Well almost...... in 2 days I will be 7 months pregnant so figured I'd sit down now and get you up to date as Ive been so slack. These 2 pictures are taken of me lounging round like a fat roley poley in the garden today. It was such a beautiful warm day, Ive started wearing summer clothes but unfortunately not looking quite up to par in them but anyhow not long to go now till this giant belly will be gone and replaced with a real life baby! only 12 weeks to go! or less if he decides to come earlier! woo hoo!
Since my last post I have had another midwife visit at 27 weeks and all was on track. I had this visit at the hospital because I had to get my Anti D injection. My blood pressure is fine, baby is fine, measuring well and apparently has good co-ordination as he was following around the heart monitor with his foot. I am now having visits every two weeks.
I am getting bigger by the second, some days I hate it, others I find it completely fine to deal with, just depends on my mood, which is also very up and down.
Baby is moving loads still, and watching my tummy move is one of my favourite things! He is definitely in a routine of when hes up and when hes asleep, as for my sleeping its not too bad, I get up alot to pee and am not overly comfortable but not too badly yet.
I finish work in two and a half weeks! I'm so excited. I know this seems really soon and like I will have loads of time off, which I will, but I had initially planned to take off 2 weeks over Xmas, then return to work for a few weeks in January. But so it happens my families I care for don't require me for January, thus leaving me with no work. Whats a girl to do. Well nothing! amen to that! I look after 2 boys and both sets of parents want to get them settled into their new care in the new year so they didn't see the point in coming back to me after Xmas. Initially I was panicking about money, but now that me and gardener guy have sorted things out and worked out a few things financially, we don't really care, and I just cant believe I'm almost done working!!!! After 10 or so years of caring for other peoples children I am going to be finishing to care for my own, seriously that is the most awesome feeling ever!. Me and gardener guy had initially also decided that I would get work again when the baby was about 4months old, that I would work 3 days a week, but now upon reassessing everything we have just decided not to put a time on it and just see how we go. If our little boy is sleeping well and through the night and I'm feeling ready to care for another child I will start looking for another contract, but if he is a bad sleeper and I am just not feeling up to it, well then I simply wont go back to work until I am. No stress. Gardener guy has said he would rather it was me getting up to the baby in the middle of the night and not working then us both working and both sharing the night feedings.
I have made some decisions on a few baby related issues, I will breastfeed, but I will introduce the bottle quite early on, I want to express my milk and give gardener guy the opportunity to feed his son, I want to have a bit of freedom and not be a milking machine and that is it. The baby will be in his own room from day 1, not in ours, at some point I want to introduce the dream feed - being wake him up before we go to bed and feed him, thus giving me a bigger stretch at night. I will be starting back at the playgroups etc that I go to now fairly early on, I want to get out of the house and keep up with these activities. I will not listen to other peoples advice, I know this sounds a bit mental and stupid, but I have been told by many people that you get hurled so much advice from so many people that it can just make you go crazy! I will do what I think is right and what I feel is working well for our family. I respect that what worked for one mother may not work for another. But if I do need help I will ask for it. I will appreciate peoples guidance, but there's a fine line between saying "oh we tried it this way" and "you should do this, we did". I guess as a new mother there is lots of smiling and nodding of the head and then you just go away and pick and choose what you listen too. One thing I will be happy for help on though is breastfeeding, Ive clearly never done that and from what Ive heard its not often as easy as just pushing your baby to your tit and there you go, your meals on wheels. It can involve alot more.
I have been thinking about the birth a wee bit, We have yet to really discuss this with the midwife but I have a few ideas of my own. Nothing too demanding really, my main thing which I have told the midwife is that I don't want to stay in hospital. If me and baby are well and he is feeding well we are going to leave. I don't want to lie around in hospital when I could be lying around in my own bed. I have plenty of support, we have gardener guys parents who are in town for the babies birth and I have a great friend who is a plunket nurse living close by who I will call upon if I need her, and lots of other people to help. I am not staying in hospital! As far as a birth plan, I'm open to anything, if my midwife suggests I get in the bath to help with pain, ill try, If I like it I am even fine with giving birth in the water. I am wanting pain medication, I hope that gas will be enough, I don't really want an epidural, but again if its recommended and I have been going for too long then I will do it if its best, but my preference is not too. Will see how I go. That's it really. Ive been backwards and forwards on who gets to hold him first, I had though that I wanted him handed straight to gardener guy for the first hold, but now I'm not sure, Ive read that first contact with me promotes good feeding, so I don't really know now, perhaps to me first for a quick cuddle, then to gardener guy. I just have no idea how I will feel, people have told me that I just wont believe how over whelmed and full of love I will feel when I see him, so its all a bit hard to comprehend, yes I imagine Ill be so In love with him and happy, but from what people keep saying, unless you have experienced it there is no way you can ever comprehend how amazing it will be, so needless to say I'm looking forward to that!
Ok, enough of me going on, this was meant to be a short post, this should keep you going for awhile, will let you all know how the next midwife visit goes and any new news.
So you know you have officially lost the rights to your body when you wake up one morning to find you have leaked milk all over your top and through onto the sheets. One can only imagine how much milk I will have when the little fella is here, Ill be waking up swimming in the stuff.
This leads me to my first new development since my last post - breast pads. I didn't think I would really need these till he was born, and even then I was living under some romantic notion that my boobs would just tidily keep all the milk inside where it was meant to be. But oh no! After the leakage issue I went out and brought two crop top style bras, I wanted something comfortable to wear to bed that I could securely pop the breast pads into. So last night was the first night, in they went and of course I didn't leak a damn drop! I think I will just keep using these in bed as the night I decide not to put them in, it will be like Niagara falls! Ill have to recover my dead husbands body from drowning in milk.
Since my last post I also have been a bit up and down health wise, currently I feel good, touch wood. There is nothing wrong with me. But last Sunday/Monday/Tuesday I was not. Somehow I managed to pull a muscle in my side and boy did It hurt! apparently during pregnancy all your muscles are so much weaker and you are prone to all sorts of strains and pains, and what with the added weight (5.5kgs now and counting), it was obviously just too much! now this was no silly little pain in the side, oh no, this was full on. I wake up and feel like I have had a major surgery performed on me, I cannot walk, I cannot get out of bed, I cannot lie without pain, I cannot sit without pain. It was a shocker! at first I thought it may have been the baby lying in some kind of wacky side ways position, but soon realised he was far over the other side, rocking and rolling very oblivious of the pain his mother was in. Anyhow panadol every 4 hours and resting soon healed this up and I am now back to normal.
At my last midwife appointment which was last Tuesday the baby got measured, He is measuring 27cms. Apparently the baby grows a cm a week, So I was 25 weeks at that appointment so he was 2 weeks ahead! little fatso! The midwife never said he was huge or anything, just that I was doing well, baby was well and growing good. I'm not worried about his size, maybe he will come a bit early if he is cooking extra fast!
Perhaps the weirdest and something not really mentioned in pregnancy is my skin changes. It seems I have picked up a skin condition called Chloasma, basically its brownish patches that appear on your face, mostly forehead, upper cheeks and chin. This is triggered by an increase in hormones and an increase in your bodies production of melamin. I know its sounds horrific, but its not really that bad, its not like if you see me you wont recognize me, I have a few patches and its fairly light and you would never really notice it, but too me, someone who has to look at my face every day I can tell. So yes, its not really something you hear about but it is really common and tends to come on in the second trimester. It will fade away and disappear about 2 months after birth.
Someone asked me the other day what I wanted for Christmas and of course there are many things I want, I don't really need any of them, but I still want them. My husband is going to get me perfume and some surprise purchase, with strict instructions for me to stay away from peeking at the credit card bill! Anyhow this got me thinking about last Xmas. Last Xmas was not fun, I was not happy. On Xmas eve we got a phone call from the fertility clinic telling us our 3rd and final IUI had failed and we would need to move onto IVF. Of course we knew this call was coming, we were waiting all day for it, hoping and praying it would be a lovely Xmas gift, but it wasn't. It was damn hard, I had to try my hardest to pick myself up, and get on with Xmas the next day, not an easy feat. Luckily we had a nice trip planned so me and my husband got away together for a week or so and basked in the lovely NZ sun. Although this trip was just what we needed at the time, it was clouded by the bad news we had had, it didn't go away, where ever we went there were happy families enjoying each others company, oblivious to the fact that we were both in alot of emotional pain. Of course the pain subsided and we carried on and planned for IVF and getting back into all the roller coaster of drugs and craziness. All this just makes me so thankful that this Xmas we are in such a better place, we are so so lucky we can enjoy Xmas day and talk about the arrival of our son with our family and really really enjoy the day and have a real smile on our face. Its pretty amazing really! I know what it feels like to be at rock bottom and to be where I am now couldn't be further from that! It almost brings me to tears writing this as I think "poor you, how did you manage that", and that's what I think when I continue to read other woman's struggling blogs, "poor you", its so sad. Every single day is shit. I really hope Xmas is brighter for everyone this year.
Lets just hope for now I can get through the next few months without any embarrassing breast leaking incidents. No squirting across the room at someone, no leaking down my top making me look like I'm sweating profusely. Milk is best served from a carton, not an unexpected shot of it from a strangers boob. Oh well at least if times get really tough when the baby is born, my husband will still have a good supply of free milk to put on his breakfast cereal in the morning!!!! Kidding!
So what do you do when you see a pregnant woman with a toddler in a buggy struggling to get on the bus? I know, make her life harder, ask her to get off the bus, fold down the pram, not offer to help her, all the while she is struggling to do this while trying to make sure the toddler doesn't take off on the busy street. Then don't offer to help lift the buggy onto the bus and then, just for shits and giggles start driving off before she has even got herself and the toddler seated. Wanker right. Yes that would be right. But hey that's people for you these days, always so damn rude. And what happens when the pregnant woman calls the bus driver a wanker........ Well he asks her to get off the bus. YEAH RIGHT! I'm pregnant and I'm not going anywhere, except to the mall on your god damn bus. So that was my Tuesday morning for you.
I feel pretty excited that I have reached the 6 month mark! Kind of seems like now the time will just fly by. Soon he will be here!!! Woah! It's weird to think I only have 16 weeks of my current life and then my whole life will change!
Since my last post the coolest thing to have happened is that I can now see bubba move! yes I can see him wriggling and kicking through my skin. Its so odd! it looks like a little bounce, and when he rolls it looks like a wave. Really its the coolest thing ever.
Over the last week I have been feeling really well! My heartburn tablets are really helping and everything else seems to be in check for now. The only thing is that I'm pretty exhausted by the afternoon. I'm still not keen on going out and painting the town red at night as by then I'm quite frankly had it. I'm finding that walking too far is resulting in very very sore feet and lower back pain. I used to be able to walk all the way to the local mall and back fine and the last few times I have done this my feet and back were just too sore by the time I got home, so from now on I think I will just get the bus one way, I do still like to walk so Ill keep trying to walk as much as possible.
I am yet to spot any stretch marks, I keep checking but none as yet, fingers crossed! I have my next midwife appointment this coming Tuesday, I have been told by some other pregnant ladies that the midwife will measure the baby, Yah! so this will give me some idea of weather he is big, small, tiny, huge! not huge please! This is my first time at pushing a human out of my fanny! so preferably not too big of a boy would be good!
So do I resemble a waddling fat penguin yet?, you know when you get to a certain point in pregnancy where you start to take on a bit of a waddle, much like a tubby penguin who has been chowing down on one to many fish, well I don't think I waddle like that too much yet, I must say though by the time it gets to the end of the day I am kind of waddling from having a sore back and being tired and i start pulling out the sighs and making those funny elderly lady noises when I get up off the couch. I do sometimes feel like the penguin in the picture, like if I walk another step I may just tip over, I like to liken myself to a fat waddling penguin rather that a fat pig, simply for the fact that penguin's seem to have got their outfit sorted much better than pigs, weather they are fat or not, black and white is just simply far more flattering than pink!
