I don’t know what a Bradley teacher is, but sounds like a saint
Hellooooo my first trimester. 1am cheese and insomnia, anyone? 
good news: did not last forever. Best advice my doc gave me: if you’re hungry and can’t sleep, just go eat! Or better yet, keep a protein bar or similar next to the bed or in the bathroom. Easy access.
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It’s a childbirth “method”? I guess that’s what you’d call it. It was our birth class where we learned about unmedicated pain management and labor techniques and stuff.
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Just got an Instagram ad for a mat clothing brand called “nothingfitsbut”. Ha!
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I stashed a full dinner on the nightstand last night. At 5am today I was very grateful to past self!
Spouse talked to his boss/CEO about taking some downtime this fall. Between FMLA and vacation he could have 4 months off. He also floated the idea of part-time. She was really supportive! She came up in the 80s era boys club world, and even 3 years ago they had a strict policy of no part-time. I think pandemic business concerns + their younger-but-trusted wave of staff demanding flexibility has helped open some doors.
Meanwhile, I will probably wait 2+ months to bring this up at my job. I work at a startup where plans change constantly, and it just doesn’t seem worth it to plan for November yet. Policy is up to 6 months paid leave though someone in my type of role has never taken such a long leave, so not sure what that will look like.
So our options don’t suck, especially during the first half year, but we don’t have a plan yet. I don’t know what I want. This will probably start consuming my thoughts ~August. Both spouse and I enjoy our work and neither of us wants to full-time parent permanently, but we are both curious about short sabbaticals and wish we could work, like, 75% time.
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I tried bringing a snack to bed last night but I think waking up enough to eat it was worse for getting back to sleep then just ignoring being hungry. I guess the hunger isn’t that strong 
I wasn’t going to tell anyone at work until after my 20 week scan but ended up telling my boss yesterday because he wants me to take over a completely different group. The other option on the table is that my co-worker will take over the group and I will absorb my co-worker’s direct reports and workload. We’re down 2 managers from a 5 person team and just had a hiring freeze announced so either way, my workload is going up but I’d really prefer to keep my direct reports and just add coworker’s direct reports since I know the products and people there already and have a strong reputation. I told my boss I was having a difficult pregnancy (was more true a couple weeks ago than today, but anxiety is still way high) and was worried about being able to succeed in a completely new area. My coworker is also making a case for just absorbing my reports rather than moving to the new area since we both know it will be a miserable position so we’ll see who’s argument is the most convincing!
Spouse is in academia and is planning to take winter quarter as the primary parent after I return to work. He’ll need to decide whether to take it completely off without pay, or negotiate a limited workload (no teaching, limited committee commitments, possibly just available for emergencies) with full pay. He told his department chair a few weeks ago so they would leave him off the teaching schedule.
A few weeks ago I wouldn’t even think/talk about plans for the future because I was too anxious that something was going to go wrong (the multiple miscarriage scares from an SCH didn’t help). I’m still not sure there will be a baby at the end of this, but thanks to some therapy appointments I’m glad we can at least start to plan for the scenario where there is an adorable small child in our lives.
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So weird how this can feel so good and so bad in the same day. I went for a bike ride midday and without any intentional effort set a PR on one stretch. Then just before bed I projectile vomited dinner ALL over the bathtub. Bless you spouse who cleaned it all up.
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I emailed two friends at work who have taken paternity leave to ask them about their experiences. One of them wrote back with a really sweet message, and was also incredibly helpful (“here are the magic words that will help HR support whatever scheme you need”).
Also, my monthly prenatal appointment was supposed to be today, via telemedicine (phone call). I got the check-in call taking weight and other history stuff, then I missed the call with the midwife which came 6 minutes early. I sent them a message and expect to hear back eventually, just… this is the new normal, I guess.
Update: They called again a couple hours later, pretty quick chat and report on bloodwork but all seems to be going well.
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This is awesome. The blokes at Ponder’s work have been passing around the documentation for whoever needs it because it’s impossible to find on the system and their HR is useless.
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I love hearing stuff like this. H is in a female dominated industry and when he took 3 weeks of unpaid leave (his stupid company has no leave, for anyone. Mothers get STD but that’s it) he told everyone he was taking unpaid paternity leave and when he switched to 4/10’s he told everyone it was because he is a full time dad on Friday’s. Even just those little things have opened up conversations with his coworkers about taking more time for parenting and how it’s ok to restructure your life to prioritize family over work which has been great. Even with being in a female dominated industry a lot of the leadership is still male so I think just not pretending that his work life was the same post-baby was huge.
I also found it telling when he switched clinics and got his awesome boss back his boss asked him what schedule he needed to accommodate child care instead of assuming he would work around his work schedule or that I would be handling it 100%.
It sucks to have to accept such small things as progress but I’m glad the small steps are even possible.
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Mr Pancakes is delaying applying for the 18 weeks of paid parental leave that he is entitled to for as long as possible in case a round of redundancies happen first 
. It’s a workplace that is beyond excellent on paper but in reality, its not exactly as it seems to be. The closer it gets the less convinced I am that it will happen.
I am 25 weeks. This pregnancy has been super weird. I am much less mobile and experiencing much more pain than I did with my first. Maybe because I haven’t been as active due to all the covid restrictions?
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My husband’s work has been supportive of him taking 2 months leave (from his own vacation leave though, no paid parental leave available at his company) then dropping to 4 day week when baby is due in 6 weeks. Yet to see if they actually support the 4 days or if it will be a matter if squashing 5 days hours into 4 days and being on call on the 5th day. He’s already been asked if he’ll be available at all during the 2 months off 
Had a pretty ok pregnancy so far for first 2 trimesters, have had the usual third trimester aches but I too have been far less active than usual due to covid so I don’t know what a “normal” pregnancy would be like? I’m just glad that I got to the buy nothing maternity bag in the new year so I’ve not had to buy anything except a couple bras and underwear. Our group recently opened up again and it’s slim pickings for mat wear from the looks of the people currently asking.
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I’ve been reading “Exercising Through Your Pregnancy” by Clapp and Cram, and it is such a relief to find a collection of actual peer-reviewed science with plenty of nuance and detail.
I was a competitive amateur athlete for about a decade. I think that made me treat my body as a well-tuned machine, so it was so maddening when my sleep, nutrition, and digestive systems started all going haywire.
A lot of typical pregnancy stuff doesn’t apply. For example, I gained ~15 pounds immediately and then plateaued there for the past 2 months. The plateau was freaking me out because most articles say you should gain about 1 pound a week, but sanity-checking with a fellow athlete mom she said that was her experience too. According to the book the first trimester is your body building new systems (maternal fat, placenta, uterus, increased blood volume, etc.) and even into 2nd trimester the baby itself is only increasing an ounce a week. My midwife was just like, “you’re fine” without explaining why (she’s well-recommended but that is my least favorite type of medical response), so checking in with a group of 2-3 friends from the same sport who have been or are currently pregnant has helped a ton.
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This sounds like an excellent resource, I might see if my library has it. The women I’ve spoken to who have been pregnant have run the whole gamut and NOBODY has had a steady weight gain - it’s all over the freaking shop with drops, quick rises and bumpy bits. The median weight gain line makes it seem like that’s the expected path and I don’t know anyone who’s had that.
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I actually had a very steady weight gain! …of 60 pounds, and pre eclampsia. 
so, you know, maybe not the best example? But it made for a pretty incredible graph. It is utterly surreal to be inside a body as it sheds 47lbs of weight in ten days. (Gross, too).
Numbers removed for trigger risks:
But yeah, agreed, weight gain is so strange and unpredictable, and can vary massively between people.
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Pregnancy weight gain can definitely be all over the place. I was also an athlete and in very prime physical condition. I actually lost 10 lbs the first trimester with Baby #1 because I was too sick to workout and I lost a bunch of muscle mass. Then I had a very steady gain of 35 lbs over the next 24 weeks (she was born at 37 weeks). Two weeks after giving birth I was back to what I weighed at the end of the 1st trimester. The human body is crazy.
This time around I am not in the same physical shape since Baby #1 was only 6 months old when I got pregnant, but I had started putting on muscle again. So far I’m at 11 weeks along and I’ve only lost 1.5 lbs this time.
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@economista If I remember correctly you were/are deeply involved in a sport. What was it like for you to share the news of your first pregnancy? And has pregnancy/parenting a toddler affected your interest or involvement in that sport? (Equivalent question for anyone else deeply involved in a community, sports or not.)
I’m starting to think about how to share the news within my sports community and actually a bit more apprehensive about it than the career side. My personal feelings/desire I think I can sort out – I don’t need any more achievements/victories in the short term, though participating holds lots of appeal and I’m intrigued by coming back for age group competition later on. But I’ve spent almost a decade coaching & volunteering, and while I’ve done a lot to spread responsibilities in the past 2 years I’m worried that people will be worried what happens to the programs I’ve created, especially on top of a pandemic.
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@Ferngully - I started typing and word vomit came out and this got really long. It is a complicated scenario so I tried to touch on all aspects of it. I hope this helps, and doesn’t just make things harder! I think it is a very sport and program specific situation.
By the time I got pregnant I had almost fully stopped competing. I would still compete at small local tournaments but I had fully stopped competing at higher levels. I was one of 2 coaches for the kids program at our club and I was also the treasurer on the board of directors for the state governing body for our sport. My husband also competes in the sport and he was still competing at the highest (Paralympic) level.
In my case, all of my friends are also part of the sport. We are teammates, they are other coaches, etc and while I have a few work friends, everyone I actually hang out with is connected to my sport, so I actually didn’t feel any apprehension around telling them I was pregnant. They were the first ones to know before we went public, because my sport is a contact sport and I couldn’t practice anymore once I had the positive test. They also knew we were trying ahead of time so it wasn’t a surprise. They were all really happy for us and assumed that while I was pregnant I wouldn’t practice, but once the baby came they expected me to back to practice as much as I could.
My husband did continue to practice the whole time I was pregnant so I was still at the practices, just hanging out or doing really modified things. I also continued to coach until the last 2 months of my pregnancy, but I told the other coach and all of the parents that I would be taking a year off from coaching once the baby came. I let them know that I would try to come as often as possible, but I didn’t ever want to the be the only coach there and I didn’t want the running of any practice to be dependent upon me showing up. Now that Baby E is a bit older we figured out her bedtime routine starts right in the middle of kids practice, so I definitely can’t go back to teaching that until something changes with her routine. Due to COVID we have actually cancelled the kids program for the foreseeable future, so we haven’t had to worry about any of this stuff since March.
There was a lot of worry and consternation around what would happen with the program while I was gone. I did 75% of the coaching duties and while our club has a lot of certified coaches in the coaching pool, we are a full non-profit in every sense of the word and no one receives any form of compensation. In fact, every coach still pays monthly dues and coaching is 100% voluntary. We have plenty of coaches who are willing and able to coach adults, but they either 1) are intimidated by the kids 2) don’t want the responsibility of the kids or 3) can’t make it from their daytime jobs to the club in time to coach the kids. I have a very flexible job and I’ve been coaching them for 8 years, so I have structured my work schedule around making sure I can be there by 4:45 PM for the kids classes that start at 5.
In the long run, we plan to take a hybrid approach to both coaching and practicing (although throwing baby #2 in the mix means this will be stretched out for a few years!). For weeknight practices, I want to go back to coaching my toddler class from 5-5:30 while Mr E and the parents hang out with the babies. Then the next kids class is 5:30-7 but baby E starts her bedtime routine at 6:45 and we need dinner first, so I plan to leave at 6 to take the kids home and Mr E will stay to help with the rest of kids practice and then have his practice from 7-9 (whenever there is someone there who can drive him home since he is blind). Then for Saturday morning practices, he will be on baby duty and I will practice. This was our plan pre-covid Now we don’t know what is going to happen. We just opened back up for adult practices but small, less than 10 people at a time and no spectators. I have been very vocal that we cannot have kids practices until I deem it is safe, and I do no think it is safe right now. So for now they have added extra adult practices into the time slots normally taken by kids. I have no idea how long this will last, or how a second baby will impact our plan for getting back to practice. As of right now, Mr E wants to try for the 2024 Paralympic cycle, so it will be important for him to get back to practicing routinely again. He currently is not practicing at all, but still doing daily lifting / conditioning.
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Oh, and I forgot to add that I’m still treasurer on the board of directors for the state org and I just got re-elected for another 3 year term. That hasn’t been impacted at all. I do think it is a really good thing that I’ve stayed so involved, even while having a baby.
I do have teammates who have kids, but they mostly show up for occasional practices and then go home and spend time with their families, without partaking in the more social aspects of being on the team. My core group of friends will have team dinners after practices, hang out on the weekends, etc, and we tend to go to ALL of the practices so there is no time for anything else in our lives except the sport. In this group we are the first ones to have a baby and so far it hasn’t changed anything with our friendship. Yes, we have had to say “No” to a LOT of the social things and we aren’t going to practice nearly as often, but we still try to make time for them and they have been willing to make adjustments for us (come over for dinner and games at 4, not at 9).
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