Something Else Entirely

15 - Do not push your luck, woman!

Miraculously, we managed to get through most of the holiday without too many major pregnancy glitches.

Not so miraculously, I hadn't been able to convince Sadie to tell Dad yet, despite my ceaseless efforts to do so.

She wasn't getting regular morning sickness, by which I mean, she was getting sick, but at weird and unexpected times of the day, not just in the morning. And she was surprisingly good at keeping it all down once I started buying her a box of crackers every other day and carrying them around in my backpack for her when we were out, just in case. I figured there was less chance Dad would notice her always eating them if I said I was buying them for me and she faked stealing them from me all the time. The chewing gum I also bought her helped with whole post-vomit breath thing, too.

Sadie refused to go to a doctor, claiming she would be just fine until we got home, so I had to Google everything I could think of about pregnancy to make sure she was okay. The crackers I knew about from Morgan already, but apart from that, I had less than no idea what else I should be looking out for to keep her healthy.

We took Madden to Banzai skatepark, and, despite my many quiet protests and pleading to the contrary, Sadie took her skateboard out with him and rolled around for a while. I didn't explicitly find anything online that said 'don't skate while pregnant,' but I just had a sinking feeling it would be a bad idea. You know, moving wheels on rock-hard concrete and everything. And when she almost fell on her ass after attempting to do a trick, I raced over to her before anyone else could, asking her whether she was okay and begging her to not get back on. She relinquished her stubbornness enough to let me take her skateboard off her, and I spent the remainder of the time at the park riding on her deck with Madden, just so she couldn't.

She refused not to surf, however, claiming that if amazing women like Bethany Hamilton can surf while pregnant without any issues, then she can, too. The whole surfing with only one arm thing naturally made Bethany Hamilton a total badass, and videos of her surfing while majorly pregnant and still with only one arm—duh—made her even more so. However, Sadie was my mother, and that was an entirely different scenario. But she wouldn't budge, and I instead spent most of my time in the water sitting right next to her and chasing her down after each wave, just to make sure she was okay and we didn't have a repeat of what happened the first time she paddled out at Pipe.

The seafood thing I didn't need to worry about considering she was vegan and already didn't eat any of that. Same thing obviously went with soft cheeses and raw meats. She didn't drink alcohol regularly—the whole parents being alcoholics thing put a real negative spin on alcohol for her, I guess—and was smart enough to take over the purchasing of drinks for all of us when we were out and just started ordering mocktails instead whenever she did. There was also something I read about caffeine not being good when pregnant, so I took over the coffee ordering for us all when she was back to being able to stomach it, and just started ordering hers decaf, which she deeply resented. In solidarity, I also ordered my own decaf, and had been sporting a major caffeine withdrawal headache every day since. Upside, I was sleeping better at least. Who knew caffeine and poor sleep were correlated?

The waterfall swimming was a tad challenging considering a lot of websites and forums I read said something about bacteria and parasites not being good for pregnant women. She agreed to not go in the really shallow ones, and instead only went in up to her knees in most others. I made sure to keep Madden and Dad occupied enough to not really notice that she wasn't swimming, throwing the kid in repeatedly and climbing all over Dad's shoulders while Sadie took pictures of us.

The real difficulty came when we headed over to the Big Island after Maui, and were preparing to go to the Volcanoes National Park. Everything I came across online said it was a definitive 'no' to pregnancy and volcanoes, something about sulphur and other chemicals not being good for the baby and causing defects or some shit.