Telling the Parents

2/28/13 - 8 weeks 3 days

Nothing terribly new and exciting the last couple of weeks except that we told our parents. (More about that in a minute.) My morning sickness is worse in the afternoons and evenings, which I remember from last time. (It seems more frequent and harder to get rid of than last time, but that may just be my brain not remembering things from last time. Not sure.) It starts getting unpleasant around 2:00 and then there are bouts of it off and on until I'm asleep regardless of what I eat or how much or when. I now have a baggie of crackers on the bedside table because last week I had to get up for a snack at 11:30 at night after lying there hoping the barfiness would go away, which it didn't. Eating a little something helps most of the time, but not always and not always for very long. However, for about the last week-ish, sometimes I'll start to feel sick again while eating! Generally, I push through it because I know I need to eat. I've only stopped and put the food away in the middle of a meal once.

I'm more tired and my boobs hurt more, to the point where it hurts to hold the kitty against my chest sometimes, and if someone who is skinny hugs me, it's uncomfortable. I had a few days off from uterus cramps/pulled muscle feeling (not bad, just there), and now they're back. Sometimes if I sneeze or cough or sit/stand up too fast, there's a bigger pulled-muscle-feeling which is not very pleasant, but it reminds me to slow down. Other than those things and the "morning" sickness, I feel pretty okay. (Except the other night I swear I peed about 20 times between getting home and going to bed!) Of course I like the times when I have more symptoms because it makes me feel like all is well with my body and my baby, and I get a little worried when I feel little to nothing. To remind myself to chill out, I keep thinking of it like this: When you're growing as a little kid, you don't grow the same amount every day until you reach your full height; you grow in spurts. You'll have a spurt, then nothing for a little while. Same thing with pregnancy, right?

 

There's a bit of a pooch there, or a little more of one than usual. Twice now with two different pair of pants, I've expanded them (safety pin for one, hair tie for the other) because they were just too tight since they sat right across my uterus (about the size of an orange now). I think with my next paycheck I will probably buy a pair or two of pants, though I'm not sure they need to be maternity pants yet, just bigger ones. I've mostly been wearing looser stuff, though admittedly I am staying "sucked in" when I'm in public.

The baby itself is the size of a green olive, yuck. Dad calls them monster eyes. Lovely. :P 

This past weekend I took Monday off for a three day weekend and we went to stay with our parents. We'd been planning this for a couple of weeks anyway, but it worked out well that around 8 weeks, we got to announce my pregnancy to them! We stayed with Matt's dad and stepmom Saturday night and mine Sunday night. We'd brought a bottle of wine to Matt's folks to have with dinner and they opened it a little early for a taste. Matt just said, "Well, Heather can't have any of that tonight," and we told them I was almost 8 weeks along. With Mom and Dad, after Dad finished saying the blessing over lunch on Sunday, I asked if I could pray for one more thing. We all closed our eyes again and I said, "And thank you for the baby Heather's going to have in October." Mom got a little teary and came over to hug me, but otherwise everyone was pretty chill about it. Excited and happy, of course, but I think we're all sort of cautiously optimistic this time. We're not telling anyone else, even Matt's sisters, until after my first midwife appointment, which is a week from today. (More about that in a minute, too.) Later next month (March), I think we will tell some close friends.

I've become dependent on mints lately. It's a pain to try and talk at school with gum in my mouth, but a mint is smaller and dissolves fairly quickly. When I'm feeling barfy but I can't eat something (say during class when I've got 30 teenagers in the room and don't want to be conspicuous), I pop in a mint. I go through probably four or five in a day! But hey, whatever works. I've also shoved a couple of crackers in my mouth during passing period a time or two.

We should, God willing, be able to hear the heartbeat at the first appointment next week when I will be 8.5 weeks. I also want to ask if there's anything else we can do or any other way to monitor that things are going well. I may have said this in a previous post, but I don't see much point in checking that my HCG levels are rising appropriately if there's nothing we can do about it if they're not. All it would do is serve to worry us, possibly for no reason but possibly because something was wrong. If, however, there's something we could do to help if we find out things aren't progressing as they should, then it's worth the time and money to have the blood tests. We'll talk to the midwife and see.

One last thing: Our choir/orchestra teacher came over to me today in the hall during passing period and leaned in to whisper, "Are you pregnant again?" !!!!! I smiled and asked, "Why would you say that?" She said she just had a feeling. Whaaaaaaat? I don't like lying, but I don't want to tell anyone yet! I told her I'd let her know when I knew something, and we're working on it (which we are... or I am, since it's my body that's working on growing the baby). WEIRD.