baby. The next part will be baby and what has come after. Also it's taken me four months to finish this one post so be patient with me, and if you are like "enough with this baby junk" I already have a post in mind for a yummy baking experiment that I did yesterday that was a total success. So come back in two blog posts and you will have avoided all the baby mumbo jumbo. Okay, ready? Lets break it down! *Bad white girl beat boxing sounds go here*
Food: I did experience many food aversions in the first trimester, such as I would normally be happy to eat salad every day for dinner, but all of a sudden, I wanted no part of it. It didn't make me nauseous, I just wanted heavy things that stick to your gut, like baked potatoes with cheese, anything mexican, thai food and anything cooked and warm (which in the summertime for me is unheard of. I normally can't handle anything warm when the average temp is 80 out.) I ate my weight in oatmeal, yogurt, string cheese, and had a ton of luna bars and decaf irish breakfast tea. And since I was depriving myself of my nightly glass of wine or beer, like any good preggo I substituted this with dessert! I had more milkshakes in those 9 months than in my entire 31 years. (Let me remind you that I was vegan for 18 of these years, so this is not as amazing as it sounds, but I probably had 6 milkshakes over my pregnancy which is a lot for me.) I also bought a seltzer water maker (totally worth it) and drank a TON of water
Resources: As with most women who gets pregnant, I immediately dove head first into anything pregnancy related; books blogs, magazines, etc. And then I started to pick and choose the info I could take in. (What to eat when you're expecting? Or lord, don't make me keep a food journal.) The things I enjoyed were two awesome blogs about women who had young kids: Modg Blog ( http://www.modgblog.com/ ) and The Sassy Curmudgeon (http://volcanicensemble.blogspot.com/ ). I kind of read "what to expect", but I had many moms tell me it was full of horror stories so to only take it with a grain of salt. I really enjoyed "Your Pregnancy Week by Week"and two iphone apps, Baby Bump and the What To Expect pregnancy tracker. I also was given a free subscription to American Baby magazine which (despite the silly title) I loved.
Clothing: Oh god bless maternity pants and the fact that leggings are back in style! I only ever purchased and needed a few maternity tops, but for a majority of the time, I wore my regular tops that happen to be longer. Now, that was NOT the case for pants. I must have only been 7-10 weeks along when I found I could no longer fit in my normal pants. It was as if I had just gotten thicker, which was odd because I hadn't gained much weight (yet....) Something I will recommend is don't spend much money on maternity clothes! Ideally, you won't be wearing them long, and they are not cheap. I bought a few good/cheap shirts at Old Navy, and then hit up Goodwill where maternity jeans were 3 bucks a pair.bNow THAT'S what I'm talking about. I did spend $40 on a maternity coat from Motherhood Maternity because it got good reviews, and since I was due in February, I knew I would need a jacket that covered my giant belly. Luckily, my feet never grew (I have heard horror stories about how women need to buy all new shoes after being pregnant because their feet grew. Again, I won the luck of the draw on this one.)
Baby: So we decided not to find out the sex of our baby, and this is something not only do I not regret, but I would do again. I had friends compare it to peaking early on Christmas morning, and I thought of it in the way that since I would be going through what could possibly be the most painful experience of my life (and no, I'm not talking about the whole not drinking or eating sushi for 9 month thing...) I wanted the pay off at the end to be a surprise. Plus, I'm not a fan of most pink things, and if we knew that it was a girl, everything would be pink. But you cant very well call a baby "hey you" for the first nine months, so what's a family to do? I started calling the baby Pumpkin, but Al quickly vetoed that. After a cozy night together on the couch watching "Duck Soup" on turner classic movies, it hit us: we would call the baby Groucho! And it stuck. So who was little Groucho? We only got one ultrasound (we could have had more, but our doctor had no concerns and insurance only paid for one) so we had one at 24 weeks which is standard. We specifically told them to NOT TELL US THE SEX and they were really good at not hovering over any baby junk or spilling the beans.
Hospital: Most of my friends assumed we would be having a home birth. I was raised by hippies and it seemed like the natural progression, right? Well, not for me. Not when we have an amazing hospital ten minutes from my house. I knew first thing that giving birth at Martha Jefferson was the way I wanted to go. They have a beautiful new birthing center where each room is private, there are large tubs to labor in, and I'd never heard a bad thing about it. I had no clue what doctor I should use so my family doctor referred me to Dr. Wolanski. I'm so happy they did. He is a little elf of a man whom I totally fell in love with and I miss seeing him every month. Seriously. Kind of pathetic.
Enough yammering on about baby stuff! I'll do a follow up about my birth story and my choice to have a Doula, which was the best choice I could have ever made. I'll leave you with this: me at six weeks preggo and me at 38 weeks preggo. I'd like to point out that I was under the foolish assumption that I needed to lose weight when I got pregnant. In retrospect, I would love to go back in time and punch skinny me in my flat stomach. But more on that in the next post.
