Cravings

‘So have you had any weird cravings at all Daisy?’ Louise asked conversationally over dinner. ‘No. Actually I haven’t. I think is it one of those many myths surrounding pregnancy’. I respond. Special Bloke guffaws loudly and nearly chokes on his fork in disbelief. ‘Daisy, you are such a fibber! Look at this! ’He opens a cupboard to reveal rather a lot of bumper packs of fizzy cola bottle sweets. Louise and her new bloke explode with laughter. ‘And look at this!’ He opens the fridge, which displays at least ten large tubs of peach flavoured yogurt. Then Special Bloke rubs his hands and performs a type of victory dance as he opens 2 trays in the freezer, which are packed to capacity with ice-lollies. I grin sheepishly and wonder if the baby is getting enough nutrition from my bizarre diet.

No Guilt!

Now I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill but I have definitely expanded on top. I’m sure I didn’t sleep walk to the nearest plastic surgeon last night and demand silicon implants. I like my new shape but I’m not entirely gone on the blue cheese vein effect.

Hitherto, I have not been exactly flatchested but if I tell you I skip the section on fashion pages about how to minimize your cleavage, you’ll get the picture. I didn’t think anyone else would notice my new buxom shape but as I walked around town at lunchtime a definite trend emerged. Men fixate on my chest and then guiltily look away when I catch their eyes. This has never happened to me before and I’m enjoying the novelty.

I am no longer throwing up, hurrah! I still get nauseous when I’m tired or hungry. The only way to get relief is to keep grazing. As a result, I am piling on the pounds and it’s getting tougher to close the top button on my jeans. For once I am delighted to get up on the scales and see my weight soar…no guilt!

Get used to smelling differently

Someone has switched the volume up on my nose. Everything, absolutely everything smells weird. Bananas smell of slightly sour milk. Making it past the deli counter in the supermarket without retching has become my own personal bush tucker trial.

I woke up last night in a right state, ran to the window and stuck my head out and breathed in great big gulps of fresh air. What on God’s earth is that smell coming from downstairs? Holding my nose, I run to the kitchen to discover Special Bloke making himself a post pub fish finger buttie. It smells like he’s fried a whole catch of smelly, pongy, well used gym shoes and well worn footie vests from a teenage school team. Eughhh! ‘Open a window, please. Have you been smoking in here?’ I demand. ‘I just had one, because its bucketing rain out there. Have a heart.’ He mumbles. I am furious. He tries to give me a hug and kiss by way of an apology, but his breath stinks of hops, barley and fags.

I push him off overcome by the stink, rising nausea in my throat and lets be honest. …sheer jealousy that he can happily spend a night sinking pints and puffing away while I get intimately acquainted with the toilet bowl. I storm off to bed with tears in my eyes and a profound despair that I will never feel normal again.

Your world [and tummy] turns upside down

‘Have you tried crackers first thing in the morning? Dry toast? Ice-lolls?Acu-pressure wrist pads? Meditating? Drinking 7up with salt? Smear yourself with camel dung and pull your nasal hairs out one by one?’

Yes, now feck off the lot of you and let me be sick and miserable in peace. And if one more person tells me to ‘take my mind off being sick’, I will personally wrap their tongue around their neck and spin them around on their behind.
Feck’n nausea. I want to get off this whole pregnancy carousel. Hormonal? Moi? And your point is?

Can’t believe I can’t take anything. Hitherto, if I’ve had a cramp I’ve taken a pill, headache? I have not taken a dry cracker or piece of toast. It seems a very inadequate prescription.

I must be the only woman to lose weight while pregnant. I never really got quadratic equations at school …but even I can see that there is something slightly askew with the equation below.
Normal body weight + bump should not be < normal body weight. The odd thing is that when I plea my case to the medical folk, they smile knowingly and say ‘And I’ll bet you have a funny metallic taste in your mouth too’. Yes you pack of know-alls I do, but funnily enough I already knew this. What I don’t know is how to survive the next couple of months. Apparently it’s a sign that all is well. Mmmmmm I’m beginning to think this pregnancy lark is one big design fault, that is in need of a radical overhaul. My proposal is that conception stays more or less the same [bar bloke farting immediately afterwards and rolling over for a snore fest] ; embryo develops for a few days. Mother-to be burps out the bundle of cells and deposits it in a microwave where it is nurtured and fed. After a couple of hours, out pops babs. No worries. No bloomn’ nausea.

& doing a little light exercise

The guilt books also insist that you ‘continue’ to exercise. My calf muscles are still in shock from a week’s ski-ing to even consider exercise. I do take note that I should be doing some pelvic floor exercises to stop me pee-ing when I laugh. By co-incidence, I listen to a radio chat show, with cabbies phoning in, alleging that middle-aged women frequently urinate in the back of the cabs after a night out on the town. This is news to me. I find the instructions immediately and try to understand how to do pelvic floor exercises without cheating. I grab a pillow and plump it under my head. That’s better. Ow, what’s that under my elbow? Oh look it’s the remote control. Wonder what’s on? Oh Eastenders. How many more years have I got before I’m technically middle-aged? Anyhow life’s too short and I’m too tired.

Get used to eating sensibly

Lilly from Accounts, phones to say she read a piece of Swedish research that babies in the womb love chocolate. It makes them really happy and it has calcium in it. Dark chocolate even has iron in it. Fantastic news. None of the pregnancy books mention this. My guilt books are full of colour photos of herring roll mops and mackerel with sad eyes. Now even if I wasn’t feeling nauseous, the sight of both these species in my fridge would make me a bit green around the gills. At the moment, I am struggling to keep a glass of water down not to mention the quarter ton of fruit, exotic, steamed vegetables and iron rich red meat every Mother-to-be apparently makes time to devour. I have become a major convert of fizzy cola bottles and raw celery sticks which both seem to stave off the nausea attacks.

Forget Trinny & Susannah.Magic Knickers are out

I’d love to stay and chat but I am soooooo bored. Do you have any idea how boring this conversation is? Are work nights really this dull without alcohol? How do teetotalers stick this on a regular basis? Don’t get me wrong. I have about as much interest in having a drink as having sex. But I’d love something to get me in the party mood. I have no energy. I am dull, dull as ditch water. I’m not feeling so great all of a sudden. I need to sleep..or maybe faint.

Yikes. What happened? Fiona is telling me to take it easy and ordering me to breathe in and out of a paper bag. It smells of fizzy cola bottles. Oh that’s better. She loosens my bra and asks me if I’m feeling a bit better. ‘I guess its time to stop wearing those magic knickers and tummy minimisers’, I confess. She phones Special Bloke, who arrives like a knight in shining amour.

‘Poor baby’ he soothes. ‘Was it the heat in here?’ ‘No’ pipes up Fiona’ It was the magic knickers!’. Special Bloke chuckles and throws me into the car like an unruly child. Despite the late hour, I insist that Special Bloke finds a shop that sells pic’n’mix fizzy cola bottles. We get lucky on shop number 6 and buy half a pound of them. Bloomn’ luverly!