I haven’t really posted about my pregnancy in anywhere completely public until now. I am most of the way through the 5th month, so it’s been a little while and has certainly been a journey so far. It’s been a fairly easy pregnancy, all things considered. Which is probably just as well as it’s also a weird time to be pregnant with your first.
There are a lot of things that just are not normal because we’re in a pandemic. The biggest one is that I think twice before stepping inside any business – which has made shopping for maternity clothes a little more hit or miss. And finding advice for sizing on maternity clothes is completely unavailable since most of it is from pre-pandemic times when you would just walk into a store and try things on. Dressing rooms in most establishments were closed when this first came up for me (and in many places, they still are). So I’ve pretty much just measured myself and gone (rather hit-or-miss) into ordering just about all of my maternity clothes from Old Navy. And I’ve gotten pretty lucky. They haven’t let me down yet. (I am loving their maternity jeans!)
There are other things that are different too. My spouse isn’t allowed to come to most of my doctor’s appointments. The only one he is allowed to come to is the anatomy scan. Even that can’t happen at the normal 20 weeks. It will be happening at the 22 week mark instead due to some mandatory quarantining that we have to do.
When we made the decision that we would start trying, we had been thinking that by the baby’s estimated due date, we might be in a better place in this pandemic. But it’s not looking like that’s going to be the case anymore. So we’re making plans about what a mostly isolated postpartum period will look like, and potentially what the rules around letting everyone see the baby will look like. And that in itself is weird because of all the advice to “let people help you during the postpartum period”.
Also – EVERYTHING digital! Digital birth classes, digital baby care classes, digital CPR/First Aid classes. EVERYTHING! Which, I sort of appreciated. I don’t feel awkward walking into a class and not knowing if it will be the right fit. And I can fit it to my schedule and rewatch the material if I feel like I need to. But again – because it’s DIGITAL it means that most of it was recorded before the pandemic. My Motherly birth class actually was really good about adding a chapter at the beginning of the course that went over what may be different and what to prepare for. But it still sort of makes you wish that things were going to be normal.
It seems a little crazy that this is where we are at – but while we want to be as careful as possible, we weren’t going to let this pandemic put everything in our lives on hold. And that was probably one of the best decisions we could have made. So while it is certainly weird, I’m still looking forward to the outcome.