By now you may have noticed that my baby story begins a few months before my first post. To be honest, it absolutely took just that long for the whole thing to sink in. Since day one, I have been ridiculously happy about the whole event, but it didn't become real until our second trip to the OB/GYN (obstemagician/gynecologist).
I'll get to that shortly.
From what I understand, the first trimester was a piece of cake – relatively speaking. My wife lucked out, at least in one respect. She had no morning sickness whatsoever. In fact, the only vomiting that took place during the entire first trimester was my little adventure in the ladies' room in the gas station.
Once you have a baby on the way, people that you know will tell you all sorts of things about their experiences with pregnancy – and we heard some horror stories. You might get off as easily as we did, or you might end up with mom-to-be violently vomiting morning, noon, and night. Sure, that sounds bad…but just imagine how old it would get after weeks and week with no relief.
So no complaints from me about the lack of morning sickness, though my wife may beg to differ. She was actually just barely nauseous, pretty much all the time for a couple of months. I know she wouldn't have traded that feeling for the painful constant vomiting, but on the other hand she mentioned more than once how good it would feel to just get it over with already. She had trouble eating and was in a pretty much constant state of trying to balance her nausea out with crackers and ginger ale.
Other than that, there was the fatigue. She was tired – a lot. Fortunately, a recent career move had brought her home to run our writing business full-time, so she was at least able to keep her own hours and take a nap if she damn well felt like it.
I supposed she would have dealt with it one way or another if she was forced to keep regular hours at a regular job, but I'm glad we didn't have to put her through that.
One thing that did happen – perhaps magnified by the fact that she was spending a lot of time at home – was that she developed an obsessive need to research pregnancy. She joined message boards and web communities and read everything there was to read on the subject, which often led her to fret about various symptoms that could be an early indication of this or that.
My advice to any men out there (or lesbians that won the rock-paper-scissors match to determine who had to carry the artificially-conceived bundle of joy) is not to discourage this practice. It is a fight you will not win.
I ended up feeling pretty guilty about not having the same constant and obsessive interest in all things pre-natal, but I just couldn't bring myself to keep up. Instead, I just did my best to stay supportive of whatever she was learning.
When she decided that artificial sugars were bad for the baby, we gave them up together. Same with caffeine (though since she hates coffee, I was permitted to maintain my usual coffee intake guilt-free ~ thank gawd).
So the moral of the story: listen well, nod a lot, and stay supportive.
I know I'm breezing though the ol' pregnancy timeline pretty quickly, but I'm honestly just trying to catch up to the present so I can start recapping the day-to-day now that things have really started to get interesting.
Hang in there, we'll be up at week 12 before you know it!
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