Week 9, Day 5. Tuesday. Brooklyn. Baby is the size of a raspberry this week.
So here's the thing — I refreshed the choline tracker 30 times today and I don't even feel weird about it.
I'm not gonna lie, I counted. Not on purpose. Around the twentieth refresh I started noticing the little pattern: type the food, watch the number nudge up, refresh, see if anything magically changed, refresh again. It's 4:30 PM as I'm typing this, my back is screaming, and the laptop has been open for eleven hours. Jake just walked past with tea and didn't even ask anymore. He gave up around 2.
Okay can we talk about how today started?
6:47 AM, alarm not even close
Alarm was set for 7:30. I woke up at 6:47 with my brain already three steps into a sprint, and the first thing I did — before water, before peeing, before anything a sane person does — was open my phone and read Mombite's choline blog for the second time in ten hours. Last night around midnight I'd read it the first time, and somewhere between brushing my teeth and trying to fall asleep I did the math and realized I have not come close to 450 mg in three days. Not close. Not in the same neighborhood as close.
The reason is stupid: I cannot do eggs. I tried two weeks ago and the smell of the yolk hitting the pan made me dry-heave into the kitchen sink. So that's two whole eggs of choline gone every morning, and I haven't replaced them with anything because I didn't realize I had to. Cool cool cool.
By 7 AM I was at my desk, tracker open, second tab logged into a calculator I made in Notion two weeks ago, third tab on my OB portal, fourth tab Reddit. By 7:15 I had refreshed four times.
The Productive Monday plot twist
Three days ago — Monday, April 24 — I was a productivity machine. I killed sixteen stale Asana cards in one sitting, wrote four comments on a Reddit thread about Ovia closing, organized a Pinterest board called "second trimester wardrobe" that I have absolutely no business organizing yet. I felt like myself. Like the version of me from before the test was positive.
That same energy is back today. Same engine, same eleven-hour focus. But it's pointed at one single molecule.
Choline.
That's the whole map. That's the entire territory my brain is currently occupying. Yesterday it was iron — I was doing the same thing with iron, refreshing, calculating, freaking out, until I made a lentil thing for dinner and felt better. Today iron is fine. Today choline is the war.
Jake's "Em, why do you keep checking that?"
Around 1 PM Jake video-called from his standing desk. He works from home too, but the company has him in Slack huddles all morning so we don't see each other until lunch. I picked up still typing into the tracker. I share-screened by accident — I was trying to show him something else — and the choline page lit up between us like evidence at a trial.
"Em," he said. "Why do you keep checking that?"
I said, "Because the baby's brain is developing right now Jake. This week is CRITICAL." I said it in capital letters. Out loud. I heard myself say it in capital letters and didn't take it back.
He went quiet for a second. He has this thing where he doesn't argue with me when I'm in the spiral, he just waits. Then he said: "Okay. I'll cook tonight. You close the laptop." Soft, not annoyed. Annoyed would've been easier honestly, I could've fought annoyed.
I did not close the laptop.
The recipe finder rabbit hole
Around 11 I went into Mombite's recipe finder and filtered for high-choline first trimester. The first thing it surfaced was an edamame-tofu bowl. Smart choice on paper. I stared at it. The thought of edamame in my mouth right now makes me want to lie down on the kitchen floor. I closed the tab. I opened it. I closed it again.
By noon I had a sad shortlist:
- Salmon — gone, ate the last fillet on Sunday, nothing in the freezer until Friday delivery
- Soy milk — I just don't like the taste, I'm sorry, I tried four brands, no
- Edamame — see above, kitchen floor
- Beef — Jake makes it, I haven't been able to smell it cooking since Week 7
- Eggs — see also kitchen floor
So lunch became chickpea salad on toast with way too much olive oil. I knew it wasn't going to move the choline number meaningfully. I made it anyway because I needed to eat something, and toast is currently the food group I'm most loyal to.
The Reddit deep-dive (14 tabs, all bookmarked)
Bear with me, this is the embarrassing part. While Jake was on his afternoon Slack huddle I went into r/BabyBumps and searched "choline first trimester." Fourteen threads. I read every single one. I bookmarked every single one. There's a woman in Ohio who eats half an avocado and a glass of soy milk for breakfast and hits 180 mg before lunch. There's someone in the UK who takes a supplement and her midwife shrugged. There's a thread from 2019 where a person says cottage cheese saved her life in trimester one.
Cottage cheese. I had not thought about cottage cheese.
I went to the tracker, typed cottage cheese, saw 1 cup = around 60 mg, and felt the kind of relief you feel when you find your wallet. Sixty milligrams. That's a real number. That's a snack-sized win.
Cottage cheese is now on tomorrow's grocery list. I wrote it in the Notes app at 4:12 PM with shaky thumbs. It's the only useful thing I produced today.
16:30 PM, eleven hours in
It's 4:30 PM. The tracker says 218 mg today. Yesterday it said 220. The day before it said 230. I am going down, not up, and I have refreshed thirty times trying to make the page produce a different number, which is not how websites work, but here we are.
My back hurts in the spot between my shoulder blades. The light in the apartment has gone that golden Brooklyn April color that usually makes me want to take a walk. I am not going to take a walk. Jake is making pasta with chicken and a side of broccoli, which has a small, polite amount of choline in it, and he didn't even highlight that fact, which I love him for.
Tomorrow I'm going to buy cottage cheese. I'm going to put it on toast. I'm going to add 60 mg to the number. I'm probably going to refresh the tracker fewer than thirty times — maybe twenty-five — and call that progress.
The baby is the size of a raspberry. The raspberry does not know I am doing any of this. The raspberry is just growing. The raspberry is fine.
I'm closing the laptop now. Mostly.