I want to preface this by saying that my first trimester was, in many ways, not as bad as I expected. I had been warned about morning sickness that would floor me, about being unable to function, about weeks of misery. That wasn't quite my experience — but what I wasn't warned about was everything else.
The exhaustion. The logistics. The strange particular challenge of being pregnant with no fixed address, no predictable routine, and a half-built van that smelled of spray adhesive and optimism.
Here is the honest version.
The exhaustion is not like normal tiredness
I am someone who walks about 25km a day at work. I am not, by nature, a person who struggles with physical tiredness. The first trimester exhaustion was something categorically different — a heaviness that started behind my eyes and settled into my bones, and that no amount of sleep seemed to fully shift.
In a house, when you are that tired, you can lie on a sofa. You can put something on the television. You can exist horizontally without needing to think about where you are or what needs doing first. In a van mid-build, there is no sofa. There is a mattress on a board in a space that still smells of work in progress, and getting to it involves navigating around tools and insulation offcuts and a golden retriever who has taken up residence directly in the path you need to walk.
I learned very quickly in the first trimester to be ruthless about rest. If I needed to stop, I stopped. The build could wait. Talek understood this without needing to be told, which I was more grateful for than I probably showed.
Nausea — but not how I expected it
I didn't have severe morning sickness. I was lucky in that respect. What I did have was a persistent low-level nausea that was worst in the middle of the night, when I hadn't eaten since dinner and my blood sugar had dropped.
This is where van life was actually, unexpectedly, useful. Everything is close in a van. The kitchen is two steps from the bed. I could be upright, eating ginger biscuits and drinking weak tea, within about ninety seconds of waking up feeling wrong. In a house where the kitchen is at the other end of a corridor and down a flight of stairs, that would have been a much more unpleasant operation.
Talek would make me toast at two in the morning without complaint. This is the sort of thing you don't fully appreciate until you're sitting wrapped in a blanket in a van in Cornwall at three in the morning eating plain crackers and being very, very grateful for the person next to you.
The logistics of no fixed address
This is the part that gets genuinely complicated, and the part I'd most want to warn anyone in the same situation about.
When you find out you're pregnant, a cascade of things needs to happen: registering with a midwife, booking a booking appointment, arranging blood tests, scans, letters. Almost all of these require an address. Not just any address — a consistent address, one that you can receive physical post at, one that a midwife will use to send you appointment letters and scan results and the various booklets and forms that arrive throughout pregnancy.
We used Taleks' Parents and my Mums address for all official correspondence, which made this workable. But I want to be clear: without that, it would have been genuinely difficult. If you are pregnant and living in a van, get a fixed address sorted as your very first priority — a family member, a friend who'll receive your post, whatever it takes. Don't leave it.
The second complication is that van life means moving around. We weren't in the same place every night. That's fine for most things, but it adds a layer of planning when you have appointments — you need to think about where you'll be parked that day, whether you can get there, whether parking near the hospital or midwife surgery is going to be straightforward in a large van. None of this is insurmountable, but all of it requires more thought than it would with a fixed base.
Smells
Nobody warned me about the smells. The first trimester heightens your sense of smell to an almost supernatural degree, and a van mid-build has — let's say — a complex olfactory profile. Spray foam. Wood glue. Diesel. That particular smell of warm metal on a sunny day. The lingering ghost of previous owners.
I spent a lot of time with the van doors open in the first trimester. Fresh air helped. Tilly sitting in the doorway taking up most of the available fresh air did not help, but she was committed to the position and not to be moved.
What nobody tells you about the emotional side
The early weeks of pregnancy are strange even in the most stable of circumstances. You know something enormous has happened. You can't tell anyone yet. You feel different but look exactly the same. And all the usual emotional processing has to happen quietly, in the background, while the rest of life continues.
In a van with a partner and a dog in a fairly small space, there is nowhere to be privately emotional in the way you might be in a house with separate rooms. I learned a lot in those early weeks about communicating what I needed — sometimes quiet, sometimes company, sometimes just to sit at the van doors looking out at wherever we were parked and not talk about anything important at all.
Talek learned when to talk and when not to. Tilly learned nothing, but sat very close, which turned out to be exactly right.
What helped most
- Ginger — in every form. Biscuits, sweets, tea, fresh ginger in hot water with lemon.
- Eating small amounts constantly rather than proper meals
- Keeping the van well ventilated at all times
- Vitamin B6 — worth discussing with your midwife if nausea is a problem
- Not pushing through exhaustion — resting when I needed to rather than trying to be productive
- Having a good anchor address for post and appointments before anything else
- Telling people earlier than I expected to — having support from family made the logistics much more manageable
What I'd do differently
Honestly, not much. I'd have sorted the fixed address for correspondence even earlier than I did — that was the one thing that caused genuine stress. And I'd have given myself more permission to rest without feeling like I should be getting on with the build.
The van didn't need to be finished in the first trimester. The van needed to get finished eventually. Those are different things, and my first trimester self took a while to understand that distinction.
But the fundamentals of van life — the smallness, the proximity to everything, the fact that your whole world is within arm's reach — turned out to suit early pregnancy better than I expected. Not perfectly. Not without complexity. But better.
— Wild Coast Mama