A list!
This is, I think, a rather amusing list of things I have discovered so far that no one ever tells you about being pregnant…
- Pregnancy magazines are doomed to repeat themselves, however none will tell you a sensible method of how to tie you shoes.
- This is perhaps the only time in life when you will not drink at all and yet will frequently wake with a hangover after night-long hallucinations.
- You discover muscles you never had, and they all hurt randomly!
- You begin with every intention of eating at least seventeen portions of fruit and veg a day and drastically limiting caffeine, and then discover the appeal of junk food and your absolute dependence upon cups of tea to survive.
- You learn to limit your asking of ‘how many weeks now?’ or ‘how far along are you?’ when talking with other pregnant women, after discovering how frequent and therefore annoying this line of questioning can be.
- You manage to convince yourself before the first scan that you have, in fact, somehow imagined every single symptom and are going to be one of those ‘phantom pregnancy’ cheap magazine stories.
- The world is now viewed through baby-tinted glasses.
- Scenario: Someone asked you to do a small favour for them. Apparently this is the last straw and you have a full on mental breakdown and sob as if a lorry full of puppies just crashed. There is no consoling you. Welcome to the TRUE evil of hormones, which you thought you’d be prepared for after years of PMT…you were wrong.
- It doesn’t matter how often you are re-assured that ‘you’re not fat, you’re pregnant’ – you feel like a beached whale.
- You discover the utterly insane world of maternity clothes, and try on a range of outfits that leave you looking like a demented clown or someone who has soiled themselves.
- You secretly play with the adjustable waistbands in maternity trousers etc. whilst pretending that you ‘lost 50 lb on the Krispy Kreme diet’.
- You come to the realisation that perhaps your body is attempting to get all of the sleep that it can NOW in anticipation of what is to come. However, despite this it is increasingly difficult to actually GET to sleep.
- You finally decide that pregnancy itself is an effective preparation for the big life changes to come, and that no matter what symptoms it throws at you, nothing can dampen overwhelming love that you feel for the little life growing inside of you.
