9 weeks

This week has been a bit of a mess inside my head. I thought my symptoms were lessening during the week, so I am now convinced that the remaining baby passed about mid-week. I realize symptoms can come and go, and some people don't even get any symptoms until weeks after this point, if at all, but these 1.5 week gaps between ultrasounds leave me enough time to imagine the worst.... despite any evidence to the contrary. I was trying to explain to Ryan that I thought I had lost the baby since all of my symptoms had disappeared, although I had to pause while telling him this to try to get my nausea under control. :-\ If I do decide to acknowledge my symptoms, then I can also convince myself that they're all just a side-effect of the progesterone and estrogen meds I'm still taking - which is entirely possible, but hopefully at least some of this is still being caused by a growing baby. I thought the bloating had gone down some mid-week, although I realized that that was probably just because I was wearing some work pants that are a bit looser around the waist, because when I tried to put on my non-loose jeans the next day, I was right back to being uncomfortable and constricted. I also realize that bloating usually goes down a bit before the real baby belly starts, but I've just been clinging to my symptoms as a security blanket so much that I don't want any of them to go. In fact, although the low-level nausea was back most of the day yesterday, today is the first day in weeks that I haven't put on my Sea-bands because I *want* to feel the nausea. A bit twisted, perhaps, but it's not bad and it provides me with some comfort. And if I go in for my next ultrasound on Tuesday to find out that I lost the second baby too, at least then I have a few more feelings and memories to hold onto for what it felt like to be pregnant again.

I've also still been dealing with a stuffy nose (one of the first symptoms I had, starting the day I got my first positive HPT at 3w3d!), which has been fine, except now it feels like it's starting to develop into a cold. Sleep has also been a struggle for me the last few weeks. I'm not sure how much of that I can blame on the time change three weeks ago or the pregnancy, but I've been waking up about every half hour from 6:30 on... extremely frustrating, especially this week since I had a couple days off work so I was hoping to catch up on some sleep, and instead I was up by 9:30 every day except Friday, when I managed to power through a few hours of crappy sleep and actually got a few more solid hours of sleep in, waking up after noon for the first time in ages. The craving of the week continues to be hamburgers, although that's starting to taper off now after 3 hamburgers in a week. I also ate mac n' cheese yesterday, and the cheese actually tasted sort of... good. I'm confused by that, given my long-standing dislike of cheese.

Obviously, this week was Thanksgiving, which was a point of concern for us, since we're not planning on telling everyone until Christmas, when I'll hopefully be 13 weeks. To throw everyone off the trail, I actually drank some beer at Thanksgiving... or at least, I drank out of a beer bottle ;) We had replaced some Yuengling with near-beer, which wasn't my favorite, but at least crappy pilsners just taste like glorified water anyway. It sometimes seems a little strange that we're going to such lengths to avoid telling people early - especially our families - but we're doing this for a couple different reasons, with the main one being I don't want everyone to get too excited this early, since we've had such a rough time getting and staying pregnant. Especially with some younger kids involved, I would just rather wait until second trimester to tell everyone to hopefully avoid the awkwardness and sadness of having to untell everyone.