Since I am well into my second trimester (18.4 weeks!), I thought it was about time I shared my first trimester recap. The first trimester is from weeks 0 – 13. So, here it goes! I don’t plan on leaving anything out so if you don’t want to hear about us conceiving than skip down and start reading at Weeks 6-8.
How we found out
It was a surprise to many people to find out that we were actually trying to conceive. Nick and I have been together for 11 years and married for 2.5 years. During that time I said a lot, and I mean a lot that I didn’t want kids. Truthfully, at that time in my life I really didn’t think I wanted kids or felt that I would be very content with life without them. As our relationship matured, as I matured my thoughts slowly began to switch gears. When we got married is when the thought of having kids was on my mind quite a bit. I was and still am very happy with our life. We are very fortunate to have our careers, family and friends close by, to live in a city and house that we love and have the option to basically do whatever we want at any moment. The dink (double income no kids) life was treating us really well. And then the dreaded thought would always pop into my head, can I even have kids? Due to family history and hormonal issues I have been experiencing basically since puberty I honestly didn’t know if I could even convenience. And plus, Nick wears compression shorts pretty much everyday so who even knew if his little swimmers worked either. I kid. The more Nick and I grew as a couple and built a life we are proud of the more we wanted to share that with our very own family. Just this past July is when we had the “big talk” and decided to go for it. We knew we were happy with our current life so if we weren’t able to conceive, we also would have been okay with that and may have explored other options. We both feel extremely happy and grateful that we were able to conceive naturally and can’t wait to become parents to a human and not just to our fur baby. It is a scary thought to have a little Nick and even a scarier thought to have a little Brooke running around, but we are up for the challenge!
Rewind to July, that was our first month of “trying.” We didn’t tell anyone we were trying except my best friend because we really didn’t know what was going to happen and we didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. I told myself that I wasn’t going to stress myself out about it and to just got with the flow. That lasted about 2.5 seconds. Ovulation strips, tracking my period, trying to figure out my “fertile window”, laying in weird positions, and noticing every little change my body made making me think “am I pregnant?” Each month as I put more pressure on myself I would get more and more disappointed when it didn’t work. At one point I got so upset and frustrated because I could not for the life of me get a positive ovulation test. I didn’t think I ovulated and felt completely defeated. It was during these times a frustration and sadness when having a baby became much more important to me. This is something I truly wanted to happen. I wanted to have the opportunity to be a mom and build a family with my husband that I love so much. These thoughts and feelings were new to me because I thought I’d be okay if it didn’t happen. That’s at least what I was telling myself. November rolled around and I was of course still tracking my period, which was almost impossible to track by the way because they were different pretty much every month. Anyways, the week I thought I would be ovulating turned out to be the opening of deer gun season and Thanksgiving which is a week Nick and I rarely see each other. I thought there was no way we were going to conceive in November and that we’d have to try again in December. I kind of just forgot about it and I was able to destress from the thought and pressure of getting pregnant. Of course I was the only one putting pressure on myself. Nick was amazing and so loving during this entire time. I didn’t pay attention to my period, I didn’t take a single ovulation test and when we did have “alone time” getting pregnant wasn’t taking over my thoughts. I was simply able to relax and bam, we conceived in November.
I wasn’t expecting to get pregnant in November so when I started to experience different symptoms of pregnancy I chalked them up to getting my period and my symptoms just being a bit different which was pretty normal for me. My first symptom that tipped me off was my BOOBS! Holy.crap. did those things get big and got big fast and hurt so bad. I typically get tender breasts during my period, but this was completely different. The only other thing that made me take a pregnancy test was that my period was late. This wasn’t a huge indicator because like I mentioned, my periods were never normal. Ever since I competed in a figure competition in 2016 my cycles have been all over the place. Sometimes I’d get it on day 28 and other months I wouldn’t get it until day 35. Some months it would be heavy and last 7-8 days and other months it would be light and last 4 days. I was able to maintain a pretty lean physique post competition by slowly increasing my food take over time. It is pretty common for women with lean physiques to have hormonal imbalances so when we made the decision to try and have a baby, I made a decision to gain a little bit of weight in hopes this would help our chances. I gained 5 pounds by the time I became pregnant. The first test I took was negative. Whomp. I wasn’t too torn up about it because I wasn’t expecting to get pregnant that month anyways. A few days later I decided to take another and there it was, the two pink lines indicating I was pregnant! I immediately had a rush of happiness mixed with anxiety as I was now going to be in charge of growing a human and being a mom. That’s some scary stuff. I didn’t have any elaborate or sweet plans to tell Nick the news. It was a Sunday morning and he was already awake so I just walked out of the bathroom and handed him the test. So special, right? He pretty much just woke up and was a bit confused as to what he was holding in his hands so I had to tell him. His face went blank for a little while and then a smile swept across his face. He was very happy about the news, but something about Nick is that he is a worrier and over thinker. He immediately went into over thinker Nick and started listing off everything that we need to do and need to do it right now! I nicely explained to him that a lot of those things will need to be done further down the road, like baby proofing the house…
Weeks 6 – 8 (so we thought)
Based off of my last period we found out when I was 6 weeks pregnant (so I thought). I called my doctor right away the next morning and we made an appointment for my 8th week. During those two weeks I felt completely normal except having giant and very sore boobs. Christmas was within these two weeks and we made the decision to tell our parents even though it was extremely earlier. Fast forward to our 8 week appointment and our doctor wanted to do an initial ultrasound to get a good reading on my due date. All we could see on the screen was a small flicker of a heart beat which made my eyes fill with tears (I think there was just some dust in the room, though) and Nick look like a deer in headlights with a small smile of happiness and “oh shit, what did we do.” This joy quickly turned into fear as my doctor said I wasn’t measuring at 8 weeks. I was measuring at 6 weeks. My mind immediately started going a million miles an hour with horrible thoughts of my baby not developing correctly, I did something wrong in the beginning to cause this, will my baby survive and so on. My doctor quickly assured me, after seeing the panic on my face, that I could simply just be a late ovulater and we could have just simply conceived later than normal. This wasn’t all that comforting at the moment, but it at least gave me some type of hope that everything was okay. My doctor wanted to see me again in 2 more weeks when I should actually be 8 weeks along to ensure that everything is developing correctly and on the right track.
Weeks 4 – 8 (the real weeks)
Leading up to our very first appointment which was actually weeks 4 -6 I felt almost completely normal. From the beginning my boobs got massive and seem to just keep growing, but during these couple weeks I was so incredibly hungry all.the.damn.time. I couldn’t eat enough to ever feel satisfied and it wasn’t just a little hunger feeling, I was full on starving and like my stomach was eating itself. I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I haven’t eaten for days. I would eat my normal sized meals and then another helping and a snack after that. My hunger was unreal. Everything decided to switch weeks 6-8. I started to get nauseous in the morning, but I soon realized if I ate something small that would go away. Rice cakes were my go to every single morning and went with me everywhere for a backup. The site and smell of large cuts of meat like roasts and anything in a broth were absolutely disgusting to me. I would crave something to eat and five minutes later I wouldn’t want to touch it. I could and still could careless about sweets. All I wanted was savory meals like eggs and bacon, pickles and burgers and chips and salsa. This was telling me that my body was lacking sodium and it was trying to make up for it for the benefits of the babe. My nausea would come back throughout the day, again if I needed to eat which at this point, was every hour! This is also when I started to experience my first bouts of bloat along with slower and I mean much slower digestion. I started to experience quite a bit of fatigue during these weeks and my workouts really suffered. I would miraculously find myself in the gym, but most days all I could do was slowly go through the movements or just walk on the treadmill. I also experienced some dizziness during my workouts which made me slow down even more and oh man it is so much harder to breath. I feel so out of shape working out because I am so winded. There were a few good things during these weeks too, like my appetite seemed to go back to normal towards week 8, my skin seemed to clear up and we received the news that baby is growing and developing perfectly!
Weeks 9-13
Week 9 is when I stated to feel my energy slowly increasing which helped with getting back on track with my workouts. These weeks, however, and some after were all about getting my bloat and food sensitivities figured out. I have a dairy and gluten sensitivity along with certain other foods that don’t agree with me like beans/legumes and certain vegetables that give me access bloat even when I wasn’t pregnant. Before pregnancy I would be able to tolerate small amounts of dairy like if I wanted pizza, whey protein that had the majority of lactose removed and fiberous vegetables like broccoli, brussel sprouts and cauliflower. Nowadays, I can’t consume those foods without experience crazy bloat and horrible stomach pains so I started to stay away from them all together. The vegetables one was a little bit harder to figure out which I actually didn’t figure out until really recently. In my 2nd trimester recap I will go into more detail of how I overcame the bloat and indigestion by changing up what I was eating. I had a 12 week checkup where I heard the heart beat for the very first time!
Overall, my first trimester treated me well. Yes, I experienced nausea, fatigue, food aversion and heightened food sensitivities but it could have honestly been a lot worse. I read stories about women needing to pull over on the side of the road to take a nap because they were so tired, not being able to hold any food down or experiencing intense migraines. I feel lucky to have not experienced such severe symptoms in my first trimester.
There you have it, the ins and outs of my life since last July. My second trimester has already been much different with my first and I will be sure to cover the good, the bad and the ugly in my second trimester recap in another couple months. Stay tuned!