I can't say it's been a positive experience so far. I mean, obviously on one level I'm pleased that it's happening because of the (hopeful) eventual outcome; but as a day-to-day experience, I've had more fun at the dentist. The sickness has been really pretty horrible: from weeks 8 to 16 I was throwing up most days (not just in the mornings, all kinds of times), sometimes several times a day; it was making my throat sore & my stomach muscles achey, and it got to the point where I couldn't bear to eat or drink anything because everything just seemed to sit on top of my stomach sloshing around & waiting to be thrown up. It got to the point where I was feeling actually jealous of
Then there's the mental/emotional side of things. The midwife asked if I was feeling depressed (knowing that I had a history of depression), and I said that being sick several times a day & being unable to eat/drink anything except ice-cubes was enough to make anybody miserable, which was true, but only really half the story. I've had episodes of miserable weepiness where everything feels hopeless and despairing, and I've been struggling to concentrate on anything (getting into that horrible hitting-refresh-on-facebook state of mind where I hate myself for procrastinating but can't force myself to do anything), and both of those are pretty strong indicators of heading into depression, at least for me. I don't want to dwell on this side of things, because it'll just drag me down. If I'm not in that state of mind I can't write accurately about it; if I write accurately about it, I'll be in it, and I'm not currently in it, and I don't want to be in it.
I'm not suggesting that any of these are insurmountable things; worse things happen at sea, mustn't grumble, etc. I did get really really tired of people suggesting "infallible cures" for morning sickness when most things are no better than a placebo; but I did also eventually find things that were less impossible to eat/drink (of course, it was hard to tell whether they were helping or whether I was just slowly getting better anyway). I sort of got used to being sick every day. I do have coping strategies for fighting the various forms that depression takes for me, and I found a few more self-motivation tips in a rather good book called 59 Seconds (evidence-based self-help in easily digestible chunks), though it's harder to keep battling against the emotions when I'm physically tired and achey. But the alternative is sinking into a pool of misery and never getting out of bed.
On top of all this there's been the medical side of things: ultrasound scans, blood tests, midwife appointments, that sort of thing. The blood tests don't bother me (fortunately, since they had to do all the 'booking bloods' a second time because they lost the first lot -- I never did get any results back from those). The scans have been interesting: I confess I didn't find that I was swept away by emotion at the first sight of the baby, but it is still pretty damned awesome, both from the point of view of there being an actual moving living thing in there with, like, hands and feet and everything, and from the point of view of us having the technology to see it and hear the heartbeat. I'm also taking part in the Intergrowth-21st study, so as part of that I get extra scans, including a 3D scan, which was pretty nifty and made the baby look like something from Alien v Predator. (Incidentally, they should have been able to tell from that one what sex the baby is, but it had the umbilical cord tucked modestly between its legs. Hopefully they'll be able to get a better view at the 20-week scan in two days' time!)
I figured that if I was going to be miserable for 9 months I might as well be of as much use as possible to medical science in the process, so I'm also taking part in the SPRINT study, a trial of selenium supplements to prevent pre-eclampsia. It's not very troublesome: I have to take a tablet every day (which may be selenium or a placebo) and I also had to give my toenails to medical science (they can measure current selenium levels in toenails). I am generous with my body-parts, see; I also donated some of my saliva to yet another study, a psychology study about (I am loosely paraphrasing here) whether seeing unhappy babies makes pregnant women stressed. As part of this I had to watch a 6-minute video of babies yelling their heads off; for me that seemed much less traumatic than the other part of the experiment, which involved filling in pages and pages and pages of those bloody awful self-assessment questionnaires ("I get stressed by filling in forms" -- strongly disagree/disagree/neither agree nor disagree/agree/strongly agree). I also had to sign a form saying that I was giving your saliva samples to the University of Oxford as a gift. Happy Christmas, University of Oxford: here are some spit-soaked cotton-wool balls! All this stuff is actually quite cheering, because it gives me a sense of Being Useful.
What with all the sickness and tiredness and faff (and carrying on going to work and going to choir and volunteering at Oxfam and just Getting On With Life) I've not had much time to think about the actual baby. But now that I'm starting to feel it move, it's reminding me that it's there, which is good. So far it seems to be most active around 10am, 3pm, 8pm, and midnight -- dunno why, though the first three of those are roughly a couple of hours after I eat, which may be relevant? It also seems to move in reaction to me singing; I just wish I knew if it liked it or not! :-} It doesn't really feel like kicking yet (what I said about being kicked from the inside was just poetic licence), it's more like something wriggling and turning over inside; it's not unpleasant (just a bit odd) but quite distracting.
So that's where I'm up to now. Sorry so much of it has been whinging -- I'll write more about the thoughts and decisions and stuff at a later date, and hopefully that'll be more interesting!