As I inch closer to the date where Baby K will be served her eviction notice, I can’t help but think of the differences between my pregnancies.

1. Morning Sickness — Some people say that you will follow your mother’s footsteps with this one. I guess it’s true for me. I hardly got morning sickness in both pregnancies. Even if I did, it was quite mild and the nausea would pass quickly. With Baby K, I did feel nausea a couple more times.
2. Aches and Pains — I feel that Baby K is a lot more low lying than Emilee. Perhaps that’s why from the second trimester onwards, I started to feel my tail bone aching quite badly when I lay down flat. With Emilee, I did not have any pains except for that one week where my pelvic bone hurt a lot. It probably was shifting to accommodate her.
3. Cravings and Food Aversions — With Emilee, I had no cravings whatsoever but I had food aversion to tonkatsu. I would imagine this greasy smell whenever someone mentioned tonkatsu. It was so weird because I had no trouble downing fast food! With Baby K, I had a craving for flavourful spicy food in my first trimester. It sparked off when I taste tested the carbonara flavoured Samyang spicy instant noodles in NTUC. In my second trimester onwards, I suddenly craved coffee or tea. I stay away from coffee during my pregnancy so I end up drinking lots of tea. Perhaps Baby K will be a tea lover like her mummy and hopefully she’ll take to spice a lot better than Emilee. Emilee is really drama when it comes to spice. Just a tad bit of pepper and she’ll start making sucking noises.
4. Stretch Marks — I had no stretch marks when I was pregnant with Emilee. I am now suffering from small stretch marks near my navel with the current pregnancy. To be fair, Emilee was a lot smaller in size so my tummy didn’t have to stretch as much. I was religiously applying stretch mark cream in my first pregnancy even though I didn’t have any stretch marks so I thought I wouldn’t need to put any for my second pregnancy. Oh no, I was wrong. I started to feel slight pain around my navel at about 32 weeks. I kept looking for scratches but saw nothing. A few days later, I started to see what were faint beginnings of stretch marks. Thank goodness I kept some of the stretch mark cream samples I got from the baby fairs. So now, I’m religiously applying the cream. It’s not so much for the sake of appearance but more so to soothe the skin from the horrible pain and itch. Who knew that stretch marks could be painful? Then I also discovered that the stretch marks are at the areas where the little one kicks and pokes. Thanks baby.
5. Hormonal Changes — With Emilee, I had the classic good hair days with little hair fall during the second trimester. Never really experienced any other great signs of hormonal changes. With Baby K, I seemed to experience the little hair fall much later in the third trimester. I started to experience itching on my legs which results in small ugly sores (due to my scratching) in the second and third trimesters. Previously, I only experienced this while I was doing my confinement. I also developed an allergy for the insulin I’m injecting quite early in the pregnancy. This was not seen in my first pregnancy. The injection site would itch so badly that I needed to scratch and then it would swell like a huge mosquito bite. Thankfully, this went away once I stopped injecting Levemir. Till this day, I’m not even sure I was allergic to Levemir or it was just my hormones acting up to all types of insulin in general.
6. Tiredness — Well, that goes without saying. Hands down I feel more tired carrying Baby K than Emilee. Not sure if it’s partly due to age but definitely because Baby K is bigger and weighs more. Some days are fine but some days I feel so heavy and tired.
7. Activeness of Baby — Both Emilee and Baby K are really active babies. However, Emilee seemed to be more active in the morning while Baby K just loves kicking around some time between 11pm and midnight. Hmmm…is Baby K going to be a night owl? Hope not. But she does settle down to sleep when I sleep, so that’s a good sign.
8. Forgetfulness — The famous “pregnancy brain”. Didn’t seem to have it with Emilee. Definitely experiencing it with Baby K. It’s sometimes so bad that I can’t recall names/terms of things and I have to Google it. Urgh.