Week 13...and a half

Hi everyone! This week has been a grueling one, as Alex started off with a cold and has successfully passed it on to me. Ugh. Thankfully, it has stayed pretty contained in my head and sinuses. I have been taking lots of supplements and fighting this virus with tooth and nail! My Thanksgiving will NOT be ruined! Speaking of Thanksgiving, I cannot wait to get home to the family. Unfortunately, we will spend Thanksgiving day here in KC and then as soon as Alex can get off on Friday we will head to McPherson. Needless to say, I am so ready to spend some Quality Time with the family. We are so lucky to have [almost] all of our family in the same town. If we could just get the extended Fast family and Alex's brother Aaron closer to McPherson, we'd be in business : )

In other news, I am almost through Week 13. Nothing real exciting this week, but I am still constantly seeing changes. Here are the things I've noticed:

• My belly getting bigger and bigger, by the minute it seems. No twins though, as this was a question I had for Dr. Carter this week. Whew! (Alex and I both come from a lineage of twins...ugh, can you imagine?)


• My energy is slowly coming back, but still not back to what I felt pre-pregnancy. I have been walking a tad more and getting a little bit more done at home, but not much.


• More people asking me about my belly and asking about names, gender, due date, etc etc. I must say, it's a lot more fun when you can talk to friends about what you're going through. Plus, it makes it a little more "real."


• I cannot stop craving junk food. It is all I can do to "do the right thing" and eat my fruits and veggies. All I want are Ched'r Peppers from Sonic! Ahhhh!!!


• I went maternity clothes shopping this past weekend with my friend Danielle, who is now 19 weeks pregnant. She is barely showing and is just now deciding to buy some stretchy outfits for the future. I, on the other hand, can no longer wear normal shirts/pants without it looking like my clothes are entirely too small. I was also given a whole box full of clothes from my boss' wife, who is about the same size as me. I hit the jackpot! And just in time for Thanksgiving, too : )

Alex has been so wonderful through this whole process so far. I feel so terrible for him sometimes because I am just SO tired all the time and he picks up so much of the slack. Our house has been a mess and without his help, we would probably live in a pigsty and have nothing clean to wear. He made a trip to Trader Joes earlier this week and came home with a bottle of sparkling italian soda and a beautiful red rose, just for me : ) (However, I think he was partially trying to make up for the fact that he had come home with a month's stash of Two Buck Chuck. ha)

Well it is wayyy past my bedtime. I think I better hit the hay so I have enough energy to cook our mini-Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday! Cheers!

Week 12

Hi everyone, I know it's been AGES since I've written. But I figure maybe this way would be a good way to keep everyone up to date on how our Small Fry, aka, Baby Koehn, is a-cookin'. So, without further adieu, here, in bullet-point format, is how my pregnancy has been going. In a nutshell.

Leading up to this week, here are a few of the symptoms I have been experiencing:

• Starting in week 7, I had severe dizziness/fainting. Yes, I said fainting. Nothing a little hydration through an IV couldn't fix!

• A HUGE increase in appetite. Those books that say you should only eat an extra 300 calories/day (approx 1 bagel, without cream cheese) has clearly never been pregnant.

• Nausea off and on, but has mostly subsided

• Constantly needing to pee.
  

• Constipation. Severe. Eww.

• Occasional migraines-oh the agony! So miserable when you can't take a single thing. Sometimes a few sips of coffee seem to do the trick.
  

• Decrease in motivation/ability to work out. I am SO unbelievably tired that taking myself for a walk around the block is nearly impossible. Pretty crazy for me, considering I was working out pretty intensely, 5 days a week, before this "alien" has taken over my body. Hopefully in the second trimester I will gain some energy back to start up a workout regimen again.
  

That pretty sums up the first trimester. Here, again in bullet-point format, is a list of my most recent symptoms:

• A growing belly. NO JOKE. My belly seems as though it's growing by the minute. No pictures yet, because I'm frankly not quite ready to accept that it's ok to get "fat." (This is a whole issue in itself, one to be discussed in another post.) I never realized that this would be such an issue for me! (Well, maybe I did.)
  

• No cravings, per se, just a beastly appetite for LOTS of food. One thing that I have NOT wanted since the minute I found outI was pregnant is beef. Not steak, not barbecue, no slab of beef in any form. I can barely choke down beef tacos. However-chicken is a whole different story! Give me chicken in any form-baked, fried, in quesadillas, enchiladas, on pizza. Wherever I can get it! Weird, because I've NEVER been a huge fan of chicken. Hmm.
  

• Foods that I have wanted in my diet recently: yellow squash, eggplant, apples (granny smith or honey crisp) with grandma's caramel apple dip, lots of CHEESE! (hmm, constipation cause???) and wheat thins. And to be real honest, I would eat hamburgers and pizza every night if I could. I have never in my life allowed myself to do that, but this pregnancy has really opened up my abilities to eat junk food whenever offered! (Let's just say Halloween was areally difficult holiday to get through.) Next up: THANKSGIVING! Yessss. A pregnant woman's dream!

• (I really miss lunch meat. I used to eat it all the time for a quick piece of protein.)

• Horrible constipation. This is an ongoing issue. We'll leave it that.

• Indigestion. This is an issue that my NAET dr and I are working on. Gotta get that liver motivated again!

• I've been super super tired, but just the last few days have seemed to pep up *ever so slightly.* I'm hoping that this is a good sign!

Well, I think that is really as much as you probably want to hear for now. I must say that when people ask me "How are you feeling? Do you feel different?" I think to myself, "YES! I feel nothing like myself!" All these symptoms are SO foreign to me, along with getting "fat," I'm just hoping that the second trimester will bring me some more energy in hopes of feeling like a real person again. But as they all say, it's all worth it in the end! Cheers to our little Small Fry!