Nobody told me about the burping

The thing nobody tells you about the first twelve weeks is that you are learning a body that keeps moving. By the time I had a rule for something, the rule needed updating.

I kept a note each week with three lines: what changed, what I did about it, what I want to ask. Twelve weeks of that is a genuinely useful document to take to a review.

Weeks four to eight were the steepest part for me. Everything was changing slightly every week and I could not tell which changes were the medication and which were just November.

Thank you. Genuinely.

I had two completely uneventful weeks in the middle of this stretch and I found them oddly hard, because I had nothing to report and felt as though I should have.

I reread my own notes from week two recently and I sounded genuinely frightened. I had forgotten that. Twelve weeks does more than I gave it credit for at the time.

The most common question in this circle is some version of "is this normal for this stage", and the honest answer is usually yes, with the caveat that if it worries you, ask somebody qualified.

Something that helped me through the middle stretch: I stopped judging a week by the last day of it. Fridays were always the worst read on how the week had actually gone.

Adding a name to the list of people this helped.

Around week nine I stopped noticing it. Not because anything dramatic changed, but because it had become part of the week rather than an event in it.

Something in the middle of this stretch will probably surprise you, and it will probably not be the thing you have been bracing for. Mine was sleep. I had prepared for everything except sleep.