Body Con

Pregnancy is a bitch…on top of nausea, there’s excessive gas (emitted from both ends, sometimes uncontrollably and without warning), vomiting, gagging while brushing your teeth, headaches, diarrhea/constipation, heartburn, food aversions, headaches, mood swings, fatigue…and that’s only in the first 19 weeks. I’m not even sure what lies ahead in the next 21 weeks, but I can guarantee that it’s probably not a bag of fun…well, other than the end product, our beautiful baby boy/girl. Now THAT part of pregnancy I am totally looking forward to, holding a cooing/smiling/crying/pooping mini me/mini hubby in my arms. Can’t wait! Speaking of which, we will find out the sex Feb. 9 via a gender reveal cake cutting…exciteddddd~~

But anyway, on top of all these side effects, I am struggling with similar prepubescent body image issues I dealt with when I was younger. All the throwing up kind of gives me flashbacks of when I used to make myself throw up…voluntarily. Yes, sadly, I was a bulimic, sometimes an anorexic. Never so severe that I needed help, but it did get bad enough that I toyed with the idea of getting help for my own sake. At the end, preparing for/being part of a pageant after college helped me get over all my body image issues and helped me to become the confident person I am now. (Ironic, no?) In fact, I felt the sexiest when I weighed my heaviest in my adult years.

However, as a young girl, I suffered from some grossly distorted images of myself and was very, very insecure of the way I looked. I was always taller and bigger than most of my peers, including the boys before they hit puberty. This didn’t bother me until I was on the swim team the summer before 6th grade…I specifically remember feeling “uncomfortable” during swim team because I couldn’t see the bones in my feet like the “skinny” girls, my thighs rubbed together, and I had a rounder tummy. I longed to be like them…and the insecurities really started there. During the 6th grade I experienced a major growth spurt and started shedding the baby fat, but I was constantly comparing myself to “skinny” girls. It wasn’t until the summer before the 8th grade that I decided to deal with my body image issues…by starving myself. Luckily, it wasn’t severe, but when I look at pictures from that summer, my head looks oddly large on my lanky body. From then on, it was a constant roller coaster ride…I never thought I was slender enough…if I wasn’t obsessively counting calories, then I was on some extreme diet. I tried everything from diet pills to SlimFast to Chinese laxative teas. These habits lasted for several years (at least a decade), sometimes making me feel like a prisoner in my own body. I had a friend who almost lost her life during my junior year of college because of a very similar struggle…yet it didn’t deter me from my own ways, I always thought, “It’s not that bad. That will never happen to me.” Luckily, she fully recovered and is now a mommy of three very cute, sometimes rambunctious brood of boys!

And now, I am also a fully recovered mommy to be of a mystery being growing in my belly. BUT as I mentioned before, the throwing up was giving me flashbacks of when I wasn’t healthy about my body image. At first, when the nausea first kicked in, my body refused to let me throw up…maybe some mental mechanism, who knows. So I was constantly fighting the urge to throw up and when I needed to I couldn’t…but that quickly changed and I was throwing up after almost every meal for a few weeks. And I will admit, when I started losing weight because I couldn’t keep anything down/in, I secretly reveled at the the diminishing numbers on the scale and needed to remind myself, “Girl, you’re pregnant! You shouldn’t be rejoicing over your weight loss!” And now that I AM starting to put on weight, I have to again remind myself that I’m pregnant and that it’s normal and it’s okay to be gaining weight.

Some days, I feel so fat and disgusting, that I can’t even bear to look at myself so I need to remind myself “YOU’RE PREGNANT!!” But I also totally do not feel pregnant because my belly has yet to really look like a pregnant belly, although as of week 19, it is starting to jut out way more. I’m concerned that strangers will just think that I’m out of shape – why do I even care about what strangers think?? My husband always tells me I am beautiful (I love when he rubs and kisses my little belly) so that’s all that should really matter. He knows I struggled with body image issues so he also reminds me that I’m pregnant too when I complain that I feel fat. (Side note: I love him, trulydeeply, no one has ever made me feel as beautiful and as special and loved as him.)

I’m not sure if other pregnant women that had similar body image issues when they were younger felt them return during pregnancy, if you did, I feel you. Now that I am starting to get over the nastiest bits of pregnancy, hopefully I will stop having prepubescent mental flashbacks and start enjoying this very special induction into womanhood. But I will have to say, the 2 best reminders that I’m pregnant are: 1) when the hubs rubs my belly so adoringly and 2) when the baby makes his/her presence known with a little kick or two.

End note: if you know of anyone struggling with an eating disorder, please encourage them to get help. Anorexia and bulimia are real conditions that effect both men and women and can become life threatening. Let them know that they can find their happy endings.

Korean Vegetarian

It seems for the most part that the nausea is slowly starting to go away…or at least lessen in severity. Sometimes car ride can trigger it, but it usually comes with a vengeance out of the blue, as it did last night, but the constant 24/7 nausea is going away.

Last night, I was craving fried chicken, but ended up throwing it all up only moments after dinner. It was an interesting vomiting session…I had been drinking an Ocean Water (a blue coconut soda from Sonic), so when the food came out, it was this cool electric blue color. I kind of wanted to take and post a picture, but that is just plain disgusting and is sure to drive away my whole 5 readers if my TMI hasn’t already.

So it seems that the baby growing in my belly is definitely Korean and there are strong indications that s/he is a vegetarian. The following three cravings have no adverse effects on mommy (so far):

1. Veggies (almost all veggies…but need to be careful with potatoes, onions, avocados and mushrooms – it’s a toss up with those for some reason – probably all PSYCHOlogical haha)
2. Cheese – omahgah, I love cheese…particularly in the form of grilled cheese sandwiches. Nom nom nom
3. KOREAN FOOD, the SPICY variety – I particularly am enjoying bibimbap, ddukboki, and kimchi jigae…my intestines punish me later, but diarrhea is way better than constipation so I’m okay with that…unless I have a sudden urge to evacuate my bowels when no bathroom
is in sight – a fun story for later, maybe hahahaha. Anyway, I jokingly told my husband that there is no doubt the baby is Korean to which he replied, “Should there be any reason WHY the baby wouldn’t be Korean?” Hee hee hee, funny guy.

However, I still can’t fully enjoy the following…but still get cravings for them, grrrr:

1. Meat of most kinds – i.e fried chicken…sounded like a good idea, it was not. I DO love Spam in my kimchi jigae though hee hee…And lamb, but only when I want it
2. Seafood is a hit or miss – Hubby took me to a fantastic steakhouse for my birthday but my meal and appetite were destroyed by a lobster bisque…I can enjoy an occasional shrimp and the other day I really wanted sushi!
3. Espresso – I used to live on this stuff, but nowadays, the smallest sip of a latte makes me jittery to the point of feeling sick, which cannot be good for the baby! But of course sometimes I really really want a latte, but only to feel like shit afterwards.

I am also still experiencing daily headaches, hormones are making my armpit skin dark (WTF??), my farts are still awesomely loud and rank, and the b00bies are still growing – although extremely full now, still no under boobage, gah! I bet they would look awesome in a corset though, full tops of breasts spilling out all over the place.

The nausea I am feeling however, is nothing compared to this one poor girl. A friend at church shared with me how her sister-in-law has such severe hyperemesis gravidarum (extreme morning sickness, the kind that put Princess Kate in the hospital – when one suffers from this, even clear liquids won’t stay down, yikes!), she needs to be on a continuous Zofran (med for nausea) drip and will probably need to be induced because both mother and baby are suffering…ugh, I can’t even imagine how that must feel! I probably would have struggled with wanting to terminate the pregnancy. My thoughts and prayers for her and the baby…after hearing that, it really put things into perspective!

Also, my belly is taking its sweet ass time to grow…currently it just looks like I have developed a fupa.

What Dreams May Come (REISSUE)

I was somehow able to retrieve my lost entry (minus the pictures), YAHOO! Have had many more dreams since then, but so happy that I was able to save this entry!

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams…they are always vivid – so vivid in fact, I can taste and smell things in my dreams sometimes. Sometimes I’m lucid in my dreams…when I was little, I used to have scary dreams…I taught myself to wake up from them and I still can. When I sleep in other people’s beds (at hotels or at a friend’s house etc), I have some of the weirdest dreams…I swear I am dreaming dreams of whoever was the previous occupant of the bed. Other times my dreams are like premonitions…like the one time I dreamt the the pastor’s wife was pregnant – well it ended up that SHE wasn’t pregnant, but 8 of the ladies at my church were, including myself! Not like fortune teller style, but sometimes I think there might be some divine guidance behind them. Like the time Jesus appeared to me in my dream – scary, but healing and inspiring (this was really an awesome dream, message me if you want to hear about it.)

Anyways, I diverge…so yea, I love dreams and the dreamworld…but now that I am pregnant, my dreams are even MORE VIVID and MORE FANTASTICAL than ever before. Apparently, it has something to do with all the frequent urination at night so you’re constantly interrupting your sleep cycle. Or something like that. Some of the dreams are awesome and so fun (like when I was a wizard at Hogwarts and was flying around on my broom), and others are sad or creepy (like the time I stepped into a room of snakes…but I’m pretty sure it was because I watched a clip from Killer Karaoke where a girl gets dunked into a tank full of snakes before going to bed).

Here, in more detail, are a few of my favorite ones:

ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE:
Last night, my brain was so desperately trying to process my much forgotten Polish. In my dream, I was in some sort of zombie apocalypse and I had to go into a Polish bar that was selling EB and Zywiec beers (czas na piwo anyone?) decorated top to bottom with the Polish flag and their national emblem to get some crucial information on the next zombie attack. I kept mixing my Polish with my Spanish and it was incredibly frustrating – there was a lot of “nie rozumiem” (“I don’t understand), but alas, I was able to get the information needed and went running off with my zombie defense group to penetrate zombie headquarters before they could attack the last human outpost.

UNDERWATER ADVENTURE WITH SCOOBY DOO:
A couple weeks ago, Scooby Doo took me, my husband and a couple of our friends on an underwater adventure across the ocean floor. And it was all animated…except Scooby Doo. Except it wasn’t the real Scooby Doo, but Bo the White House dog.

So anyway, we have to cross the ocean floor to get to a house to baby sit a house full of puppies so Scooby/Bo leads us into the water were we enter a world much like Sponge Bob’s and walk to the other side of the ocean. Along the way, we encounter a very crudely drawn octopus who gives us a slimy high five. Once we reach our destination, we’re no longer animated and then we enter a house full of baby animals of all types, but mostly a lot of puppies.

THE SNORE:
My husband is a snorer and normally it doesn’t bother me or wake me up, but these days, because I am constantly getting up to pee (damn you, growing uterus squishing my bladder!), his snoring has actually taken on a role in my sleep in the form of a sound effect! For example, in one dream, I was talking to my friend’s sister but for the life of me I could not hear a single word he was saying because there was a leaf blower or a lawn mower in the background. I ended up waking up to my husband’s snoring. In another dream, his snoring was the sound of a tidal wave that was roaring towards my high school and I needed to run to the top floor of the school for safety which ended up being connected to a mall where my car was parked and I drove away just in the nick of time. Whew! Another time his snoring just woke me up so I pinched his nose to make him stop, hee hee hee.

At least he doesn’t talk in his sleep because who knows what role that may play in my dreams!

The Next Frontier…Trimester #2

Week 14: the most notable difference during week 14 was that my appetite…it returned!! And it was glorious, laaaaaaa! *Play triumphant sounding orchestral piece*

Food tasted like it should, if not better…I had a hesitant welcome home party for my appetite at Benihana’s – might as well have licked the plate(s) clean – and after that, I slowly re-introduced food items that I could not even stand the sight of, starting with eggs for breakfast. Yum! And then Korean food! Double yum! Welcome Home, Appetite…this self-professed foodie/fattie had been (im)patiently waiting for your return. And luckily, I only threw up twice during week 14

Sadly, Thai food may be a lost cause forever – didn’t enjoy it at all. I could only manage to choke down a few bites, but something about it just…blech. Also, I still didn’t have much of a palate for meat, poultry or pork, but not a huge loss there. Contrarily, the possible permanent death of pad thai is a true travesty. Let’s take a moment of silence in its honor…

Week 15: So, as luck would have it, week 15 brought on, once again, the love/hate relationship with food…actually there was a lot more hate as the nausea returned (again, in the form of all day nausea). The thing that was worse this round of nausea was that I can’t seem to throw up and have only done so once (at a restaurant, blech!) so I have to ride out the nausea for the most part 😦

Food aversions made eating difficult…mostly because they just developed as soon as it was in my mouth…I couldn’t predict what I would
not be able to eat. If I ate one thing that didn’t agree with the palate, the rest of my meal was ruined.

For example, because of the previous success at Benihana’s, I wanted to go again for a family dinner. Unfortunately the only thing I liked this time was their salad as the fried rice completely ruined my appetite, awesome! Meat is still a huge no no, heartburn accompanies the nausea, and I burp up bile more often than I would like. Luckily, I was still enjoying Korean food though, so whew! 🙂

Week 16: That would be this week! Food and I are still on shaky grounds…even water tastes weird. I am, however, really loving vegetables and pineapples and Diet Coke. Korean food tastes better than ever, but is almost always followed by heartburn and the most disgusting and stinkiest burps of my life.

That sonofabitch nausea persists and I am sooooo tired all the time. Headaches are pretty much a daily occurrence and I finally caved and started taking Tylenol because sometimes they’re so bad, I can’t function. My boobs have lost their sex appeal for me, I feel like I belong in a National Geographic, but I think the hubby is still enjoying them so that’s all that matters.

[On a side note: my dog is experiencing her first heat cycle and I’ve noticed that her nipples have gotten larger…I also heard my husband say (as he was rubbing her belly), “Mabel, your nipples have gotten bigger just like your Mommy’s!” I couldn’t help but laugh…darn, so he HAS noticed!]

On the upside, I have felt the baby move AND kick. Apparently if you poke your belly around weeks 14/15, the baby will respond by moving. So I wanted to see if I could feel the movement and I did!! And one time s/he kicked back! It was such a weird feeling! But awesome…so awesome in fact that I like to dedicate a little bit of time during the day to lay down and poke my belly to see how Baby will respond. S/he seems to favor the left side.

Also, went to the doctor today and she confirmed that Baby is extremely active…she always has a hard time detecting the heartbeat bc s/he moves so much. We may have our hands full come June 17! Also, due to the nausea and vomiting in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, my net weight gain has been only 1 pound…I’m sure that will change in the next few weeks! I am looking forward to having a baby belly…maybe once the belly starts protruding more, I’ll stop feeling fat and more pregnant instead.

As the second trimester looms ahead, I am both excited and apprehensive. The MAIN thing I want is to be able to enjoy food and indulge in some weird cravings…will this ever happen for me? Week 14 was such a tease! *Le grand sigh* Oh and I can’t wait to find out the sex of our baby…which we will know by the end of this month!! Stay tuned!