DIANE KNOX: After the nausea comes 'normality' as life's new chapter starts to unfold
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Five tests with the double lines for “positive” – and Garrett still wouldn’t believe we were looking at a confirmed pregnancy result!
As I wrote in my column last week, we’d been trying for a baby for six months and had received countless negative tests – studying the wee strip under the torch on our phones for any kind of line formation. It became emotionally exhausting.
Therefore, I couldn’t really blame him for keeping his excitement under control until we knew for sure.
The next morning, we went straight to the pharmacy to purchase a box of digital pregnancy tests, the kind that quite simply say “Pregnant” or “Not Pregnant”.
We sat over breakfast with the tests in a plastic bag beside me, and let ourselves get completely carried away; it’s a conversation I’ll never forget. By this time I was 99.9 per cent sure I was pregnant, but was excited for the verification, in words, for Garrett to believe.
As soon as we got home, I took the test and didn’t even need to wait the recommended three minutes; the result was there in seconds. We actually filmed the moment we turned the stick over and I’ve watched it in the region of 500 times!
I know you’re supposed to wait 12 weeks before telling anyone, but we told my parents and brother right away, and shared the news with Garrett’s family and some close friends when I was about eight weeks.
The excitement was too much to contain. Plus, many of our family and friends knew we were trying for a baby, so it seemed silly to not share the happy news with them. Most of them were waiting in anticipation for some kind of update.
I’m making it sound all very rosy, and we are obviously completely over the moon, but the last eight weeks or so have been tough.
I’ve suffered from terrible sickness and constant nausea, and it’s been such a mental battle. I was pretty much confined to bed for six weeks straight, thankfully being able to work from home and following a relatively flexible schedule.
Working out has always been a huge part of my life, but I haven’t stepped foot in a gym since mid-March. I’ve had such low energy and really didn’t leave the house much in those two months, apart from short walks with the dogs.
But at almost 15 weeks, the sickness has pretty much subsided and the nausea really only hits at night, so life is returning to some kind of normality.
It’s a new kind of normality, as my belly blossoms and we spend our free time brainstorming baby names and looking up the highest rated prams and cribs.
By the time this column is published, we’ll know whether we’re having a boy or a girl, so I hope to divulge that information soon.
We want to deliver the news to my brother in a few weeks once he’s home from golf, so will keep it under wraps until then.
It’s a whole new chapter of our lives beginning and I’m so excited to be able to share it, each (baby) step of the way.
Diane Knox: There will be plenty to be thankful for after one of the hardest times of my life
