Where we're at
Dec. 19th, 2010 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4As of today I'm 25 weeks pregnant. I'm terribly bad at remembering how many weeks I'm up to, and recently lots of people have asked me "how many months are you now?" and this has invariably thrown me into a morass of mathematical fail, because I've been trying to count in weeks, and can neither convert that to months nor recalculate fast enough to answer the question. I tend to just tell them that I'm due on April 3rd, they can do their own calculations.
The baby is kicking more and more; I can see little ripples and bounces from the outside now (indepedently verified by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
addedentry at last!) and they feel like much bigger movements from the inside. It doesn't generally wake me up in the night, but it does sometimes stop me going back to sleep if I wake up anyway and find she's moving about. (It's not always a kicky kind of feeling; sometimes it feels like she's turning somersaults or crawling from one side of the womb to the other. It's weirdly fascinating - I could lie there for ages just feeling her moving and watching my stomach move!)
At the moment I'm waking up several times a night with a rotten cough and cold; I wonder to what extent the baby can feel it when I cough? If my own coughing doesn't keep me awake thenaddedentry's does; and if my some miracle both of us manage a few hours where breathing is easy enough to sleep, there's always the mice in the loft to wake me up, noisily scurrying around and chewing things above our heads. (Sorry, mouse-lovers, but the council's ratcatcher has already been up there and put poison down.) And if the coughing and the mice don't keep me awake then the wind/indigestion/bloating usually does a fairly good job - it's always uncomfortable and often painful.
What with the cough/cold and the broken nights and the cold weather I'm even tireder than usual - it's an effort to drag myself out to go anywhere. Everybody has told me that the tiredness is far, far worse when the baby's actually out, and frankly that scares me - sleep deprivation makes me more depressed and generally less able to cope with anything. Trying not to dwell on the depression, but it is very much still there; I'm feeling tearful and headachey a lot of the time, and increasingly panicky about work because I'm struggling to keep my head above water and my thoughts in a straight line. At least I've finished work for the year now and I'm hoping that the time off will help get me back on track - lots to do when I get back, things to finish and things to hand over before my leave starts in mid-March. But I don't need to think about that for another three weeks!
The bump is much bigger now (and my belly button is more or less flattened out) but it's still difficult to see under six layers of clothes... I feel the cold badly, but fortunately had the foresight to order more thermal stuff from Millets before all the deliveries stopped working. Unfortunately what with the layers of clothes and the layer of baby I'm carrying so much extra weight that I feel like a total heffalump, and it always seems like a massive effort to drag myself off the sofa. Fortunately cycling still works, and it's about the one thing that makes me feel like I can move freely from A to B. Also, since I bought heated gloves (like these but mine don't have the 'window' for the battery pack) I can even get from A to B with all my fingers still capable of moving! I thoroughly recommend them for fellow Raynaud's sufferers and other cold-fingered cyclists.
I finally managed to get in touch with the people who run the NHS antenatal classes (this has been a bit of a saga of failsome phone numbers); I've already been to one session (billed as a 'mid-pregnancy' class and run by the physio group but actually containing not much physio and more general information) and have a place booked on a proper 'antenatal preparation' class a few weeks before the due date. I'm also supposed to be going to a real physio session on Tuesday (snow permitting) and I've got my 25-week GP appointment tomorrow (not sure what that's for exactly, but will ask the GP about the still-very-minor twinges in the joints). In other admin news, I've handed in my maternity leave request and talked to HR about the possibility of going back part-time when I do go back to work (they're positive about it in principle, but I'll have to apply for that separately a couple of months before coming back, as "flexible working" requests are completely orthogonal to maternity leave anyway). We've also put our names down on the waiting list for the University nurseries (with a waiting list of over 300 people I doubt we'll get a place, but it's worth a try). It seems very unfair that there are so many forms to fill in just at the point where my brain feels like it's slowly turning into mush... almost as unfair as the hospital being at the top of a hill which I'm too out-of-breath to cycle up any more. :-}
I think that's about it for updates. What I really want is a progress bar. 8-) Definitely over halfway now though!
The baby is kicking more and more; I can see little ripples and bounces from the outside now (indepedently verified by
addedentry at last!) and they feel like much bigger movements from the inside. It doesn't generally wake me up in the night, but it does sometimes stop me going back to sleep if I wake up anyway and find she's moving about. (It's not always a kicky kind of feeling; sometimes it feels like she's turning somersaults or crawling from one side of the womb to the other. It's weirdly fascinating - I could lie there for ages just feeling her moving and watching my stomach move!)At the moment I'm waking up several times a night with a rotten cough and cold; I wonder to what extent the baby can feel it when I cough? If my own coughing doesn't keep me awake then
addedentry's does; and if my some miracle both of us manage a few hours where breathing is easy enough to sleep, there's always the mice in the loft to wake me up, noisily scurrying around and chewing things above our heads. (Sorry, mouse-lovers, but the council's ratcatcher has already been up there and put poison down.) And if the coughing and the mice don't keep me awake then the wind/indigestion/bloating usually does a fairly good job - it's always uncomfortable and often painful.What with the cough/cold and the broken nights and the cold weather I'm even tireder than usual - it's an effort to drag myself out to go anywhere. Everybody has told me that the tiredness is far, far worse when the baby's actually out, and frankly that scares me - sleep deprivation makes me more depressed and generally less able to cope with anything. Trying not to dwell on the depression, but it is very much still there; I'm feeling tearful and headachey a lot of the time, and increasingly panicky about work because I'm struggling to keep my head above water and my thoughts in a straight line. At least I've finished work for the year now and I'm hoping that the time off will help get me back on track - lots to do when I get back, things to finish and things to hand over before my leave starts in mid-March. But I don't need to think about that for another three weeks!
The bump is much bigger now (and my belly button is more or less flattened out) but it's still difficult to see under six layers of clothes... I feel the cold badly, but fortunately had the foresight to order more thermal stuff from Millets before all the deliveries stopped working. Unfortunately what with the layers of clothes and the layer of baby I'm carrying so much extra weight that I feel like a total heffalump, and it always seems like a massive effort to drag myself off the sofa. Fortunately cycling still works, and it's about the one thing that makes me feel like I can move freely from A to B. Also, since I bought heated gloves (like these but mine don't have the 'window' for the battery pack) I can even get from A to B with all my fingers still capable of moving! I thoroughly recommend them for fellow Raynaud's sufferers and other cold-fingered cyclists.
I finally managed to get in touch with the people who run the NHS antenatal classes (this has been a bit of a saga of failsome phone numbers); I've already been to one session (billed as a 'mid-pregnancy' class and run by the physio group but actually containing not much physio and more general information) and have a place booked on a proper 'antenatal preparation' class a few weeks before the due date. I'm also supposed to be going to a real physio session on Tuesday (snow permitting) and I've got my 25-week GP appointment tomorrow (not sure what that's for exactly, but will ask the GP about the still-very-minor twinges in the joints). In other admin news, I've handed in my maternity leave request and talked to HR about the possibility of going back part-time when I do go back to work (they're positive about it in principle, but I'll have to apply for that separately a couple of months before coming back, as "flexible working" requests are completely orthogonal to maternity leave anyway). We've also put our names down on the waiting list for the University nurseries (with a waiting list of over 300 people I doubt we'll get a place, but it's worth a try). It seems very unfair that there are so many forms to fill in just at the point where my brain feels like it's slowly turning into mush... almost as unfair as the hospital being at the top of a hill which I'm too out-of-breath to cycle up any more. :-}
I think that's about it for updates. What I really want is a progress bar. 8-) Definitely over halfway now though!
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 09:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 09:42 am (UTC)breastfeeding makes both you and the baby sleepy.
One thing I wish I'd done is used the couple of days after the birth better to catch up on the sleep I'd lost while in labour overnight. You're running on adenalin at the time and there are lots of interruptions in hospital so it wouldn't have been easy, but babies are quite sleepy in the first couple of days and didn't take as much advantage of that as I had wished.
The over thing that helped our sanity I think was making the decision to cosleep (with Jon in spare bedroom) when it became apparent that Owen really really didn't want to sleep in either his Moses basket or cot. We spent the first week or so persevering with the Moses basket and it was quite a relief to just give up and do what actually gave us sleep. Likewise with feeding to sleep - I might regret it down the line, but now, getting sleep feels way more important. Also a bit turning point was making the decision that I would give up breastfeeding if it was making me too stressed or driving me insane. I'm still breastfeeding but it's been easier carrying on knowing that I won't feel bad if I do decide to give up or add in formula top-ups.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 09:56 am (UTC)Next time I will definitely co-sleep fulltime from the start. We did a part-way thing to begin with last time which was ok, but you just get so much more sleep co-sleeping I wouldn't bother with anything else in future. And in the tough weeks I sent G to sleep in the spare room Mon-Thu so he could function for work, and then he took her away to play from first waking so I got long lie-ins at the weekend.