**Disclaimer: I am not writing this post because I think I am pregnant. In fact, I made the decision a while ago to give up thinking that I am pregnant. It’s less disappointing that way. I still hope, sure, but I just assume that I’m not and proceed from there. At this point it is a policy that has yet to be proven wrong. **
I have a question for all you who have been pregnant. (Sorry, guys, you’re kind of excluded from this one.) What’s it like, at the beginning? I realized the other day that I have no idea. I know some of it can be similar to PMS, because you hear people talk about sore boobs and being tired and cranky and moody, which pretty much describes my PMS symptoms. I always kind of assumed the absence of PMS would be a clue, because maybe the pregnancy symptoms kick in later, but now I’m not so sure.
There’s a whole long technical explanation for why I’m not so sure, but I just wrote it out, and it’s really boring. Really. Boring. So let’s just leave it at I’m curious. If (when) I don’t get pregnant this month, we’re moving ahead with either one more IUI or straight to IVF, and so my chances of getting pregnant should be improving. And I want to know what it’s like. When we first started trying to conceive, I had naïve notions about how we’d have a perfect, romantic evening followed by fireworks-filled sex in perfect harmony, and then somehow, I’d just know that we’d been successful*. Going on four years later, I may be just a tad more cynical about the process. Still, I’d like to know, did you feel different at all, or was it like any other month? If you felt different, how early did you start to feel different? Were you taken by surprise, slightly suspicious that something might be up, or totally expecting it?
I’d love to hear your stories.
P.S. Totally unrelated, but very exciting to me – I won my first chess game tonight! John gave me two do-overs when I made particularly stupid moves (“are you sure you want to do that?” he’d ask. “You might want to examine the board a little more closely.”) and then refused to give himself a do-over when he made a stupid move, so I had a little help. I’m happy the game is starting to make more sense to me. It’s nice to have one win under my belt. I’m sure I’ll have to work really hard to get the next one!
* Not that we don’t have “perfect, romantic evenings followed by fireworks-filled sex in perfect harmony...”. It’s just that I don’t think they are going to result in conception anymore.
I had this post in my bloglines yesterday morning, and when I tried to comment, poof! It was gone.
I'm currently 20 weeks pregnant, so I remember those early days well. I was on my last 'natural' month before moving to IUI's. I had sort of resigned myself to not being pregnant. Then the weirdest nausea hit me, 2 days earlier than the end of my luteal phase. If I didn't have exactly the right balance of food in my stomach, I was nauseous. That balance only lasted for 1 hour after eating. I also couldn't stand the smell of cold tomato sauce.
So I tested the next morning, and got a positive. The other symptom that came in the next week was extreme exhaustion.
Hope this helps.
My boobs were incredibly sore almost immediately, and shortly after that I began requiring 14 hours of sleep a day.