Please excuse me while my writing drives over the yellow line into the oncoming traffic of bad taste. It is difficult to compose anything with one hand poised to dive down my throat at the command of my nausea. I have been trying to figure out what is different about this pregnancy as opposed to when I was pregnant with Sol and Zaviera. I was nauseated with both of them and it was not pleasant but this pregnancy has been particularly brutal. There is very little I can eat and when I do eat, I often have to throw-up about hour after I have eaten. At first I thought the obvious: I have two other children to take care of, it is making it more challenging. But that doesn’t explain the degree to which I get nauseated. The only pregnancy I threw-up with was Zaviera and that was only once.

Not that figuring any of this out is going to relieve the experience but hey, a woman has to find some flimsy sense of control when her body is swerving all over the place. So my theory (as of today) besides this maybe being another girl, is that with both of my previous pregnancies my diet was radically different. The previous first trimesters featured such staples as: gummy worms, marshmallows, BK Chicken burgers, Subway, mochas, blueberry white choc muffins, choc in general…you get the picture. The first trimester has always featured junkfood because it was all I could stomach and then i would go back to my usual healthy eating for the remainder of the pregnancy. I think one of the many ways I have disappointed my father is that when Dan and I came back to the USA with Sol’s pregnancy I was, as he said, “A boring pregnant woman.” No wild moodswings, but more importantly, no wild food cravings. My dad was looking forward to those food cravings, to being sent out on missions that meant he would have an excuse to eat whatever I was eating.

This pregnancy? The most refined carb on the menu, the closest thing to sugar my body has experienced is hot chips. I really think the constant nibbling on ‘lollies’ (Kiwis call all candy ‘lollies’) might have not necessarily relieved the nausea from my last pregnancies but made it less acute. I promise to try not to write about my nausea every week for the next 3-4 weeks but right now it is all consuming.

I have decided to allow the Monday blog to become a Tuesday blog (like how I make this sound as if it was a conscious, focused choice rather than the fact that I couldn’t function today?) because Tuesday is the official day I reach a new week in the pregnancy. A new week equals a week closer to the safety zone of the second trimester and, more importantly, the nausea-free zone. I am now officially eight weeks pregnant and the baby is the size of a lima bean, and is starting to develop like crazy. Hoooboy can I feel it!

One of the positives of this first trimester madness (when it isn’t working against me) is the way my senses are enhanced. Dan took me out to Japanese food for Mother’s Day and the taste! Ooooh the taste! And while I hate enclosed spaces because of all the lingering smells, I love being outside. I went on a long walk today to get my exercise in and it felt like being a child again, the way the world was so vividly alive. This time of year usually brings a mood disorder to NZ’s weather, or, as others like to say, “Four seasons in one hour”. Yesterday a sudden thunderstorm shook our house on and off for about an hour. It was like a dark, echoing shute had opened in the sky above us and the universe came roaring down. At one point I looked outside to discover the lawn had turned white with hail. It piled up in the streets so quickly that roads flooded. Today we are back to our rain/sun, rain/sun weather but evidence of the hail still exists in small dirty piles on the lawn and gathered around storm drains and on my walk the air had this crisp beauty to it that brought me back to all the autumns of my childhood.

I have still been unable to write but I am reading like crazy and I have discovered that this is actually more important right now. This week I stumbled on to a discovery, a book called Hunting Humans that has brought to the surface the thrust of some of the issues I want to explore in the novel as well as in the academic component of my thesis…more on this later, I am itching to write about it but I am being swamped by my bugaboos right now.

So my goals for this week?
Survive. Get fresh air. Try not to cry about the nausea. Read. Have faith.

And you?