Zygote
Growing a human is pretty crazy when you think about it. I mean, of course millions of women do it all over the world, some of them time and time again, but still - when you think about it, the ability to grow and sustain life inside your body, instinctually, is kind of an evolutionary marvel. I never really thought about it until I started doing it. It is so instinctual that sometimes I forget I'm pregnant. My body does all the work. It is the exact opposite of when the baby actually comes out and you have to consider and weigh every single action you take with this precious tiny person that your body sustained and nurtured for nearly 10 months without needing a single directive by your conscious brain. It's almost unfair that there's such a leap from not having to do anything other than be sort of generally healthy to having to do everything all the time when you really have no clue where to start.
Regardless, best time to begin a pregnancy journal? Halfway through at nearly 20 weeks! I'm so on top of this responsible mom thing already. Let me just sum up the previous parts of my pregnancy for posterity.
First trimester
Weeks 1-6: Blithely unaware of the cells dividing and the zygote forming. I was helping to open a restaurant and therefore thought that my late period was due to stress/travel/terrible diet/extreme fatigue. My 16-hour (on average) workdays consisted of working on my feet, which I should have been accustomed to - and part of me wondered when I had become so soft. I was so bone-grindingly tired those weeks, and I tried to pretend like I wasn't because, you know, pride. And then the nausea started creeping in. Let me tell you, working in a kitchen and having to taste everything and being assaulted by a barrage of pungent smells was not the best way to kick off morning sickness. About a week after my first missed period, I started thinking, uhhhhhh ohhhhhh, this is taking a little bit too long, and so the test was bought and taken and the test immediately showed two brazen lines. I didn't even have to wait the 3 minutes or whatever. It was like, "YOU'RE PREGNANT, STUPID! SUPER PREGNANT! SEE HOW DARK THESE LINES ARE? SEE HOW FAST THEY SHOWED UP?? YOU GOT BABY HORMONES!! NO DOUBT ABOUT IT!" And I was like, "OoooOOOoooh." And then I told Mark, whose immediate reaction was pretty much pure unadulterated joy. Whereas my reaction felt more like pure joy tempered by unadulterated panic.
Weeks 6-13: You see, I was happy that we were having a baby together because I love Mark and we both love babies and we know that we want to have a family and spend our lives together and eat delicious food and go to the beach and work and watch movies and do all the things that people spend their lives doing together, but all I could think about were the weeks that I didn't know that I was pregnant. I don't know how, developmentally, the first weeks can be both critically important and also not that big of a deal. The internet claims both to be true, and both definitely cannot be true. Sidenote - the internet was NOT my friend during this time. I know I had committed the mother-of-all mother-to-be sins by not taking prenatals (or any vitamins...sorry Mom) because I didn't know I was pregnant. Which RUINS YOUR BABY. I was also eating sporadic and not-at-all nutritious meals (think a fistful of french fries for breakfast, then nothing nothing nothing nothing, tasting bites of mise-en-place, nothing, nothing, nothing, 11pm pizza.) Which also RUINS YOUR BABY. So those cells that had already started to become a little thing with a developing heart was definitely not getting any nutrients from that. Also, drinking. Luckily I was drinking a bit less than normal because of all of the work, but still. I think we all know that alcohol RUINS YOUR BABY. And the paranoia was pretty crushing at times. Of course as soon as I found out, I started prenatals and attempted to eat healthy and stopped drinking alcohol and caffeine, but still. I think that was my un-mantra in the beginning...everything will probably be fine, but still...what if it's not? Luckily, I had lots and lots of morning sickness and lots and lots of exhaustion (I'd walk from the bedroom to the kitchen and would be so drained from the extreme exertion that I'd have to sit down on the couch) to distract me from my what-if fears. I definitely felt at my most pregnant during this time just because I didn't feel like my normal self. I wasn't working (thanks Mark, you're the best!) which was amazing and I had plans to do things - efficient things - scheduled, creative, exciting, cooking, baking, art things - but I really couldn't bring myself to do anything more than sleep and dry-heave into the toilet. We had a 13 week ultrasound as well as the first trimester combined screening whereby blood is tested, mama stats are collected, and baby parts are measured to give you a percentage change that your child will have a chromosomal abnormality, such as Down Syndrome. Our little potato scored well (A+!), which means we have a pretty low chance - but again, nothing is absolute until the baby is born and you know. But the results definitely eased my mind quite a bit. And then came the...
Second Trimester
Weeks 14-20: This is where I'm at now. So far, it is pretty great. I cut all caffeine the first trimester and have eased 1 cup per day back in, and I think we all know what caffeine means to me, so that's nice. Also, my nausea has vanished for the most part, which is beautiful and amazing and rainbows and unicorns. I've never been so turned off by so many foods in my life as I had been during the first trimester, and it was kind of soul-crushing. I was eating raw cucumbers, plain pasta, cheese and that's about it. Everything else was gross and disgusting. I couldn't eat garlic for awhile, which pretty much rescinds my Korean heritage. But now? Delightedly, I want all the food again. I generally feel 100% normal, except for the fact that my body is slowly changing and that is an exciting and interesting thing. My tummy/uterus is getting bigger and poking out a bit (which is expected and not surprising at all), but what I had never thought about is that my ribcage is expanding like crazy to accommodate all the intestines and organs and stuff that my uterus is displacing. The place where your rib cage joins? And that space in between? I'm pretty sure that pre-pregnancy all of my internal stuff was behind my ribs. Now I have a little pouch of stuff (my stomach? fat? intestines? who knows?) extending past that part of my rib cage and it is weird. Also, my hips are getting wider and my butt and boobs are getting bigger - again that stuff was all expected. It will be interesting to see how things continue to change as the biggest and most dramatic changes are still yet to come (yay for the much dreaded and yet highly anticipated third trimester!) Some nights when I'm laying very still at night, sometimes I think I can feel the baby moving around - it feels like brushing or bubbles or sometimes like little patters of pressure - but that could also just be my own body. I haven't had a moment yet, where I've been like "THAT is the baby, FOR SURE." I am highly anticipating being able to feel the baby moving around, although I'm sure I'll be taking that back once I get regular kicks and punches to the bladder. Speaking of which, I have to pee all the time. I'm a little worried about what it means for the third trimester, since that's when its supposed to get really bad, but literally, I have to pee every 10-20 minutes some parts of the day. I've also started looking at baby stuff that we will be needing to prepare for adding another person to our household and there is a lot of it. The stuff I mean. Kind of too much stuff. And I feel like most of the stuff is for the parents. Mark and I have decided to be minimalist. Well, at least we are going to do our best to be minimalists. Please ask us how that's going in a year.