I'm going to start everyone off with a "duh" today: Every pregnancy is different. Okay? I've put that out there, and it's my disclaimer for this post. I am acknowledging that what worked for you or me might not work for your sister or friend. However, we can take comfort in the fact that SOME things might work for many.

I now have three pregnant friends, who are all a gradation of weeks behind me in their pregnancies, so since I'm the one to run the gauntlet first, I'm the one who answers questions and gives out what advice I can. I like it. I like sharing what I've learned, especially if what I learned can provide even one hour of relief to the expectant.

By nature, I'm a fairly nauseous person. That is, I'm easily nauseated -- cars, cabs, planes, naval gazing, American Idol -- will all do it to me. I've been this way for awhile and so learned early on in life that Dramamine was my friend, my confident, my constant companion.

I had feared that pregnancy might be much worse for me because of this disposition. (Remembering a ten-year-old New Yorker article that talked about pregnant women who have uncontrollable nausea and vomiting to the point of hospitalization didn't help allay my worst fears.)

Happily, I was wrong. Aside from those annoying people, who don't ever get any morning, noon, or night sickness, I don't think my nausea was any worse than what a lot of others experience in 1st trimester.

The most valuable thing I learned was that the nausea was a result of a blood sugar drop -- explaining why it's worse in the morning and therefore given the totally fallacious name of "Morning Sickness" -- so as long as I had enough food in me at all times, I'd be okay. In order to stave off what was for me 24-hour nausea, I had to eat every two hours.

My stomach was a clock. It would even wake me up in the middle of the night to warn me of waves of impending ickiness. I started keeping food next to my bed because, as the books warned, even the mere act of walking to the kitchen was a lot of effort for a body that was working hard to build a baby from scratch.

Ignoring the resulting crumbs, crackers and almonds were my food of choice for middle-of-the-night noshing. Sometimes cookies for a valuable quick sugar kick.

Food

Carr's Table Water Crackers: Bland, bland, bland, but they will line your stomach.

Almonds: I still carry the Diamond resealable bags of these around with me in case of emergency. I learned early on that the rush of protein these nuts gave me was a sure-fire way to get ahead of the nausea.

Apples and Cheddar Cheese: This was pretty much my lunch for seven weeks. Apples have always been a stomach-soother for me and the cheese was that needed protein. The cheese wasn't fancy -- as you might have expected from an old cheesemonger -- it was just bulk, yellow, grocery store cheddar. Comfort food.

Grilled Cheese Sandwiches: Ah, the ultimate in comfort food. Yes, I ate a lot of these in first trimester because I couldn't handle anything else. What is it about grilled cheese sandwiches and why are they so comforting for so many of us? Is it all rooted in childhood? With a lot of psychoanalysis, I'm sure we could get to the bottom of it some day.

Totino's Frozen Pizza: Again, maybe it's going back to childhood and what we all individually define as comfort food, but Totino's was something we always had at birthday parties when I was a kid. Totino's Cheese Pizza was my Thanksgiving turkey this year.

Drink

Gleaning facts from friends and books and the ever-opinionated Internet, I discovered that sour flavors were great for beating off nausea. I also knew from my long relationship with motion sickness that ginger was also a good curative. Plus, it's very important to stay hydrated throughout pregnancy, so get that liquid into yourself any way you can.

San Pellegrino Limonata: Not sweet or sugary, this "lemonade" has sparkling water to soothe the stomach riots and a nice bracing citrus edge to it. I love this stuff and drink it regularly now. With some bruised fresh mint, it makes an easy and refreshing mocktail.

Fever-Tree Ginger Ale: Yes, I love Fever-Tree so much, it even cures my nausea. (Had the newest Fever-Tree flavor, Ginger Beer, been on the market, I would have stocked that in bulk. But that's for another review. It's a doozy of a drink!)

Sparkling Water: The partner to my Carr's Water Crackers in all times of tummy trouble, sparkling water is stalwart and true. During weeks 6-13, I stuck with the flavorless variety even though I normally prefer lemon (and now PAMPLEMOUSSE!) because the less flavor the better for me.

Miscellaneous

These are a few things that I either carried with me in case of a nausea emergency or gulleted to give me a stomach boost when I knew my preferred food might not be immediately gettable.

Ginger Chews: Jen wrote about these a few weeks ago. Before pregnancy, I was exclusively buying the Ginger People chews at Trader Joe's, but then Jen introduced me to the firmer Chimes chews, which don't go all soft and hygroscopic-y in their wrappers, and I was converted. I found my source of Chimes at Andronico's, but still eat Ginger People in a pinch.

Trader Joe's Triple Ginger Cookies and Trader Joe's Vanilla JoeJoe's Cookies: First of all, it's a ginger 3-way with the ginger cookies, so that's fantastic. Second of all, even if I weren't pregnant, I'd be craving these vanilla JoeJoe's. No, they aren't just like Oreos or other sandwich cookies out there. For god's sake, people, they have actual vanilla bean in the cream filling! Highly addictive and a perfect midnight snack.

Preggie Pops: Yes, it seems like a rip-off to buy very special pregnancy candies when you can just rely on lemon drops or Sour Patch Kids, but I was intrigued, so in the interest of research and in the interest of having a full arsenal to combat nausea, I ordered these. They come in sour fruit flavors (lemon, apple, raspberry, tangerine) and herbal (peppermint, ginger, lavender) and you can buy mixed or single flavors of some. My reaction? Not bad. I went through all the fruit first and picked my way around the herbals. They definitely quelled my rising gorge in times of car trouble, so it was money well spent.

It's not a long or balanced list by any means, but I wasn't being a Renaissance eater during weeks 6-13. You really don't care about the lack of dietary variety when you're just praying it will all stay down.

Good luck! Just remember: gag softly and carry a barf bag.

I'm stating the obvious, I know, but every single pregnancy decision you make is rife with potential controversy. Absolute strangers feel perfectly fine in their own heads about offering their opinions, advice, or finger-shaking at the slightest provocation.

I'll never forget the night I went to a dinner party and it came up that we were going to find out the sex of the baby. "Oh, I wouldn't do that," one old biddy advised me, "You really should be surprised." I'm sorry lady, but do I even know your name? More to the point, do you know mine?!

Luckily, my backbone was firmly in place and I calmly and decisively delivered my prepared statement: "We think it's a surprise at any point in pregnancy, and I'd rather not be hopped up on drugs when we do find out." Then I braced myself for the unasked-for lecture on unmedicated births, but happily, I was spared that.

This is the deal: your pregnancy, your decisions. Unless you are causing physical harm to yourself or your baby, no one has the right to make you feel guilty or like a bad mother. NO ONE.

And that goes for your food choices as well. A fellow pregnant friend had to deal with a co-worker, who was all Judgey McOpinionPants that my friend hadn't given up sugar for her pregnancy.

Personally, this pregnancy turned me into a Salt Vampire. Usually fairly light-handed in my application of salt in the past, I have really been piling it on recently. Which is odd because with my pregnancy-endowed super smeller, it would seem to follow that I've got a super taster as well, right? So why the need to increase my blood pressure?

Well, some articles, books, or blog posts might tell me that I'm craving salt because the baby wants minerals he's otherwise lacking. These same articles also tell me that I don't want chocolate because the baby is telling me to eat healthy food. So, then I gotta ask: what is said baby is trying to tell me when I crave McDonald's cheeseburgers, Safeway doughnuts, and root beer?

Look, I know there are pregnant chicks out there who make the irrevocable decision to eat healthy, healthy, healthy their entire pregnancy and that's admirable, it really is. However, for me, it wasn't at all reasonable in the first trimester. And by "reasonable" I mean, "either I eat this bag of Cheetos or the kid starves because everything else is making me nauseous."

Ironically, I was a fairly healthy eater before I got pregnant. I ate mostly grains, legumes, and vegetables with fish and some meats mixed in. I didn't overdo it in the dessert department, and I tried to restrain my rampant cheese obsession. Also, we mostly cooked at home with only occasional dinings-out.

That all went out the window in weeks 6-13 where I scarfed every possible item of junk food known to man and couldn't bear to set foot in the kitchen.

At my first doctor's appointment, I had to fill out a sheet describing what I had eaten in the previous week. This was my menu: hot dogs, grilled cheese, cookies, Totino's pizza, apples, crackers, water. My UCSF midwife smiled at the list. "This reads like one of my pregnant teenagers," she commented. I hurriedly told her that normally I was a really healthy eater and that I knew I had to get good stuff in my body for the baby. She calmed me down and said it was perfectly normal and no, I wasn't already a bad mother.

After I got past my nauseous stage, my body went back to allowing in all the stuff from my old diet without kicking up a mighty, bathroom-dashing fuss.

What I'm trying to say is, pregnancy is stressful enough as it is, so if you're craving "bad food," try not beat yourself up about it. Can you go overboard and eat ten donuts a day for every day of your pregnancy? Sure, all things in moderation and so on, but the upshot is, it's only nine months, you'll get your body back on track.

Note: Don't read this if you find my other posts disgusting or offensive. Move along now. I mean it.

I suspect that our doula saw my stash of pop tarts on top of the refrigerator. That would explain her hesitant tone when she called me after I had called her, hysterical, three weeks before my baby was due. Some women get post-partum depression; in my case, I had a whopper case of pre-partum depression, which, needless to say, did not bode well the post part of the partum.

“Um, Meghan, I know this might really not be your style, but maybe you'd like to think about something that I've read can help fend off post-partum,” she said.

“Anything, anything!” I would have freebased free range koala turds at that point if it meant I would okay after the birth.

“You could have your placenta, uh, processed,” she said.

“Processed?”

“Some studies have shown that consuming your placenta after the birth can prevent post-partum depression. And I know someone who can process it for you. Into pills.”

Pills, eh? Well now, I’m a fan of pills! And it’s not like I was a complete stranger to the notion of consuming placenta. In Thailand, one of my Thai friend’s favorite soups was made with buffalo placenta, and I’d certainly heard about women consuming their placentas in smoothies, omelets, etc. I did take birth classes in Berkeley, after all. (If you don’t believe me, there’s this thing called Google...)

Fast forward a couple of weeks...

I’ve just pushed out my kid. He’s across the room, getting meconium vacuumed off his schnozz, and the placenta (His? Mine? Ours?) is on its way.

“It’s in our birth plan to save the placenta, right? Save the placenta?” I called to the intern, who was busy between my legs. (A situation which can’t help but call to mind the classic Saturday Night Live skit with Dan Ackroyd playing Julia Child saving the chicken livers.

“Yep, we’ll save it, don’t worry. It will be in the fridge down the hall.”

Ah, really! In the fridge down the hall along with the Odwalla smoothies we have stocked there...and every other maternity ward mother’s snacks, too. Nice...

Fast forward two days...

Our newborn son is strapped into his car seat, and we’re headed home at three miles an hour.

“Shit, we forgot the placenta.”

Well, suffice it to say that much as we wanted our placenta, we weren’t really in the mood to turn back at three miles an hour. So, we called the hospital.

“Save our placenta! Please! Don’t throw it out! It’s in a Tupperware container in the fridge! Put a post-it on it that says, ‘Urgently needed placenta! DO NOT THROW AWAY!’”

Next phone call: the doula (not ours) whom we’d hired, for $250, to prepare our placenta. Bless her little organic soul, she agreed to go pick it up herself. (I had visions of our placenta, aging in its Tupperware, ready for a Manager’s Special markdown.)

Next phone call: back to the hospital. “Can you release our placenta to someone who isn’t us? Yes? GREAT!”

Fast forward another two days...

Post-partum depression has not, as of yet, struck. But I’m jonesing for my placenta pills, man. Big time. Because surely if I don’t get them THIS INSTANT my son will wind up in juvi hall in 15 years.

Panicked phone call to the placenta preparer: “Don’t worry,” she told me. “It’s all done. I’ll bring it over this afternoon.”

And voila:

129 pills of pure Laslocky placenta, steamed lightly with ginger, jalepeno and lemon, sliced thinly and dried in a dehydrator, then ground into a powder and put into capsules.

The label reads: “Placenta medicine. Dosage: Up to 2 caps 3x a day for 2 weeks postpartum. Take for immunity, menopause, and to augment the Chi and nourish the blood. Also for rites of passage: teething, walking, school, times of growth and separation.”

I could rub some powdered placenta on my boy’s gums, the preparer said, if I thought he’d ever lost his way.

Our placenta, she added, was a particularly beautiful one -- so beautiful she dried some of the amniotic sack that was attached to it. Here it is:

Oh, and this?

This is a bit of the membrane and the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord, some say, makes a great teething ring.

Fast forward another two days...

You know how fish oil pills make you burp? There I was, dutifully downing two capsules three times a day, burping up placenta like there’s no tomorrow. And it was NOT pleasant. Gag-inducing belches, and no matter how I consumed them -- with milk, with a sandwich, with an entire loaf of bread -- there it was: the unmistakable piquant flavor of placenta.

My neighbor sniffed the jar. “Hmm. Smells like mushrooms,” she said, oh so helpfully.

Mushrooms STUFFED WITH PLACENTA, that is.

Fast forward four months...

Okay, so I cut back and took just one pill a day for...a day. The jar of pills sits in my cupboard, nestled with the honey and my great-grandmother’s circa 1915 Noritake soup bowls.

I’m not inclined to take it -- fortunately I did not get post-partum depression -- but I’m glad it’s there, and the truth is that when I give the open jar a good whiff now, it doesn’t smell nearly as horrible. It smells more of ginger now than it does of placenta. There’s something really sweet about having it, and I’m not saying that with snark. Plus it’s always good to have options: Early onset of menopause could be right around the corner, and my boy will be teething any day now.

And I do have delightful visions of sending him off to college, rubbing the contents of the 129th pill into his gums. "Don't forget who's your mommy, baby."