Weeks 9-12

Preparing for nausea & food aversions, staying active, going to our first OB appointment, calendar planning the things we wanted to get done, adjusting the budget, prepping our home, looking at daycares and telling our families, this month was packed with planning. Wrapping up the first Trimester, was not what I had anticipated. All my reading and research had me prepared for a sleepy, sick first trimester, but that was not the case for me.

As a non-pregnant person, Joe already felt like I had food cravings. In my defense, sometimes I just knew exactly what I wanted to eat. Joe could probably eat, hotdogs, pizza, and ramen on rotation for the rest of his life and be perfectly happy. Joe did not want to have to make late night runs to the store so he stocked up on ice cream, cookies, pickles and other random things. Although prepared, I never ended up wanting those things. Joe happily ate them. My advice, be informed about the possible and likely symptoms and have a game plan to mitigate, but wait until they actually hit you.

The first couple weeks we were hyper-attentive to my routine and schedule making sure I was being kind to myself, but keeping up with my goals. At this point we were no longer figuring out the “rules” of pregnancy’s. In the beginning it felt like we were looking up everything we did and ate to see if it was “safe”. I am glad that stage was over. After we fell into a good rhythm and realized we were not going to have to weather the dreaded storm of feeling sick the first trimester, we were able to clear our minds and make plans for how we wanted the rest of the pregnancy to go.

Weight: 143lb. I did not see much weight change or body changes.

Symptoms: NONE. Still miraculously, I was not sleepy, I was not nauseous, I had no craving or food aversions. I did have sore breasts especially when running.

Workouts: The 75hard day challenge got tough. 2 x 45 minutes of active time a day, sometimes looked like 2 walks. I did keep up with at least a couple weight workouts a week. The challenge was complete at the 12 week mark so I had to finish. Running (my go to) was so uncomfortable. Not because of the baby or anything, at this point I couldn’t feel anything and had no weight gain. It was because my breasts were so sore. I tried wearing two bra’s to reduce the bouncing but really they felt like they were getting ripped off my body when I tried to run.

Food: There were a couple noticeable changes in my preferences. I was very hungry for a hearty meal right away in the morning, Therefore, my smoothies switched to lunch. I pretty much wanted chicken salad for three out of three meals. Not mayo chicken salad, but lettuce with chicken on it. Yes, I did wake up one morning and make myself a chicken salad at 6:00am. I also found that I was not really hungry after 7:00pm. Even if I didn’t have dinner yet. I just didn’t want it. I was also on a pretty strict eating plan for 75 day hard challenge that I eased up on. I let some more carbs back into my diet and had pasta with real noodles instead of zucchini noodles for the first time in over 6 months. It was good.

Doctors Visits: We lucked out. Just 3 days prior to our first OB visit, they lifted the COVID visitor restrictions for OB allowing Joe to attend the appointment with me. They took my weight, BP, Urine sample, Dating US and met the MD. We also learned about global fee’s and how our insurance would cover pregnancy.

Money Spent: We really had not spent any.

Our To Do List:

• Write out and space out what we wanted to get done by when. – Here is what we planned so we didn’t feel overwhelmed but still felt on top of it.
• Budget – we became debt free (besides the house) and made a plan we both felt good about. It was important to me to have options and not feel trapped by finances.
• Do we want to know the gender? – We decided to wait.
• Tell the family – We decided to wait longer than I wanted to be able to tell my family in person.
• Look into insurance – Global Fee’s are awesome.
• Figure out Childcare options- In Greenville SC, there were already waitlists at many day cares so we knew we had to decided if daycare was right for us. This was something that couldn’t wait.
• The Bonus Room – We were loosing my office for the baby room, and we really wanted to utilize the bonus space. Current state, it was not a room I would want to hang out in. Also, Joe works from home so we wanted to make sure he could work while I was on maternity leave. I wanted a nice clean place to hang out with the baby while Joe remained working on the main floor.

While this list seems small, it was packed with big, important to me, items. I didn’t want this post to be too long and know that these things can happen at different stages so I broke them out here but will go into detail on each bullet in other posts.

How as the end of your first trimester? How and when did you tell people? Did you figure out the gender? How did you prepare financially? What was your childcare plan? When did you start your nursery?