5 weeks, 2 days

Yes, that is my stomach at 4 weeks pregnant. Those who know me know I wouldn't show off my stomach for any old reason, but I think it will be interesting to watch it grow for a good reason!!

Week 4 ended uneventful. I still had no symptoms of pregnancy outside of HUGE boobs and no period. The lack of symptoms was a bit unnerving, but they say Week 6 is really when the symptoms start to come full force. I was officially 5 weeks pregnant Friday (October 19th), but I am not allowed to see the doctor for my first visit until Monday, November 12th. By then I will be 8 weeks, 3 days pregnant. Why so long? Well, that is how they do it. Obviously, if there are concerns, they will see you sooner, but that seems to be the rule -- 8 weeks. And these will be the longest 3 weeks of our lives as wait to make sure everything is ok with our little Woody.

Friday at work, I went to the bathroom. (Similarly to TTC, when you are pregnant, you notice things about your body that you never would have thought about before. For instance, you watch for every type of discharge and body twitch.) So, I went to the bathroom and I noticed a touch of brown tint on the toilet tissue when I wiped. They say it is fairly common for women to spot early in pregnancy. It can happen for many reasons -- old blood trying to clean out of your vaginal area, implantation, etc. They also say you are probably fine as long as the blood isn't bright red and if you don't experience terrible cramping. (I have had some cramping here and there, but nothing persistent or severe.) So the slight tinge of brown may have alarmed me, but I wasn't completely freaking out. I think that may be because I was starting to experience another pregnancy symptom -- I am hungry ALL THE TIME.

Ok, not all the time. But definitely more often than usual. And the problem is, if I don't eat within a few minutes of the onset of hunger, I feel sick for about a half-hour. Certain foods don't appeal to me at all, but I am trying to eat healthy in both amounts and types of foods. I am prone to easy weight gain, and I don't want to be the lady who uses her pregnancy as an excuse to eat 10 times the normal amount of food.

So the start of this new symptom shows me that I have a lot of hormones running through me, thus the slight brown tinge concerned me a little less. And then, it went away anyway, so I felt better. I did call the doctor, because the ladies on the message board (www.thenest.com) do recommend that you call with any spotting, but the doctor was closed for the day. And I know they would have said to keep an eye on it and they would see me the following week, so I figured I could wait until Monday. If something serious happened, there isn't anything they could do anyway.

Yesterday (Saturday), I woke up and felt nauseated pretty much immediately. HUNGER! (Note to self: Keep crackers on bedside stand for emergencies.) So I ran down and got a granola bar while Duane made me an omelet. But I let the hunger go too long, and all day I felt a little off. Late last night, I started spotting again, this time more so. But it wasn't anything more than a streak on the paper, and it was brown in color, so I still wasn't terribly alarmed. I will call the doctor tomorrow morning, and hopefully they will have me come in and they will check my hormones and make sure everything is going okay. But there is the hunger again, so I better go feed the little Woody or I will be sorry!