20/20 hindsight.

[rivka]

In retrospect, I didn't have very strong pregnancy symptoms with my miscarried pregnancy. At the time I certainly felt tired and nauseated, but there's just no comparison to the way the first trimester is beating me down this time around.

It's not totally intolerable, and in fact I actually find the symptoms reassuring. I need all the evidence of pregnancy that I can get. But... it's the difference between having to be careful about what I eat and sometimes being unable to eat; between often feeling tired and often needing a nap to get through the day; between outgrowing my regular bras and outgrowing my maternity bras. (ZOMG I have outgrown my maternity bras and I'm only just entering the ninth week.)

I produced pregnancy hormones last time - enough to make a placenta, even though it had nothing to support. My pregnancy symptoms were real. But they were a shadow of what I'm experiencing now that I'm churning out enough hormones to support an inch-long fetus.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

What does Alex know about it? I don't think you've said.

Once we saw a heartbeat, we thought it right to tell Alex. We had told her about the previous pregnancy, but because there was no evidence that there had ever been a fetus we didn't present the miscarriage as a death: "we thought I had a baby growing inside me, but I didn't - I was just very sick."

A fetus with a heartbeat is a different story to me. Even if we lost it this early, I would have still wanted Alex to know that there was a baby who died. Although of course the risk of that drops considerably once a heartbeat has been sighted.

Alex is very excited. She has lots of questions. (Is the baby going to be a boy or a girl? Are she and the baby going to be twins? What will the baby's name be? Is my tummy getting big yet? How big is the baby? Can she see pictures of the baby coming out?) She has been very interested in looking at pictures of fetal development and has many theories about what we ought to buy for the baby.

She is also, as one might expect, enjoying pretending that she's a baby. I am relieved that this is happening now, when I can still lift her bodily and do pretend infant-care things for her.

Oh: and she thinks she should get an allowance now that there's a baby on the way. Six cents. She lifted that idea, including the amount, directly from Russell Hoban's A Baby Sister for Frances.