A funny thing happened to me....

.... I got pregnant....

.....which is awesome! I could not be happier or more excited about the next stage of my life. I'm so happy and grateful to be having this amazing experience and to have such a wonderful man to share it with.

Now enough of the gushy stuff, time for the honest stuff :)

There's a lot that no one warns you about (or can warn you about) when it comes to getting pregnant. The first trimester which I am finally out of is a real learning curve. It's full of weird feelings and emotions, a whole new you; some experiences funny, some daunting, some just downright strange!

I don't even really know where to begin in explaining them, but here goes....

- Almost instant baby brain. I feel like almost immediately I experienced a mental block with my writing, and everything I wrote no longer flowed or made sense. This led to a major loss of confidence when it came to my blogging (hence my big break from posting). At almost 15 weeks I have now also found myself forgetting my point mid-sentence a lot which makes for some super awkward conversations....

-A loss of the sense of who I was. I felt exhausted, run down - like a shadow of the confident, healthy and braver person I had become. I didn't feel like me anymore and it was scary. I felt like I had gone backwards.

-A confusing paradox in energy levels. One minute you are charging around as normal, living life at 100 miles an hour, the next you are comatose on the sofa as if twenty trains have hit you and the walk to the toilet (which you will need to visit rather more excessively as time goes on) feels like a trek up Everest. However, you'll then inexplicably wake up at 7am on a Saturday like its normal. WHAT?!

- A sometimes alarming 0 to 60 change in mood. Something that may have irritated you a bit before, makes your blood boil at a murderous level now and a whole lot less afraid to be blunt about what you think. Being cut up at a roundabout may or may not result in said driver being loudly called a prick nowadays. Oops...

-A strange sense of vulnerability that you are walking around GROWING A HUMAN BEING but that you cannot tell anyone. It can be quite an isolating feeling. The hugest thing is happening to you, but the fear of telling people or fear of the dreaded M word is so great you are forced to pretend it isn't happening. Effectively living a lie for the best part of two months is hella tough.

-Nature's boob job. On the one hand your boobs are getting bigger and bigger for freeeeee (score!) On the other they are like someone keeps punching you in them to the extent that sleeping on your back in sports bras is the only option. Swings and roundabouts.

-The nausea - I was one of the lucky ones with this from what I can gather. I was only ever sick once (suffice it to say salmon is now off the menu for me) but the nausea all day is bad enough. I was lucky that (most of the time) eating, drinking ginger ale or wearing Sea Bands (acupressure bands you can easily find in your local Boots) did the job. However, some days these made no difference and I felt horrendous. Another thing that sucks about having to keep it secret - at your very worst you can't have a moan and get all the sympathy, sniff.

-The cravings - My partner's dad made the mistake of mentioning Salt & Vinegar Chipsticks. That was it. Suddenly I had to have them and nothing else would do. I went on several unsuccessful post work hunts for them - they are surprisingly hard to come by! Gregg's chicken slices have never tasted so good. The baked bean/cheese melt from Gregg's is enough to illicit a happy dance of joy. Pineapple is the fruit of the Gods. Guacamole has been ingested by the truck load. Poor child.

- The anxiety and how time drags - The time between finding out you are pregnant (on average at about 5 weeks) and the first scan can be agonising. Time has never gone so slowly. A wait of 7 weeks to even find out if the little one was ok was too much for us. We paid for a private scan at 11 weeks as we still hadn't received a 12 week scan date from the NHS. I couldn't cope with waiting all that time to potentially discover the worst (this is new levels of anxiety I now have to fight). I was not prepared for how hard that wait would be AT ALL.

- Your body as public property - At 15 weeks I am just beginning to show but a lot of what you are seeing is mostly bloat or all the food I have eaten over the last couple of months, people!! Yet the minute you are pregnant people suddenly think its ok to touch you. To point out the size of your tummy. I don't mind if this is my close friends, but I have found people who would never normally do it touching me and its super weird. My wonderful but usually very serene yoga teacher said in no uncertain terms that I should "tell them to fuck off". Not very yogic but I could probably just put it down to hormones, right?!

- What you can't eat/drink - I've decided (realistically of course) that my post-birth meal will be as follows: untold (runny) poached eggs on toast, prosecco, a smoked salmon cream cheese bagel, chorizo, a medium rare steak, all washed down with a pornstar martini cocktail and maybe a Rose wine chaser just for fun. I have felt guilt for craving these things while pregnant, but what you can't have is always more appealing and I have always been a terrible one for FOMO.

My not being able to eat runny eggs was actually how we broke the news to Lee's family at brunch one Saturday when I unusually asked for my eggs scrambled: "It's not her fault because you can't eat runny eggs when you're pregnant." Silence...... followed by near instant hysterical crying and probably the most hilarious/best reaction we could have asked for.

So there you have it, a few of my learning curves from the last 9 or so weeks.

I'm excited to see what more I can learn over the next 5/6 months, and so happy and excited for this new journey in my life. Can't wait to meet our "Little Chum" as we call the little bump that is now beginning to blossom.

Here's to the next (enormous) step out of the comfort zone!