Pregnancy has been an incredible experience, and my body is changing by the day. My favorite part of reading other pregnancy blogs is reading about changes and getting to compare myself to them, so below I have listed a few of the major changes and how they have impacted me.
Morning sickness: I will go ahead and say that morning sickness is no joke, and it doesn’t happen in just the morning, it can and does happen all day long. Many of you know how much I enjoy eating, so not being able to eat and throwing up a lot really sucked. Certain smells , especially eggs made me gag on the spot. Being at work and changing bed pans and experiencing all the other wonderful smells there was also very hard to handle. Thankfully, my doctor gave me some nausea medicine, and helped me to get the sickness under control. I still get really nauseous from time to time, but it is not an everyday thing like it was.
Fatigue: I was not expecting how tired I would be. The first few months I was tired ALL THE TIME. It was hard to make it through the day without taking at least one nap, so normally I did. If I didn’t have work, I would nap whenever I felt like it, and that really helped me to feel better and get me through the first few months. I have a little bit more energy these days, but I still really enjoy napping, and working three twelve hour shifts in a row is very hard to do now, so I try to avoid it.
Emotional wreck: Pregnancy turned me into an emotional roller coaster. I am not normally the type of person that gets upset over stupid stuff or cries a lot, but those first few months, the tiniest things would set me off. TV shows, not being able to find my keys, dropping my sandwich on the floor, dumb things like this would cause me to tear up. Luckily, Jordan is very understanding, and he never made fun of me (though I probably would have in his shoes). After the first 4 months, I began to get more control over my emotions, but I am still much more emotional than I was pre-pregnancy.
Getting a Belly: Obviously, I knew it was coming, but starting to grow a belly was still kind of surprising. Once I started showing, the idea that there was a child inside of me no longer seemed so abstract and it started to become real. It took up until about 5 months before I started to look pregnant, and not just fat or oddly shaped. The fourth and fifth month are a pretty entertaining time, because you can tell people who look at you are trying to decide whether you are pregnant and whether or not it would be ok to ask. I found that of my patients at work the only people who never hesitated to ask were the old ladies. It’s like once women get past 70 they don’t care if they are offensive are not, they are going to say what they are thinking. I have been trying to take pictures every few weeks since I started seeing a noticeable difference in my belly, and I am glad I did because between the 5th and 6th months I popped. At six months, now I definitely look pregnant, and I already feel big so I can’t imagine how I am going to feel in a few months. Here are some pictures with weeks, weights, and food references, which help to put the size and growth of the baby into perspective.
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| Belly around 15 weeks (beginning of 4th month). Baby is about 41/2 inches long, 2 to 3 oz, and the size of an orange. |
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| Around 19 weeks (beginning of month 5), looking a little bit rough after walking Scooby in the scalding heat. Baby is 6 inches long and a half pound in weight, or the size of a large mango. |
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| Beach for my birthday around 21 weeks, and the last appearance that bikini will make for a while. |
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| And BOOM, 24 weeks/6 months, definitely a baby in there now. Baby is about 1 1/2 lbs and 8 1/2 inches, the length of an ear of corn and my uterus is about the size of a soccer ball.. wow. |
Gaining weight: You would think this would go hand in hand with getting a belly, but I put them in two different categories. When I found out I was pregnant, I thought “Ok, I am going to work really hard so that I don’t get fat, maybe I can just get a belly and the rest of me will stay the same.” I was dreaming. As of today, I have gained 15 pounds, and that doesn’t sound like an excessive amount but it certainly feels like it. When you are pregnant, your blood volume goes way up and you have a lot of extra fluid on board. I don’t know if it is from gaining fat or fluid, but my hands and feet have taken a hit. I didn’t think it was possible, but my feet have gotten even uglier. They are constantly swollen and my ankles ache like I’m an arthritic 80 year old. My fingers are swollen and I have to be careful when I put rings on because there is a chance they might not come off. I have also gotten bigger in my thighs and butt, which is to be expected, but it still sucks. Though I know weight gain is a positive thing during pregnancy, every time I go to the doctor I think of the scene in Knocked Up where the nurse is like “Don’t worry your baby wants you to gain a whole mess of weight” and Katherine Heigl is like “ARE YOU F*****G KIDDING ME?”, because that is how it makes you feel.
Despite all these changes, I am feeling great, and I am incredibly thankful that I have had a safe and relatively easy pregnancy thus far. Plus, being being pregnant has a lot of incredibly amazing and fun parts to it, such as seeing the baby, learning the sex, and coming up with names :)
Seeing the Baby: Going to the ultrasounds has been fun, and Jordan has come to all my appointments so we have been able to watch the baby grow into a beautiful little person. My first ultrasound was at 8 weeks, and the baby already had a heart beat and little arms and legs beginning to grow. When you are pregnant, you count weeks from the first day of your last menstrual period. So basically the first 2 weeks that you count, you aren’t even pregnant yet. So when I had my 8 week ultrasound, it was really only about 6 weeks since the baby was actually conceived. It is absolutely amazing to me that something can go from a single cell to the shape of a person in just six weeks. My next ultrasound was done at 12 weeks, and was my first trimester screening for Down’s Syndrome, Trisomy 18, and other genetic disorders. I was shocked that at 12 weeks, the baby looked like a baby and was absolutely huge compared to the 8 week ultrasound. We got to see a really cute profile picture, and even some 3-D images. Luckily, the ultrasound and all my blood tests came back looking good, and the chances that our baby has any type of severe genetic or chromosomal disorder are very slim. After much anticipation and waiting, the 20 week ultrasound came, which includes the anatomy scan that makes sure your baby has all the right parts, the belly and heart and bladder are developing, and… the sex! It was never a question for us whether we wanted to know the sex of our baby, we both knew we did from the very beginning. I wanted to be able to buy stuff and plan, and I feel like it is just as much of a surprise if you find out at 20 weeks than if you wait until the baby is born. Jordan’s mom thought it was going to be a girl from the beginning. My dad guessed it would be a girl, my mom and my sister thought it would be a boy, and I think Jordan changed his mind on a daily basis. I knew I would be happy with either, and I can honestly say that I did not have a preference. Our baby was not shy, and the first thing that we saw in the ultrasound picture was that it is a baby girl! After getting over the excitement of finding out that it was a girl and telling everyone, we were able to settle on a name.
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8 week ultrasound, baby is about 1/2 an inch long and the size of a raspberry
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Baby at 12 week ultrasound/1st trimester screening, baby is 1/2 ounce, 2 1/2 inches, and about the size of a large plum.
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| A 3-D image from 12 wk ultrasound, she already looks like a little baby! Such a huge difference from the 8 week ultrasound! |
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| 18 week anatomy scan, Baby is 5 1/2 inches long and 5 oz in weight, or the length of a bell pepper. |
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| The gender shot... baby girl! |
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| Another one from the 18 week scan, you can really see her arms and legs in this one! |
Naming the Baby: Discussing boy names was difficult, because I did not have any ideas going into it, and it was hard for me to find names that I really liked. We both wanted to come up with names that were different without being weird, which I think is harder to do for boys. I feel like there are a lot more options for girls. I had a lot of ideas for girl names, and one name that I loved. It was the front runner from the beginning, and though we discussed other names, we could not find one that we liked better. Once we found out we were having a girl, we already had the first name picked out. It took a while longer to decide upon a middle name (which she will share with my sister), but now we have the perfect name for our baby… Cora Elizabeth Wilkes.
Moving and shaking: Kicks! Feeling Cora kick has been the coolest part of pregnancy thus far.
At first I wasn’t sure if I was feeling kicks or not, but one day it was like she woke up and became superbaby. The first real kick I felt sent a jolt through my whole body, and was so powerful that I had no doubt what it was. Since then she has kicked and flipped on a regular basis, and now I can actually see her moving from the outside.
