My Second Trimester Recap

My goodness, I know this post is months overdue, but with the craziness of the pandemic, giving birth a month earlier than expected, being a first time mom raising a newborn, and stopping maternity leave a month earlier, I’m just holding on to the crazy train that is life right now. It really feels like I’m just trying to survive some days! However, there is still so much I want to share with you about my journey to motherhood so here I am writing my 2nd trimester recap haha!

How my 2nd trimester differed from my 1st

Thank goodness I kept a journal during my pregnancy to remind myself of everything I was going through. My 2nd trimester was definitely a lot easier than my first! The nausea and extreme tiredness of the first trimester went away literally the first week of my 2nd trimester. I felt so much more energy and at times I would even forget I was pregnant because I felt so normal. I was excited to get my appetite back because I literally had no appetite in the first trimester.

Cravings & Aversions

I didn’t have any real cravings in the first trimester so I was excited to find out what I’d want to eat in the 2nd. My biggest cravings were hot dogs haha! Hot dogs are kind of frowned upon during pregnancy because they had to be made sure to be heated to the right temperature but I craved them weekly! I think I really only had about 2-3 hot dogs during my whole 2nd trimester but I thought about them all the time haha. I also craved cake and Starbucks guava white tea drinks. I still had aversions to all beyond burger products unfortunately and I still couldn’t finish big meals. I could only eat about half of a meal and feel full, probably because the growing baby was taking up a lot of room.

2nd Trimester Symptoms

A new set of symptoms started to arrive as the 1st trimester ones waned. (TMI City coming up, so proceed with caution!) I still had crazy sore breasts. They just hurt all the time and that never went away during my pregnancy. A new stereotypical symptom started to gain strength and that was my need to pee. I had to go to the restroom all the time and that was something I never had a problem with before. I was trying to drink as much water as possible to stay healthy so that didn’t help at all haha but I just had to go to the restroom everywhere I went, it was so annoying! Another weird symptom I started getting was something called Lightning Crotch, haha. Technically it’s called round ligament pain and it’s just a shooting pain that comes out of nowhere, like someone just kicked you in your private parts. That was fun.

Finding Out The Sex of Our Baby!

The 2nd trimester was also when we could find out the sex of our baby! I took an NIPT test which was a blood test that would screen for chromosomal defects but also would tell you the sex of your baby. The results came in the mail and Jared and I read it together. I first looked to see if there were any chromosomal anomalies and thank God everything was looking normal. Then I looked down and it said the baby was female. My husband and I both bursted out crying. We were both ready to be happy no matter what the sex of our baby was. I actually convinced myself I was going to have a boy. I don’t know if it was because I knew I’d be slightly sad to not have a girl to dress up in cute girly clothes, or if because our baby doggy Moby was a boy and I felt used to baby boys somehow haha. When we saw that she was a she I was so beyond happy and thoughts of cute Disney Baby outfits started rolling around in my head and I couldn’t stop thinking if she was going to look like me or my husband. He was also so excited to be a Girl Dad.

Getting to Tell Everyone We’re Pregnant

It wasn’t until the 2nd trimester when it was safe enough for me to tell everyone I was pregnant. Being older, it always felt like touch and go with every test so we were super cautious to not get ahead of ourselves. The first person I told was my friend Kim. I didn’t plan it haha, but we were at a cool event at the Disney Studios to celebrate the premiere of Disney Plus’ High School Musical the Musical the Series. We were the only ones in the Disney studio theatre bathroom and I just blurted it out and told her haha! It felt so great to tell someone and Kim was the best person to tell because she kept my secret till I announced! I love you Kim!!!! We then told my parents when we visited them. I put a pic of our ultrasound in a card and handed it to them. They were so surprised and never thought they would be grandparents because it took me forever to get married haha. My dad high fived Jared haha, and they were so happy.

Getting Ready For Baby

I started researching all baby stuff, but mainly I started buying all the baby clothes haha. It was so exciting to find all the cute baby clothing companies. It was like a whole new world that I never thought I would be a part of. Some of my new favorite baby clothing stores were Hugo Loves Tiki, Spearmint Baby, and saw that Uniqlo, Zara and HM had a lot of cute baby clothes.

The Coronavirus

I started my 2nd trimester at the end of December 2019 and ended my 2nd trimester in mid March so this is when my pregnancy started to take it’s weird and at times scary turn. January and February was filled with fun events with friends and so much fun announcing to the world that I was pregnant. There was so much fun day dreaming about bringing her to Disneyland for the first time and I even found out of my dear friends Jess was expecting a baby girl about 10 weeks later than I was. 2020 was looking just so exciting! =( Like everyone, in late February there was a lot of news on the news about a virus that was going around. My friend Jaycee warned me about going to Disneyland with the virus starting to run rampant and there was so much talk about washing your hands and using hand sanitizer. It started to get scarier and scarier as a pregnant lady. I remember one of the last times I went to Disneyland, I went by myself and I forgot my hand sanitizer and for the life of me, couldn’t find any to buy at Disneyland. They were all sold out. For the first time ever I was a little bit afraid of what was going on. I couldn’t even feel fully safe being at my happiest place. I also had all my work and health insurance and maternity leave planned out and everything was supposed transition smoothly into going on maternity leave. Being a freelance TV Producer, I was blessed to have work lined up till I was ready to start maternity leave and I was planning on taking a nice month off right before the baby was born. Well that all went up in smoke at the beginning of March and I found myself out of a job, while 7 months pregnant and so uncertain of the future. I didn’t know how I would afford my health insurance while having this baby and all we had was our savings which we were saving up for the baby and to help supplement our income while I was on maternity leave which paid about half of my regular salary. A bit of pre-partum depression started to settle in amongst all of this and I found it harder and harder to celebrate having a baby during all this uncertainty. I found myself taking less and less pictures of my growing bump which I regret now. Luckily, and I know a lot of others were not so lucky, but I had a friend who took sympathy upon me and hired me to work on her show the week after I was let go. I was soooo grateful and at the same time pretty scared because for the first 2 weeks I had to go into the office due to the fact that the company was still transitioning to work from home. For 2 weeks straight, I had to drive to the heart of Hollywood and basically bathe myself in hand sanitizer while not being able to stand close to my dear coworkers who were also my friends. I sat in an office all day by myself, sanitizing my office from head to toe every morning. I was feeling so alone. By then it started to sink in that it wasn’t a good idea to see my friends in person anymore and it wasn’t a good idea to see my parents either, who lived in a retirement community. Thinking back, it was so tough and I do believe this pandemic played a huge part in my post partum depression, which I’ll talk about soon.

Any who, that’s basically how I ended my 2nd trimester, on such a sad note! I started my 3rd trimester just as we started lock down for the Coronavirus. I think that’s why it’s also taken me so long to catch everyone up on what the rest of my pregnancy was like. I’m just finally starting to feel open again about it all so if you’re still with me on this journey, thanks! I’m excited to fill everyone in on the craziness of the past few months and what the rest of my pregnancy was like as well as all the wonderful things about being pregnant and eventually soon I’ll tell you all about Baby Violet’s birth story!=)