And Baby Makes Three!

I'm pregnant! We're having a baby! I'm knocked up! And I'm so excited! So I decided to start this blog as a bit of a diary so that I'll remember this time, and that all of you who live far away can share this with me.

So, to answer all your questions…

1. The baby is due January 28, 2007, which makes me 13 weeks along. Yep, I've been keeping this under my hat for awhile. I just thought that if something awful happened, I wouldn't want to have to call everybody and tell them there wasn't going to be a baby after all. But I've hit the second trimester mark, so I'm guessing it's pretty safe to let the cat out of the bag.

2. I'm going to make a lot of women mad at me with this one - I didn't throw up once. There were days when I ate or smelled something that my stomach definitely didn't like, but I didn't throw up. Okay, that's not totally true. I did throw up once, but 24 hours after my husband Nathan did, with the same symptoms he had. So I'm not counting that one as morning sickness.

3. I wasn't sick, but I was SO TIRED, and SO HUNGRY!!!! I ate us out of house and home for about a month there. One night, after eating all of my supper and finishing off Nate's too, I made myself a big bowl of Guacamole dip and ate it and an entire bag of those Tostitos Scoops tortilla chips. And there were a couple days in a row where at three o'clock in the afternoon, I had to close my eyes and have a 15 minute power snooze right there at my desk at work. I just couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. And the same thing would happen right after supper. As soon as I was done eating, I needed a nap, and it was non-negotiable. I've never been that tired before! It was very weird for me.

But Monday morning I woke up and I wasn't tired anymore. Well, wasn't as tired as before, anyway. It'll be a couple years before get back to my pre-pregnancy state of alertness, since most of it was caffeine-induced. Have you ever watched Lorelei on the Gilmore Girls? That was me, but my addiction was Diet Coke. I'll bet their sales have plummeted drastically for Western Canada and they just can't understand why…

And that, in a very short nutshell, is how things have gone so far. I'm kinda glad to be through the first trimester, mostly because I finally have the energy to exercise again. And I LOVE exercise. I'm not one of those people who think of it as a chore - for me it's the thing I look forward to doing at the end of the day. Running, biking, step aerobics, tae bo; if it gets my lungs burning and my heart pounding, then I love it. It's been bothering me as I feel myself get further and further out of shape. It's not really a body image thing for me - although it's not fun to watch all those pounds pack on. It's more a big part of me that I miss.

I exercised a couple nights this week, and it was the first time since I did the team event at the Tinman Triathlon in Vulcan on June 3. It felt good, but it was a little bit frustrating though, just because when you're pregnant, you have to keep your heart rate lower than 140 beats per minute. And for me, that's barely getting started. I never realized it before, because I honestly never pay attention to my heart rate when exercising. I'm one of those people who like to push myself until my lungs are burning a little and I'm just starting to gasp for breath a little bit, and then back it off ever so slightly and stay at that intensity for as long as I can. Then I know I'm getting the best out of myself and my workout.

So on Monday night, I hauled out my step bench and blew the dust off my old introductory (therefore easy) step aerobics tape. I thought it was perfect, because you stop halfway through and take your heart rate, and then I would know how hard I could exercise. So, I'm breezing through this thing and barely getting winded and thinking that at the halfway break I would have to stop and put the step bench up a couple notches. But when I took my heart rate, I was right at the 140 beats mark! So I guess I have to wait a little longer for my heart-pounding workouts. God I miss them!

But my new daily dilemma is - what the hell do I wear? I'm just starting to get a little baby bump (plus the extra pounds that have come with eating tons and not exercising), so my old pants and shorts don't fit, but I'm not big enough yet for maternity clothes. I have one pair of capris that are stretchy and therefore still fit somewhat, and I'm wearing them nearly every day. But they're white, and me being me I'm going to spill something on them one day very soon, and then I'll be screwed! I think I'm going to make a stop at the Baby/Maternity consignment store here in Airdrie and see what I can find. Either that or just go to the Superstore’s Joe Fresh Style section and buy a bunch of cheap pants and shorts a couple sizes bigger than usual to get me through until it's maternity wear time. All you women who've been there, what did you do?