Evening Sickness

WEEK

13

Welcome to week 13, and a temporary reprieve from fruit comparisons. As of today, we have a fully-formed, 3-inch baby, described by babycenter.com as "roughly the size of a jumbo shrimp". I'm not sure what I think of that comparison, but I am tremendously excited about the progress. This is the last week of the first trimester, which is good news for two reasons. In the second trimester, the miscarriage risk greatly diminishes, and morning sickness often subsides.

When someone hears that your wife is pregnant, they usually say two things:
1) Congratulations
2) How is she feeling?

Item number 1 is self-explanatory. Number 2 clearly refers to morning sickness (aka Nausea & Vomiting of Pregnancy - NVP), a condition experienced by a majority of pregnant women. There are a few important facts about morning sickness that some people (meaning me) are not aware of:

- morning sickness is not confined to the morning
- the sickess is not always manifested as projectile vomit
- nobody has determined the exact cause or purpose of this condition

R suffers from a milder form of NVP that could be described as "evening sickness", or more accurately as "the after eight blahs". She feels fairly well in the morning, but she always feels kind of iffy after the evening meal. It lingers into the night, but she usually feels better after she gets up and gets going the next day. I don't know if there is any valuable insight that we can draw from these observations, but I point it out all the same. Consider it a detailed answer to question #2, provided to those of you who would have asked, given the chance.

I'll assume that you send your congratulations, as well. Thank you very much.