I remember so vividly the feeling after you hope you conceived and between the time you were able to test positive on a home pregnancy test. Those days were the longest. Except maybe the last month of pregnancy. The start and the end of every conception to birth journey is so unique in that you need to let go, and let time just happen. But it really feels like you’re briefly sucked into a time vortex where the clocks stop moving and you’re just tapping your finger and waiting.
Remember, none of the below is medical advice. I am just a mama, and I happen to love pregnancy and birth and love to write about it. If you are genuinely concerned about your pregnancy, issues conceiving, or with upcoming labor/birth, make sure you ask your medical provider your questions.
TRYING FOR A GIRL
With both pregnancies (when we were trying to get pregnant) I read that if you tried at the very beginning of your ovulation cycle, or even 2-3 days before your ovulation cycle began, you’d have increasingly higher odds of getting pregnant with a girl because something about male DNA carrying sperm dying out quicker, so by the time you were at the peak of your ovulation cycle, only female DNA carrying sperm remained. I can only prove this twice, because I have only two kids, but both of them are girls, so maybe it worked? :)
CANDLESTICK METHOD
Another method for getting pregnant that I used was called the candlestick method. It’s when you kick your feet up in the air, and place the palms of your hands against your back. Apparently this is a known fertility exercise during ovulation and conception. I again don’t know if its effective, but its what I tried with both babies. It’s known well as a yoga move too.
FEVER
Both times that I got pregnant with my two daughters, the very first early pregnancy symptom that I experienced with each pregnancy before I could even test positive with a home pregnancy test was a fever! Yes a fever! With both pregnancies! It lasted a very short amount of time, I can’t remember exactly anymore because my very first pregnancy was 7 years ago, and my second pregnancy was 4 years ago, but I believe the fever was less than 24 hours in duration and it was a low-grade fever both times, around 100.6. I can only guess the reasoning behind this was my body lowering its immune defenses as it prepared for implantation.
CRAMPING
Once we tried for each baby, I was so impatient to know if I had gotten pregnant successfully. Instantly I started googling what early symptoms of pregnancy could feel like before a home pregnancy test would actually give me real results.
With both of my times getting pregnant, one of the earliest symptoms of pregnancy that I was personally able to feel was menstrual type cramping. Later on I found out that this could be a sign of a fertilized egg traveling down the fallopian tubes to your uterus.
With both pregnancies very early on I experienced slight bleeding between weeks 6-8 which I thought could be implantation bleeding.
FATIGUE
Right away with both pregnancies in the first trimester, I immediately felt tremendous fatigue. When I got pregnant with my first baby, I’d come home from work, and fall asleep right away for a late afternoon/early morning nap. Once I got pregnant with my second baby (and something nobody tells you that complicates things with pregnancy related fatigue!) I couldn’t nap anymore when I felt exhausted! Because it seemed that the moment I got pregnant with my second baby, my first child who had just turned 2 years old, completely stopped napping.
METALLIC TASTE
HELLO Pregnancy! The Metallic Taste is the one thing most complained about by myself during both pregnancies, family members of mine, friends of mine and even my birth photography clients. It just tastes like you have pennies in your mouth, and its super unpleasant. It can make food taste awful and unappealing causing you to eat less, causing you an empty belly and more nausea, and it can just be an overall frustrating feeling to not be able to wash it out of your mouth no matter what you do!
MY FAVORITE TRIMESTER
My favorite trimester has always been the 2nd trimester. The second trimester goes from week 13 to 26 of pregnancy.
My belly always started to look more round, so I was visibly pregnant, my skin was tight around my belly, which made me feel more confident in myself, pregnancy caused fatigue went away, and although I was still nauseous during this time with my first pregnancy, the nausea definitely got better with my second pregnancy during this trimester and by the middle of the second trimester my pregnancy related nausea was completely gone.
NAUSEA AND HYPEREMESIS
Nausea was something I unfortunately experienced A LOT of during both pregnancies.
During my very first pregnancy with my first daughter, my nausea started at about 6-7 weeks and lasted consistently every day until the 37th week when it finally dissipated. No matter what I tried to eat or drink, I couldn’t keep anything down. In the middle of the day, either just before lunch or immediately after lunch time, I could keep down anything chocolate, but that was literally it. So it was no surprise to me that my now almost 6 year old daughter is a huge chocolate addict!
It wasn’t until my first baby was about a year and a half old that I found out that I experienced during my first pregnancy a similar condition to Kate Middleton called Hyperemesis Gravidarum. It was actually in an article about her pregnancy which is how I found out.
Hyperemesis Gravidarum is a pregnancy complication that is characterized by severe nausea, vomiting, weight loss, and possibly dehydration. Signs and symptoms may also include vomiting many times a day and feeling faint. Hyperemesis gravidarum is considered more severe than morning sickness. (source).
I also later found out that many women who experience Hyperemesis Gravidarum (also called HG) during their pregnancy end up being hospitalized for dehydration and malnutrition since they cannot keep anything down to hydrate properly or nourish themselves.
The OBGYN I was with during my first pregnancy never mentioned this medical condition. He also never gave me any solutions to treating it. I realize now looking back, I was very underweight, although I gained a healthy 15lbs, I really should have gained more. I looked very thin until 37 weeks of my pregnancy. My OBGYN recommended oral 8mg zofran tablets but they only barely took the edge of for 30 minutes per day. So every day I had to decide which 30 minutes of the day was worst and take it then. It was misery. It was like being sea sick for 30 weeks of my pregnancy! Or a really bad hangover.
So there you have it, those were the bulk of my early pregnancy symptoms and some of the most prominent during my pregnancies. There were definitely many other symptoms I experienced as time went on. More food cravings, headaches, round ligament pain, back pain, mood swings, etc, but the above were the ones that hung around for most of my pregnancies! I hope this blog post was helpful or insightful to you on what to possibly expect when you’re pregnant.
ABOUT ME
I am a birth photographer in Boca Raton, FL. I started out 11 years ago originally photographing engagements, weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties. But once I had my first child almost 6 years ago, I felt a calling to only working with new moms. I limited my work to maternity sessions, newborn photography, photographing families and breastfeeding photo shoots. I became very well known in south Florida for my advocacy of breastfeeding.
Shortly after my daughter turned 2 years old, I attended my first birth as a photographer. It was for one of my maternity / breastfeeding photography clients.
The moment I photographed her birth a little over 4 years ago now, I knew then that I wanted to be a full time on call birth photographer & birth videographer as my career.
I never looked back.
Today, I have photographed almost 100 births in the last 4 years, ranging from birth center births, to home births with midwives and doulas, inductions in the hospital, unmedicated births in the hospital, surrogate births, twin births both vaginal and c-section, schedule cesarean births, emergency cesareans, and I love what I do. I have birth great professional relationships with the midwives, OBGYNs and labor doulas here in south Florida, many of my colleagues are baby nurses, lactation consultants, pediatric sleep specialists, physical therapists and chiropractors. I would love to work with you for your birth story, and typically I book about 5 to 7 months in advance, however, it is not unheard of for me to sometimes take a client who is in the last two months of their pregnancy, so don’t hesitate to reach out!
