Hi! I decided to start writing about being a pregnant, normal person because I was trying to research blogs and all I could come up with were people who were training for marathon's who are 5 months pregnant, those who wanted to make all their children's clothes out of hemp, and those who spend $1M decorating nurseries. Sadly, I am none of these people. I like watching terrible TV shows, like Real Housewives of Any City, and I eat Reeses Pieces for dessert whenever I want. The purpose of this is to talk about being a pregnant person while basically being what I consider, relatively normal, however, that may be up for debate.
A couple things about myself, My name is Kaitlyn and I am 13 weeks pregnant - I live in the Magnolia neighborhood in the greater Seattle area and work a M-F job at local retailer in merchandise planning. I am married to a man who is also employed and we have a wonderful golden retriever Ellie ( aka: Peeps). This is my first pregnancy so I don't really know what I am doing, and I rely heavily on books and the internet to answer all my questions. Hopefully some of you out there will have better resources than typing in 'headache and blurry vision' into Google and finding out that you might be dying. Very reassuring!
Now a little about my pregnancy, as I said, this is my first pregnancy so I am not very confident about what I should and should not be doing but I think I have the basics covered: No booze, no hot tubs, no sauna's, no delicious deli meat, no shark meat, and no contact football. Basically don't do anything fun - and I can continually run the question through my mind, 'Are you having fun? If you are, you probably shouldn't be doing it!'. I have been fortunate not to have morning sickness my first trimester, which I hear can be a real downer (minus one side story), but I do often get shooting, painful headaches and my newest symptom, blurry vision! It makes for a great workday when you stare at a computer most of the time and can barely read it. Speaking of work, not sure if this has happened to anyone else, but my desire to work, which was extremely low before, has now reached new, mind blowingly low levels of motivation to even show up. Why can't I just stay at home, sleep in until 9 and watch Good Morning America? What did I do in life to deserve working 5 days a week!!! I don't think I have ever relied more on winning the lottery than I have right now.
Back to my quick side story - I have thrown up once, but I am still not sure if it was due to pregnancy or if I actually just drank too much lemonade...seriously. Last weekend I was driving to a wedding that was 6 hours away, and I didn't want to drink a lot because I didn't want to stop every 10 minutes to go to the bathroom. After dehydrating myself for the car ride, by the time we arrived I was very thirsty and pounded about 7 glasses of lemonade, it was so delicious! We had some dinner and I was ready for bed at the late hour of 10 PM. Unfortunately, my stomach disagreed and woke me up around 2 am to projectile vomit my delicious lemonade in the jointly shared bathroom! Unless I have picked up some odd allergy to lemonade, I am not exactly sure what happened there. The next morning I told my husband I was starving since I threw everything up, and he suggested I eat the leftover French fries out of our garbage can from his earlier run to Mcdonalds. I would be surprised if he does not win husband of the year in 2014.
Let's talk about first trimester tests next! These are by far my favorite because when you receive the results, they are essentially written in wingdings font to any normal person, with the exception of the single sentence that says 'normal', which is all you really care about. My first trip to the OB I was 9 weeks pregnant, I had the wonderful opportunity to take a full STD panel as well as an HIV test - it was an exciting time for everyone. I wasn't counting on an HIV test, but I immediately assumed I had HIV and started planning my pregnancy accordingly. Fortunately, when I received my results after waiting on the edge of my seat, I was told I did not have HIV and could continue my life normally. Yessssss!!! I also wish someone would have told me when I got these blood tests, they were planning on taking 5 VIALS of blood from me in one sitting, I feel like that was a lot and I was not prepared for it as I was passing out by the end. My second round of tests were for downs and trisomy, which again, I received a sheet of random information and all I could see was the word 'normal'. However I have many questions about these 'odds' they have listed...I plan on asking my Dr. about this when I meet him on Friday, however, it is weird that they send these results with very little explanation. I did refer to my best friend google, but didn't get the answers I needed.
My next appt. is this Friday, not sure what this trip will have in store for me, but hopefully something equally as terrifying as the potential for HIV and birth defects. I will keep things updated here with the random things that happen along the way. Hopefully I continue on my path of being that normal, pregnant person hanging out in Seattle.
-K
