The honeymoon trimester

Once you reach the 14 week mark of your pregnancy you are officially in the second trimester, and if you're lucky like I was, most of the horrible symptoms of the first trimester go away. That means no more all-day nausea and no more wish-you-were-dead exhaustion. Plus an added bonus, you can feel the little tyke move!

Around 15 weeks I started to think I could feel something in there, by 16 weeks I knew what I was feeling was baby, and by 18 weeks my husband could feel him moving around in there. Actually by 18 weeks my husband could see him moving around in there.

What does it feel like? Ask someone to come around randomly throughout the day and gently poke you right above your pelvis a few times with a finger. That's about what those first few weeks felt like to me. It is simultaneously amazing and super creepy. Or maybe I've seen too many sci-fi movies...

Unfortunately though, the second trimester of pregnancy brings it's own problems. For me, problem #1 was round ligament pain. Normally this is a sharp groin pain that most women feel when standing up or rolling over or something similar, it normally lasts for a few seconds and then it's gone. Well, let me tell you something my fellow riding friends: The stronger the muscles of your pelvic floor the worse you'll feel round ligament pain. Know what makes your pelvic floor muscles really, really strong? Horseback riding, especially dressage. Yay. So one Sunday morning, as I was trying to make myself breakfast, I ended up on the floor gasping and crying from intense groin pain that didn't quit for 10 minutes (my poor husband had decided to throw me in the car and take me to the hospital when it finally let up). When I called my doctor's office the next day, the nurse said that was normal. "But it put me on the floor!" I said. "Totally normal," she replied.

Uh huh, not acceptable. So I did some internet searching and found a website called Spinning Babies that had some exercises for stretching out those muscles and ligaments that were killing me. The first one is called the Inversion, it looks absolutely bonkers but it helped SO MUCH! It takes your head a few days to get used to it, but the stretch on my ligaments started to help immediately. If you can, keep this up during the rest of the pregnancy, not only is it a good stretch but it also helps get the baby head-down for birth.

Helpful exercise #2 were the pelvic tilts, these not only help stretch the pelvic floor muscles and ligaments but also stretch your lower back nicely in the third trimester. Feels SO good!

let the belly hang

tilt your pelvic toward your chin and round your back

 And finally, another exercise I couldn't do without, the Bird Dog exercise. These are for when your back starts to hurt and pain starts shooting down your legs. Give it a few days to a week to start working, but it will help the pain go away. This can be done in the third trimester, balancing becomes hard but not impossible.

 

After I started doing these exercises, the second trimester was a breeze for me. I even went for a few rides, much to Coriander's chagrin. Here's another tip: When you're six months pregnant, canter in two-point/half seat. Trust me on this.

At this point I've still got a month to go. We're almost ready to meet our little guy!

More on pregnancy: A few details I missed

In my last post I wrote about some of the lovely symptoms a woman may encounter during the first trimester of pregnancy. I realized a bit later that I missed a few things, mostly the side effects that are just annoying in the beginning but don't go away after the first trimester. Nope- they just get more obnoxious.

The breathing
You may not be aware of this, but pregnancy hormones also affect your lungs, increasing their capacity. What this means is that you might start breathing a bit heavier when you become pregnant. Or you may be like me and end up breathing A LOT heavier really early on. Seriously, I'd climb one flight of stairs and I'd be breathing like I'd just run a mile. I wasn't tired, I wasn't out of breath, but boy did I sound like I was. I was walking across campus with a coworker one day when she asked me if I wanted to slow down, "what, why?" I asked.

"Because it sounds like you're dying," she said. Oh.

Of course later on you start having issues breathing because you've got a baby kick-boxing your lungs. But that's for later.

The gas
When you get pregnant your hormones will also affect your digestive system, slowing the whole business down. When this happens you start to accumulate gas, which then needs to come out. Pregnant women start to sound a bit like one-person bands. One day, after burping for the umpteenth time after drinking orange juice I turned to my husband and said, "I burp after drinking orange juice, who does that?"

"My grandfather," he said. Excellent.

Fortunately for everyone around me, my gas tends to come out of my mouth, some aren't so lucky. When we got married, the best man's wife was pregnant and she stayed in our spare bedroom for the night before the ceremony. When we came back from our honeymoon a week later, the stench in that room was still bad enough to make your eyes sting. True story.

The peeing 
Even if you've never been pregnant, you've probably heard about how preggos frequently need to urinate. You might think that starts later in the pregnancy when the baby gets big enough to start pressing on your bladder, but no, it starts immediately. Sure, in your first trimester you'll probably only need to pee once every two hours instead of the once every half hour/10 minutes/5 minutes that you'll experience later in the pregnancy, but even peeing every two hours gets a little annoying. Given this you might be tempted to drink less, but that is not a good idea. First of all, you'll feel terrible if you don't drink, your body wants that fluid for a reason. In the first trimester you're building the placenta- which is filled with amniotic fluid, and you do not want your amniotic fluid levels to be low. Also, your blood volume doubles and water is pretty necessary to that process too. So drink up ladies, and stock up on toilet paper!

Fortunately you probably won't pee yourself in the first trimester. Nope, that bit of fun is saved for the second and third trimesters. Joy!

Laugh it up now, dude, the mood swings are coming for you...

The joy (?) of pregnancy

FYI- this post has pretty much nothing to do with horses. I'm putting it up because I remember being newly pregnant and scouring the internet for other women's accounts of their pregnancy. I wanted to know if what I was feeling was normal. So this post is for those among you who may become pregnant and wonder if what you are feeling is normal- just remember that every pregnancy is different, even for the same woman.

I'm currently in the middle of the second trimester, and I think I can say so far that I've had a pretty easy pregnancy, but still...

The first trimester SUUUUUUUCKS!

Seriously, it does.

It didn't help that I wasn't trying to get pregnant and that when I found out I was I had to get over being annoyed about all my plans for the year getting tossed. Riding in another dressage show? Nixed. Getting Coriander to reliably pick up that left lead canter? Nixed. Getting Gwen solid under saddle and attempt canter by the fall? Nixed. I was a little cranky for a couple weeks.

Anyway, physically the first symptom I had was cramping that started, literally, an hour after conception. At that point I ran over to the calendar and did a little mental arithmetic after which a few profanities fell out of my mouth. My midwives still don't believe that I know the day of conception but I do, down to the hour.

The cramping continued for the next six weeks, it was accompanied by dizziness, thirst, and the need to eat ALL THE FOOD. Heaven help you if you annoyed me when I was hungry. It wasn't pretty.

Hyperbole and a Half, I miss you

Eventually the cramping went away, at which time is was replaced by round ligament pain and SOUL CRUSHING FATIGUE. It was a daily struggle to stay awake at work, I would daydream about curling up under my desk for a nap.

I never looked nearly this nice

By the time I got out to my horses after a full day at work it was all I could do to feed and groom them, then I'd just let them loose to graze and lay down until I could gather enough energy to stand up again. If you're in the first trimester and you have the energy to ride just know that I am really, really jealous.

Sometime around 9 weeks the morning sickness hit. This was all-day, constant, never-ending nausea. It's much worse when your stomach is empty, which it tends to be when you wake up in the morning- thus the name. Here is an interesting discovery:

Pregnancy is the one time in a woman's life where she'll feel sick for months on end and it's considered a good thing.

Somehow I got lucky and never tossed my cookies, but that doesn't mean I didn't have a few close calls. Unlike me, there are a bunch of women out there who have hyperemesis gravidarum, and vomit so badly while pregnant that they have to be hospitalized for dehydration. That really sucks.

Really all cats are

Fortunately, the worst symptoms went away with the beginning of the second trimester, but I'll write about that later.