1. Baby kicking sucks.
In the movie version of this you feel the baby kick for the first time. You loving place your hand on your rounded bump and your eyes mist up with tears because of the miracle of life growing inside of you. Then you take your partner's hand so he can feel and a reverent look of awe steals over his face. You share a tender kiss. This IS how it is for the first month or so you can feel the kicking. A miracle.
During the last 3 months you will start hating that baby and their violent ways. Because having a bowling ball with appendages inside your gut sucks. And when your baby starts waking you all night, bruising your ribs, kicking directly unto your bladder and crushing your internal organs with his little arms and legs you will hate it. HATE it.
2. You get bloody gums.
This is the weirdest, but you will totally start to see blood in your spit when you brush your teeth. It's pretty unappealing in general.
3. You may get excess saliva.
Another weird mouth thing? Yes. Remember when you were a teenager and you had braces and you constantly did that mouth thing where you inhaled, with your lips slightly open, to control the sudden excess saliva threatening to pour out of your mouth? Yeah, that's coming back. And it's even less sexy than when it happened to you when you were 14 years old.
4. You have crazy sex dreams in the second trimester.
Don't fight it. And don't feel guilty. It's normal. No matter how sure you are of your own sexuality, you will be having wild girl-on-girl dreams and sex dreams with various male celebs. It's fine. Just go with it.
5. Totally weird physical crap can happen.
If something weird and/or sci-fi is happening to your body....it's pregnancy's fault. The list of medical oddities cannot even be recorded since it is so long and exhaustive. While pregnant with Bianca, all mint toothpaste tasted exactly like sharp, raw, garlic to me. Overwhelmingly so. I had to eventually go to Wal*Mart and buy a travel size of every toothpaste on the market. I figured out that Colgate brand was the least garlicky of the brands and stuck with that for the following 6 months. If that's not the weirdest thing you've ever heard then I don't even know about you.
Also, my nose spreads while pregnant. Mine gets half-again as wide and really huge. It's bad. I hate it. It always goes back down afterwards, but it's just another reason to feel like a fat cow while pregnant.
6. Morning sickness doesn't end after the first trimester and isn't just mornings.
It's all day, every day, all the time. Sometimes it goes away after the first trimester. Sometimes it stays until the day you deliver. It is brutal.
7. You'll probably get hemorrhoids.
More than 50% of the US population has hemorrhoids in their regular life. Which seems funny since no one ever cops to it. But, if your pregnant, it's almost certainly going to happen. There is a huge increase in the amount of blood your heart is pumping while pregnant and those pesky little veins down there just can't keep up. Add additional pressure on those veins from weight gain and you've got a recipe for a real-life Preparation-H commercial. Even if you don't have them while pregnant, once you push out that baby a few veins are bound to burst. And those commercials you see with people squirming in their airplane seats don't lie. It's pretty awful.
8. You can get increased or decreased sensitivity to smells.
I think this one is pretty well known. Your sense of smell kicks into overdrive and makes you crazy. All of the sudden your husband's breath, cinnamon pine cones, etc is like an assault on your nose. Oddly, I have the opposite problem. I smell less. This means I also taste less. When I was pregnant with Bonkers I made the Sonic Drive-In employees put 2 shots of lemonade flavoring into my lemonade and it still tasted like water. Sad times.
9. Your eyesight gets worse while pregnant.
So much so that you can't get your eyes checked/get a new prescription while pregnant. So, buy your disposable contact lenses accordingly.
10. Your feet get bigger from a compressed spine.
For some funny reason women seem to think this is just a hormonal thing, but it's actually from your feet flattening because of excess weight causing your spine to compress a bit and then flatten your arches. You can get them back to your previous shoe size by using shoe inserts designed to lift your arches. or better yet, wear good inserts from the beginning of pregnancy and then you don't have to worry about it.
