When pregnant you're extremely happy. You're baking a baby in your oven - the developments happening each week are amazing. It's an exciting wonderful time. Everyone is nice to you, everyone is excited, although you probably have a few too many conversations about the impending birth, (apparently it is impossible to talk to a pregnant woman about anything else). There are many wonderful benefits to pregnancy. You are offered seats on public transport, no one minds if you're late for stuff, you don't have to rely on public transport to get home from meals out with your husband, you don't get hangovers, you get to work from home. However, as much as there are good things, there are drawbacks....
You get tired
You can't sleep on your back
You spend a lot of time feeling sick
Someone will always say the phrase "You're eating for two now" when queueing for birthday cake at work (something that happens at least weekly during the summer in my office).
People always reply "make the most of it" on your Facebook status when you mention something about sleeping in etc.
and the two worst things of all........... You can't EAT and DRINK what you want anymore,
Now, anyone that knows me, knows that I live for food and drink. And when I say drink, I mean red wine, (and maybe some Limoncello or Sloe Gin in the summer months). I was pregnant from March to November - in that time I tortured myself by going to the Whitstable Oyster Festival for my birthday in July. Now that may not sound like torture to a lot of you. But I love oysters and I love seafood. In the years when we have discussed going to the Oyster Festival this is how I have imagined it.....
We get the train,we don't drive. We wonder around Whitstable. We eat lots of oysters. We stop for lunch and eat seafood and drink wine. Lunch takes a few hours. We leave the restaurant and go to a different pub where we continue drinking. It soon isn't worth going home just yet and we stay for dinner and more seafood and more wine. At some point we consume a bottle of champagne. Sounds good doesn't it? The reality was also good, but for me involved no oysters at all and a very small amount of wine - a slightly different experience to the one I had imagined for the last few years.
So, back to food and drink. Drink is easy. You can't do it - just the odd glass here and there. I found that a lot easier than I thought I would. The hardest times were when we went to our local Michelin star restaurant for our wedding anniversary. I drove, (advantage for husband with pregnant wife - designated driver), but it was our anniversary, so Jon ordered a very nice bottle of wine. I had to have a taste and that was a big mistake!! It was soooo nice. When you don't have to consider how much you're drinking everyone quickly learns one is never enough - it is impossible to only have one. When you're pregnant and designated driver you really can only have one. The thing is though, you really shouldn't. What is worse - having no red wine, or having one glass of really nice red wine? The answer is the second, because you can never only have one - especially when it is a really good one. I wanted more! It would have been better to not have any. We then went back to the restaurant for Jon's birthday and I made exactly the same mistake again. I taunted myself with that wine! I can't wait until the days when I can properly drink red wine again! (You may have noticed, Jon did not help by cutting down his consumption of drink whilst I was pregnant, if anything he increased to compensate for the wine I wasn't drinking).
The only time the no drinking worked was the work away day. At these kind of things the budget is never enough to supply decent wine - they go for quantity not quality, (despite the fact it is easy to get nice, cheap wine, no catering company seems to manage that combination). At the work away day, I got to watch everyone get drunk and laugh at them without having any kind of craving for the wine that was available. I had a sip to make sure and I was right - it was cheap. What can I say, I have good taste. It was fun in the morning seeing incredibly hungover people and feeling smug.
all right - does that make me a bad mother? I wasn't completely reckless though - I did cut out blue cheese, and apart from that one time brie. I also cut out oysters and runny yolks. It was tough but I survived.
So what is the point of all this rambling? It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I am now allowed to eat oysters and Champagne. I had an epiphany in the middle of Tesco's - I'm allowed oysters. You can't imagine how happy that thought made me. It wasn't like I was always eating oysters - but they represented something. They represented successfully making it through pregnancy - not the baby part of it but the restrictive part of it. Now we have already established I didn't massively restrict myself, but for me, it was a lot. Oysters were my freedom. Despite that, I didn't buy any.
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