You are 7 Weeks Pregnant!

WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH YOU

Rapid acceleration of hormones can cause your face to break out. Wash your face twice a day with a gentle cleaner and drink plenty of water. If you are taking vitamin B6 to help with nausea, you may find it also improves the condition of your skin.

During pregnancy week 7 everything you place in your mouth has the potential to affect your unborn baby.

Many women start having cravings during pregnancy. Cravings are a perfectly natural part of pregnancy, but taken to the extreme can lead to excessive weight gain.

Cravings may also be an indication that your body is deficient in certain nutrients. You may, for example, need more calcium if you are craving products with milk in them.

Three things are starting to become the norm this week:

  1. Icky pimples
  2. The perpetual green feeling of Blah
  3. My fascination with Yoplait Mango.

Hence, if I were a caricature, I would be spotty, green, and sporting a pooch that is courtesy of my newfound love for yogurt. And because I have been shaped like a beanpole for years, having a paunch makes me look like a straw with a pea lodged in it. Today, I had to abandon a pair of low-waisted board shorts because the waistband and fly is held together by Velcro. And well… modesty really should be held together by something far sturdier and lasting. Like metal and teeth.

But oh, let me explain the phenomenon of being quite in love with yogurt. And yes, yes… it’s probably poor Blob screaming for more calcium and less chilli, thankyouverymuch. But you have to understand something. Pre-Blob, I loathed yogurt.

I can have ice-cream by the pail, and I can down a cheese melt in 15 seconds flat. I don’t mind pizza, and since migrating to Australia, I’ve started to understand why soft cheeses are divine. (Not that I have any now, mind you.) I have to avoid cream because my body repels it faster than you can say “dunny hog”, and I tolerate whole glasses of milk. But I have never been able to stand the taste and texture of yogurt.

I’ve tried, you know. I used to be really lactose intolerant but I’ve gotten over most things, and when I got to Australia and had real quality dairy for once in my life (Asians cannot do dairy, sadly), I told myself I’d give yogurt a go because it’s such a great snack and awesome for my calcium intake, etc etc. Nuh uh. Yogurt, no matter what the flavour or brand, has never stopped feeling like I’m shovelling spoonfuls of curdled milk into my mouth and try as I did, I could never finish even half of those tiny snack-tubs.  Such a lost cause.

Enter Week 7.

The Chinese way of handling nausea is to suck on sour plums. And we’ve already talked about ginger biscuits. (Such a gross invention, BTW. As incongruous to me as fish with ice-cream.) But yesterday, while feeling particularly poorly, I flung open the refrigerator door in a desperate bid to find something – anything! – that would take this misery away, and then my eyes fell on Tony’s tub of yogurt and mango.

Two thoughts:

“Actually, that looks really, really good right now.”

“What the!”

And before I knew what had possessed me, I had polished off – and I kid you not – a third of that tub of yogurt. That’s, like, Tony’s yogurt rations for the week. And because I was making a mango chicken dish for a farewell lunch at church today (which was what was making me feel awful, I suspect), I had to run over to the stove, hold my nose while I stirred, and then run back to my yogurt, because it was the only thing that would make me feel better.

It also means this child is turning out more Tony’s than mine. Yogurt, indeed.