Bump watch - The End

I'm totally going to regret posting this and referring to it as 'The End', when I'm still pregnant in 2 weeks time.  But I've just spent ages trying to make and embed this slideshow and I've done it now, so appreciate it, m'kay?

I'm going to miss my lovely bump.

My heart

Apparently, I'm going to have a baby next week.  That's when my due date is, anyway.  One of my biggest anxieties, is losing my relationship with Jacob.  It's been tested to its very limits in the last few months, as he's fought against the changes going on with me: my lack of energy and desire (and ability) to play with him, not being able to bounce on me, my pain levels and simply not being able to sit on my lap; and the changes in his life: finishing day nursery, starting school, changes in the house to accommodate a baby.

He's had tantrums of the most epic size, complete with screaming, hitting, kicking, stamping, and shouting, the likes of which we never imagined he could produce.  We're still working our way through these, trying to figure out what to do to help him with his feelings, and how to get him to understand that he cannot attack people when something isn't going his way.

All of that aside, he is so excited about his baby coming along, he is so filled with love for us, and wants cuddles, hugs, kisses and to touch our skin all the time.  He often asks me to 'get the baby out' - which means to pull up my top so he can talk to the baby and kiss my bump.

I love him so much, and I'm so scared that the baby is going to come between us.  Everyone says that doesn't happen though, that your love doubles, rather than having to split it between two.  But just in case, I'm trying hard to appreciate every second of these last two weeks, to spend time cuddling and reading stories and just being the two of us.

My cheeky monkey, my boyface, my heart.

Update on this pregnancy lark

I know I've been pretty rubbish at writing anything at all to do with this pregnancy, despite all my best intentions.

So let's have a catch-up now, eh?

Today I am 37 weeks and 5 days pregnant (or 37+5, to those in the know).  That makes it about 2 weeks until I'll realistically think something could happen (although I am now technically full-term) and 4 weeks until I'm booked for induction (done to avoid a repeat trip to see the consultant if I go over.  I'm sure I won't go over).

This cheeky baby was breech, just like her big brother, up until a week ago, when a scan showed that she was indeed head down.  And has a full head of hair, and ribs, and all kinds of cool things.  The best thing about the scan was that Jamie couldn't attend it with me, so my sister drove 200 miles with her 4-month old baby to be with me.  I therefore had my sister, my niece, and Jacob in the scan room with me.  Jacob was awesome, and thought it was really cool to see the baby.  Although he kept thinking we could see the baby because it had come out of my tummy, and when he turned round to see my tummy still intact, he got very confused.

Since then I've been getting lots of crazy movements, and I'm not entirely sure she's still head down, but am crossing my fingers.

She's given us a couple of scares during this pregnancy, going very quiet for a couple of days so we've had to haul ass down to the Day Assessment Unit to get monitored, but each time everything has been fine.

I've been a bloody nightmare to live with - lots of crazy mood swings, crying at the drop of a hat, and lots and LOTS of pain.  Pain in my ribs from her head bouncing where it shouldn't be bouncing, pain from her trying to move round and stretching me further than I'm designed to be stretched, painful Braxton Hicks, painful kicks in the bladder, pain from Sciatica, pain, pain, pain.  Restless arms and legs that make me want to crawl out of my skin or rip my limbs off, getting up six times in the night to go to the toilet, a pelvis so tight I can barely walk ... pregnancy sucks.

But as I'm approaching the end, and knowing that this could be my last pregnancy, I'm feeling kind of nostalgic and sad, like I'll miss it a fair old bit.  I'll miss the wiggles (even when they last for 5 hours at a time and keep me awake half the night) and the quiet times spent looking at my belly and being so happy that I'm here again.

I'm scared, of the birth, and of going through the difficult newborn phase again, and of splitting my love between Jacob and a new baby.  But I'm so excited too.  I can't wait to meet her, I can't wait to name her, and to carry her, and love her, and see Jacob loving her too.  We very suddenly seem to have reached the end of what has been a long struggle, and I don't feel quite ready, but I know we'll be fine.

Check out my belly ;)

20 week scan

We had our 20 week scan today and all is hunky-dory, we were in there for 35 minutes because she couldn't get a good look at the heart (I was worried it was because my bladder was too empty - we arrived early at the hospital and I was already busting so I went for a wee, then literally the second I'd sat back down and started drinking again, they called me in! It turned out that even with the wee, my bladder was too full and I had to go and empty it half-way through the scan!) and eventually baby cooperated and she saw all 4 chambers of the heart. Everything else was fine, the scan looked far more detailed than I recall from last time, although it is in a different hospital so the scanner may be more up-to-date. Seeing all the ribs and vertebrae, and the bloodflow through the umbilical cord and in and out of the heart and kidneys was just amazing.

And it seems that the world and his lobster were right with their guess, as we're having .... (close your eyes if you want it to remain a surprise!) ....
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.......... a GIRL :D

A convoluted announcement

Around 4 years ago, I sat on this sofa (well, not this one, the old one), staring in disbelief at a stick I'd just peed all over.  Jamie wasn't going to be home from work for another 5 hours or so, I couldn't tell him by email or phone, and I couldn't, just couldn't, cope with this on my own for 5 hours.  So I rang my sister.  She knew how for the last 6.5 years, we'd been trying to have a baby, and how we'd pretty much given up and were looking into what our options for medical assistance were.  After a convoluted introduction, where I explained how I'd been feeling nauseous and sore, and how I'd been trying to calculate when I last had a period but couldn't (damn PCOS), I told her that I'd done the peeing, and there were 2 lines looking defiantly back at me, but I couldn't believe they were true.  She screamed, and cried, and came to her senses and talked me into going out to buying another (six) tests.  I returned home (after a hilarious encounter in the pharmacists, where the pregnancy tests were located on the shelf below the haemorrhoid creams, and two elderly women were very s l o w l y and LOUDLY deliberating the efficacy of each and every one; while I dithered behind them, muttering under my breath about needing to GET A DAMN PREGNANCY TEST NOW), peed on 6 more sticks, and ended up staring at 7 lots of glowing double lines.  Yep, no mistaking those.

Living 3 hours away from my beloved sister means that we don't get to spend as much time together as we'd like.  When I next saw her, I already had a little bump going on.  We took this photo of me with a real bump and her with a cushion stuffed up her dress, to commemorate the occasion.

Fastforward 3 years, and sometime last year I had a phonecall from my sister.  "I need to talk to you," said she.  It transpired that she was on her own, her husband at work, and she'd done a bit of peeing-on-a-stick of her own.  But, presuming it to be negative, she'd forgotten to actually look at the stick, had merrily tossed it in the bin and gone about her day ... until she next went to relieve herself.  She found herself looking into the bin, where the discarded stick showed two unmistakable lines.  I screamed, I cried, I congratulated her.  And persuaded her to go out and buy some more tests, just to check.  She did, she peed: they were positive.

She's now got just a month left to go, and when I saw her just before Easter, we decided to recreate the above photo, in reverse.

Just a couple of days after the above photo was taken, I was back home again, alone (well, as alone as you can be with a very noisy toddler running around), and making a necessary call to my sister.

"I need to have that conversation with you that we have with each other before we have with our husbands", I said.  After a beat of confused silence, she screamed "Are you fucking shitting me??!" (which, funnily enough, were the exact words my husband would say a few hours later).

It turns out that in the above photo, I didn't need a cushion at all.

EDD: 9th Nov '12