I mentioned in the comment section recently that my biggest challenge during the first trimester was tiredness.  But to call it just ‘tiredness’ is an understatement, I think!

Here’s what that tiredness looked like for me: I was going to sleep early (10 pm – very early for me, since I’m a night owl), and waking up with difficulty about 7:15 am.  I’d get the kids ready for school (or not – some mornings I just couldn’t get out of bed and the older girls would take over), and within an hour or maximum two, feel totally finished.

Back to bed I’d go, for at least two hours.  Sometimes four!  There were plenty of mornings that I was sleeping from the time I went back to bed (at about 9 am), until I had to go pick up the littles from gan, at 1 pm.  I was happy I could rest while almost all of the kids were out – I kept thinking how grateful I was not to be homeschooling during this time, because I would have felt very guilty to be so unavailable.  Ds2 is home with me, but he still needs a long nap during the day, so he started falling asleep next to me earlier in the day rather than at 1 pm, which worked out great.

Then you’d probably think after all of that sleeping, I’d be fresh as a daisy for the rest of the day.  That’s what I expected!  But by about 3 or 4 pm, I was exhausted again.  So I’d take a nap for 1 – 2 hours in the afternoon.  That got me through until 10 pm, when I’d go through the entire thing again.  This blah, no energy feeling was compounded by the cold weather and cloudy skies outside, being new here, etc.

The bar mitzva preparations fell out during this time, and I was very, very grateful that the bar mitzva itself was the very end of the first trimester.  It was a non-stop couple of days of work for me and was tiring, but at an earlier stage, there would have been no possibility of pushing myself.  I just couldn’t.  It was really a push to be up for an hour earlier on.  I guess I could have delegated everything but I was happy that after my older kids taking on more than usual during my tired stage, that I could be available  like my normal self for the bar mitzva.

During this time, my diet was pretty good, no processed stuff.  I actually was more careful than usual about what I ate, since flour and sugar make me feel tired at the best of times, and I didn’t have the luxury of any additional tiredness.  In the beginning, I was exercising a few times a week, in addition to my daily half hour walk to get the littles from school.  I did it in the morning before I ran out of steam, since it gave me more energy.

Unfortunately, my husband’s  laptop broke about seven weeks ago, and then he needed to use mine during the day instead.  Since I used my computer to play the dvd for my exercise program, it became too hard to logistically work it out, so I only exercised about two or three times in the last seven weeks.  I’m hoping to get back to it now that he has a new laptop (as of a week ago), and my mom went back to the US yesterday so I’d like to get back to my usual schedule.

It was hard for me to feel so exhausted and sluggish.  I felt almost embarrassed.  I knew intellectually that it was physiological, not because I’m a lazy person, but I had to keep reminding myself of that.  I’m grateful to have older kids who can help out, but I didn’t  like putting them in that situation so much.  Sometimes I wondered if  I was using pregnancy as an excuse to not get up and do what I needed to do.  But then the second trimester started, and the difference was so huge in my energy level that it was obvious I wasn’t taking advantage of having a good ‘excuse’.

My midwife asked if this was unusual tiredness for me, but I couldn’t say for sure.  I told dh a couple weeks before she asked me that I don’t remember ever experiencing this kind of exhaustion during pregnancy, but that might be since in the past I was homeschooling all the kids and didn’t have the option to rest as much as I did this time.  I remember feeling like ‘a slug’ last time, but I definitely wasn’t sleeping as much as this time.

I kept telling myself that this would pass, and of course I’m very excited to have such a good reason for being low energy!  I think part of what was hard mentally is that I expected that since I was eating well and taking care of myself, that I would have lots more energy than I actually did.

Avivah