My pregnancy

It makes sense for this blog to be fairly chronological, so let’s start at the beginning.

My pregnancy was fairly boring and uneventful. We conceived while on holiday in Europe, and I found out that I was pregnant
half way through our holiday, while we were in Rome. Yep – I went and found a pregnancy test from a pharmacy in Rome…and then I probably should have stopped drinking wine and eating smoked salmon, but I have to be honest: I didn’t. I figured that I was on holidays, and everything was so fresh, and I had been told that in the first weeks of pregnancy that the fetus doesn’t get that much stuff from my system (like alcohol), plus when I thought about the first three weeks of the pregnancy and all of the drinking and salmon eating I had already done, well, what harm could it do?

Anyways, I got home and made an appointment to see a GP. I told the doctor that I was pregnant and he responded with “Congratulations, when are you due?”. Honestly, I thought that he would work all of that out for me. I had already downloaded an app to put pregnancy stuff in to, so I had a date from that…but I thought there may be a more scientific way to tell when I was due. Turns out, not so much! So a due date of May 11 was determined, and we were set to go. That was basically all of the information that I received from my GP, to be honest he was pretty useless and I ended up changing doctor’s half way through my pregnancy.

I decided to have my baby at the Birth Centre at the local hospital, with the Continuity of Care program – so I would have the same midwife throughout my pregnancy. I also decided to go in to this experience as prepared as possible, and so I signed my husband and me up for a Calm Birth class. I can tell you now, he was very unimpressed with the idea of the class! But in the end it was fairly worthwhile and I’ll tell you all about it in a future post.

I will say this for my pregnancy – it is not the ‘beautiful experience’ that people led me to believe. I was uncomfortable, tired, sore and miserable a lot of the time. To prevent having one long post complaining about pregnancy, I’m breaking my experience up into the following four categories:

• My pregnancy body – how I coped with my changing body, and how I kept my self-esteem up;
• Calm Birth class – this is a national phenomenon, and I would encourage almost anyone to give it a go;
• The Birth Centre – a way to have a baby while being supported, and not 'over-medicalising’ your pregnancy; and
• Contradictions of pregnancy – my last trimester drove me crazy! I felt like I was being given so much advice, but one piece of advice would contradict the other, or just cause more problems. Argh!

Stay tuned to journey through my pregnancy – what I remember of it anyway – and hopefully some of my stories might help you through your own pregnancy adventure.