Julie's Boggle

To be fair, I think I got off pretty lightly on the whole morning pregnancy sickness front. It’s definitely been on the way out for the last two weeks, but while I did have it, I found that the only real “rule” I had to follow, was “Keep Eating”.

I hated the grotty nausea feeling, so followed the rule diligently. This had me feeling a bit like an addict going after my next fix at times. Not all foods worked either, but a typical day’s eating / meal-planning regime went a bit like this:

07h00: Alarm goes off. Sit up in bed and eat a Jacobs Hi-Fibre cream cracker trying to keep all the crumbs in the bag. A bit of a chore but very necessary.

07h50: Thanks to the cracker, I’m feeling well up for my big bowl of breakfast cereal and a cup of coffee. (Although I have to confess my coffee ardour, even now, has been somewhat affected by this whole pregnancy thing. Not enough to stop drinking it altogether – but I do prefer it on a full stomach.)

08h45: Wander around the Tesco near work buying the makings of mid-morning tea and lunch, and perhaps ingredients for supper.

10h45: Snack-time. Lashings of peanut butter on a crusty white continental roll. Mm-hmm. I guess you could count this as a ‘craving’ because, usually, just contemplating the fat content of peanut butter sends me haring off in search of something else. But for those weeks, it was the one thing that worked when fruit, yoghurt and cereal bars just didn’t cut it.

13h00: Definitely need lunch now. We didn’t get back our canteen at work until I was almost at the 12-week recovery period, so this tended to be the half-carton of fresh soup with a bagel or roll bought earlier.

16h00-ish: Bit of a struggle in finding something that will work at this point. I can usually squeak by till I get home with a couple of clementines and a cup of rooibos. Those little Babybel cheeses also tend to hit the spot but I need to remember to stock up the fridge at work.

18h30: Back at home. Tom won’t be in for another half-hour and supper will be another 30 minutes after that, so it’s time for a small portion (just 10 — 15g + milk) of microwaved Ready-Brek (instant porridge) to stave off any pre-supper sickness. Like the peanut-butter breadroll, a nice hot serving of thick, milky porridge works pretty well.

19h30: Supper at last. I’m not that hungry (real hunger doesn’t work for me any more because if it gets that bad, I’ve usually lost my appetite in the nausea) but this is definitely a case of eat or else. And as long as I have a good enough meal, that’s me all the way through to bed-time.

23h15: Lying awake thinking about food. All those meals that will send the grotty feelings completely away. Planning my grocery buying for tomorrow’s shopping trip and forcing myself to leave it alone and drift off just as the discomfort starts to come knocking again.

Fortunately, the end of week 12 heralded the return to some form of normality. I still tend to feel a bit off rather than starving, but it’s no real stretch to push past that. Now it’s just the adjusting back to more normal mealtimes and the ongoing debate with Tom as to whether the “bump” he’s seeing is the result of all that peanut butter, or the (still very small) body growing inside!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Pregnancy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.