All my other pregnancy diary posts have been by week, but being away for 3 weeks right at the beginning of my second trimester, I decided it would be a whole lot easier just to merge these all into one. Most of my symptoms disappeared at this point plus the weeks just kind of all merged into one! So here’s a quick run-down, in pregnancy form, of how weeks 14 to 17 while I was away on honeymoon went, scattered with a gratuitous amount of holiday bump pics!
See more of my pregnancy diary posts here or check out the whole thing:
Aversions disappeared!
This is my favourite thing ever – as you can tell by those crazy eyes above! I’d been really, really nervous about going away and still hating the thought of all my favourite foods – I hadn’t been able to eat the vast majority of vegetables or meat for well over a month and was basically surviving on the bare minimum of food I could force myself to eat.
One thing we were most looking forward to on honeymoon was eating ALL the food. We had the Disney Dining Plan booked and I literally had a spreadsheet with all our restaurant bookings, plans and the snacks we most wanted to try – we’d been gathering this information for at least the past 6 months so we had the ultimate food guide to Disney, as well as ideas for places to eat and things to cook in NY state. Since we’re both huge food lovers, I didn’t want to disappoint Ben or myself by only wanting to eat bananas and crackers on our trip, so I was hoping and praying that I’d at least feel a bit better.
See more of our Disney honeymoon posts here:
But as soon as my feet touched American soil, I felt instantly better! Okay, I was a little nervous to try chicken at first again and it took me a couple of times of Ben ordering it and me trying little bits before I ordered my own, but by the end of the trip, I was eating totally normally again – not an aversion in sight! I’m SO glad I got to try as many of the snacks as I could manage, particularly with the Food & Wine Festival at Epcot – and had my appetite return with a vengeance.
Thank you, second trimester, or honeymoon, or rest from daily life – whatever the answer, I SO enjoyed this.
Energy returned!
The other thing I’d been nervous about was how exhausted I’d felt since approximately week 0 of pregnancy. I’ve never taken naps, but I was coming home from work and promptly falling asleep; I couldn’t motivate myself to do anything, not even read some days! Since Disney and travelling are generally pretty exhausting work anyway, I was scared we’d be finishing our days before they’d even begun.
But fortunately, that 14 weeks pregnant magic worked its stuff on me again and the tiredness disappeared! On the day we landed, we had it provisionally noted down in our spreadsheet that we might pop over to Magic Kingdom to grab a quick service tea and catch the fireworks – only a short boat ride from our resort, Wilderness Lodge – but it was in the back of my mind that we might not manage it. I thought I would crash and need a rest with a meal at the hotel. Nope! We not only managed to make it over for a meal at Columbia Harbour House, where I enjoyed a really tasty grilled salmon with vegetable rice and green beans, but we rode a Haunted Mansion and Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin (I won!) AND watched the fireworks before heading back to bed. Pretty impressive for any first day at Disney, let alone one where you’re pregnant!
I also managed to summon up enough energy to climb 28 storeys up a mountain (the lift was broken!), walk 10+ mile days in Disney, and take the “intermediate” trail through a gorge in New York state throughout the honeymoon. Honestly, I feel like it was the healthiest and happiest I’ve been in a long time!
Quick random aside: we managed to get the above pregnancy “announcement” photos (even though we’d already announced!) while in Disney thanks to the free Photopass that came with our tickets! We had a wonderful photographer who lined up our photos perfectly with the ears, castles and fireworks which was such a magical moment!
Movement!
I started feeling what I thought were movements towards the end of week 14, just some strange twitches really. By the end of 17 weeks, I was completely and totally convinced it’s really the baby in there! I’ve had a few bigger “oh my goodness, did it just flip over?!” moments, but they’re mostly something a bit more like a muscle slightly twitching in an odd place in my lower abdomen.
At first Ben didn’t really believe me, but I kept trying to convince him since I didn’t normally get weird twitchy muscles in my abdomen, so what else would it be?! He hasn’t yet felt any movement despite me telling him to “FEEL IT!!” multiple times, but there have been moments where I’m absolutely certain I’ve felt something on the outside. Ie. the day we were driving through the mountains during late week 16 and I suddenly had a weird flippy feeling in my lower abdomen – when I put my hand there, it felt really hard then just slowly eased off as the feeling went away.
There have also been times when I’ve noticed the baby has been especially active, such as during take off and landing on the various planes we took – now that was a strange feeling!
There were times when I was getting a little worried; it had been so long since my 12 week scan while we were on honeymoon, and I was worried I might be overexerting myself – eating all sorts of food (but still Googling everything and avoiding things that I really could probably have eaten if I wanted to!), climbing mountains (I took it slow, I promise – what else would I do?!), and walking 10+ miles a day in 30+ degree temperatures at Disney (no other option!). The movements I started to feel though somewhat reassured me so that was awesome.
Lack of jet lag!
Jet lag is yucks at the best of times, so I was really quite fearing it being pregnant. I was concerned I’d be uncomfortable on the plane overnight (I am anyway, so that’s no surprise!) and that the lack of sleep and changing time zones would kill me.
The journey to the airport(s) to get home was a little stressful: due to staying close to the Canadian border, we flew from Montreal to Boston, then Boston to Manchester. The drive to Montreal was slightly nerve-wracking though: we used Google Maps which gave us a nice 2hr 15 drive time, and we set off with plenty of time as it was raining – and previous experience has told us that, when it’s raining on the way to the airport, accidents happen. Well, driving through the mountains, we had no signal on the phone, so while Google Maps continued to direct us, the traffic and journey time would only update when we hit a town, which was infrequently. It didn’t take long though before I realised that at each town, our journey time was remaining the same…then it started adding minutes every so often. Once we got enough signal, I checked the route ahead to find that, uh oh, the bridge into Montreal had a jack-knifed truck on it and the traffic was backing up. Cue my panic that we wouldn’t arrive in time to get the car back to the car hire in time, we’d be running through the airport to the flight…fortunately, the traffic had completely cleared by the time we got there, so the panic was in vain!
But there was a second panic: the flight was only a teeny tiny one – less than 40 seats in total – and we got sat down and ready to leave in plenty of time. The pilot announced that we were preparing to push back, we waited…then his voice came back on the speakers to let us know that the plane had a flat tyre and we needed to “deplane” for a few minutes while it was changed. Okay, not a problem – we had a good 3.5 hour wait at Boston for our international flight so we’d be fine. Except that few minutes was nearly 2 hours. Eek.
We arrived at Boston with less than 2 hours before the flight, needed to pick up our luggage, get to another terminal, check-in and get through security. And of course, we got off the plane to find that they, for some reason, weren’t telling us which carousel our baggage was coming on, plus the people at the information desk had gone for lunch! Finally, after around half an hour, our bags appeared on a carousel that said it had bags from New York (?!) and we rushed to catch a bus, which took 20 minutes to appear, despite the buses for the other terminals arriving every 2 minutes – argh! Then we arrived in the biggest check in hall known to man to find our desk at the furthest end. Luckily we were through there and security very quickly, but we barely had a couple of minutes to sit down before we were boarding our flight.
Nevertheless, this story is about the lack of jet lag! Luckily, we had a very well-timed and pretty short international flight of only 5.5 hours which got us into Manchester just before 5am. This meant that we got quickly through the airport and were home around 7am, just as the sun was coming up. So here’s how we combatted the jet lag: we went to bed for 2 hours! I know it’s not recommended, but if you arrive home at that time, it means you can be up for 9am, a fairly normal wake up time, and you’ve at least had some rest.
This definitely helped me. When we got up, I unpacked everything, did a couple of loads of washing, tidied up the house, then went to bed at normal time. This meant that on Sunday, we woke up at normal time, then Ben made me a healthy fruit salad for breakfast, I made vegetable minestrone soup (with ALL the veg) for lunch and we enough leftovers for days! Jet lag – beat!
The rest of this week continued with much more healthy eating now I could get around my food aversions with a big veggie stir fry, a mushroom and kale frittata and more.
Back to normal
Monday meant back to work and back to normal. I was amazed at how very not-tired I felt sitting at my desk that week – jet lag normally zombifies me for a week, plus pregnancy on top, but I was fine! I was also back at Brownies this week to a much-diminished pack as a group of our older girls had left – it was very quiet!
Oh and finally another random symptom: the bump started to show a little while we were away (although not as much as I expected!) but the more noticeable thing for me was the veins that appeared on either side of it – this was strange!
And now we’ve finally reached the time when we went away for honeymoon in September in the pregnancy diary, and now that I’ve got the minimoon posts complete too, we can get started on the real honeymoon posts themselves! Starting next week, Florida and Disney! Although the wedding posts will still be underway for another few weeks at least!
