The First 10 Weeks of Pregnancy

AS ALWAYS THIS POST IS TOO LONG TO READ IN EMAIL SO MAKE SURE YOU READ IT IN THE SUBSTACK APP OR ON YOUR DESKTOP

I can’t lie to you, life has been a little tough this past month. Between moving (I will be sharing a newsletter on that next week !!) and being pregnant, I'm exhausted to say the least. I know I’ve let so many of you down in not posting to Substack and for that I am truly sorry. I’ve been in survival mode. But it finally feels like the haze is lifting, the announcement is OUT, and I feel like I can finally stop self-censoring myself use my voice again to discuss everything that is truly going on. I’m including a week by week mini-account of what has been going on pregnancy wise in the belly of this newsletter. pun intended.

📚 WHAT TO READ: If you’ve been reading the newsletter for awhile then you know that I was trying to get into The Nightingale for quite awhile and ended up putting it down. Well, my mini book club (it’s literally just me and my sister) decided to read it so I’m back in baby! She already finished it, I’m like 50 pages in… but I’m determined to get to the end this time.

I’m also of course reading my pregnancy books, The Natural Mama and Real Food for Pregnancy. I already read The Natural Mama so I sort of just skim each week to remind myself of the highlights and what nutrients I should be prioritizing that week, but it’s my first time reading Real Food for Pregnancy so that’s been great.

📺 WHAT TO WATCH: Most nights lately I’ve been falling asleep when I put Celia down around 7:30-8:30pm, so needless to say I haven’t had much time to watch things. However, I powered through putting her down this past weekend and was determined to stay up so Daniel and I could hang out and watch something together. His pick: The Bluff, where “A Caribbean woman gets her secret past revealed when her island is invaded by vicious buccaneers.” My pick: Jurassic World Rebirth, where “On a mission to find dinosaur DNA for a miracle drug, a team of experts must fight to survive against the remote island's carnivorous”. It felt very much like a Gabe and Erin movie night feud. We ended up watching Jurassic World because I simply wanted to be mindlessly entertained and while the movie was pretty terrible, I was indeed simply entertained. The Bluff will be next!

🎧 WHAT TO LISTEN TO: I’m listening to a couple songs on repeat. Daniel found God of My Seasons and immediately showed it to me because he knew I’d love it. I’ve also been belting out There Goes that Man (if you’re watching The Holy Girl Diaries then you know…) eyes on him and I think I love you are also phenom.

Today is your day to do a workout. Am I telling you or am I telling myself? I truly have not been working out at all and my body is rapidly declining because of it. First trimester is such a doozy and it’s an effort to simply exist, but I know that movement is the key to overall wellbeing, energy, and idk I’m so tired that’s where my thought is gonna end. Just do the dang workout.

“I often think of a comment someone left on one of my first trimester pregnancy food prep videos. They said something along the lines of “jokes on you because none of this will help you this pregnancy”. And to you sir, you were right. Well played.”

If you’re one of those lucky people who don’t really have symptoms during your first trimester, all I can say is wow that must be nice. On the flip side, if you’re the kind of person who has an incredibly difficult time during the first trimester and is constantly throwing up, to you I say I am so sorry and I don’t know how you do it. I’m somewhere in the middle. I don’t feel good by any means, but I also haven’t thrown up once during this pregnancy. My other two pregnancies I only threw up a handful of times as well.

And can we just discuss for a moment how fake science the pregnancy weeks are? Like hello when I ovulate I’m not already 2 weeks pregnant? This was particularly frustrating this pregnancy because since I only had one period between stopping breastfeeding Celia and getting pregnant, my follicular phase was 3 weeks vs 2. So when I was scheduling my first doctor appointments they wouldn’t accept the fact that I knew definitively which day I ovulated and that I was a week “behind”. But I digress. Let’s get into it.

Week 3: I know this sounds crazy, but with both this pregnancy and Celia I “knew” I was pregnant around 4 DPO because I get a weird shift in taste and smell. I can’t explain it, but it’s happened twice now so I think it’s just something my body does. With Celia I drank my typical warm lemon salt water in the morning and it tasted like straight up ketchup. I knew. This time I gave Celia a cucumber and warning this is so gross, but it smelled exactly like dog anal gland liquid…. if you know what I’m talking about I’m so sorry you have to deal with that too. Regardless, in that moment I assumed I was pregnant and was just hopeful it would progress and implant. I was also totally and deeply in LOVEEEEE with Daniel which don’t take this the wrong way, I always love Daniel and he always loves me. But for all three of my pregnancies, before I ever get that positive line him and I are OBSESSED with each other. Like cannot stop smiling and hugging and just loving on each other. So when that happened instead of my great disdain and anger (I get bad PMS and I’m not proud of it…) I once again ~knew~.

I found out I was pregnant with Celia at 10 DPO. This time I had about 50 pregnancy strips (so inexpensive) so I figured why not just pee on one starting at 8 DPO just to see what happens. I mean you totally can implant at 8 DPO so what’s the harm? Well, I must have implanted at 8 DPO because I got what I call an “imaginary line”. A line so faint that you convince yourself that it must just be an evaporation line. Which let me tangent again and talk about evaporation lines because the test instructions will tell you to throw it out after 5 minutes, but I personally keep the tests because I like keeping track and making sure the darkness doubles every two days, but once again… I digress. So of course like any crazy person would do, I took tests every single day for about a week. By 10 DPO the imaginary line doubled and I was sure that for at least that moment I was pregnant.