Posted On: 19/10/2015
By: Scouse Bird
You can read all the baby books you want, listen to friends’ stories and spend hours on Mumsnet, but nothing, and I mean nothing, can actually prepare you for pregnancy and living it for real. Most of the time you’re in a bit of a daze and generally quite made up with yourself that you’ve created life, but interspersed with that are all the wild symptoms and do’s and don’ts that people just can’t even begin to warn you about.
As I head into my second trimester (and fingers crossed my symptoms start to ease up… although I’ve just spent the last half an hour dry retching into the toilet) here’s the shit I’ve had to deal with in my first 3 months of pregnancy. Every pregnancy is different though blah blah blah so you might not come across all of these or you might have some mad ones of your own.
17 Truths About The First 3 Months of Pregnancy
- Your boobs will become possessed by Satan and decide they’re going to live a life completely independent of you. You’ll wake up one day and they’ll be huge and the skin will be all taut and stretched like a freshly installed boob job – ‘that’s sound’ you might think, but you’re also gonna need to strap them down so that even the slightest movement is impossible. They hurt. It’s like the pain of ‘due on’ boobs if that pain had spent 18 months down the gym popping steroids (Sorry dads-to-be it’s deffo a ‘look but don’t you fucking dare touch’ situation for you too). Do you have lovely delicate pink nipples? Say goodbye! They’ll be dark purple and massive in no time. I woke up one day, looked in the mirror and was like “What the FUCK has happened to my nipples??” and spent the rest of the day fuming.
- If you decide not to tell people you’re pregnant until after your 12 week scan then you’re gonna need to come up with some imaginative and varied excuses as to why you can’t go on a massive vodka bender. Honestly it happens so often you begin to question whether or not you’re actually an alky on the sly. Good ones you can use include: I’m driving, I’m on antibiotics, I have a water infection, I’m doing Sober-tober/Dry January/giving up ale for Lent, I’m too hung-over, I’m on a diet or I’m converting to Buddhism/Islam. FYI: The government guidelines say you can have some alcohol when up the duff but put it this way, whatever you drink, your baby drinks and something the size of a plum is going to be a massive lightweight so… best not if you can.
- You will become like a tiny tears doll. Your fella says something that you take offence to? Crying. The pamper advert comes on? Crying. You watch a Disney film? Crying. Mention of babies? Crying. Seeing mini Converse trainees in the shop? Crying. Watching One Born Every Minute? Floods of tears. Drink plenty of water – you’re gonna get dehydrated.
- You will need plenty of naps. The tiredness is the absolute worst thing in my opinion (worse than the sickness which I’ll get to in a minute). As soon as that wave of tiredness hits (no later than 3pm) you need to get to a bed IMMEDIATELY! You’ll sleep for hours, wake up feeling tired and groggy all night and then sleep right through the night too. I feel like 85% of the last 12 weeks I’ve been asleep. The tiredness is like that horrible ‘burny behind the eyes’ tired that you get when you get up for work on a Monday morning after a three day bender… which of course you haven’t been on, Because you’re fucking pregnant.
- You’ll be starving all the time. All the baby books you’ll read tell you that you don’t need to eat for two, you just need an extra 300 calories a day. You tell that to my rumbling belly and stfu ‘experts’.
- Like the smell of bacon cooking? Ha! We’ll see about that. Wait til Saturday morning when your fella’s rustling up bacon butties and you’re hanging with your head out the window and dry retching at the downright offensive odour. Honestly, I’d rather sniff a tramps armpit than smell bacon cooking.
- Speaking of sickness; the adorable thing about “morning” sickness is that it actually lasts all day & just as you think it’s going away for good, it comes back with a gang of mates to kick the shit out of you. I was really cocky with morning sickness; not everyone gets it and up to 8 and a half weeks I hadn’t had a sniff of it. I was swanning around like the cock of the pregnant women going “This pregnancy shit is easy, don’t know what everyone’s on about” then it hit me like a ton of bricks and I’ve been stuck with my head down the toilet more times in the last month than in my entire life combined. You don’t even get the boss night out with a bottle of vodka beforehand… just all the hangover symptoms.
- On the plus side, you get to send your fella the shop a lot and he has to do it without moaning. It’s the law of pregnancy.
- Most people don’t start showing a bump until about 18 weeks or so, however, almost straight away, you will get bloating so bad that it looks like your 6 months pregnant anyway. There’s fuck all you can do about it.
- Wait until you learn what foods you can’t eat! Basically everything on a standard cheeseboard is off limits, only one tin of tuna a week, eggs can’t be dippy eggs (so basically what’s the point?) and steaks have to be well done. Only virgins have their steaks well done FFS! Caffeine is limited as well so best make that pumpkin spice latte a decaf….
- You will start googling the weirdest things and lose hours to reading the Mumsnet forums. Expect to find “Can straining to poo hurt the baby?”, “Can cats and dog smell pregnancy?” and “The cat jumped on my stomach, is the baby ok?” in your search history.
- You have to have a degree in code breaking to read the Mumsnet boards. I blame Americans but they have the stupidest fucking abbreviations going. Here’s a cheat sheet: BFP –big fat positive. Just say positive??, OH/SO/DH – Other half, Significant Other, Dear husband. Cringe. DS & DD – Dear son & dear daughter. Vile. All vile.
- Loads of your beauty regime will become off limits – say goodbye to Botox, SPMU and spray tans. Even getting your hair dyed isn’t recommended. My poor fod is already fully awake and wrinkling up and I’m looking at another 6 months before I can get my freezy face juice fix.
- You’ll become obsessed with comparing your growing baby to fruit – this week it’s a kiwi! Next an avocado!
- The baby brain will kick in. Whether your work is suddenly full of errors or you walk into a room and have no idea why or you even stop mid-sentence because you’ve completely forgotten all the words in the world… you’ll soon think you’re losing your mind. Because you are.
- You will genuinely be able to enter fart competitions competitively.
- Cravings are mad. Even before I found out I was pregnant, I couldn’t get enough of Maccies fries, they were all I could think about, I could taste them in my mouth. When I got my fix I’d suck all the salt off them. I don’t get a lot of salt in my diet because my Nan had mad heart problems because she loved the stuff so your body will start crying out for what it needs. Your cravings can change daily, even hourly; once minute you might need grapes and then the next it’s a chicken Caesar salad and you will not stop until you get it. You also become really suggestible to food, someone can mention a certain type of food and then it’s on your brain until it’s in your mouth.
Pregnancy is a rollercoaster of weird symptoms and wild emotions and I can genuinely only describe it as PMS on steroids mixed with a terrible hangover. Never forget the end goal though, 100% it’ll all be worth it in the end when you’ve got your baby in your arms… and the real hard work begins 😬
XOXO
Scouse Bird
Check out the fab designer babywear & accessories at My Crib Rocks
Check out the fab designer babywear & accessories at My Crib Rocks
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