The first two pregnancies, I spent a lot of time reading the baby guides, browsing the websites and kept up to date every week on exactly how many millimeters the baby has grown.
This time around, I have yet to blow the dust off my trusty What To Expect guidebook. Because I know what to expect. Nausea, bloatedness, heartburn, vomit, swollen feet, incontinence, hemorrhoids, and at the end of it all, a big, fat episiotomy to take home as a present. Fun times.
Well, now that I’m officially out of the first trimester, I thought I’d do a quick round up of all the things you need to know in the first 3 months of pregnancy.
1. Gas, gas, gas
The pregnancy books make it sound so tame – you may experience some bloatedness due to the increase in progesterone. Um, understatement of the year.
The reality is that being pregnant makes you burp and fart like a drunken sailor. The awesomeness of my day is now determined by how much gas I can expel and I’ve never been this happy to pass gas from either end. I certainly don’t enjoy burping and farting in the presence of other people but it’s causing me so much discomfort that I’m past the point of modesty and decorum. Some days, I’m throwing up bile because my gut is so filled with air that something’s got to give. On multiple occasions, I even contemplated sticking a giant needle into my intestines just so I can let out the air.
I’m only glad that I don’t have to sit in an office all day because given the present state of things, let’s just say that I’m not going to be very popular with the colleagues.
2. Sleep all day
Being pregnant is exhausting. It sounds like an excuse pregnant women concoct so they can laze around and be a slug all day but no. I liken it to taking drowsy flu meds – you’re out before you even know it.
Naturally, the husband doesn’t fully understand this concept and he’s all like “you’ve been sleeping a lot lately…what do you do all day?”
“Oh, what do I do all day? Well, on top of taking care of 2 kids, I just spent the day making another human with my uterus. In fact, I made like 2 fingers and half an eyeball today. What did you do all day? Paperwork? Pffffff.”
3. All-day Sickness
Commonly known as morning sickness, this bout of nausea and loss of appetite can in fact happen throughout the day. Smells that you normally wouldn’t mind will suddenly trigger off a gag reflex and next thing you know, you’ve got your face over a toilet bowl. That is if you don’t first throw up in the middle of the street or in the car.
The good news is that this general feeling of discomfort usually disappears after the first trimester, so yay!
4. Baby wants food
Closely related to the morning sickness is the pregnancy cravings. This heightened sense of smell makes you extra picky about what you want to put in your mouth, so you end up craving for food you might not typically want to eat. In a way, it’s not really you craving for stuff, it’s the baby craving for stuff, and we all know that when it comes to making the husband go out on midnight supper runs, using the baby is a far more convincing argument.
However, in an unfortunate turn of events, I find myself averse to meat this pregnancy. Everyone who knows me knows how much I love meat. I eat all kinds of meat, including pork, beef, lamb, crocodile, squirrel, turtle and any form of poultry. And the meatier, the better.
But of late, the thought of meat makes me want to vomit in my mouth so I’ve been loading up on fruits, veggies and carbs. My mom is thrilled because she’s been telling me to eat my vegetables for 29 years and I’m finally doing it out of my own volition. Actually, it’s the baby that’s making me do it.
5. What Libido?
Most doctors will say that it’s ok to do the naughty naughty during the entire pregnancy but the truth is, the first trimester is not a good time to be getting any action in at all. There’s the exhaustion, which means that I’m literally too tired to make the sexy-time because any time I spend in my bed is going to be the sleeping-time. And then there’s the gas, which not only makes me bloatey and uncomfortable, it makes me pass gas at the most inopportune times. Let’s not even go there.
What all this means is that my libido has packed her bags and is somewhere in the region of Inner Mongolia by now.
PS. Oh, and the baby is doing great.
