Hello everyone! As this is my first blog ever I may be a little awkward but I’m gonna try to word everything properly for you so you don’t have to try and figure out some unknown language I’ve just made up on the spot.
So considering at the minute this is all I know; live; sleep; breathe, I’m gonna be talking about pregnancy, babies and all that jazz. Don’t get me wrong I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable as i should be at 36 weeks pregnant but I’ve picked up a few things that I didn’t know and I’m gonna share it with you, even the gruesome stuff that still makes me cringe thinking about it.
So I should probably start from the beginning.
First Trimester.
So, Finding out I was pregnant was terrifying, I always tried to stay away from kids as much as possible, I didn’t like the sounds they made, or the way they run around and generally have more energy that me so knowing that I had one growing in my belly was horrifying and what was even more scary was telling my boyfriend and my mum.
I didn’t want to make my boyfriend feel like he was trapped or throwing away his life and you know, he didn’t take it well at first. I didn’t expect him too, It’s a pretty big deal. But he never left my side, we went to the doctors and the doctor straight up offered me an abortion. It was super awkward and the fact that they just offered it me there and then was just shocking. I didn’t want an abortion… like at the time I didn’t want a baby either but an abortion, nah that’s not for me. I turned down the abortion and she referred me to the midwife, telling me if I change my mind before my booking appointment I could always go back and be referred for the abortion. To anyone who gets the same treatment from their doctor please leave the clinic and think it through before deciding what you really want. being offered something like that so easily can sway you towards it easier than you think whether you want one or not. After the appointment with the doctor I felt better knowing there was options, I wasn’t stuck this way if I didn’t want to be but like I said, think before you actually choose. for the time leading up-to my midwife appointment it honestly felt like a lie, like there was nothing in there.
I still looked and felt pretty normal even though I knew there was a tiny thing developing and growing in me. At the booking appointment, once again I was terrified and didn’t know what was going to happen. even talking to the receptionist made my heart thud. We sat for a good 10 minutes in the waiting room where we was basically alone, then a midwife called me and my boyfriend into a room and introduced herself. She wasn’t meant to be my midwife and it took me a good 29 weeks to actually meet my midwife but the midwife i’d met my first appointment was lovely and even though i still felt super awkward she made me feel better about a lot of stuff. There was a number of things she asked me about that I was completely clueless about, then I had to do a chlamydia swab which is totally normal by the way. A pee test, and a bunch of other stuff which I was totally uncomfortable with, but apparently its all very important.
Nothing much happened in between my booking appointment and the first scan I had except the never-ending morning sickness, day in day out. In fact I just want to say well done to every single woman who has gone through morning sickness because oh my god I never want it again. It was literally a never ending loop of feeling sick from being hungry, trying to eat but smells tastes and textures made me physically sick, then being sick from being hungry again. Trying to take vitamins to keep myself and my baby healthy but throwing it back up. Honestly everything made me sick and sometimes I felt like nobody quiet understood how bad it was, like morning sickness is nothing like being ill. It’s being highly uncomfortable, Feeling and being physically sick, being weak and hot all the time. Trust me, Unless my experience was fully OTT then you will not be a happy bunny with morning sickness.
Anyway I somehow managed to lose track a bit there… MY FIRST SCAN! Okay so this is where everything got real, because up until now I totally didn’t believe anything that was happening too me and I still didn’t have a bump or movement or anything, which BTW guys is totally normal at this point. I was 13 weeks and 5 days and my baby was just a little bean with a fat head who couldn’t be bothered to move for the sonographer even when she made me stick my bum in the air and wiggle it around to see if I could jiggle the little guy into a more visible position. I can definitely confirm that the first time you really believe your little bean in there is when you see it’s heartbeat thudding away. (like everyone’s experience is different I guess but that’s when I believed it any who) and I’m being genuinely serious its magical, like your heart melts and its better than anything you’ve ever seen before.
After my first scan everything went slowly again and sometimes I forgot I was even pregnant still, I’d definitely gotten a little belly going on because people I didn’t know started to ask when the bump was due, how far along I was and all that. My morning sickness was still on and off some days I’d wake up knowing it was going to be a bad sicky day and other days I woke up feeling human and it was nice waking up feeling human even if i didn’t quiet look it. At this point I was still pretty clueless to everything and hadn’t had many appointments for anything even though I thought that midwives were a pretty big part of being pregnant, which they are but not to the extent I believed. I started to do a bit of research on babies, the fetal development process, and every week I would check on Bounty to see how big my bean should be and whats meant to be going on with my body during that week of being pregnant. I would recommend looking into the individual weeks of your pregnancy because you learn a lot you wasn’t aware of before such as babies tend to eat the lanugo hair that’s on their bodies in the womb and that 1 out of 25 baby boys are born with undescended testicles. I think it brings you closer to your bump because honestly just personally until you start seeing those mad kicks and punches the baby is just a bit of fat on your belly you can’t get rid of and it’s hard to think of it as another human being when you cant see it.
Second Trimester
Even though technically at my first scan I was already in my second trimester I didn’t know it at that point so i still count it as the first. There’s not a great deal I remember about being in the second trimester because I felt normal-ish again, my morning sickness was basically done (apart from the odd days that still happen now) and I still wasn’t feeling a great deal in my belly. Although one new thing that happened was painful nipples. and you know, this parts a bit odd to share but no, on a serious level my nipples were on fire. whenever I got cold my left nipple specifically would burn like it was being stabbed with a hot rod, not so much the right, but the left oh my god it was like torture and I had no idea why, or how to fix it. (I would personally just recommend to keep your nips as warm as possible to avoid this happening or use nipple cream.)
By the way if anyone was wondering at this point me and my boyfriend had started to enjoy the fact there would be a little us soon enough, and in fact we both grew to children more, so instead of avoiding loud children with ignorant parents we would just chuckle at the kids and smile at the parents because well… I don’t know you just kinda go soft. (Despite this I can still determine whether your kids a little shit or not)
So anyway… everyone wanted to know the gender of our little bean and I was totally ready to find out and go buy tiny shoes and outfits (and completely forget all the things necessary to look after a baby). My boyfriend and I were both convinced the bean would be a little girl, which we were both pretty excited about, but neither of us were bothered. Gender wasn’t going to effect our love for ‘the bean’. At about 20 weeks we had our gender scan and found out after I don’t know how long being prodded by the scanny tool that our little bean was a boy! (his bits looked like a duck on the scan)
Not long after I started to feel something, that I wouldn’t have called kicking but no, it was. It just kinda feels like tiny little butterflies that build up over time and eventually you can see brutal kung fu baby trying to rip out of your belly like in alien.
Third Trimester
So this is where I’m at now I suppose, close to the end. This is probably the trimester I learned the most in due to it being so close and wanting to know the in’s and out’s of giving birth and what not. Also around this time the midwife tends to give you all your little booklets and stuff to help you prepare, this includes booklets on breastfeeding, perineum massage, episiotomy, which is where they snip the skin between your vagina and rectum so that the baby has more room to come out and also booklets on how to look after your baby, which includes pictures of dirty nappies and the different types of poop babies have, so anything grim they can give you, they do. So this trimester is basically the one I felt the most pregnant in which obviously makes a lot of sense, My belly is now considerably a lot bigger than before, I wake up a lot with heartburn (And I mean like throwing up stomach acid at 5 am kinda heartburn) I can no longer reach round my belly, standing up is effort, my legs hurt and i want to sleep all the time and it was all so goddamn sudden! I’ve reached a point where I want it to be over, I want to feel slightly normal again and more than anything I wanna meet my little boy because there’s nothing worse than knowing you have something amazing stored away but you’ve gotta wait for it for so long that it actually becomes annoying waiting. Anyway I feel like at this point I’m just rambling so I should probably whack in a few facts.
Things you probably didn’t know about pregnancy unless you’ve been through it or studied it…
- The mucus plug. – Yeah this is definitely something I didn’t know existed and to be honest, didn’t want to know existed. So yeah, The mucus plug is what it says basically, it’s a mucus plug that plugs your cervix up until labour when it dislodges and comes out. Its main purpose is to stop infection and protect your little fetus from any dangers that could make their way up there… It’s about 4-5 cm long but you don’t always see it come out and honestly I wouldn’t google it unless you need too, because it is not pretty.
- Waters? – So in movies you’ll see a sudden gush come out and shabam, she in labour get her to the hospital oh no hurry! Yeah… that doesn’t necessarily happen, your waters can gush but they can also just trickle…. like you’re peeing yourself only you can’t stop it. Also, your waters breaking does not mean you’re about to pop your baby out.
- The pains… – Nobody tells you it hurts to be pregnant, at all. It’s not sunshine and happiness. It’s completely the opposite, backache, leg ache, headaches, boobache, cramps from your abdominal muscles stretching, stabby pains from your baby sitting on your nerves… you literally get pain from everything even though people think that being pregnant is easy and you can just laze around peacefully.
- Piles – yeah, you’ve probably heard of them, they’re also known as haemorrhoids. Pregnant people get these more easily because your growing uterus puts pressure on some of your veins including the vena cava which is a large vein on the right side of your body which pumps blood to your lower limbs. This causes them to swell or become more dilated, leaving you with piles. On the bright side, this doesn’t always happen and if it does, it goes down after giving birth so no need to worry your butt hole.
- A lot of people already know this about pregnancy unless you’re as clueless as I was before becoming pregnant. Some people poo themselves while giving birth, the reason for this is the pressure from the babies head in the birth canal actually also puts pressure on your large intestine pushing anything in there, out. but on the bright side… because trust me there is, even if you poop you don’t care because you’ve just birthed a magical little human into the world and you were in too much pain to even notice you did it.
Thanks for taking your time to read my first blog post, I do apologise if I spoke for too long but I hope you enjoyed the read or can relate to some of the things I’m saying. Do not quote me on anything because I may not be right about a lot but this is just stuff I’ve picked up through research and experience and I’ll keep you all updated on the whole Labour thing… Thanks everyone!
Enjoy your day! – Boo ♥
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