Top 10 things I can no longer do;

1. Stay awake
2. Button my jeans, or any pants for that matter. I do the rubber-band trick
3. Eat less than 2 hrs apart, unless I want my old friend nausea to pop back up
4. Get any work done at work
5. Get anything at all done at home (when did I last do laundry? Before the wedding?)
6. Phantom how I will ever get an actual baby out of my body
7. Remember why I thought it was an excellent idea to put it in there to begin with
8. Physical activity without breaking a sweat/get a pulse/ feel faint after a nano second
9. Have weekend plans, I will only cancel and end up in bed napping anyways, might as well accept it
10. Write an actual text in my blogg. Fatigue makes me retreat to lists.

Things I still remember;
1. Love wifey
2. Love baby
3. Tomorrow is Friday = weekend = sleep!
Hurray!

TGIT!!!

Just one more day until the weekend!
Today I day-dreamed of being a housewife. With a maid. To take some of the workload off of wifey. All I want to do is nap all day long. I'm so tired I don't function properly.
By 3 o clock my day at work is over. I'm all spent. Then I have to simulate working for 2 more hours until I can go home, And it's not like I was up to speed to begin with.

The nausea has settled slightly. I'm still nauseous, but not 24/7. It gets worse when I don't constantly eat (clementines are my new addiction), when I'm tired or when I feel stressed.

One of the few collegues at work who knows I'm pregnant calls the baby Roy. She says it can be the new unisex name, kind of like Kim or Robin.

We talk in code, something like this;
Me; I had lunch with Roy today!
Collegue; That's nice, what did you have?
Me; Roy had a strong request for grated carrots and spinach. I had to go home and start peeling.
Collegue; Roy does have a particular taste. Is Roy still keen on nyponsoppa?

Me and wifey has a secret name for baby. It feels safest to keep it a secret, eventhough we're almost done w week 12 and the greatest risk of misscarriage should be over by now. It was my grandmothers nickname as a small child and it sounds great with wifeys last name.
I'm gonna change my last name to wifeys too. When I get around to it...
We should also try to get a bigger place. But somehow finding an appartment and moving does not seem doable right now.
Wifey works 17 hrs/day and I'm not much of a work asset as it were.

I don't think I look pregnant yet, but my shape has def. change, all my tops keep sliding up over my belly when I'm sitting down. But I actually lost weight. I'm not really worried as I constantly eat, and also have a lot of reserves for baby to live off of.
However, my tits made me cringe when I saw them in the bathroom mirror at work today. Whatever you do sisters, don't wear a pushup bra while pregnant! Unless you want someone off the street to offer you a job in adult entertainment. Atomic tities took on a whole new meaning.
Luckily the fall fashion in Sweden is filled with tunics, huge sweaters and cardigans as wide as circus tents.
There is still hope to keep Roy undercover until after salary negotiations. I think I can get away with faking obesity.

The ticker!

Make a pregnancy ticker

My head is spinning...

...from all the things I'm supposed to do and not do, eat and not eat, feel and not feel. And while you're trying to do all this doing and avoiding, remember to not stress out, since stress is harmful to you and your baby.

Btw, also do not google for pics of you fetus at a certain week. You will come across a bunch of pics of aborted fetuses and start crying. Again.
The picture is a model (not an actual fetus) of approx how big babys feet are right now. I wonder what size that is?

I had a moment the other night with wifey where I managed to forget everything about the pregnancy and felt like myself again for a couple of minutes. (Yes, she is a good kisser). But mostly, I'm so wrapped up in this I don't know where to begin. I'm too tired and nauseous to cook, but of course take away food and prepackade food is unhealthy/harmful for your baby. I can't eat bread anymore and just the thought of cheese makes my stomach turn. (It's Italy. Do those people ever eat anything that doesn't involve cheese, tomatoe or white bread?). So that rules out the sandwich strategy.

I'm so sensitive to smell, even wifeys empty coffee cup in the kitchen makes me want to vomit when I'm in the livingroom. (We def. need to get a bigger place).

Doing the dishes makes me sick. But having the dishes undone makes me even sicker. How does anyone survive being pregnant without having a live-in maid?

I worry about my astma being bad for the baby. I worry about the delivery since the more I read, the more I realize that absolutley everything I've wished for myself for my delivery is forbidden in this country (homebirths, waterbirths, birthing centers, having the same midwife during the pregnancy and delivery, or just having a constant midwife during the delivery, not having hospital staff and interns run in and out of your room, having some - ANY - kind of privacy and resemblance of a natural child birth, postponing cutting the umbilical cord until it stops pulsating, being left alone with your baby for an hour or two and not having it taken away to have baths and being weighed etc etc etc etc. Do I need to go on or do you get the picture? ).

Ok. It's time to not freak out. I'm sure we'll manage (survive) somehow. I'm sure my baby won't have cerebral palsy just because I used to work with handicaps in my youth and dreaded every minute of it. There is probably diffrent strategies at different hospitals and I might not need to run off and hide in the woods to birth my baby the way I want. That would be a bad idea btw since it will be birch pollen season and I will be allergic.

I'm just gonna take a deep breath. Trust that baby is feeling amazing (and that's why I feel so crappy). And do something about the things that's in my control. Like cleaning my messy house.

Also survived first day at work yesterday. It went ok besides not finding anything to eat for lunch and ending up eating a pre-packaged chicken sallad. Just to read this morning in my new pregnancy book that you should avoid prepackaged food. Especially chicken.
Oh well baby, I hope you have a strong genetic foundation and will survive all the things I put you through.

Piggelin

Nausea is keeping me from doing much now a days, such as blogging. I survive with the help of Piggelin popsicles - the only thing that seem to help, momentarily.

You give up a lot of things when you're a mother (to be). Such as birthdays.

My 33d birthday came and went. I spent it locked in our rental car in Rome, with the aircondition on full blast. Wifey wanted to see the Colosseum. Baby wanted to see the celing of the car and the inside of my eyelids. Baby won.
Besides being over heated, hungry, nauseous, exhausted, terrified that the cramps in my lower abdomen was an early sign of misscarriage, I still had the best birthday ever.
Married to the love of my life, pregnant and not having to show up for work. What more could one wish for?

Still, never go on vacation when you're newly pregnant. It's a total waste of money. All you manage to do is lay in bed and cry, wish you were home and could eat what you're craving, and obsess about misscarriages.
I was so miserable wifey started to remind me daily we were in Italy - not a third world country. Then she discovered a scorpion the size of a plum on our livingroom wall and agreed we should def. go home early.

We celebrated my birthday last night instead. I got a semi free pass from nausea most of the evening.
Wifey took me out for carrot cake and an authors night with Erica Jong. I dressed up, almost forgot I was nauseous and miserable and had a lovely, happy, evening.

Wifey also got me a Marimekko Pitekemäkko. A striped night gown I fell in love with on the ferry to Finland in my youth and dreamed I would sport as and old, rich, pregnant woman. ( In those days I imagine you needed to be rich to pay that much for a night gown. Now that I'm older and wiser, I know it's just about marrying the right woman).
And since wifey makes all my dreams come true, she took out her Ipod GPS and navigated to the Marimekko store.

So you see, I got all I wished for and more. I read (on the internet, where else?) that it can be difficult to be happy about your pregnancy when you're in the first trimester, tired, cranky and nauseous. Amen!

But sometimes, with a popsicle shoved in my mouth, and wifey rubbing my back, I'm the happiest I've ever been.

Raspberry baby in grapefruit womb...

Yes, that's right. According to the experts (google) my womb is now the size of a grapefruit. Do you people realize how big a grapefruit is? Try shoving it down your pants the next time you're in the grocery store. It's HUGE. (Yes, I actually tried it myself, not in the store but later at the house).

I had a miscarriage crises a week ago, but have calmed down now. Baby seems to be doing just fine. I feel constantly sick. "Morning" sickness is obviously just a phrase invented to lure women into pregnancy. It should really be referred to as 24/7 sickness, which would more properly describe it.
I can't even remember what it felt like not to be constantly nauseous.
How am I to function like a normal human being, feeling like this? Ok, I forgot. I'm not normal anymore. I'm somebody's mother.

Another noveau experience is violent nightmares. I scared wife half to death by screaming bloody murder and throwing myself on the floor w all the bedding approx. 15 min after I went to sleep the other night. Wifey got me back in to bed, still asleep I darted out of it again ( like a bat out of hell, Meatloaf might say). Wifey then tried to tuck me in tight to keep me off the floor, which made me half-way wake up and hiss at her " don't touch me! I feel nauseous!".
Wifey said she felt comforted by me acting like myself again and let me be.
Me? I don't remember a thing. For all I know I had a peaceful and restful night's sleep. Me and my raspberry.

I can hear the bells!

Tomorrow I'm a married woman and Klumpis will no longer be a bastard but a child born within a marriage.
Not a cilvil partnership, not a gay marriage but a proper marriage. Since Sweden came to her senses and made marriage gender neutral.

There is a lot of stress going into a wedding of course. But I'm mostly floating around in my own little bubble.
My body is whispering to me. I have baby growing inside me. How can I be bothered by life's petty details? All that matter is that Klumpis keeps growing, that wifey shows up tomorrow and that we survive until we're on our way to our honeymoon.

The weather is awful, we were hoping for an outdoor wedding. There is still hope I suppose. But I'm glad we got heaters for the tents.

Klumpis is now approx 3 weeks old. 5 weeks if you count the medical way. I think I'm gonna celebrate her 3 week conception-day w a nap.