Tag Archives: pregnancy

differences and similarities

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Common wisdom states that all pregnancies are different, and I knew that going into this one, but it took a while for the reality to set in.

For one thing, the nausea during the first trimester? SO MUCH WORSE this time than it was with Catie. Of course, I didn’t really get sick until my 3rd trimester during my first pregnancy. This one has more of the “traditional pregnancy” (?) feel, since right around the 6 week point, I was absolutely flattened by the nausea. Because of my gastric bypass surgery, I can’t throw up, but so many times, I wished I could. (A nurse at my OB’s office told me to be thankful because most women say they don’t feel any better even after they barf. Uh, good to know?) I spent a lot of time with that horrible metallic “about to barf” taste in my mouth, without actually being able to do anything about it. It was pretty awful.

What’s funny is that I absolutely hated keeping my misery to myself, I wanted to whine about it. And I kept thinking, oh man, just a few more weeks and then I can moan about how miserable I am on my blog. Only now that I’ve ‘fessed up to being pregnant, I’m right around the 13-week point, and most of the horribleness is over. I get an occasional nausea flare-up, but it’s pretty rare. The heartburn is no fun, but, eh, it’s manageable. That’s why God invented Tums, right?

One thing that I didn’t expect? That my cravings this time are totally different than they were with Catie. The main things I remember craving with Catie were peanut butter and tomatoes. (Um, not at the same time. Ew.) But with this kiddo, I suddenly want:
1.) Coffee. Which is weird because I normally hate coffee. I’m not a fan of hot beverages in general, I’m a Diet Coke addict. I’m not sure if it’s the power of suggestion (the office smells like coffee because everyone here drinks it all day), or if I want a hot drink because the office is cold and I’m trying to warm myself up. But my normal “hot beverage of choice” would be green tea, and I don’t want that. I just want COFFEE. Weird.
2.) Citrus fruits. Specifically, mango and pineapple. Which I’ve always liked, but now it’s like, neeeeed. (Maybe my body needs the vitamin C?)
3.) Fried eggs. When I ate eggs while I was pregnant with Catie, they had to be either scrambled or hard-boiled, because if I saw even a hint of a runny yolk, I’d get sick. Now I want my eggs over easy, and the runnier, the better.

There are other occasional food cravings that pop up. Like last week when I decided that I needed a baked potato more than I’ve ever needed anything in my entire life. So I decided to cook steak, just so I’d have a vehicle to serve baked potatoes. And I mean, I went all-out with it: I bought sour cream, chives, and shredded cheese to put on top. The works. And when I finally ate it? I made so many happy noises that Dave was like, “Uh, do you and your potato need some privacy?” It was borderline obscene. And you know… Don’t get me wrong, I like a good starchy carb as much as the next girl, but that was weird. I don’t think I’ve ever had that kind of reaction to a potato in my life.

But to be fair, there’s a pretty long list of things with this pregnancy that are the same as last time:
1.) Exhaustion.
2.) Crazy dreams.
3.) Stretch marks (yes, already).
4.) All the tiny new-growth hairs that are sprouting up all over my head and driving me crazy. (Last time, I decided to tackle that issue by getting bangs. Which I liked at the time, and now I look back and wonder what the hell those hormones did to my brain. The “before” picture is so much better than the “after.” Yeesh. So let’s all say a prayer that I maintain enough of my sanity this time to not do anything too drastic to my hair.)
5.) Acne.
6.) Itchy dry skin.
7.) Complete and total loss of my attention span.

Wait… What was I talking about?

Oh right. I guess that overall, there are probably more similarities between my two pregnancies than there are differences. At least so far. I just have to wait and see if that stays true over the coming months.

Pregnancy Low-Down

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Two major topics I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post:

* Despite the fact that we waited for what feels like AGES for this baby, the timing with my new job could be better. For those of you keeping track, I applied for this job back in August (before I got pregnant), and I found out that I was pregnant sometime around my third interview. Then they waited another five weeks to actually hire me. So I started working here when I was already 10 weeks pregnant. And I’ve been praying that nobody would figure it out right away, and that they’d think I’m chubby with an unfortunate way of carrying my extra weight around my mid-section. But I’m already mostly in maternity clothes, so I think it’s going to be really obvious very soon.

(This is the burden of having a short torso. Nowhere to expand except outward.)

I mean, I just didn’t want to walk in here on Day One and be like, “Hey, thanks for the job and all, but BTW I’m gonna need some maternity leave in a few months.” It seemed… tacky. I wanted to establish myself as a valuable employee first. So, I’m working on trying to figure out a graceful way to handle that one. Obviously, this is not my first time at this particular rodeo, so it’s not like I’m going to be quitting when the baby arrives. I know that I still want to (need to) work, so I just need to make sure I explain that very clearly to my manager when I tell him.

(Oh, that’s the other weird part. My manager is based in the Colorado office, so he has no idea what I look like. I could theoretically wait until a week before my due date to say anything. I mean, I won’t do that, because that would be horrible. But I probably could get away with it.)

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* Catie is pretty aware of what’s going on now. We’ve talked about how she’s going to be a big sister “someday,” since it’s hard to explain timelines to an almost-4 year-old. I tried telling her it’ll be next summer, but I don’t know if she understands that or not.

I showed her the ultrasound pictures from yesterday and explained that it was her baby sister and that the doctor took a picture of her in my tummy (she found her own ultrasound pics once and I explained to her that it was a picture of her before she was born, so she’s familiar with that). I told her that it’s going to be a long time before the baby is here, and my tummy is going to get reeeeeally big in the meantime. She said, “Wow, I’m so excited to see a picture of my baby sister! [3-second pause] Mommy, can I play with Daddy’s iPad?” So… yeah. I’m not sure how much she really understands about this whole thing.

But she IS excited to help me decorate the spare room. So there’s that.

Oh, also? Now I really, really, REALLY want my parents to hurry up and sell their house to move up here. I’m going to need their help more than ever, no doubt. Anybody need to buy a 4-bedroom/2-bath house in Ridgeland, Mississippi? Anyone?

Knocked Up

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So, sometime in late September, there was this.

And then today, there was this.

It looks like we’re having baby #2 sometime on or around May 31st, 2011. I’m a little over 12 weeks along. And based on the ultrasound today, the doctor said there’s about a 95% chance that we’re having another girl.

If you know how long Dave and I were trying to get pregnant (OVER. A. YEAR.), you know that obviously we’re both beyond thrilled. And we’re super-excited about having two girls, too.

It’s funny, after how horrible my first pregnancy was, I couldn’t imagine being excited about doing it all over again. And it’s true, I’m still not the glowing “Earth Mother” type. I’m much more likely to whine about heartburn or moan about how my clothes all suddenly stopped fitting about 5 minutes after I got a positive pregnancy test.

But at the same time? I’m so psyched. I absolutely cannot wait to meet this tiny person. If she is anything like her big sister, we are in gonna be in for SO MUCH FUN.

YAY FOR BABIES!! (And more on the nitty-gritty pregnancy details later!)

on having a second

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I haven’t talked about it much, but I had my IUD taken out last August, which means that Dave and I have theoretically been trying for baby #2 for the last 10 months. And I say theoretically because, well, at first my heart wasn’t really in it. I was so indifferent about having a second kid for so long, and there were months when we didn’t try at the right time because I just didn’t really want to get pregnant at that particular moment. Maybe we were particularly stressed about money that month, maybe I was going through a rough phase with Catie and doubting my ability to survive another child, whatever.

My attitude for the longest time has been, “We’ll have another kid if we’re supposed to have another kid. And if we don’t, then I guess we’re lucky that the one we have is pretty freaking awesome.”

Then something changed. I don’t know exactly what. It could be that I’m barreling down on 35 (“advanced maternal age,” oh no!), or because I realized that Catie will be at least 4 years old by the time we have another baby, or because I suddenly know so. many. people. who are having babies. (Seriously, those are just 3 examples. There’s also at least 2 girls I know from high school who are pregnant right now, and a few other people I know who have had babies in the past 6 months.)

Suddenly, I was hearing about all of these friends of mine being pregnant, and I felt… jealous?

So, for the past couple of months, I’ve been focusing more attention on trying to get pregnant. I’m even considering charting my cycle, since that worked last time. (Funny: I just went looking through my blog archives to see if I could find a post where I talked about charting my cycle, and all I could find was whiny “this isn’t working & I don’t think I’m even ovulating and I’ll never get pregnant, boo hoo!” stuff. Spoiler: I got pregnant the next month.)

And that sort of relates to my recent exercise obsession. See, for those of you who don’t already know this, the last time I was pregnant? Was bad. I got really, really sick during my 3rd trimester, and no one could figure out what was wrong with me. But I lost all of my pregnancy weight while I was still pregnant – which, for the record, is not the ideal weight-loss solution. I mostly lost muscle, not fat. By the time Catie was born, I was so weak that I could barely hold her. It took a long, long time for me to feel “normal” again, energy-wise.

So, this crazy need to work out every day and build my endurance as quickly as possible? A large part of it is because I want to make sure that if/when I get pregnant, I’m starting at a healthier baseline than last time. So if I get sick again, it hopefully won’t have quite such detrimental effects on my health.

We’ll see how it goes. And in the meantime, if any of y’all want to throw out a little “get Cindy knocked up” prayer or thought, I sure wouldn’t mind.