23 weeks pregnant: Sophie's Pregnancy Tonic

Of course when you’re pregnant everybody wants to know what you’re craving. I’m sure my coworkers are just dying to hear that I’ve been eating Big Macs and ice cream sundaes, since I generally eat very healthily and they find this extremely disturbing. But apparently I do live in an alternate universe where raw green beans and mustard is a perfectly acceptable snack.

Side note: dipping vegetables in mustard is not a pregnancy thing either; I’ve been doing that for years. I’m just semi-obsessed with mustard. Totally normal.

The only new craving I’ve had is for tart herbal tea blends, most of which contain hibiscus flowers. For some reason, this tea is pretty much the only fluid I can stomach. After I discovered this and drank gallons of the stuff a day, I decided on a whim that I should probably Google if hibiscus is safe for consumption during pregnancy.

This is where you scream useless protests at me, much like you would do while watching a horror movie. "NO! STOP! WHY WOULD YOU GO INTO THE HAUNTED BASEMENT ALONE? WHO DOES THAT?"

Internet consensus: probably not, and also why are you trying to poison your unborn child? God. Damn. It.

I called my midwives, who assured me that they could care less if I ate a basket of hibiscus flowers a day. Okay, they may have not said exactly that, because that would be weird, but they did think it was totally safe for me to drink my beloved tea.

I’ve since bought enormous quantities of the stuff and have been drinking that pretty much exclusively. I even started making a juice cocktail with it that I’ve nicknamed Sophie’s Pregnancy Tonic. So if I can just travel back to the 1930’s and peddle it as a cure all, I’d be set.

I think the lesson here, as it always is, is DON’T GOOGLE ANYTHING EVER WHEN YOU’RE PREGNANT. Which is of course why I continue to do it on a daily basis.

Not very interesting but that’s my big pregnancy craving. After I finished off yet another box last week, I announced to Joe that I was probably going to give birth to a giant hibiscus flower. Strangely I have not had nightmares about this yet.