The Icky Trimester

I somehow was in the dark about the challenges of the first trimester. I am convinced our mothers never tell us how hard it actually is for fear they will scare us off from producing their much desired grandchildren. After finding out I was pregnant, the first week or two were a mysterious bliss. It was like carrying around a secret that I myself wasn't actually sure I believed. But I remember distinctly the day of that dreaded Google Chat Text to Camille: "Oh, Crap.... Here comes the nausea."

I still don't understand why they call it Morning Sickness. I preferred to refer to it as "All-Day-Feel-Like-Poo." The first night of Morning Sickness followed an evening of appetizers including Jessica's Famous Clam Dip and some Krispy Kale Chips. Two things I will not be able to look fondly on again for some time. Luckily for me, except for one night of dry heaving, I never threw up so I wonder if it may not have been as severe as others get. And for every few bad days, I would get a respite of a good day or two to recover.

The fatigue of course was constant. I had the bright idea early on that I was going to take brisk walks on my lunch break to help boost my energy and I quickly learned that this was having the exact opposite effect. I was very glad at that point to be working from home where I could lay down and rest for my hour lunch breaks which became necessary. I was able to keep a 40 hour work week still, but that was about all I could do and the last hour of the work day was always a struggle. The housework, cooking, and grocery shopping pretty much fell to Don and if I had a boost one evening and was able to unload the dishwasher I felt like I deserved a medal. I started to wonder and be in awe at the women I knew who were on their second or third pregnancies and working full time jobs outside the home, and tried to keep in perspective that I really did have it easy.

The most challenging thing for me though that I was not prepared for was the fact that your tastebuds completely change when you are pregnant. Forget even trying to work around the nausea, things simply didn't taste right anymore. Coffee, chocolate, and black pepper all taste like dirt. The idea of meat completely grossed me out. Vegetables were too "strong" tasting so for a while I had to switch to frozen vegetables because they have almost no flavor. Bread and crackers, which were things I almost never ate before, along with fruit were my new staples. The most challenging week came when we went to Boise for the Christmas Holidays and stayed with Angie and Mike (Don's sister and brother-in-law). I felt so bad for them because they wanted really badly to try to prepare foods that I could eat but there was just no working around my appetite. I could never tell from one minute to the next what would sound good, or more accurately, what the one thing would be that didn't sound bad. We spent a lot of money on food in the first trimester (a lot of which went bad), and learned to buy things in small quantities.

Angie asked me at one point if I was really excited about the pregnancy and if I ever had trouble believing that this was actually happening for us. I told her that honestly when we first found out that I was definitely in awe of the magic and mystery of it all, but since the full blown side effects of the first trimester had appeared, I was more than anything just focused on surviving it and looking forward to the promised land of the second trimester.