Where we're at

[j4]

As 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 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!

Comments

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I think it's a different sort of exhaustion once the baby arrives. You need to feed it at least every three hours so if you are breastfeeding and so can't delegate feeding then your sleep all comes in chunks of two hours tops if that and days and nights run into each other in a relentless sort of way. However you don't have the physical exhaustion of pregnancy and after the first week or so I've always been able to drop off instantly, plus it all feels much more worth it.. A lot will depend on what your baby is like too in terms of sleep etc it seems to vary quite a lot. I know it is a cliche but not sure anything can really prepare you though.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I googled for stretchy t-shirts with a nine-bar progress counter. Found nothing... Yet.

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

Co-sleeping with the new one is something to talk over with Owen now, and revisiting the things you think of as the pregnancy progresses. The main issue, as far as i can tell, is whether you use a duvet or not, as sheets and blankets are easier to move about so as to keep the right temperature for the baba. An alternative is to have a Moses basket (did i offer to loan you ours?) right next to the bed so feeding is less disruptive to your sleep.

It's quite hard, isn't it, when having been an autonomous and intellectual person with a wide range of emotions one is brought to focus on a situation which is so completely and comprehensively out of the classifications of prior experience. And when there are so few viable role-models in the hinterland, so few reference-points of women who openly balance the physical and emotional changes of pregnancy with the demands and interests of a working life which is in the head, and requires so little of the body. it's too easy to beat oneself up over these changes and to feel there's something wrong...

xxx

[venta.livejournal.com]

What I really want is a progress bar.

... so long as it's not a Windows progress bar.

Your baby is due in nine months... no, it's due tomorrow... no, it's due in 2014....

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

A very good time of year to be born (says the April baby) ;)