Hey friends, I’m back and this time with another little baby cooking. I wanted to share some pregnancy updates with you. I thought I’d take it back to a few weeks ago and talk about the first trimester. Also, I realized I have yet to take any bump pictures so I guess I’d better get on that. Alright, let’s get into it.
Due date: June 5, 2021. The boys were both early so we will see how close this baby gets to his or her due date.
How we found out: I just had a weird feeling so I took a test 6 days before my missed period. Funnily enough, I forgot all about it and never looked at it. When I remembered to look a few hours later it showed the absolute faintest line and I wasn’t sure if it was an evap line. A few hours later I took another one and another faint line appeared. At that point I decided I needed a clear answer so I ran to the store and got another test that gave me a clear yes or no. I took it the following morning and bam, I was definitely pregnant. I told Jordan when he woke up, I actually sprung it on him in the worst way and I think we were both in shock for the next 24 hours.
How did we know we were ready for a third: Well, to be honest we didn’t. We weren’t actually trying and hadn’t decided for sure if we even wanted a third, but life has a funny way of working out and we couldn’t be more excited.
Boy or Girl: We don’t know yet! I’m leaning towards team boy, Jord and Theo are leaning towards girl.
Symptoms: From the day I was four weeks pregnant I had to pee all the damn time. Like 3-4 times every single night regardless of how much or little water I drank. Right around five weeks I started feeling the fatigue. It wasn’t horrible but it definitely hit me late afternoon. I had pretty bad morning sickness with Archer (you can read about my first trimester with him here) so I prepared myself for the worst. Sure enough, week six rolled around and the morning sickness came along with it.
I was nauseous for probably 22 hours a day from week six to week twelve. The worst of it was right around week nine. I never actually threw up, I just had a constant sensation of needing to gag. It was awful. I could barely get up the energy to do anything at all and pretty much anything and everything just intensified the nausea.
Mornings were rough, and I felt pretty much nonfunctional until about 9am. Then I had a decent window until about 11 or 12 where I could get some work done so I tried to schedule all of may patients during that time. After that, the day just went downhill. I maybe cooked dinner once a week, barely cleaned my house, and definitely did no exercising. First trimester is all about survival mode, am I right?
Sleep was also rough in the first trimester. I would wake up throughout the night to pee and then I had such bad insomnia that I’d be awake for hours. It was exhausting.
Ooh, and let’s not forget about the acne. My face broke out constantly in the first trimester, I was so uncomfortable!
What helped with the nausea: Honestly, nothing really helped all that drastically. It was rough. The biggest thing that helped was getting acupuncture. From weeks 8-10 I got acupuncture 2x per week and I did notice a slight improvement for the 24 hours following my appointments. Wearing sea bands constantly also helped a bit, which makes sense because they are working off of acupuncture points. I have some other tips and tricks for morning sickness in this first trimester survival post, some of which helped a bit and some of which made no difference at all for me.
Food aversions: Basically everything. But especially eggs and chicken.
Food cravings: Either nothing sounded even remotely good or there would be one specific thing that I wanted more than anything in the world. I remember at one point I was just desperately craving a blue gatorade so my mum stopped at the store to get me some and she got me the zero sugar kind that has artificial sweetener. I am not a fan of artificial sweeteners and I was so sad!
Weight gain: nothing yet.
Differences/similarities between this pregnancy and the first two: Well this one has been nothing like my first pregnancy which was an absolute breeze. And pretty similar to my second, I’d say the morning sickness was more severe this time but my mood was better. I gained 5 pounds in the first trimester with both of the boys, so the fact that I haven’t gained any weight with this pregnancy has been different.
How the kids took the news: Theo is absolutely over the moon excited. We told the boys when I was five weeks and he has talked about the baby every day since. He’s convinced it’s a girl and tells everyone that he meets that he’s having a baby sister. Word to the wise, consider not telling your toddler until you’re ready for him or her to share the news with everyone. Theo asks to talk to the baby and cuddle the baby every single day and loves to kiss my belly. Archer for sure has no clue what’s going on but he copies Theo and shrieks “beebee” and kisses my belly too.
Birth plans: We plan on having this baby at the birth center where we had Archer. It’s a great fit for our family and we had such a good experience there with both boys (I ended up transferring to the hospital with my first so he wasn’t actually born there but all of my prenatal care was through the birth center). You can check out this post for why I chose a birth center.
That just about sums up my first trimester, I’ll share another update at maybe 20 weeks!
