I’ve never really believed that I had much in the way of cravings during either my first pregnancy - apart from the need to eat a hamburger for lunch every day during the first trimester - or this one. Then today I realised that I am having one. A quite unexpected one. And I’ve probably been through a couple of others.
During the first trimester, when morning sickness was kicking my arse, I ate apples - Fujis and Pink Ladys. They seemed to help settle the queasiness in my stomach. I now think there was probably more to it than that because I really ate a lot of apples during that time and it wasn’t always because I was queasy. And then, quite suddenly, I stopped eating them. I haven’t even looked at an apple since about the 16th week of the pregnancy.
For quite a while after that I was drinking a fair bit of soft drink. Again, I thought it had something to do with my stomach. They made me burp and that seemed to help both with queasiness and reflux/indigestion. I tried to avoid drinking too much Coke because of the caffeine and so developed a bit of a taste for mineral water, particularly lemon flavoured stuff. Until recently.
Lately I’ve been drinking more water than usual. I’ve always been one of those people who never drink enough water, preferring to obtain my fluids via tea. Although I occasionally make half-arsed attempts to drink the recommended daily amount of the stuff, I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded. I don’t even like the taste of plain water much and tend to have it with cordial when I do drink it. But that appears to have changed a bit. I’ve been drinking much less tea than normal (down to 3 or 4 mugs a day, which is a significant decrease) and having plain water instead. I hadn’t really noticed the change, though, until I was out and about today.
I decided that I wanted a drink and popped into a shop, thinking that I would buy a bottle of water to drink as I wandered. Once I was at the counter I changed my mind and got a lemon mineral water because I thought I’d like the taste. I didn’t. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t quench my thirst (and it didn’t really), but the taste of it wasn’t satisfying. There was nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t what I had wanted. When I got back to the car I chugged the half bottle of water I’d left there the previous day and it hit the spot perfectly. It quenched my thirst and, even after a day sitting in the sun in the car, it was exactly the taste I was looking for.
So there we have it. I’ve been through apples and soft drink and now I’m on to water. It’s not pickles and icecream, but that’s probably a good thing.
