My pregnancy
There are almost no words to describe what it feels like to be pregnant. you have another human inside of you, growing for the next 9 months! The first month, most people don't know they are pregnant. Some people get sick right away, but I didn't. My husband and I were with our youth group on a trip when I thought I was starting my period. we stopped at a gas station, i went to the bathroom, and there was a spot of blood. My husband and I had been trying to have a baby for a year, so in order not to get my hopes up, i treated it like the beginning signs of a period. We got home four hours later and my period had not started yet. I decided to go ahead and use a pregnancy test, just for fun. Right after I put it on the counter, my husband came in a picked it up. I was finally pregnant!
About a month after that the morning sickness started. I felt like my body thought that food was actually poison! Some mornings I even threw up the water I drank a few minuets earlier. My morning sickness lasted during month three and four. All my baby let me eat was bean burritos, with no onions, from taco bell. Other than being sick, I didn't feel pregnant. I didn't gain weight, in fact I lost ten pounds! (I started out overweight) I kept feeling that maybe the baby had died, or there was something wrong; but there wasn't. =)
Month four I started gaining some weight, but people didn't know I was pregnant until month six. Along with the weight gain came the acid reflux, that wasn't fun. Funny things happen to you when you finally get your baby belly. It's eagerly awaited, then when you finally get it you realize that your life is slowly changing. Buckling my seat belt and driving started getting interesting. Instead of reaching over myself to buckle, I started having to pass the belt to the other hand. It got increasingly hard to get up and down out of the car, I'd have to push the door open with my foot then grab what I could to lift out. By the end of the pregnancy my stomach touched the steering wheel. It terrified me ever time I drove; i couldn't imagine what would happen to the baby if I got into an accident and the air bag went off. People didn't understand why I stopped driving, but I did what I thought was safest for my unborn child.
The first time you see you baby on an ultra sound, it takes your breath away!! At month four we got to find out the gender of our baby!! Some people like to wait and find out, but I'm impatient. we went and found out that we were having a baby boy!
Month five, six, and seven passed very similar to month four, except I was getting bigger each week, and more scared of giving birth. Of course being scared wont do you very much good, because it's too late now. I made the decision to get pregnant and giving birth is just something that I would have to do. Also things got harder to do, and I could no longer pick things off the floor. If I dropped something, it stayed there.
Many people work until they give birth to their child, and I congratulate them on that accomplishment. I had already made the decision to be a stay at home mom, I am lucky enough for my husband to have a job that makes it possible for me to do this. It also made since financially for us. After I added everything up, it would be cheeper for me to stay at home with the baby than for me to work. I decided to quit my job at month eight. driving to and from work was getting hectic, getting on and off the chair at work was really hard, (I was a bank teller and we had chairs that were almost taller than me plus a bruised tail bone) I couldn't get a good nights sleep, and my job was going through a merger, so it was either quit or stress out. The reasons don't really matter, and I can sit here all day and think of things, it was just an opportune time.
Month nine is where it got fun. Sleeping was hard, my legs and arms would randomly fall asleep, and it would wake me up. The weight of the baby made it hard to sleep on my back, and it took me over a minute to switch from one side to the other. I was constantly worried about if I would know I was in labor or not. Oddly I was no longer worried about labor itself. I spent countless hours on the internet looking up the things I was feeling, seeing if they were normal or not. Almost everything is normal, but different from person to person. At the beginning of my ninth month the doctor moved me to weekly appointments. The first week I was already one cm dilated, and 30% effaced. I got excited and thought that labor would be soon. During this week and the next two I started having what they call "Braxton Hicks " contractions. Which I feel are basically the same as real contractions but don't get more intense or closer together. They felt just like period cramps to me. The next week I was still one cm, and 50%. I started looking up how to bring on labor. I did the walking, and the bouncing on the exercise ball, drinking raspberry tea, and of course spending time with my husband. Sometimes these things would start cramps, but they didn't work to start labor. The next week I was 3 cm dilated and 95%, both the doctor and I were sure the baby was going to come that week. He stripped my membranes (which was uncomfortable) and sent me home. The baby still didn't come. The next week was christmas week, I wanted to delicately place the birth of my child between christmas and the new year; since he didn't want to come sooner. I asked the doctor to induce me the day after christmas.
