Bump watch 2012

7/22/12 Almost 15 weeks pregnant

First off, why is it that every time I open Microsoft Word, there is a “critical update” to install? How is it that each version is just as crappy as the last? But I digress.

Nothing new and exciting to report on the pregnancy front. Still nauseated most of the time, no bump.  Several people have told me that I’m starting to show but seriously, I’m not. I honestly believe that now that everybody knows I’m pregnant, people stare at my gut ALL THE TIME and a lady can’t suck it in 24-7. Plus there’s the whole pregnant = bloated like a beached whale thing.

Luckily, I’m a nurse so I already own a maternity wardrobe. It’s called scrubs. I feel weird when I wear pants that don’t have an elastic waistband or tops that aren’t four times too big for me.

On the nausea front, no real change. Still feel I have some sort of cruel stomach virus that makes you gain weight. I also attribute the heightened sense of smell to the nausea. It’s not so much that I can smell better, just that every smell makes me sick. I often think of an episode of King of the Hill where Bobby is put on a Ritalin-like drug that heightens all his senses. He sits in the kitchen, starring blankly into space. He sniffs. “The milk in the fridge is about to go sour.” He announces. He pauses. “And there it goes…”

Indeed, Bobby, indeed. 

Sometimes I still bake

In other news, I still bake. I've had to cut down since college, since I no longer have our roommate Brian to count on eating everything I make. Recently I made a plum upside down cake in order to use up a bunch of plums we got in our produce box. Joe ate it within 48 hours so pretty successful, I'd say.

Plum upside down cake, adapted from Real Simple

Ingredients

• 1/2  cup  (1 stick) plus 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, plus extra for the pan, at room temperature
• 4  firm, ripe plums, each cut into 8 wedges (This looked measly and I cut them into 16)
• 1/4  cup  plus 2/3 cup granulated sugar (I cut this down to 1/3 cup and thought it was fine)
• 1  cup  all-purpose flour
• 3/4  teaspoon  baking powder
• 1/4  teaspoon  baking soda
• 1/4  teaspoon  kosher salt
• 1  large egg
• 2/3  cup  sour cream (I used plain nonfat greek yogurt)
• 1  teaspoon  pure vanilla extract

Directions

1. Heat oven to 350° F. Butter an 8-inch cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.
2. Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the plums and 1/4 cup of the sugar and cook, tossing, until the sugar dissolves and the juices from the plums become syrupy, 3 to 4 minutes. Arrange the plums in the cake pan in slightly overlapping concentric circles, starting from the outside. Spoon any pan juices over the top.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
4. With an electric mixer, beat the remaining 1/2 cup of the butter and 2/3 cup of the sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg, sour cream, and vanilla. Gradually add the flour mixture, mixing just until incorporated.
5. Pour the batter over the plums and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 50 to 55 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 1 hour. Place a large plate over the cake pan and invert the cake onto the plate. ______________________________________________________________________________

In conclusion, here's a terrifying fact about Martha Stewart:

Thanks Martha Stewart! Now I know just how to welcome my bambino into the world. 

Stop ruining my life, google.

7/14/12 – About 13 weeks pregnant

Well, I was really hoping that I would magically wake up the morning of week 13 with no morning sickness but alas, it persists. My midwife says that hopefully it will ease up between 15-18 weeks so that’s the new light at the end of the tunnel.

On the up side, Peapod was looking more humanoid at my 12 week ultrasound. Which means that it looks less like a gummy bear and more like Skeletor. Progress, people. I gave Joe a high five when I read that the little peanut should no longer have a tail at this point. Good work, baby.

Pregnancy is pretty amazing in that I’m pretty sure I’m still eating at a calorie deficit but have somehow still managed to put on a couple pounds. Like, where are you getting this extra stuff to store? Are you converting my bones to fat stores? I was kind of hoping I could avoid that pesky gaining weight part of pregnancy. Thanks, evolution.

I’m a pretty little chick and was feeling pretty okay about my total lack of baby bump until I googled what other women look like this far along and now I totally have a complex. Some of these women have legit cute little bumps. And I look like I ate too many cupcakes last night, if that.

So lesson learned. Do not, I repeat, do not, google anything. You will be totally paranoid about how your pregnancy compares to others and then you will convince yourself that the cherries you ate half an hour ago are going to poison you with listeria because you are a fool that never washes fruit. Also, all the glowing pregnant ladies with cute bumps and not a lick of nausea will send you into a murderous rage.

So don’t google stuff. Instead you should probably eat some macaroni and cheese while watching episodes of Jersey Shore.  It’s working out for me pretty well.

Everybody has been asking me if I’ve been having cravings yet and the short answer is no. Every food makes me want to die. There are some foods that make me want to die less, if you want to call that “cravings”. Probably worse than food actually is any fluid, which I just can’t stomach. I read in a pregnancy book the other idea that I should be striving for 12 glasses of water a day and I actually snorted. I consider it a great accomplishment if I’m able to gag down 32 oz of fluid in my 9 hour work day. Someone we work with brought in sugar free lemonade from Hot Dog on a Stick and I was able to drain that sucker pretty good. So I’m all about lemon water and lemonade right now. Peanut butter and fruit are other faithful standbys. But really, these are things I was semi-obsessed with before pregnancy so who knows.

In other news, pregnancy has made me even lamer than my usual lame self but provides an excellent excuse to take bubble baths before going to sleep at 8 pm. It also had made me fully appreciate the true beauty that is Cinnamon Toast Crunch*. But let’s be honest, you don’t have to be knocked up to realize that.

*This message was not brought to you by Cinnamon Toast Crunch. However, I will not turn away large sums of money from General Mills if they wish to offer it to me. Just putting that out there.

Mood swings? I WILL CUT YOU.

6/30/12 – about 11 weeks

My trip to California went much better than imagined. Or much worse, depending on how you look at it. My flying anxiety was much lower than usual, though I think this was because I was so nauseated (a charming combination of morning sickness and motion sickness) and sleep deprived that my body didn’t have the energy to produce adrenaline.

 We took a couple red eyes, each flight several hours long. And despite the fact that I was too busy drooling and chanting a mantra of DO NOT THROW UP IN PUBLIC, DO NOT THROW UP IN PUBLIC to claw the walls off the plane as per usual, I still couldn’t sleep a wink. Even pumped full of my usual sedatives, I normally can’t sleep on airplanes. Every single bump, tremor or small noise makes me jump ten feet out of my seat while I instantly imagine ten different fiery deaths. I insist on sitting in the window seat on each flight so at the very least I can make sure that weird buzzing noise wasn’t an engine falling off or that the series of turbulence did not in fact dislodge a wing.

So by flight number 2, I hadn’t slept at all and was so nauseated that I feared an Exorcist-like vomiting scenario. For the first time in years, I searched out the little complimentary barf bags and was disturbed that they were both miniscule and seemingly made of tissue paper. Not reassuring. Thankfully somewhere on the second flight my body gave out and I passed out for an hour or so, with brief moments of, “OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT WE ARE CERTAINLY GOING TO DI- ZZZzzzzzz…”

And then we drove to San Francisco to visit my sister, where I’m sure any “baby weight” I’ve gained to this point is really just a collection of the alarming amount of pizza I ate.

While my morning sickness hasn’t gotten any better or worse in intensity, I have been able to tolerate a wider variety of foods. Which is to say, more than dry toast and SpaghettiOs. I’ve even eaten the occasional vegetable! Very exciting.

Other than the nausea, I’m still fairly comfortable and feeling pretty non-pregnant. I do get tired more easily but it also doesn’t help that the magic nausea medication I ritualistically take is a ¼ tablet of doxylamine, otherwise known as the over the counter sleep medication, Unisom. So obviously it makes me sleepy, especially if I’m having a particularly bad morning and have to re-dose in the AM. Combine that with the whole growing another human being thing and yeah, I’m tired.

I’ve only had a few of the fabled mood swings. I think anyway, Joe may tell you differently. I am more emotional in general and any commercial involving a baby instantly makes my eyes well up. But any huge emotional 180’s have been more rare. The big one that comes to mind was a couple weeks ago on a weekend, where I suddenly became paralyzed with depression for no apparent reason. Joe convinced me to crawl from my fetal position on the couch to the bedroom, where I cried and then took a nap and felt a lot better.

Anyways hoping I’ll feel a little better once the first trimester ends, at least a little less puke-y. Please keep all your anecdotes about women who have morning sickness their entire pregnancy to yourself, I really don’t want to consider that a possibility and might be forced to do you bodily harm. See? No mood swings at all.

Morning sickness, you wretched beast

6/14/12 – About 9 weeks pregnant

So was MIA for a while there because right on schedule at 5 weeks pregnant the morning sickness kicked in and I’ve spent most of my time focusing on not vomiting. I’ve worked out a medication regimen that at least takes the edge off. I still can’t be near anything food related until about noon without wanting to die but at least I’m not throwing up constantly. The other day I forgot to take my medicine and promptly threw up multiple times. Lesson learned.

People have asked me if I’ve been craving anything, to which I say HAHAHAHA. NO. DO NOT WANT FOOD EVER AGAIN.

Mostly I eat bland carbs. Cheesy carbs are especially good. I ate one of those awful frozen mac and cheeses the other day and thought I had died and gone to heaven. Bland!  Carb-y! Reminiscent of cheese! Mushy to the point of predigested! Perfect.

I usually eat a pretty healthy diet but for the last month I haven’t been able to look at a vegetable without dry heaving. So I’m eating a very balanced diet of bread and cheese. Good thing they make you take a multivitamin. All the morning sickness info I’ve read basically says look, just eat what you can eat and don’t worry about it. The baby will just steal from your own bodily stores! Great. Thieving, thieving babies…

Here is what the little cupcake looked like when we first checked in, by the way. Good news, honey, we are gestating a gummy bear! 

In other news, told most of the extended family as well the past week or so. Last night we went out to dinner with Joe’s extended family and told them there. Well, Joe told them there. It was extraordinarily loud and half the family was at a different table next to us. So Joe eventually went over to the other table and shouted that I was pregnant, possibly using hand gestures to illustrate his point. And I’m sure everybody swung around to look at me, where I was probably grimacing and poking glumly at some soup. The vision of motherhood! Everybody was like, “Congratulations!!” to which I said, “Thanks. Please stop making sudden movements.”

Joe and I go to California tonight, part vacation and part work so I’m looking forward to that. Except for the Xanax-less plane ride, since Xanax is verboten during pregnancy. Which is a huge bummer for me. And Joe too, since my nails are quite sharp and last time we hit turbulence while flying together I about clawed Joe’s arm off.  The last time I hit turbulence solo I quickly calculated the maximum dosage of Xanax I could consume without causing organ damage and then chugged that back immediately. And then I don’t remember anything after that. AND IT WAS DELIGHTFUL.

In short, I really hate flying and am not at all basking in the joys of pregnancy. Fingers crossed, I should feel better in a couple weeks. Until then, you will find me in a fetal position on my couch, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and trying not to drool on my pillow too much. 

Sophie's first "Mother's" day

5/13/12

Joe and I decided to gather our immediate family for a mother’s day brunch and tell everybody I’m pregnant then.  We didn’t exactly plan how we were going to announce it, so Joe just said, “So we have some big news…” and then looked pointedly at me. Except at that exact moment I was busily shoving a chocolate tart in my mouth so he was forced to finish the big announcement.

Everybody was happy for us, which was a little weird for me really. I guess I never got over growing up with the message, “DON’T GET PREGNANT!!”  I was like really? You guys aren’t going to disown me?

Still feeling normal except for cravings for a salt lick. My TV snack as of late is a big jar of capers. Also picked up a Costco sized jar of pickles so my blood pressure should be through the roof in no time.

In other news, I made the mistake of telling Joe that they blastocyte is about the size of a poppy seed right now and now he looks at me in terror whenever I make a sudden movement. The does not bode well for the next 8 months.

It's official

5/12/12 – a little over 4 weeks pregnant

Blood tests came back very much positive and my nurse practitioner is pleased with how everything looks. It’s official: I’m pregnant! WHAT?

Joe was in favor of waiting until after the first trimester to tell friends and family so we could make sure everything was truly okay. While I do want to wait to tell the world (meaning Facebook) it’s just not reasonable to wait that long to tell immediate friends and family. We’ve gone to several family dinners in the last week and of course everybody asks if anything is new with Joe and I. And Joe and I look at each other in a panic and go, “HAHA NOTHING NEW WHY WOULD YOU ASK? DEFINITLEY NOTHING LIFE CHANGING. SOPHIE IS DEFINITELY NOT GROWING A BABY.” It’s torture.