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2005-10-14 - 10.22pm��previous entry��next entry
6 weeks, 2 days pregnant
Six weeks and two days! Time is passing faster I think, with this pregnancy, than the last one. Which is good! I love being pregnant, but this part is a hard part, the feeling horrible and waiting to see if everything is going to be okay by the end of the first trimester. And getting to those important milestones faster will be good!
Soooo. I am so behind on all things web-based. Ugh. I have diaries to check, comments to make, emails to reply to, an increasingly overdue diary entry to make in my other diary, messages to reply to at my many online groups, etc. But I seem to have so little time at the moment. Neil has been off work all week to spend more time with Arthur and stuff (so sweet!) and he has helped me such a lot with Arthur this week, but STILL it feels like I have not had any time. I have been online LESS than when Neil isn't home! I guess because in the day when Arthur naps, I go online for the short time he's asleep. But although I'm getting more time in the day to do things, I am mostly using it to sleep, or spend time with my boys, or phone my mummy for 40-minute chats, etc. My online time is in the evening, and I feel so gross in the evening.
So here I am again, on another Friday evening! I am slooowwwly nibbling through a plate of roast chicken, sweetcorn, carrots and mashed potato. The very thought of that meal just makes me LONG to eat it, but actually chewing and swallowing it is a whoooole 'nother challenge! So I'm nibbling. I have been nibbling for an hour so far. At the moment I am managing to eat my usual amounts of food - which is wonderful for me compared with last pregnancy at this stage! - but this is basically because I take hours to eat each meal. I do eat it all in the end though, pretty much. I nibble dry cereal through the whole morning and that gets me a good (if drawn-out!) breakfast. And dinner is the same every night - I always have to eat it over the whole evening. No matter what it is, I struggle to eat it. Evening is definitely a difficult time for morning sickness, although there are patches in the late afternoon that are awful too. The rest of the time I am queasy to moderately nauseous.
Last pregnancy I noticed that I had absolutely zero nausea overnight (once I was eating again, that is) and it became my sanctuary, to be in bed at night! This time I have no part of the day or night where the nausea goes away, but it is definitely less awful during the night, and overall I am managing the whole morning sickness thing SO well! I am so proud of myself! :) Let's hope I keep managing this well!
I have become a secret pickle eater in the middle of the night! And I am starting to have trouble getting to sleep, for HOURS, it's so frustrating! I am so tired as it is. Tsk. Anyway, I lie in bed and try to sleep. Sleep doesn't come. Hunger does instead, so I get more queasy. Then The Pickle enters my mind. I visualise the jar in the fridge full of those crisp vinegary pickles and imagine the luscious crunch as I bite into one! Hehe! So yeah, 5 minutes later (after some half-hearted will-power) I can be found standing at the open fridge in a dark kitchen with only the glow of the fridge light to see by, crunching pickles right out of that jar!! ;) Then once the pickle thing eases off, I need cheese, and then a cracker, and then milk. And then an hour later when I STILL can't sleep, I get hungry again, and thus queasy, and go back down for a marmite sandwich and another glass of milk.
So I'm definitely getting my calories in!! ;)
I LOVE this weird pregnant behaviour! It's so pregnant of me! :) I had a teensy tiny bit of brown spotting yesterday but nothing today, and I'm not thinking about it, because I feel sooooo pregnant that I shouldn't worry, should I? I am still feeling slightly nervous about the scan on Thursday, all the same. People in my buddy groups seem to be miscarrying left right and centre. It's scary.
Remember a few weeks ago, when I wrote this?...
"The main thing on my mind at the moment is that I seem really scared that this pregnancy is not going to stick. I don't know why, but I just am. I barely believe I AM pregnant, it just seems too.... unlikely. Surreal. Something. I don't want to think of names or antenatal appointments because it feels like I can't even see myself getting that far along, so getting attached by doing those things would be a bad idea. I have a pregnant friend online whose ticker says 7w5d, and I couldn't imagine being 7w5d pregnant with this baby. Like I wonder if it will even happen. So I set that as a mental marker in my mind. At 7w5d, I wonder what I'll be doing, how I'll be feeling. What my situation will be. Will I still be pregnant? Will I have morning sickness big time? Will I feel differently about the pregnancy, safer and more confident? Whatever is happening on the day I am 7w5d, I hope I remember today and think of how I'm feeling now. I hope it will be reassuring when I'm there."
How weird that I am getting quite close to 7w5d now! I will be sure to remember that entry again when I reach that gestation, like I said I would. But I mention it now, because my friend whose ticker I was referring to has had a miscarriage. A missed miscarriage at 10 weeks. The baby died somewhere around 7 weeks. She had been worried lately because she had no morning sickness like she had with her first baby (we were both consoling each other through our first pregnancies with our awful nausea!) and couldn't find the heartbeat on her doppler this week (although she knew it was early for that). Then she found out at a scan :( I'm so sad for her. Scared about the fact that miscarriage is so "out there" and scary. But mostly I am so incredibly thankful to be feeling sick and pregnant at the moment. Everyone in my due dates group is beginning to moan and whine about morning sickness. Usually I might add my own woes about it, though probably not really whine since I already feel glad in a way that it's there with my spotting and from last pregnancy with the big bleed. But I can't even post in those threads any more. Since I found out about my friend, she is on my mind all the time. I feel so irritated at anyone complaining about the things that show so clearly that all is well with their babies. I feel like rejoicing in my nausea, even though I HATE the actual sensation and it makes life a little more difficult. Aside from that, it's a wonderful reassuring companion, always present to let me know my baby is inside me and growing and surviving all the time. I hope it really IS, but it does look promising with my symptoms, so I'm trying to think positive all the time till my scan.
Anyway. That was just such sad news for me. I am now the only pregnant person in that buddy group, a group I have been in since we were all TTC our first babies. We have been through our first pregnancies together, and now the first year or so with our little ones, and several of us were TTC at the time I got pregnant. This friend of mine was the first to get pregnant, and then I did. Nobody else has so far. So now it's just me. It feels weird and I feel like if I mention my pregnancy there I risk being insensitive to her pain at the moment. I don't want to do that, so I think I will keep a low profile for a while, except for supportive messages for the others. Especially with my scan next week.
Anyway. I should nibble a bit more food.
Sweetcorn and I love each other. I can REALLY eat sweetcorn! Also raisins. I discovered raisins by chance the other day. I was nibbling crackers and feeling grim, and then I grabbed a few raisins, and felt less yucky! So now I have a tupperware box of crackers by my bed, the pile of antacids, a glass of water (which is NOT my friend), and a box of raisins! I eat crackers in the night (until I give in and go down for pickles and cheese!). The last few mornings, I have eaten a cracker before getting out of bed, in the hopes that I will feel okay. I tend to feel much better when I'm lying down at night, but as soon as I get upright for the day I feel sick. The crackers didn't do anything. But this morning I ate half a box of raisins before getting up, and I felt reasonable enough to go downstairs, make toast and marmite, and eat it in a normal length of time before starting to feel queasy! Yay! So I will try that every morning now.
I am not drinking enough, because water is gross. Unfortunately, so is any other fluid in the house, although milk is okay. I am on full cream milk now as I need the extra calories, but it's quite rich so I can't always drink lots of it at once.
Oooh, this evening I was sitting in the bathroom while Neil and Arthur were taking their bedtime bath (Arthur's bedtime, that is!), and I was in mid-sentence to Neil about something, I can't remember what. And I literally broke off mid-word, because I got a sudden shock of flavour in my mouth, saying, "Oh my gosh!!! I have to have it!!!" Hehe! Neil was going, "What?!" and I told him I had to have pickled onion flavour Monster Munch. I am filled with sorrow that there is not a single bag of them in the house :( But oh well. When I eat them, much as I LOVE the tangy flavour, they give me a tummy ache. So it's probably for the best! ;) It was SO strong though! I just HAD to have them. I could feel them in my mouth, the texture, the crunch, everything. And the flavour... gaaagghhhaahhh!! Oh now I want them again. I am really big on pickled things at the moment. Maybe Sprout is a boy after all??
Talking of Sprout, my little one is 6mm long already!!!! What a growth spurt!! It's still soooo tiny, but if I hold my fingers out and make that size between finger and thumb, it's getting very visible now. Not so long ago, my baby was just a clump of cells completely invisible to the naked eye. Sprout's heartrate is an average of 127 today.
Jenn asked me where I get my info from, about embryos. I have a fantastic book called "A Child Is Born" with AMAZING photos inside the womb from fertilization, and I find some of my info from that book. I quoted it often here in my pregnancy with Arthur, and scanned some photos from it too (illegal of me?!!!!). But my main sources are embryology websites that I spent hours scouring for during my first pregnancy, and I have had them bookmarked waiting to be useful again ever since! The main ones I use are:
The IVFers Pregnancy Calculator Page - this one is where I get the trimester info from (how they are defined) and also it has the charts for embryonic heart rates and crown-to-rump lengths.
The Visible Embryo - this site is fantastic! It has a time line of all the different embryology stages as well as the later fetal stages, and at each stage link it tells you a lot of detail about the development taking place.
Bioscience.org - this one is similar to The Visible Embryo and says a lot of the same stuff, but with more weird diagrams and things! It was the first one I found during my pregnancy with Arthur, so I quoted it a lot more than the other one then.
I should put those on my links page. I should DECLUTTER my links page! It has so many things that aren't that relevant any more, and broken links and all sorts. But I'll probably never get around to that! One day, maybe.
Anyway. Sprout is at Stage 14 at the moment, and updates about details will get fewer and further between from now on, because the stages happen very close together up to stage 14 (like every couple of days), but stage 14 covers 4-8 weeks from fertilization. I am just over 4, so the same stage will continue for another 4 weeks nearly. By the end of it though, all Sprout's major organs will be developed. How amazing is that?!
Okay I need to go and eat the last few bits of my very COLD food, hehe! Let's see, what other little things can I comment on before I go? I am peeing a little more. Nothing too special because I'm not really drinking enough, but still peeing more all the same. I can't make it through the night without one or two pees. I am having a few twingy stabby pains low in my abdomen in my pelvic area. Some almost up to my tummy button! I know they are all good signs that my womb is growing and stretching, which is exciting! I am really excited about this pregnancy, and it's sinking in more and more each day now that I'm really FEELING pregnant!
We have a definite boys name! Of course it may change. The middle name will be Gerrard, after Neil's dad. We don't know if he'll still be alive when the baby is born, but we think that every year and he's still hanging in there, amazingly! So Cameron was definitely the first boy name to use as a special middle name, and that's Arthur's middle name. Now the next special name will be Gerrard. Fortunately it goes great with our choice of first name and our surname :) We had two girls names but we've already gone off one of them, and the other I'm not so sure about. Girls names are so hard! None of them jump out at me and make me ooh and ahh and think how we simply HAVE to name our daughter that. But I don't want to settle for a name that DOESN'T make me feel that way. Hmpfh. Plenty of time yet though.
I am soooooooo bloated!! I have horrible gassy pains and I think some of my evening nausea is probably to do with the fact that my whole gastro-intestinal tract is inflated with air at that time of day! My whole abdomen stands out and feels tight and hollow with air, ugh. I used to get this ALL the time with IBS, so I know it's that. It used to make me feel nauseous enough to pace and have a bowl near me some evenings, so I'm sure it could be contributing to the evening nausea now. Blargh. Anyway, I keep reading how totally normal gassiness and bloating is in the first trimester. And I remember as much from Arthur, so I'll just wait it out.
Okay I am going to bed now. I feel like I could sleep for a year! Night night :)
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