I found that baby’s delicate blood sugar required me to eat at like 9pm, 2am, 5am and morning both before and after birthing him. So I was pretty ready for his night feed schedule.
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I’m only a few weeks farther along than you so take with a grain of salt but I’ve tried two pillows (a boppy total body and a mini snoogle) and neither is as comfortable as just sleeping on the couch with a small throw pillow to support my belly so that’s where I’ve been for a month now 
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I used a Snoogle. I found it helped my comfort a lot. Seemed like an extravagant price to pay for a pillow but the comfort and rest were well worth it for me, I kept it in the bed for a while after birth, too. It eventually compressed in a few places, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy another one (I have no intention of needing it again but 
). Life with no decent sleep is brutal.
At the very least, it was a wall down the middle of the bed so gave me my own space when there were times where I didn’t want to be touched at all. 
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Dear god yes. It was uncomfortable, but less uncomfortable than not having it, if that makes sense. By the end of pregnancy I was using a head pillow, a U shaped pregnancy pillow ($15 FB marketplace!) and a little ikea bolster for right under the belly, and one extra pillow for my top arm that always went numb. I normally sleep with only one pillow.
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Today is week 24 for me. Apparently 50-75% of babies are viable if born at this age, and the stats only improve from here. That is reassuring somehow.
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I definitely get a lot of comfort from that point and watching the weekly statistics.
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Our collective love for pillows almost eclipses the love for maternity clothes earlier in this thread!
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Oh this is a good reminder, I’m having my husband pull out my boxes of clothing from under the bed today
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Yay, congrats on making it to viability weeks!
Next countdowns:
27 weeks - no longer considered ‘micro-preemie’
28 weeks - graduate to ‘very-preterm’ (instead of extremely pre-term)
32 weeks - graduate to ‘moderate-preterm’
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I am a little bit horrified by this whole discussion…not sure if I need to be grateful to live in Massachusetts or grateful to have BCBS or some combination thereof. I did not pay one cent for prenatal care either pregnancy, and I had polyhydramnios with the first one so multiple additional ultrasounds. I paid $1k for the hospital visit, solely because my plan covers semi-private hospital rooms and my hospital only has private maternity rooms. I had c-sections both times
And 4 overnights in the hospital. Worth the money even if they didn’t. I could also look up the estimated costs ahead of time by hospital, but that was on the login for my insurance, not sure I could have accessed it before I was on the plan. Might be worth contacting your hr department if you can’t find comparisons.
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I definitely felt the same. I was lucky and mostly enjoyed my first pregnancy. I started getting uncomfortable around 36 weeks, and ready to be not pregnant by 38 weeks. Second time…I had pregnancy induced carpal tunnel in both hands, and was wfh while watching my 2 year old, but it sucked so much more. My doctor said that your body does not do you the favors in your second pregnancy that it did in your first. But second pregnancy was significantly less pleasant than first.
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Jesus. I had carpal tunnel, heart burn, insomnia, massive weight gain, DR and umbilical hernia, and ended up with preE and my kidneys shutting down. Was that my body doing me favors?? What will happen if I have a second pregnancy then? 
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More that the discomfort happens more quickly because your body already knows how to stretch so it does so much earlier in the pregnancy. Hopefully you don’t get repeats of all of those things 
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Just picked up a crazy snail-shaped body pillow (called a Snoogle) on Buy Nothing. I might fall asleep on the living room floor.
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Wow Bracken, that’s horrible! Preeclampsia is really scary and I ended up in the hospital a month before delivering with sky high BP. That was my third pregnancy and definitely helped us decide 3 kids was plenty.
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I’ll be the outlier in that I hated the pregnancy pillow. Perhaps it would have been more useful minus terrible reflux, but it didn’t help at all for it. I did find that the best sleep with reflux was in a recliner, because you have the same level of propped up as a pillow mountain, but more stability overall and more comfort on the tailbone. Alas, I was only able to do so two nights at a friend’s house, but I very seriously contemplated buying one, and would have gotten one of FB if not for the plague.
I think the ideal pregnancy length is 6 months, because that’s enough time to prepare, but also most of my third trimester was horrendously uncomfortable between the reflux and extreme swelling. And yeah, that plus surprise preeclampsia, plus 3rd degree tear? One and done for sure.
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Now I’m reading about perineal tears and researching ways to minimize/prevent. I think my mom had one with my brother and recovery was a beast. 
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I had a pregnancy pillow given to me during my first pregnancy and I used it but it almost seemed like it was more work/difficult than not using it would have been. This time I’m at 17.5 weeks and haven’t taken it out of the closet yet. I don’t know if I will. What has made a huge difference is using a wedge when I feel heartburn coming on. We have a big foam wedge that I used for elevating my legs/feet/knees in the past when I had injuries and I figured out that if I put that down and then put my pillow at the top of the wedge then I can actually sleep when I have heartburn since it keeps me propped up in an inclined position. I can even turn onto my left side while laying on it.
In regards to second pregnancies being different, I had a VERY difficult pregnancy the first time around but not in the normal pregnant-person ways. I never had any kind of back pain or round ligament pain, although I did have a ton of heartburn. I had insomnia but it didn’t really negatively impact me at all; I just read a lot of books at night and still performed the same during the day. The biggest issue was that my blood pressure is naturally really low. Like 75-80/55-60 low. Once the baby got to a certain size, anytime I tried to stand in place she would block my blood flow and I would almost pass out. I could either walk quickly to make my blood pressure high enough to push past her, or sit reclined with my feet elevated. By the end of the 2nd trimester I was on bed rest unless I was going for a brisk walk.
This time around the syncopy (I think that is the official term for my blood pressure issue?) is hitting me way earlier. I am already at the point where I can’t cook dinner without keeping a stool in the kitchen to sit on while prepping and cooking. The doctor said it isn’t surprising at all, for the same reason why your bump comes a lot sooner the second time around. I’m just glad I’m on full telework and not trying to work in the office right now.
A slightly more worrying sign is that I still haven’t felt this one moving around 
I started feeling Baby E move around 15 weeks and by 17 I could consistently feel her throughout the day. The doctor said I was feeling a lot more on the earlier end of things because I was so thin. This time around I’m just as thin but I still haven’t felt anything. It’s heart rate sounds good at each checkup so I don’t really have anything to worry about, but it still makes me worried. We have the anatomy ultrasound in 2 weeks so hopefully by then I’ve either felt something or the scan will show us that everything is developing and working like it should.
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Fingers crossed it’s just the placenta in the way of feeling movements yet, or something else odd but normal.
They definitely vary a lot. I tore with my first but local anaesthesia + a couple of stitches and I was fine. Read up on caring for them afterwards as well as prevention, I think massage reduces scar tissue which helps overall healing if you do tear (a small amount of tearing is normal in first time mums, but not necessarily needing stitches)
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I had 3 stitches… I have a minor complaint about the angle of the last stitch, but healing was absolutely fine. @ferngully…I didn’t feel the tear and the needle for the stitch I felt only the poke for the local anesthetic and I dgaf because there was a lovely baby on my chest. It was about two months later that I found out that the stitching up happened after Mr. Elle was brought in and not before, when he started advising me that I had 3 and not one. If I decide that the angle is wrong enough to warrant fixing, I’ll go the massage and physio route to fix it, instead of a cut and stitch…within the first year or so if healing you can do a lot by massaging. But anyway, IME the sutures are all healed up by week 6 or earlier (they check at 6 weeks over here). The only treatment you need to do is using your lovely squirt bottle and dabbing, and making sure that when you use the other end you dab away. The hurting to sit etc were all more to do with ripping the pelvic bones apart and stretching out the pelvic floor muscles and shoving a baby through.
Ask your doctor, but I’m not sure if you can even prevent the really serious ones. I think that the only thing you can do is wait for the attending to tell you to push…although mine was faffing about with her fingers and trying to manually stretch my tissues between the few pushes? So maybe?
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