Yesterday I talked on the phone for more than an hour with my childhood friend (who lives in another city). I knew she was pregnant because she had sent me a message with the wonderful news a couple of weeks earlier, but we didn't have the chance to talk until last night. She was now twelve weeks pregnant and had just started to feel a bit more energetic and stable after a few weeks of feeling tired and moody constantly. The nice period of pregnancy starts now, I told hear, and lasts about to the 30th week, then it's all downhill (in my opinion) from there. Until week 12 it normally doesn't show that much and you might feel out of shape, as if you've put on a few pounds (and you probably have), but once the baby bump starts to show, and to you tell your friends, family and co-workers about the pregnancy, you can reveal that beautiful tummy and be proud. That state lasts for a few months until you start to become enormous and you feel less like a blessed shiny woman and more like a clumsy elephant...Anyway, my friend is really thin. She has always been super skinny and she was really watching her weight during her first pregnancy. I don't think she put on more weight than the actual pregnancy, unlike me who put on close to 55 pounds/25 kg during both my pregnancies. But now she told me that she was always hungry and that she was constantly eating. I told her to enjoy all the foods she wanted to eat and she agreed, saying that this was probably her last pregnancy, and she does need to put on weight to be able to carry the baby and nurse it once it is born, but I thought in my head that I perhaps would also say something like: Eat when your are hungry and eat the foods you like, but don't go bananas, because it is so much hard work to lose all that extra weight afterwards, and besides the weight loss struggle, being huge can lead to complications during the delivery. But I didn't say anything at all about that because she is so tiny and I know that she would never let herself go completely. She always stays healthy. But with another friend I think I would have been more upfront about it, because I really remember the sensation of being pregnant and wanting to eat all you crave, all the forbidden stuff, just because you know that you can. And who thinks about tomorrow's weight loss problems when their pregnant? But they should...because it's so much hard work to lose all that pregnancy weight!!
Week 20 something, first pregnancy, working hard on becoming huge, by eating like a horse...but still small enough to wear this dress...
//Nicole Hellgren
