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Pregnancy: 5 things that will help you survive the first 12 weeks!


Well ladies, I found the first twelve weeks of this here pregnancy pretty tough. It wasn't the morning sickness - I was able to learn to manage that part - it was the utterly OVERWHELMING exhaustion! It was waking up in the morning and feeling like I had already done my day, when it was still ahead of me... It was feeling like I had stayed up all night and had reached that achy, tired and emotional stage. But ALL. THE. TIME! Thankfully, it has worn off now and I'm feeling quite back to myself once again. During the first twelve weeks though, there were a few little gems that helped me through - and here they are:

A large, BPA-free sports water bottle
Suddenly I was always thirsty. And that included waking up four or maybe five times in the early hours - for water. I started filling my cycling water bottle and keeping that beside the bed - it turned out to be just the thing, allowing me to drink water lying down with no spills! This is the one I have.

Jacob's Marietta Biscuits
Perhaps this is my number one tip! I bought a packet of Marietta Biscuits in SuperValu and left them on my bedside table for 'early-morning' morning sickness. If I woke up feeling green immediately, one of these helped me to feel better right away, and allowed me to get down to the kitchen to make breakfast (instead of spend ten minutes with the toilet bowl!). I think plain crackers or ginger nut biscuits would work too.

Fox's Glacier Fruits
These hard-boiled sweets have a lot of flavour and you can suck on them for ages. I found that they got rid of any lingering nausea in between meals or while in the car. I found them at Londis, Centra and SuperValu. Marks & Spencer Percy Pigs did the same, plus they're just so tasty!

Bio-Oil
I started using Bio-Oil every night from about 8 weeks. Apparently it's a good one to keep stretch marks at bay. It also smells lovely. Although I wasn't really showing yet, it was something nice and relaxing to do after a hot shower and it made me feel like I had some sort of control over the changes that were about to happen!

A hot water bottle and an ice pack
Again, these are just some comfort items that really helped me along. Some evenings a lukewarm hot water bottle on my lower back while on the couch was just the ticket to making me feel like I could do this. The ice pack was great relief in the place of painkillers for a headache or migraine.

There have been a few other things that I have learnt along the way, I'll put them together for another update post soon! I hope this helps any of you ladies out there suffering through the 'silent' twelve weeks when all is still a secret... ;-)

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