First Trimester Feels

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Or girl? Oh girl oh girl oh girl!

We don’t know, you guys. We don’t even know! But there’s a tiny human about to really rock our lives in a few short months, and we are beyond excited to meet our little yumlette.

Sage, too.

Your responses – emails, comments, and messages – to our big news yesterday were just overwhelmingly sweet. I’ve been looking forward to the telling day for so long so I could actually share the real reason why all I want to eat right now is bread and cheese! and your kindness just made the day so special to me. And us. I’m sure Bjork and Sage read every comment, too.

Before jumping back into the regular food-and-recipe thing, I am dyyyyyinggggg to catch you up on all the things that we haven’t had out in the open over the last three months.

Settle in, now, CAUSE THIS IS A LOT OF WORDS. I’ve got my water (boring) and you’ve probably got coffee (kinda glad I can’t smell it) and we’re hopefully both in very comfy clothes, and here we go.

The Baby Basics

Alright, here are the basics about this little bub.

Baby’s due date: April 26, 2017

Found out: end of August

First ultrasound: 9 weeks – the cutest jelly bean you’ve ever seen, TBH

Told family/friends: around 10 weeks

Told the internet: yesterday, which is about 14 weeks

Baby’s current size: a lemon

My current bump size: somewhere between post-Thanksgiving-dinner-belly and she-might-be-pregnant-belly

Boy/Girl: we don’t know yet, but we’re going to find out in December!

Plans for work: Both of us will probably take some time off when the baby’s born – maybe me a little longer than Bjork, and then we’ll take it step-by-step from there. The tentative plan is that Bjork will for sure get back to it full-time and I will probably see how I feel – maybe Bjork and baby and I will find a good balance (that ever elusive thing) of working a few days, being home a few days… we’ll see. It’s hard to know without actually knowing, know what I mean? It all just feels like a big blind guess.

Plans for our house: This is the big pressing issue. We would love to either finish our upstairs into another bedroom/bathroom for a little more space (currently living in 900 square feet of house) OR possibly… I hate to even say it… MOVE? before the baby comes. We don’t want to move, though. We hugely love our neighborhood and our house is pretty cute, too – it’s just a little on the small side and regardless of what we do with the upstairs, it doesn’t have a great bedroom layout (two bedrooms on the main floor, right next to the living and dining room). Perk: you can stand in one place and see into every room of the whole house! Downside: we might never be able to make any noise after 7pm ever again once we have a baby sleeping in one of those main floor rooms.

First Trimester Foods

Here’s the bummer thing about the first trimester: what would otherwise be a dream job (writing about / making / photographing / thinking about food all day) becomes a VERY BAD SITUATION when you are in the first trimester of pregnancy.

For me, the sick feelings started around week 6 and seemed to generally resolve by week 11-12, although I still have the occasional OMG-I’m-going-to-be-sick moments if I don’t eat often enough. It’s an okay problem to have.

If you take a look back through the recipe posts of September and October, you will notice some strong themes. Bread, Soup, Pizza. Pizza, Bread, Soup. Cheese, Cheese, Cheese, Bread, Soup, Pizza. Cereal. Bread, Soup, Pizza. Oh my word, I want to say I tried to branch out with the recipes, but honestly, the word TRY was literally nonexistent in my vocabulary for a while there. I was on a food lock down.

If I could have done a full post about all the best processed snack foods in the world, I most definitely would have, because processed snack foods and I became very familiar with each other. There were – er, are – snacks that I haven’t had in decades that have snuck their way back into my life (looking at you, Ritz Bits with the cheddar cheese).

In my hypothetical post about favorite processed foods, I also would have included the story about the time when literally the only thing that made me NOT feel like I was going to throw up right that very second was sprinting into a grocery store where I then busted open a can of Cheddar Cheese Pringles and ate at least three hundred of those thin, salty little crisps right there in the aisle before even paying for them, and then brushed the crumbs out of my hair and calmly paid and eventually found a nice spot for them in the cupholder of the borrowed pickup truck (hello I just said PICKUP TRUCK) that I was using to transport stuff to and from the studio.

Obviously it’s always been sort of a life goal of mine to drive an old pickup truck while eating Cheddar Cheese Pringles so as not to throw up all over myself.

Hello, first trimester. You sure are a glam girl, aren’t you?

On the less strange but equally as un-proud side of things, there was the ongoing loud and proud carb parade of the last three months.

Bread in all forms: Grilled cheese. Bagels, toast, English muffins. Cheesy bread. Homemade bread. (It is a zero percent coincidence that the Miracle No Knead Bread made its blog debut during this time.)

Juice – that sweet nectar of heaven – became a staple early on, like around week six. I would wake up in the morning and just need a glass of juice. NEED. Orange juice, grapefruit juice, and all these fancy blends that they have now? Gah, it’s amazing. I’ve jumped back on that juice train and I plan to ride it all the way till baby arrives.

There were also Daily Carb Categories in my life that have never before existed: like Salty-Crispy (ILYSB chips!!!!), and Sweet-Crispy (hi cereal), and the Tangy-Crispy (those super-flavored honey mustard pretzel pieces) – all of which provided a reliable safe zone for me in that 10am-12pm range when my appetite would totally just reject all of life. I always knew that if I could just get one bite of a honey mustard pretzel down, my body would remember that food was okay and then I’d be onto my staple food of the entire first trimester: PIZZA.

You guys.

Pizza. Is. Life.

I’ve always known it, but my appreciation for this food of the gods has gone deeper and wider than ever before.

Just to be clear, prissy is not an option when it comes to your precious pizza in the first trimester. We are not talking about cute pizza shops with artisan toppings and thin crusts that are baked just right in brick ovens. We are talking GIMME THE CHEAP DOMINOS. Pizza Hut cheesy breadsticks became life’s great delicacy to me. And frozen pizza? All over it. No shame. Never have I ever eaten more DiGiornos and milk (seriously favorite combo ever) in one short segment of my life than these last three months.

You know you’ve reached a pizza milestone when even your husband doesn’t want to eat frozen pizza with you anymore and you are forced to buy single serving DiGiornos. I repeat: single serving. For just you and your pizza-loving self. So, yeah. Things are going well.

If I had to sum it up in a few pictures, my food during the first trimester would look like this:

Why does life work so that when you most need nutrients, you literally cannot stomach a single nutritious thing? It doesn’t even make sense.

Thank goodness for those vitamins and Panera green smoothies (which grossed me out 100x less than my own green smoothies – go figure) and the occasional brussel sprout salad, which was weirdly the only type of salad I really could handle during those three months. Of course, served with pizza. I’m not joking.

First Trimester Moods

A photojournalistic summary of my mood during the entire first trimester:

I literally could not. With anything.

I don’t know if that’s normal or if I’m just overwhelmingly sensitive to life and all its things, but wows. I was Blah with a capital B. And sad. And tired. So, so tired. Just let me lay down for a minute or 90, okay?

Work became very difficult, and not just because of the food. I was just down and out to the max. Every day Bjork would ask me, how are you doing? and every day I’d sound like an Eeyore version of myself: fiiiine, I guess. The weird thing was that it had nothing to do with my feelings about the baby and everything to do with my work. Suddenly I just wanted to stop blogging. It felt like nothing mattered, and I didn’t enjoy it, and no one was reading, and blah blah blah, and WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LET ME LAY WITH SAGE ON THE COUCH IN A SLEEPING BAG FOREVER.

Combine lots of hormonal changes, the blah’s of the first trimester, and a generally anxious personality with the unexpected loss of my grandma during those few weeks, and I think I was just a walking recipe for sad, woe-is-me couch-dwelling.

The good news: I am so grateful to have had a flexible schedule during these last few months. I literally do not know how I would have dragged myself up and into a normal job every day. HUGE RESPECT to those of you pregnant mamas who have done this and still found a way to function in normal society like a human while likely hiding it from your co-workers. I mean, honestly. I still had lots of work that I had to do, but to be able to choose when and how and where I would do the work (and whether or not I would wear sweatpants while doing it) was such a sweet gift that I will be forever grateful for.

The other good news: I am feeling so much better, work-mood-wise. Like, I am writing this post and it is like nothing to me. My fingers are flying across the keyboard. I have energy, I’m excited to talk with you all, I can stay awake long enough to exercise aka walk when I’m done with work, and I am looking forward to things – like the fact that tonight is Halloween and we’re going to put Sage in her ghost costume. Eeeee!

First Trimester Things That Have Been Awesome

Glow Nurture app: I use this app every day for tracking things – like vitamin intake, macronutrient goals (hooked it up with My Fitness Pal so I can see a graph of how many carbs I’m eating – awesome), and other random symptoms. It’s easy to use and well-designed.

Bump app: I like this app for the concise week-by-week updates on baby’s growth.

Candles: Both Bjork and I are loving these candles from Farmhouse Pottery (we have/love the pine scent). They are made in the USA with soy wax and essential oils for fragrance. Small and a little spendy – yes – but honestly one of my most prized possessions right now. I carry it around the house with me all day, and lately, he might not want me to tell you, but even Bjork has been found carting this into his office for a little naturally fall-winter scented mood lighting.

Clean Makeup: I have a lot of things to learn and say about this, but in general I am slowly making swaps over to some clean makeup products. Brands that I’ve been liking include W3LL PEOPLE, Ere Perez, and EcoDiva Beauty for everything-in-one-spot. I’m planning to write a post about my favorites once I get my collection all set.

Books: Actually, TBH, during the early part of the first trimester, I had NO TIME for reading. Not actually no time, just no time like don’t you dare even bother me with a book right now. But as I’ve found my groove, I’ve been digging some mind candy reads and some more serious ones. Currently queued up is The Headspace Guide to a Mindful Pregnancy and Everything We Keep.

Sweatpants: I got these sweatpants (okay, “joggers”, whatever ) at the blog retreat I went to a few weeks ago, and long story short, I want to live in them. End of story. You should get some.

New Phone: Kind of dorky, but I got the new iPhone 7 and I’m having a lot of fun playing with the new features, specifically the camera, from my permanent lounge spot on the couch. Sage makes a great subject.

Instagram: I finally did it – I made a personal Instagram account. I hardly ever post life updates on the Pinch of Yum Instagram account (it’s a wild and active food community! can’t slow that down with too many baby pics) so I thought this might be just the time to transition over to a personal account. I would love to have you follow – it’s @lindsaymostrom because I’m so original like that.

How did you guys even read that? I’ve just got so much to get off my chest after 3 months of secrecy, I guess?

To you mamas who are also pregnant – I’m so glad you’re here! we can do this.

To you mamas who are still trying to get pregnant or recovering from loss – we see you, we love you, we’re cheering for you and your babies.

To you readers who are in a completely different life space altogether but still show up to be friends on the internet – umm, you’re the best. ❤️

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