The 3rd Trimester

By the 3^rd trimester I was the size of a beached whale and definitely felt like one. I could barely move, couldn’t sleep and just wanted Baby H to arrive.

Throughout the pregnancy Baby H was measuring on the 95^th centile, which means that only 5 babies out of 100 would be measuring larger than her, which isn’t a lot. This also meant that she was a rather large baby, which explained the giant bump. Baby Daddy when born weighed a hefty 10lbs you can imagine how terrified I was at the thought of pushing a 10lb baby out of not so large hole. Every time we had a scan, which was 4 times (another post will explain) they kept mentioning how large the baby’s tummy was duh duh duhhhhh… I was terrified. On our last scan which was at 34 weeks they said Baby H was roughly 7lbs and on average a baby would gain 1/2lb a week, this meant if we had got to 40 weeks Baby H would be weighing roughly 10lbs (terrified face).   

  
29+5 weeks 

By the 3^rd trimester I didn’t have any real cravings but I did enjoy a chocolate milk every now and then…I lied, a pint a day…I lied again sometimes even 2, promise that was it. I also no longer felt sick or nauseas, big thumbs up but the bottom of my back ached and my groin was swollen and it took me a couple of minutes to get up and down, big thumbs down.

I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I was fed up with being pregnant and I am not ashamed of saying that. I know that some people love being pregnant and have a glow blah blah blah, but the only glow I felt was that I no longer looked as crap as I did in the 1^st trimester. I was so uncomfortable by the end I couldn’t sleep in my bed as I couldn’t get up out of it, Baby Daddy made me too hot and my bump didn’t allow me to get comfortable so I had to sleep on the sofa. Every day I hoped that Baby H would make her appearance because honestly I forgot what it felt like to not be pregnant and really wanted my body back. I am pretty sure that I am not the only one who has felt that way and I do not think we should be ashamed to admit it.

The 3^rd trimester was the hardest, I felt like I had no control of my body it was being controlled by a small-handed person on the inside and she was having a whale of a time with my bladder. The 2^nd trimester was the best as I no longer had the nausea or morning sickness and had a lot more energy than I did in the 1^st. The 1^st trimester was the messiest as you can imagine.

I would love to hear about your pregnancy and the ups and downs you felt because one thing I have learnt through out this process is that everyone has a different process.  

Baby Mumma xx   

25 Weeks

25 Weeks

Is anyone else finding it tough to sleep?

I have always been one of those people that could shut their eyes be asleep within minutes and then not wake up for 6-8 hours, whereas Baby Daddy takes ages to fall asleep and then can stir by the smallest of sounds.

Since being pregnant I am having a lot of trouble sleeping and it is getting on my nerves. I know people say that it is your body training you for when the baby comes but in my opinion I should be able to sleep now so when baby H does turn up I’m all well rested and ready to go. But no I am up at least twice a night to go to the toilet and now indigestion has kicked in so when I am trying to sleep I am lying there with terrible heart burn and indigestion plus my bump is constantly in the way. Why body why?!

I know my bump is in fact my beautiful baby but gosh it is getting in my way when I sleep. The weight of the bump and gravity do not bode well for sleeping, I can no longer sleep on my back as it hurts my spine too much and lying on my side means I topple over from the weight of my bump. I have had to start sleeping with a pillow underneath by bump to keep me straight and take the weight off the bump. This helps until I switch sides because in a semi-conscious state I have to remember take the pillow over with me to the other side. 

One night I must have been on one side for too long as the baby was lying on a certain nerve at the top of my left leg which caused the whole leg to go dead which was fun when I got up for my mandatory wee at 3am. After walking up and down the hallway to make the pins and needles go I had a numbing pain at the top of my left leg and groin which didn’t help when I was trying to fall back asleep.

I can walk in the pitch black from my side of the bed, around the bed through the corridor and into the bathroom without hurting myself, impressive right? Thinking about the positives.

The worst thing about not sleeping great at night is how tired I am throughout the day, I wake up in the morning tired and only get more tired throughout the day so by 6pm I am shattered and could go to bed. 

Let’s just hope all this ‘training’ does indeed help when Baby H gets here maybe I should start getting Baby Daddy up as well?

24 Weeks

24 Weeks

I can proudly say that I am not afraid of the labour section of pregnancy.

In my head from the moment I fell pregnant I have had the same thought about giving birth and that is ‘you can’t stop the labour from happening so why be scared of it’. I can imagine a lot of women have wished, begged and tried to stop the labour from happening but as much as everyone tries it is going nowhere. We do not suffer with weak bladder, sickness and indigestion for 9 months to not get the reward at the end. 

For the past 5 years I have suffered with IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and in that time I have easily suffered with the worst pain I have yet to go through. The pain is all in my lower abdominal which I can imagine is a very similar place to child birth.

Going through the pain of IBS I now know and so does Baby Daddy how I deal with (in my opinion) extreme pain and hopefully this will help for child birth. Firstly the pain comes in waves much like contractions, the tight, stomach punching pain can last between 30 seconds and 2 minutes and will then ease for a couple of minutes and it can go on like that for hours sometimes.

Going through these waves of pain I get extremely hot and need a wet cold flannel on the back of my neck to keep me cool, I will also strip of all clothes as they make me feel even hotter and very claustrophobic. I find the part of my body that gets the hottest is my feet and they swell (which is always lovely). This is one point I will definitely mention to the midwife’s as I will over heat and probably strip down.

The second thing I will mention to the midwife’s is that I deal with the pain quite internally and like to breathe through it and once the wave of pain has gone or subsided that is when I normally will talk to Baby Daddy and ask him for a new cold flannel or some water. I personally don’t think I am going to be a screamer as I do like to breathe through it and count in my head.

The worst thing I feel about my IBS pain is that I am not too sure on what my body is about to do and this is what mentally scares me especially when I am on my own. Sometimes I don’t know if I am going to be sick, pass out or poo myself! (All 3 of these things have happened, thankfully not at the same time). The one thing about giving birth is I know what my body is trying to do so hopefully fingers crossed this keeps my head in a good place and I won’t be too scared and plus I have Baby Daddy and a trained team on hand to help me with anything I need.

Hopefully going through the pain of IBS for the past 5 years will help me understand not necessarily the pain I will feel giving birth but how I will deal with the pain. It will also help those around me if I explain that I get very hot, don’t like my feet being touched and go quiet. Let’s wait and see what happens in 16 weeks’ time.

Baby Mumma xx

22 Weeks

Lets talk symptoms…

A few of the symptoms I have felt are;

-       Tiredness

-       Extreme Emotion

-       Lack of appetite

-       Gagging

-       Nausea

-       Generally feeling low and deflated

-       Full Bladder!

The first thing I want to make apparent is that I didn’t find out I was pregnant until I was 12 weeks. This meant that I was trying to find reasons for my symptoms which obviously looking back now was all because I was pregnant and some of the excuses may of contributed but were not the only reason.

Lets start with tiredness; March to June is the busiest months at my work and probably the worst months to fall pregnant. We were very busy and I was working a lot of overtime, which I thought explained the tiredness. I was knackered, one weekend I was only awake for about 8 hours over the 48-hour period and that was only because Baby Daddy woke me up to eat. I didn’t start to feel tired until Easter time, which meant I would have been 4-6 weeks, don’t worry though the tiredness stopped at about 18 weeks. Baby Daddy and I noticed a sudden difference in my fatigue and since then I have had a lot more energy to get up and do things. I have struggled to keep my eyes open some days, I do not know what it is going to be like once Baby H gets here, they do say its your body going into training.

I have never cried so much in my life than I have done in the past 22 weeks. I have cried at adverts and sometimes I don’t even know why I was crying. Again we put this down to being stressed and unhappy at work it seemed to be the best excuse for most of the symptoms I was having.

I will talk about gagging, nausea and lack of appetite in one paragraph as I do feel they all go hand-in-hand. About 3 weeks before I found out I was pregnant a nasty bug was going around the office and of course I caught it. For a week I was bed ridden; I couldn’t eat, I had swollen tonsils, diarrhea, vomiting, think about anything you could have, and I had it. Even though this only lasted a week I thought that my pregnancy symptoms, which obviously continued after the bug, was my body still just getting over the sickness. I have a very good gag reflex normally, not many things could make me wretch, my sister on the other hand only has to smell something bad and will gag for 5 minutes. A good friend at work who also had the horror bug was saying that she was still gagging even though we were both better, to me this made sense to why I was gagging. I can officially say that gagging is horrific! If you are someone who suffers from a short gag reflex I feel your pain and do not know how you live your life as everything was making me gag. When I say everything I mean I was gagging at everything! A few of the most memorable and weird things were; walking into a warm room, walking through a swarm of midges and people talking about number 2’s. Due to all the gagging this is what made me be sick the handful of times that I did, it was only when I couldn’t breath through it, or control it that I threw up, thankfully.

**Side note ‘Morning Sickness’ is bull it should be called ‘All Day Sickness’ it does not just happen in the morning do not be fooled!**

Along side the gagging I continuously felt nauseas, for a good 6 weeks. To help this I ate the most; plain, boring, tasteless food you could think of. I had rice and corn cakes coming out of my ears, none of the fancy flavours literally plain maybe lightly salted. I ate these for breakfast and lunch for 6 weeks, this is what seemed to settle my stomach and help the sick feeling. Another food that I felt helped was mints, I would suck on them through-out the day to keep my stomach occupied and from building up the acid which was causing the nausea. Due to the nauseas feeling I completely lost my appetite and within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy I lost quite a bit of weight obviously I didn’t know I was pregnant so was not looking out for myself in the way the books say you should. Thankfully at about 19 weeks I found my appetite; which I am very happy about, the one downfall is I cannot eat as much as I used to. I can now only eat half a pizza!

Before finding out I was pregnant I was feeling very low. I couldn’t 100% explain everything I was feeling and I was getting upset and frustrated. The day I had my doctors appointment I was expecting to be written off work and given anti-depressants that is how low I felt. I am not embarrassed about how low and depressed I felt at the beginning as my body was changing and preparing in ways that I can never understand or explain. Maybe if I had found out earlier I would of understood why I was feeling the way I was and could of helped myself through it better, instead I didn’t want to get out of bed, do the things I enjoy doing or some days even talk to people. The moment I did find out I was pregnant the doctor made sense of all the symptoms and I did instantly feel better as I had answers to why I felt terrible.

The last symptom I am going to talk about is one that I think will last until this little rascal is in the world and that is my bladder! I can honestly say I think I have gone to toilet more in the past 22 weeks than I have in a year. When I am awake I wee 3 times an hour, honestly. I am one of those people who can sleep through a thunderstorm but since being pregnant I wake up at least 3 times a night to wee, which can be very frustrating. One positive I can walk from our bedroom to the toilet in the pitch black.

I hope that hearing about my symptoms will help you feel less strange as I would of felt a lot better to know that I wasn’t the only one who could fill a pool with urine within a day. I would love to hear about the symptoms you guys had/have as I do feel everyone is different and we should all help each other through this confusing time in our bodies lives.   

Baby Mumma xx