**Warning!  If you are currently in the bowels of morning sickness hell, please proceed with caution.

I’ve been wanting to blog these stories for weeks now, but due to the nature of what I wanted to type, and therefore had to give much thought to, I had to hold out until food, the alien baby, and I called a truce.  It’s been a rough few weeks, and the battle has been long and incessant, inducing many a dry heave and countless belches….belches from the bottom of my toes that teenage boys would lust over…belches that have erased any ounce of my feminine mystique in my husband’s eyes.  I am no longer the relatively polite priss he fell in love with.  I can belch on command, and am not about to hold it in…even if that means we just finished dinner at a fancy restaurant.  In fact, I usually follow up this end of dinner belch with unzipping my pants as far as I can while sitting at the table.  Sometimes I remember to strategically place my napkin over my open fly…sometimes I don’t.  It is almost a guarantee that IF I have pants on after 6 that do not have an elastic waist while hanging out at home, I will be walking around with them completely unbuttoned and unzipped, folded underneath my college freshman beergut.

The belching is still here, not as bad, but that just means it’s only every 5 minutes versus every 2 minutes.  I guess I’m lucky though because I’ve only really puked once (stay tuned for that story further in this post).  Apparently, morning sickness for some women is just belching, and I guess I’m one of them.  However, I have to say it took me a few weeks of running to the bathroom every time I belched to realize that most likely nothing was coming back up.  But enough about belching….let’s talk about food.

I was fully prepared for all kinds of morning sickness before I ever got pregnant.  I was mentally preparing myself to puke like a seasick puppy.  What I was NOT expecting was my complete disgust for any and all food!  Ahh…food aversions.  For a good two to three weeks almost all I did was munch on crackers and sip water and choke down the occasional ginger ale.  My husband would try and try to suggest good food for me to eat.  Bless his heart, he wanted me to eat HEALTHY food!  He was worried the baby wasn’t getting enough leafy greens and protein.  HA!  He’s lucky that baby got any nourishment at all!

Now, everyday there would always be an hour or two when the clouds of food aversion would part and, BAM, it would hit me….the only thing in the entire WORLD that sounded good enough to eat…and I had to have it NOW.  God only knows how long it would sound good for.  It made for a desperate situation nearly every day.  The worst part is, most of the time this would happen between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.  Folks, I do not live in the city that never sleeps.  Most places close their doors promptly at nine around here…except for the all night grocery store.  However, the problem with that was even if it sounded good enough to eat, it did not sound good to make.  Having to prepare the food completely negated my desire to eat it.

One of these desperate situations happened when I suddenly got the urge to scarf down a baked potato with cheese, butter and a little sour cream.  Where could I get such a delightful meal in a hurry at 10 p.m.??  Wendy’s!!  I jumped in the car and raced over. I even got brave enough to order a Frosty while I was there.  I was so ready to tear into this culinary delight when I got home that I barely made it to the kitchen before I pulled it out of the bag and audibly gasped when I saw that they had ruined my dinner by pouring their runny nacho cheese all over it!!!  NOOOOOOOO!! I wanted sprinkly cheddar cheese!  Who the hell puts nacho cheese on a baked potato?  I swear, I had one months ago that had sprinkly cheese on it.  To make matters worse, my Frosty was the consistency of icy chocolate milk…there was nothing “frosty” about it, and it only had to survive a 10 minute drive home.  This sent me into a mini-meltdown.  I was crying over Wendy’s…and I was still hungry.  My husband was baffled, speechless, and trying not to laugh his ass off at me.  The happy ending to this story is my husband driving me back across town to the late night diner, after wiping my tears and coming to grip with reality, to pick up an order of loaded mashed potatoes, smothered in butter, cheese and bacon bits.   It was no baked potato, but it would do.

The only other story that I will share in this post that is turning out to be much longer than I intended is my McDonald’s story because I feel it is a much needed Public Service Announcement for all pregnant and soon to be pregnant women.

One day, after a three day battle with food that left me lightheaded and sick of the sight of the saltine box, I became incredibly hungry for a McDonald’s cheeseburger.  Generally, I don’t even like McDonald’s (well, except for the fries), but on this day it sounded like gourmet fare.  And since I had hardly eaten anything for days, I was more than happy to indulge this craving.  I left for McDonald’s with the intention of only getting the cheeseburger, but upon arriving, I decided I should get some fries and chicken nuggets while I was there, too, since they also sounded yummy.  The plan was to take all three home, taste each and see what I wanted the most then pass the rest off to my husband and dogs.

Flash forward to ten minutes after I got home…everything was in my belly.  I demolished a McNuggets Meal and an extra cheeseburger like I was in an eating competition.  As soon as I polished off that last fry and stood up, I knew it was going to be a long night.  The belching came quickly since I had also guzzled the whole soda and progressed into dry heaves.  I knew it.  THIS was going to lead to throwing up.  My belly was so full that I felt like Templeton, the rat from Charlotte’s Web, after over indulging at the fair. The puking came at the end of a HUGE belch/dry heave, and while I hated puking at all, I was disappointed there wasn’t more.

I ended the evening sitting in front of the toilet, chugging water and shoving my hand down my throat in intervals, trying to get the rest of it back up.  My efforts only produced an extremely full bladder, a bad taste in my mouth, and the realization that that toilet will never be clean enough. Lesson to be learned – NEVER binge eat fast food while pregnant if all you’ve managed to choke down for days is a package of crackers.

For the time being, it seems that the alien baby is allowing food and I to rediscover our love for each other.  But every now and then, the baby will remind me who’s boss and I will be completely disgusted by a certain smell or sight of different foods.  At this point, though, I’m happy to say I’m craving more than I’m disgusted by.

(9 weeks 5 days pregnant)