Well nobody mentioned THAT!! Things I never thought about pregnancy until I actually got pregnant

[heylottie]

I consider myself fairly well read on all things fertility and baby, having been ttc for some time. But now I am pregnant there are things that I am still surprised about.

1. Drool - I am sure I never used to wake up in The Pool of Drool that now greets me every morning
2. Baby gender - was always adament that I would never want to find out the sex, but MY GOD the temptation to ask at the 20 week scan was nearly overwhelming! I didn't but golly...
3. That I would need panty liners some days (TMI? yes but still)
4. That listening to Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs on the radio had me wailing (I don't expect this one to be universal)
5. The amount of people who, when you tell them of back ache, gripes and pain, say 'well it will only get worse' triumphantly.
6. That when the baby kicks my first response is still (sometimes) 'Oh I need to fart.'

Any more???

This makes me think of a night out the other month...

I have a little girl who will be four in Oct. My friends eldest will be four in Aug. We make it a duty to share info with the childless women in the office, to avoid the darkness we felt we'd walked into. We went out on a team dinner, and were telling stories to a friend...

So we were going through all the things you didnt know... the fact morning sickness doesn't go away in the afternoon, the fact you feel somebody has turned up the temp, the extreme tidyness, the sad crying (I sobbed for four hours after writing something on the wrong line in DD's baby book, DH was promising to get me a new one, but I kept wailing "but I will know forever) etc etc. I said about how people will keep asking after your nipples, and that midwives will handle your breasts without asking.

And then we got talking about stitches. Childless friend looked disgusted at the idea of tearing, so my friend (with the baby) said...

"oh, and they use a torch to look to see if you need stitches."

my childless friend refused to believe it was true, friend with child adamant that somebody had looked up there with a torch to check for tearing. Childless friend asked me to verify, I burst out laughing as I had a section proving that despite having one child, I still dont know all there is to know!!!

No one mentioned the ridiculous tailbone pain, which escalates to excruciating in labour

The unbridled joy of being able to take your first deep breath in two months after a small human is removed from under your diaphragm.

that even though you can fit into your pre pregnancy jeans, it doesn't mean you should actually wear them... I was in agony the night after I'd been wearing my jeans all day; and cursed the little poses I'd been doing. I didn't realise it would take so long to heal.

After giving birth i (foolishly) looked in the mirror to discover I had burst practically every blood vessel in my face with all the pushing...even the whites of my eyes had turned pink! It scared the sh*t out of me and I remember asking the midwife if I would stay like that forever! It did go away in the next few days tho, much to my relief...

So it gets worse the more children u have apart from waking up at some ungodly hour
suddenly stopping mid sentence and gazing into space vacantly and then thinking what was I saying
the suddenly bursting into tears and thinking why did I do it why did I have more children
the running to the toilet and then just accepting you are just not going to make it and your DD giggling at you when you ask them to go and get Mummy a clean pair of knickers from her room
and this and much much more is after you have had the baby
When you get to baby number 4 expect everything to go southwards you will need to triple cross everything when you sneeze the bracken hicks from 15 weeks the child will drag every ounce of goodness from your body and I'm still trying to get my hair back into the condition it was 2 years ago my nails have never been the same
still getting up at an ungodly hour because DD3 is awake and wants to watch Teletubbies and then going into her bedroom and she says Hello and I totally melt and thank my lucky stars I've got her

Things I wished I had been told:
I would cry whilst watching the news, the Olympic Games, charity ads and 'Many Rivers to Cross' on TOTP2.
I would be sick and have nausea for the full term. (Have you tried ginger? AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!) Yes I have, and b6, and medication, and crackers etc.
I would be the size of a house even though I kept very little down, and now have stretch marks on my boobs and thighs (but not on my belly where I expected to have them...)
Although I felt too tired and ill to go anywhere and basically hibernated whilst I was pg, I would have great hair, skin and nails until immediately after birth when my hair would fall out at a scary rate. This is compounded by ds pulling out a few every time he is picked up.
Breastfeeding is not easy. I tried, produced a small amount of green milk, (to the fascination of the hospital staff - they still don't know why it was green) and spent hours on the milking machine to get a couple of ounces. Ds is now purely on SMA and doing fine but I am often made to feel guilty about this. A staff member in my local supermarket once said to me 'you're not feeding him that formula silliness are you? I nearly punched him.
Competitive grandparents with lots of out of date advice will drive you to distraction.
Finally - and this is a big one, you might not dilate enough! I wanted a home birth and got an emergency c-section...
Ds is great though. We think he's feeling sorry for all the distress he put me through during pg and birth.

I wish I had known:

That the smell of coffee would make me retch from the beginning, and that drinking any caffeine at all would turn my stomach. (I got very into peppermint tea)

That the baby can be in the birthing position for the entire pregnancy to get lots of lung-kicking in.

That your own mother will only comment on how she never got morning sickness, while I threw up in a bin at the bus stop... (sorry for the tmi)

That anti-epilepsy medicine can get into the breat milk so I would have to bottle feed and could only give my DS the colostrum, (at least he got that) which began to appear WAY too early.

That my boobs would get so huge so quickly, and that my bump would extend so far up my chest that wearing a bra at all would be agony. consequentially, I have much sag.

That if you don't constantly rub oil on stretch marks, they turn into a sea of numb yet itchyness.

Or that I would never regain full feeling in my bellybutton.

That, as you tried to pay for something, you would forget the pin for your debit card. Which is also the pin for your credit card. Which means you are completely stuffed and can't do any shopping or take money out the machine.
I'm 40 + 4 - this happened yesterday in the vet and I still can't remember the pin.....

Re pubic hair - it's not just you, Leningrad. I try to keep things trimmed for hygiene reasons (not easy to do flying blind), but I still keep catching glimpses in the mirror and thinking "What's Brian May doing in my bedroom, and isn't he short in real life?"

Ohhh Love this thread...

1. The sobbing. I was v pg with DD when the whale in the Thames thing happened. Spent all bloody day watching Sky News and then it died. Could not and would not stop crying. It was like loosing a member of my family!

1. The amount of times i heard myself say "No i'm not being unreasonable because I'm pregnant, I would feel like this if I wasnt pregnant." I soon realised telling my boss to F off is something I wouldnt "normally" do.

1. That you can virtually fit an entire arm up there

4.The bleeding afterwards... noone warned me about that one. Thought I was dying for a while until a various midwifes convinced me it was normal.

Bloody kids eh, how would have em.

for me

sprouting ching

heh who am i kidding i am like one of those play doh hairdresser kits. sprout sprout sprout all over my whole body.

Sorry DP but I just can't keep up with it!

that my norks would smell of M & S sultana cookies

Leningrad mine not only became more profuse and longer, it also CHANGED COLOUR from blonde to brown and also turned curly for the first time ever when previously it was more or less straight

No one told me that I would be so desperate for relief from my itchy fanjo - not thrush, just swelling and hormones - that I would resort to Bonjela in the middle of the night And for the curious, it makes you shriek and run round the entire first floor of your house for about a minute, but then affords blissful relief for 3 hours.

Oh, and the belly button pain (around six-seven months) I didn't even know I had any feeling there and never would've thought it could be a source of such agony ! Or am I the only one on this one?

Getting to about 17 weeks without a noticable bump the first time round, but showing about five minutes after conception with number 2! :0

That it becomes astonishingly difficult to put your knickers on unassisted.

That you can vomit with such forceful retching that it brings your whole face out in a rash.

And after you have given birth, when you fart, it feels like it's coming out your fanjo.

Many of the above, but also (which I've not seen mentioned yet) that your feet may get bigger during pregnancy and, if they do, may never go back to their original size. None of my lovely pre-DS shoes fit me any more. Of course, in parallel I never get to go anywhere I could wear heels anyway, so it's not as bad as it could be...

Oh, I consoled myself during my c-section with the thought that at least my fanjo would retain its youthful pristine glory.

EH-EHHH (Family Fortunes noise)

Okay, so I didn' tear, but it now has a painful bend in it which my cervix has shot round and refuses to come out. I have also had physiotherapy for my pelvic floor. The scar remains bald, so you have to cultivate a bit of a comb-over. Finally, the whole area has darkened in colour and increased in size.

EH-EHHH!

Port and Lemon - my feet grew - see post Wed 1st 11.21 - I had to give away all my shoes too

Glad it's not just me - was beginning to feel a bit freakish there! No one believed me either .....

so many of these ring true.

3.5 years on and my (inny) tummy button is still horribly sensitive - it really hurts if someone, say a 3.5 year old child, sticks their finger in it! (and she doesn't even do it hard!)

not so much about pregnancy, but I wish someone had told me that the baby needs to learn how to breastfeed too - I might have persevered...