License To Ill

Stef was feeling pretty lousy this past week or so, as in: nausea. This was the onset of the dreaded "morning sickness", a reaction to the increased hormones in the body that more than half of all pregnant women get (typically between the 6th and 12th weeks of pregnancy). Of course, when Stef would get sick to her stomach, it would happen all-of-a-sudden and almost never in the morning (misnomer!). Actually, we found that it happened most right when we got home from work. This was particularly bad timing, though, because it was messing with her dinner time and her already-screwy appetite (which is very small but very frequent right now), so we took the advice of one of the books I had read and Stef started driving home each day. This seemed to do the trick; although she still had an upset stomach, she was able to keep her food down and even eat dinner. Score one for book-learnin'!

Despite this temporary victory, the being nauseous was really frustrating Stef, and my reassuring her that "[m]any health care providers think morning sickness is a good sign because it means the placenta is developing well" (or, as the saying goes: "the sicker the mom, the healthier the baby") wasn't really helping. What did end up really helping was talking to Fran, and hearing from her that everything Stef was experiencing was normal. More importantly, it was important for Stef to know that the sick part would go away soon and that she'd start being hungry again soon. Voracious, even. So we've got that to look forward to.