Survive! – Homeschooling the First Trimester

I wondered whether we could cope with so many new challenges: being in a new country was challenging enough, we had only recently started to homeschool our three young kids and now months later, we were expecting another addition to our family. How could we possibly manage it all?

Morning sickness usually hits me fast and hard. When it came, I started to feel overwhelmed. My usual disposition, when faced with a challenge, is to roll up my sleeves (think “gird up your loins”!) and rise up to that which is before me. But morning sickness is another cup of tea altogether.  It makes me miserable and emotional and cranky. The slightest trigger can set it off and months afterwards I still have PTSD-like reactions to these triggers. My world literally comes grinding to a halt. I can’t eat any normal food (except for candy, chocolate milk, lemon tea and some other obscure foods like pickles). I spend most of my time either sleeping or regurgitating and I long for the day when I can eat normal food and feel normal again. My emotions and hormones are wild, and I withdraw into myself. Everything stops functioning: no meals are prepared, the laundry basket and kitchen sink overflow, the dishwasher doesn’t get emptied, the house is an absolute mess, the homeschool is non-existent and no one has clean underwear.

I spent the first three months or so just surviving. What this looked like daily was waking up in the morning only to position my body horizontally back onto the living room sofa until the end of the day. I rested there with a blanket while the kids ran the home and my husband was upstairs in his home office. In the beginning, I tried to do the bare minimum (Maths and Reading) with the children but eventually, even this had to stop. The TV that had been taken out of our living room only a few months ago came back down to babysit and entertain the kids once again. Much to my chagrin, the kids who were doing well in their homeschool without the distraction of media were spending their days devoid of any schooling, watching back-to-back episodes and films on Netflix and Prime video! To top it off, the husband took over meal planning, grocery shopping and meal preparation which meant that our daily diet rotated between hot dogs, chicken nuggets and frozen supermarket pizza…and repeat!

It was a tough couple of months. It was hard to feel encouraged, even at the thought of a tiny human growing inside me. I had been through these times before…three times precisely but it still felt hard and impossible. I knew my body needed time and resources to grow the baby and that in three months it would go away, as it did the three times before. But the constant fear in my head was that perhaps this pregnancy would be that one pregnancy where the nausea would remain right until I gave birth to the baby! It was a horrific thought.