Second trimester wins and woes

I am already into the third trimester! Time is flying by! Sometimes these nine months can seem like they are dragging on, but as I look back and realize where I am today, the past six months have really flown by. I can say that for life in general really. The days and weeks are long, but the months are short. Once the baby is here, I know I will miss my days being pregnant!

As hard as the first trimester was (feeling so sick all the time), I really do enjoy and have enjoyed being pregnant. I love watching what God is doing to prepare my body physically and mentally for the journey head.

I hadn’t really started to feel pregnant until my belly started to show a little bit, which took a while, and then all of a sudden, I felt like it was overnight that baby just decided to make a grand appearance and swell my belly.

Just like my first trimester, I experienced lots of changes, and of course the inevitable wins and woes throughout my second trimester. I want to share with you both some highlights and lowlights of my second trimester simply to show the reality of pregnancy, or at least my pregnancy.

Highlights

1. My favorite moment of trimester two was feeling baby kick for the first time! The second trimester technically begins at week 14 and goes through the end of week 27. The first time I felt baby move was around week 17. I was lying in bed in the middle of the night and I felt what I thought was a twitch in my abdomen. The “muscle twitch” kept twitching, so I put my hand over my barely showing belly and realized it was my tiny son swimming around in there! I laughed with tears of disbelief and joy. How could something so small and fragile make such a strong movement!? This must have been how Sarah felt when God told her she would give birth to a son in her old age. Sarah laughed at God in half joy and half disbelief, but behold she did give birth to Isaac, and of course we all know Isaac means “laughter.” I didn’t want to awake my husband in the middle of the night because I knew he would be worried something was wrong, but a few days later driving home from a weekend getaway together, Hubby got to feel Baby boy move for the first time. He placed his hand over my belly and as soon as he felt the little flutters, I saw tears well up in his eyes as he too began to laugh. Be still my heart – watching Hubby feel our son move just gave me a small taste of what it will be like when he cradles him in his hands for the first time. I can’t wait for that day as well. Needless to say, from that very first night I felt Baby boy move to this day, he has been on the go non-stop. Literally, there is not an hour that goes by each day that I don’t feel this Little Bear squirm around, and each day his punches or kicks or karate chops or whatever he’s doing in there get stronger and stronger. I wish I had x-ray vision to see him swim around all day!
2. As I mentioned in my post about my first trimesters, despite being sick, I still had the energy and wherewithal to work out five days a week. Sometimes I felt sluggish and weaker during my workouts, but I always listened to my body and slowed down and scaled as I needed. It helped tremendously to move everyday, no matter how sick I was feeling. And, since I was feeling significantly better in the second trimester, I was able to increase my intensity and volume most days, again listening to my body and not over-exerting myself. I felt on top of the world crushing my CrossFit workouts five to six days a week, and I was even able to hit some personal records that I was particularly proud of! My plan is to continue to working out, modifying as needed and listening to my body, until I give birth! And as my belly grows and gets larger by the week, I do find that I have to modify more and more exercises, but I have easily been able to find alternative movements that create a similar stimulus. For example, I discovered early in the second trimester that I was beginning to develop diastasis recti, a common separation of the front abdominal muscles many women experience during pregnancy. How did I know this was happening? I started to notice a “coning” effect of my abdomen, whereby the area around my belly button would protrude in a column-like shape. Thankfully I have a dear friend who is a women’s health physical therapist and she was able to give me some breathing and core exercises to perform daily to help mitigate the separating of my abs. I realized that this separation would be inevitable for me, but now it was a matter of controlling it so as to not let the tissue between my slowly separating abdominal muscles become too thin.
3. No more nausea! Praise God that my nausea dissipated tremendously around week 14 and I have not experienced any since. With the nausea gone, I was able to re-introduce all of my normal foods back into my diet, including the ones I had grown averse to, namely chicken. How much easier it was for me to get more protein each day by being able to eat poultry again! Fish also became more and more palatable, as did rice and all the other foods I couldn’t tolerate. What a joy it was to actually enjoy food again!

Lowlights

1. Along with returning to my “normal” diet, I found that since sweets were a huge turn-off to me throughout the entire first trimester, my sweet tooth came back in the second trimester with a vengeance. Having Thanksgiving and Christmas and all kinds of celebrations in between did not help my situation. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I caved and over-indulged at pretty much every opportunity I had to eat sweets. It’s not often anyway that I find “Mandy-friendly” sweets, so I would enjoy them a little bit too much. I would justify my binges by saying that I needed to make up for all the weight I lost in the first trimester, but then afterward I would feel so sick to my stomach and beat myself up for over-doing it, irrationally fearing I would gain 10 pounds overnight and give myself gestational diabetes. I had to learn to control my sweet indulgences, but more importantly my mind space. Once the holidays were over, it was much easier for me to not be so tempted by the desserts, and I found that I really didn’t crave them as much as I thought. And while I did indulge more than I normally do during the holidays, I still kept the rest of my nutrition well on-track and ate my usual healthy diet.
2. I did experience a few Crohn’s flares every few weeks. We came to realize though almost all of these flares were in response to eating out. What a bummer this was. Hubby and I do enjoy eating out occasionally, but I usually pay the price afterward, even if I think I am being careful to order and eat only “Mandy-friendly” foods. One flare in particular was so awful that Hubby almost took me to the ER. For over one week, everything I ate went straight through me, so we were worried the baby wasn’t getting enough nutrients. But once again, low and behold, just like in the first trimester, Baby boy was still thriving and growing just fine even though I had lost a couple pounds. It amazes me how great a Provider our God is.
3. Pregnancy depression is real. We’ve all heard of the infamous “postpartum” depression that can occur after a woman gives birth, but many of us don’t realize that depression during pregnancy is a real thing too. Hormones can do funny things to your body. I don’t know if the depression I experienced was entirely driven by hormones, but mostly it was situational. To be honest, I went through an unfavorable situation, which I won’t go into detail here, that left me feeling sad, depressed, hurt, angry, confused, and worthless. I found myself with a great deal of idle time at home, a very vulnerable and lonely place for me, where negative thoughts and emotions flooded my mind. After months of prayer, seeking wise counsel from friends and family and mentors, long talks with my very patient husband, and a complete mindset and attitude change, I was finally able to pull myself out of the rut I was in. Every once in a while, I find myself sliding back to that gloomy place, but I am quick to address where my heart is heading and divert my thoughts. It’s possible the hormonal changes already occurring inside my body exacerbated my emotional well-being, but my situation was really the driving factor.
4. As a result of what I mentioned in #3, my insomnia took a turn for the worst. I had already developed insomnia over the past year and a half, but pregnancy and stress amplified its effects on me. There were nights I would maybe sleep one or two hours, and if I was lucky, I would have one “good” night each week where I would sleep a cumulative five hours, tossing and turning and waking every hour in between. I was so tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep, but couldn’t. This became such a frustrating, vicious cycle that I felt helpless to resolve. I tried taking magnesium in the evenings to hoping it would have a soothing, calming effect on my ever-stressed and wandering mind, but rarely did I feel the touted effects of the magnesium. I even tried Unisom, one of the few safe sleep aids that can be used during pregnancy, a few nights, but its unwanted side effects of bizarre dreams and grogginess made me feel worse the next day. To be quite honest, I am just now slowly starting to find better sleep as I move into the third trimester, and I am hoping I will be able to establish a better sleeping pattern for these last three months until Baby boy arrives. Most days I don’t set my alarm in the morning and allow my body to wake naturally so as to re-establish my circadian rhythms.

With great anticipation for Little Bear’s birth day, I am finding joy in nesting and preparing for becoming a family of three. Come what may, I’m looking forward to what the rest of the third trimester has in store for us! Stay tuned for more udpates!