I’m pregnant! All about my first Trimester and our baby gender reveal.
I am so thrilled to finally be able to share my pregnancy news! I’ve always loved reading pregnancy, birth and baby related blog posts, so I thought I’d share my first trimester experience with you.
Our baby was very much planned, and we managed to conceive the first month we tried which was towards the end of our honeymoon in Italy! In the lead up to conception, both Trav and I took preconception/maternity vitamins and I’ve continued to take them in my pregnancy of course! My naturopath Tess has been an amazing source of wisdom and support around preconception and pregnancy care.
Before we conceived, I also been doing a visualisation of Trav, myself, and our baby as balls of energy connected in a triangle for a month or so before we started trying to help manifest our conception and let go of fears around fertility (that turned out to be unfounded anyway!). I’d do this visualisation most mornings and evenings for a few minutes in bed. One morning on our trip I woke up and started visualising and I felt our baby’s energy in my womb space for the first time (without trying too, I just sensed it there!). This was right around the time we conceived and helped me feel connected to bub from the get-go.
A couple of days later I woke up with sore breasts and checked my period tracking app (I use Clue) - it was only day 20 in my cycle and I wouldn’t normally notice breast tenderness day 27 or 28 (I love that tracking my cycle means I notice these kind of changes, I’d have never picked up on them if I wasn’t tracking!). I thought that was interesting but it was too early to do a test to tell if I was pregnant or start getting my hopes up, but I had a sneaky good feeling which I told Trav on our flight home!
We got home from our honeymoon on a Monday and I knew by the Wednesday I’d be able to tell with an early detection pregnancy test. On Tuesday Trav left for work for a week and I decided I’d wait until the next Tuesday when he was getting home to test. Well...that didn’t last long - a few hours later I was up at 3am thanks to jet lag and forgot my resolve and did the test and…the second line appeared! I was so excited I couldn’t sleep another wink that night! Keeping it a secret for the next week was HARD - I was so bursting to tell Trav but I was determined to wait and tell him in person.
I saw my GP to have a blood test to confirm the pregnancy and check my nutrient levels, I was almost bouncing off the walls in her room because I was so excited to tell someone haha! Finally Tuesday rolled around and I went to the airport to pick up Trav and handed him the positive test as soon as he hopped in the car. He was over the moon and I was so happy to finally share my excitement!
From there, my first trimester certainly had it’s ups and downs!
While I didn’t get super severe morning sickness and didn’t have any vomiting, from about 5 weeks I would get nausea at any time of the day that would leave me couch-bound. It took me a while to get used to managing the nausea with food – I’d feel best if I was eating every few hours and LOTS of carbs but feeling nauseous meant I didn’t feel like eating at all! Normally I eat a late breakfast and have three meals a day of mainly protein and veggies but all of a sudden I was needing to eat the second I woke up (as in Trav would bring me toast in bed!) and sometimes I’d even have to have a snack in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t feel completely rotten. I also developed a pretty strong aversion to veggies – especially my usual favorites broccoli, cauliflower and basically any greens. I definitely felt a bit stressed because I wanted to be as healthy as possible but most healthy food made my stomach turn! Even walking down the veggie aisle at the supermarket made me gag! My naturopath reasssured me that the fact I’d been eating a healthy diet and taking vitamins before we conceived would mean my bub would get all the nutrients it needed,
Luckily I was OK with fruit and I found smoothies, veggie juices (I try to find low sugar options) and soups were a good way to sneak some veggies in. I sometimes felt like I was feeding a fussy toddler and trying to trick myself into eating veggies! I didn’t always succeed though and I even hit the McDonalds drive though a couple of times (so gross, and for the first time in YEARS!) because I couldn’t stomach anything else. Uber Eats was my most used app because if I cooked something, the smell of it would turn me off eating it by the time it was ready! I wasn’t craving sugar at all and I’ve hardly had any chocolate since falling pregnant, I just don’t want it. Normally I’d happily eat it every day! I’m not a coffee drinker normally but I went off all hot drinks, including ginger tea which I’d stocked up on to keep nausea at bay…ah well!
Aside from the nausea and adjusting to a whole new way of eating, the fatigue I experienced was next level! I felt like I had about 10% of the energy I’d normally have and sometimes small tasks like putting on a load of washing seemed impossible because I was so tired. I found any exercise more strenuous than walking or gentle yoga would completely wipe me out – as in I’d fall asleep for a couple of hours afterwards and wake up feeling really sick. I listened to my body and kept up gentle moving but stayed away from anything demanding. In the early weeks I was sleeping 11 hours a night and sometimes needing a nap in the day as well! I’ve never been more grateful to work from home and to be able to be flexible and rest when I needed – I take my hat off to pregnant women who have to get up and get ready for work every day in their first trimester (and women who already have kids to chase around all day!).
I found I was fine to keep up working with my 1:1 clients because our sessions were a welcome distraction but apart from those and the bare minimum of biz admin, I didn’t work much at all which was a very weird feeling! Instead I spent a lot of time on the couch giving Netflix a good workout! I started to wonder if I was just being lazy but now I have my energy back, I’m completely motivated again and so glad I listened to my body and rested when I needed to and I can see it was just my inner critic trying to make me feel guilty!
In the early weeks of my pregnancy, I was also extremely anxious – a mixture of hormones (think PMS times a hundred) and jumping between so much excitement to be pregnant…and complete dread that something could go wrong. At first I found this anxiety really distressing but I knew this was a great chance to practice what I preach. After lots of journaling I came to feel that my emotional turbulence was a chance for me to feel and let go so that I would have a cleaner slate before becoming a mama. I started to embrace the intense emotions – sitting with them, feeling them move through me, and letting them go using my Emotional Balance meditation which has always helped me let go of anxiety in the past. Doing this completely changed my experience and I started to feel much better right away.
At 7 weeks I had an early dating scan and I felt a flood of relief to see a little jellybean with a heartbeat appear on the screen! Seeing that something was there really put my mind at ease and after this point my anxiety lessened a lot. I still feel lots of strong emotions but I’m trying to embrace every experience and soften into those big feelings. Daily meditation (I do these meditations on repeat!) and exercise helps me to stay calm and present and stops me spiralling into ‘what if’s’ about something going wrong.
The scariest moment of my first trimester was when I experienced some spotting at about 10.5 weeks. I felt a total panic when I noticed and took myself straight to emergency at our local maternity hospital. Trav met me there and we had an anxious wait while we waited for the doctor to examine me. I wasn’t having any cramping or pain and the nurses told me this was reassuring but it’s hard to stop your mind rocketing to worst case scenario. I was so glad to have Trav there with me to hold my hand because I knew we were in this together.
I was examined by a doctor and midwife who took one look and seemed to breathe a sigh of relief – ‘it’s a cervical ectropion’ they said! Seeing the confused look on my face, the doctor quickly explained that this is a good outcome and there’s no issue with my pregnancy – I just have a sensitive cervix that’s more prone to bleeding. I learned that it’s the most common cause of bleeding in pregnancy and has no further health or birth-related complications. I know all this cervix talk is probably TMI but I wanted to share because I wish I had known about this condition because I thought all bleeding meant something serious was wrong in pregnancy! But I’d still always get any bleeding checked out right away.
Just to be 100% sure everything was OK, I went back for an ultrasound a couple of days later and got to see an actual baby shape on the monitor for the first time! Our baby was kicking and squirming around and in perfect health. I love the scans and seeing the baby, it’s such an amazing and emotional experience every time!
From then on the rest of my first trimester was smooth sailing. We chose to do the Harmony Test (which screens for chromosomal abnormalities like Downs Syndrome and tells you the baby’s sex) and got back all clear results and found out we’re having a baby BOY! Trav read out the baby’s sex to me and it was such a beautiful moment for us to share and made bub even easier to picture as a little person. We were both so emotional thinking about our SON and it’s a moment I’ll always remember. Not to mention I now I could start getting his wardrobe sorted haha!
I started feeling much better and felt some of my energy return towards the end of the first trimester. I could up my exercise to include swimming laps and some moderate cardio and light weights at the gym which felt great! Now I’m in my second trimester and pretty much back to my normal self – as long as I’m in bed by 9pm that is!
Even with the ups and downs of the first trimester, the main emotion I’ve felt since falling pregnant is immense gratitude and heart exploding love for both Trav and our growing bub. I constantly feel amazed that my body is growing a life and I’m so so grateful to be experiencing pregnancy. It’s not lost on me how truly special this moment in my life is and how fortunate we have been to be able to conceive easily and have a relatively smooth ride so far.
So that’s my first trimester in a nutshell!
I’m so excited to share this new chapter with you!
Big love,
