The Honest Guide to Pregnancy – First Trimester

In case you haven’t heard, I’m pregnant! I know, I know. It’s weird for me too, and most of the time, it still doesn’t seem real. I don’t have that great a bump going on yet, and I can’t feel the baby or anything, so it’s kind of just like I’m bloated all the time and can’t get enough pickles…which, now that I think of it, might have something to do with the bloating.

Aaaaanyhoe…some of the early signs of pregnancy are well-known – morning sickness, food cravings, tiredness. If you had asked me 4 months ago what pregnant women experience in the first trimester, I might have given you those three. Maybe. But I am here today to tell you what it’s really like, or at least what it has been like for me with this baby. I know from being on an expecting moms message board that no two pregnancy experiences are alike, so I won’t presume to say that my experience is universal. But here is what I have learned about pregnancy so far.

Morning Sickness Is a Lie

If by “morning sickness,” you mean nausea throughout the entire morning with possible vomiting between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m., then a more sinister nausea with almost inevitable vomiting between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m., and a slight queasiness anytime it’s been more than an hour since your last snack, then yes, that is accurate. But the term “morning sickness” implies that this is an early-in-the-day phenomena that will pass after a certain hour in the day. Lies. So many lies.

The worst part about morning sickness (once you get over the deception of its name) is that it’s every freaking day for WEEKS. Nausea is the worst. Throwing up feels terrible. But usually when you have a stomach bug or food poisoning or something, it’s awful, but it only lasts for a few days. When you feel terrible every day for a month or more, it really wears you down, and you feel like you’re never going to feel good again. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Even though you can’t imagine ever reconciling your relationship with your stomach, there is hope. The vomiting incidents start happening less frequently, and one day, you walk out the door to go to work and realize that you aren’t worried about puking in the bushes on your way to the car. It’s a good feeling.

You Don’t Know What Boobs Are Until You’ve Had Pregnancy Boobs

**TMI Alert**

I don’t think I’ve worn anything smaller than a C-cup since I was about 13, and honestly, I have no idea what size I am now. I found these amazingly comfortable bras a few years ago that just come in sizes small-extra large, and I’ve been wearing them ever since, but when you get pregnant, your boobs decide to get really ambitious. It starts out as a horrible sort of discomfort – we’ll call it “pain” – that makes sleeping on your stomach impossible. Also jumping, running, descending stairs quickly, not wearing a bra, and anything other than very gentle bathing are out. Then you notice that each boob weighs about a pound more than it did last week. When we went to our 2nd doctor’s appointment and I hadn’t gained any weight from the first one, we were surprised because we thought surely my boobs would have tipped the scale, but I guess all the vomiting evened things out.

Why the boobs need to get bigger now, I do not know. It would make sense around month 8, when the baby will be coming soon, and the milk is preparing to come in. But at week 8? I’m at a loss. On the bright side, my husband has no complaints.

Tiredness Is Nothing

Tiredness is what you feel after a day at the state fair, after a long day’s work at the office, after staying up too late and getting up too early. Everybody experiences tiredness at some point. Exhaustion is what you feel when your body is making another human being. I imagine people who work outdoor heavy construction jobs for 10 hours a day in NC in August feel the same thing. For the first couple of months of pregnancy, I slept for 11-13 hours a day, and I have never been more thankful for my part-time job. After sleeping for 9-10 hours at night, it was still all I could do to get through a 4-hour class and eat lunch before napping for another 2-3 hours. I don’t know how women with full-time and/or physically demanding jobs do it. Or moms with other young kids at home. They must have some kind of super power.

I Pee 500,000 Times a Day

I knew that pregnant women peed a lot, but I always thought it was only toward the end of the pregnancy when the baby is huge and stepping on your bladder. Nope. It starts immediately and with enthusiasm (if urine can be enthusiastic). First it has something to do with the fact that your body is making extra fluid in general. By week 6 or something crazy early, you have like 50% more blood in your body. I figured out how much that would weigh and factored it into my first trimester weight gain, but since I didn’t gain any weight, I guess we’re back to the “morning” sickness offsetting things.

I Can Smell Everything x 10

This, they really should warn you about, so I’m here to do it now. I had to switch to an unscented body wash because my regular one made me gag. My sweet husband couldn’t put his face too close to my face because despite his excellent oral hygiene, I couldn’t stand his breath. He could have just brushed his teeth and used Listerine, but my super-sniffer would only detect the half-digested food coming directly up through his stomach and esophagus from his intestines. Speaking of food, the smells of most of them made me sick, so we have gone through cereal at an alarming rate over the past few months. I don’t know how I made it through the worst of it without having to change deodorants, but maybe my brain instinctively knew that my own natural odor would have made me sicker than my fruity Dove deodorant. Thanks, brain, for sparing me from the torture of my own B.O.

Oh! And I smell a phantom smell that follows me sometimes. Mostly, I smell it at home, but I have on occasion smelled it in the car and at work. It’s a terrible, sour milk smell that Will can’t smell at all ever. Fun times.

Food Cravings/Aversions Are Serious

It’s not that you just really want Bojangle’s fries with honey mustard dipping sauce from Chick-Fil-A and a Wendy’s Frosty. It’s that that is the only thing you can even conceive of eating without hurling. And it’s not that the smell of chicken-flavored ramen makes you a little queasy. It’s that should your husband have cooked it in the last 24 hours, you have to open all the doors, turn on the fans, and leave the house for two hours so that you don’t hurl. He has been amazingly supportive and refrained from cooking things we’ve discovered cause a vomiting incident, bless his precious heart.

You Have Pain in Body Parts You Didn’t Know Existed

Ladies, did you know you have something called the round ligament of the uterus? I did not, but I am well acquainted with it now. As your uterus grows, the ligament stretches, and you feel it. Hoooboy do you feel it. You feel it when you’re walking, when you’re sitting, when you roll over in bed (that’s the worst), and when you sit up or stand up. And when you first start to feel it, it freaks you out because any pain in the pelvic region is cause for great alarm, but I’m told it’s quite normal, so whenever I feel something new, I always check first to see if what I’m feeling is connected to the round ligament. It very often is, and the other times, it’s usually gas.

Not Telling People Is HARD

We found out I was pregnant on a Saturday. That night, we went out to dinner and a movie with some friends. The next day, we went to church and lunch with Will’s mom and sister. The next day, I went to work. We told his mom and sister because we HAD to tell somebody, but when I wasn’t telling people, I had one thought running through my head just behind every other thought and conversation: “I’m pregnant. Holy crap, I’m pregnant. There is the tiniest of tiny human beings growing inside my body. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh I’m totally pregnant.” We told family pretty quickly, and close friends followed, but we didn’t tell everyone or make a Facebook announcement right away, and I’m glad. I feel like the news has spread at a pace I’m comfortable with even though not telling people was really, really hard.

Perhaps harder than not telling people is figuring out how to tell them. We just blurted it out for most people. Maybe we should have planned something more elaborate, but did I mention the exhaustion? If I had been awake for more than 4 hours when I told you, blurting it out was probably all I could muster. Whitney got the best announcement we did. She sang us the most amazing toast at our wedding – yes, sang…live – so we thought she deserved something similar. Will had given me a ukulele for Mother’s Day, and I learned how to play Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” and I changed the lyrics to give her the news. Maybe not my best performance, but it was received very well.

The Internet Is Very Helpful…Sometimes

I’ve read what the whole internet has to say on every tiny little thing I’ve experienced so far, and it can be very helpful, but it can also be completely terrifying. Say you Google “first trimester bleeding.” You’re going to get a bunch of people who say it’s completely normal, and unless you’re also having terrible cramps, you’re probably fine. Then you’re going to get a bunch of people correcting those people, and saying that it’s not normal, but it is quite common, and while you’re probably fine, you should talk to your doctor anyway. Those people are my favorites. But then you’re going to get a bunch of horror stories about miscarriages, at which point you have to just stop with the internet because the more you read, the more stressed out you’re going to get, and that’s not good for anybody.

My Husband Is Amazing

As I mentioned before, I’m on an expecting moms message board, and bless their hearts, some of these women have terrible husbands/boyfriends/fiances. Just terrible. One woman said that the smell of beer makes her sick, but her husband still brings a beer to bed with him and then wants to kiss her with his beer breath. Other women say their husbands won’t help them around the house, but actually complain that the wives aren’t keeping things as tidy as they should. And in one unbelievably sad story, a woman told us that her husband had punched her in the stomach. I mean…really, really terrible.

When I read stories like these from other women, I can’t help but be extra thankful for my husband, who has been a complete champ so far. He does the dishes because the food on them makes me sick. He brings me a bowl of cereal in bed because it helps my stomach if I can eat before I have to get up. He goes to the grocery store because I don’t have the energy to walk that much. He doesn’t cook foods that make me queasy. He doesn’t get upset when I can’t talk to him face-to-face because of his breath. He doesn’t get scared when I start crying for no reason whatsoever. He doesn’t complain that there are three times as many pillows in the bed as humans. He tells me every day that I’m beautiful, and that he loves me like crazy. He doesn’t mind that I went two whole months without folding any laundry. He rolls with the food cravings. If I couldn’t get enough Life cereal last week, but this week it must be Cinnamon Toast Crunch or nothing, that’s ok. And he doesn’t judge me if I eat 10 pickle slices in one afternoon (purely hypothetical situation, of course).

So if I’ve made pregnancy sound terrible so far, then I’ve done a pretty accurate job describing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. I’ve also gotten to see just how lucky I am to have a husband who is so incredibly perfect for me and who loves me so much, to have a body that is capable of supporting the growth and development of a whole other body inside it, and to have friends and family who have bent over backwards to love and support us. Seriously, it’s been wonderful.

And now that I’m in the 2nd trimester, I’m getting over the exhaustion and the morning sickness, so I’m able to enjoy it all the more!