The joys of Freecycle

So I figure I’ll attempt to do my bit for waste, recycling and saving some money.  I start hunting down baby gear on Freecycle – cots, pushchairs etc.  I figure, how bad can it be?  I can clean em up, do a bit of applique or what have you to tart things up.. I don’t need to spend £silly on nice looking prams and what have you.

So I rush home tonight to pick up my first schwag – a pram, costing a bargain £20 round trip taxi (I don’t have a car) to this lady’s house.  It’s folded in bin bags.  “Needs a bit of a clean my love, it’s been in the garage”.  “Great, no probs, thanks again!” as I struggle it into the cab, neanderthal cabbie too busy smoking a fag to help me drag it back to the cab.

Get it in, get home BUSTING for a wee.  Afterall I’ve come straight from work to jump in a cab and pick it up.  Finally whip the bags off and open her up.  A-hahaha.  AAAAHhahahahahaha.  There are wee stains, dead spiders, rust et al going on here.  Hrm.  Suddenly consumerism bites me, and I’m thinking of buying that overpriced pram-come-pushchair-come-trolly-thermometer-carseat yada yada you can get these days…

I wonder what my other “free” bargains have got in store for me.  So much for saving the planet, I’ll probably cause as much damage with all the cleaning fluids and steaming machines I’ll have to use to get this stuff usable!

Long time no post

It’s been about 6 weeks since my last post – seems to be that as the pregnancy progresses, I get more and more lazy and au fait with being pregnant!  But lots has been happening.  The biggest few changes in the last 6 weeks have been around movement of the BumpGirl and also size of the mummy!

Our daughter moves all the time, she’s always poking me and kicking me, and we have been able to watch this since about week 25.  I have also started feeling really big now, and found out I’ve put on about 10lbs more than I should ideally have put over the whole pregnancy!  OOOPS!  So I am trying to watch what goes in my mouth a bit more now.  I’m not too worried about how much, but trying to cut down on the unhealthy and boost up the healthy.

All our scans, blood tests and measurements are bang on target, and baby is doing very well.  So is mummy for that matter!  I feel great, and haven’t really had any bad physical symptoms.  My tummy is starting to get really heavy now though, so laying down and moving when I’m laid down is a bit of an effort – as is getting up from chairs.  But a good push with the arms to propell myself up and we’re all good.

Big pregnant and plastering

The other thing that has started in the last week is my emotional state going pretty haywire!  I’ve been crying a lot – most days in fact – over anything from just being grumpy to getting a massage from a lady with awful garlic breath…  I had to stop that massage and I burst out crying in the salon, how embarassing.. heh!

The last thing that has happened in just the last week is slight leaking from my nipples!  Looks like my milk is developing, and getting ready for our little girl in 10 or so weeks.  It’s a really interesting change in my body for me, watching what have been ornamental knockers turn into useful and nuturing tools for motherhood.  I’m really looking forward to breastfeeding, I can feel already it will be such a wonderful bond for us both.

It’s a girl :)

We had our anomaly ultrasound last week, and we found out we’re having a baby girl.

I get to have another one tomorrow as our little baby wouldn’t show her spine, she was far too busy having a good snooze to do anything exciting like actually move and give us a good view!  So tomorrow I will double check it’s a little girl before annoucing her name and what have you.

Jake and I couldn’t resist nipping out and buying some lovely baby clothes from Mothercare, and once we got started it was really hard to stop, they are all so cute!  We have some cool pirate ones I found on a website in the UK too:

I’ve got some more realy gorgeous more sensible ones coming from the US too, which are definitely not your normal style babygrows but super cool in our minds, much better than the usual pink and pastel fare you get in “normal” shops.

We have started on the nursery now, and spent all of yesterday clearing out the rubbish from the spare room.  It’s amazing how much you can amass.  Although, I am reliably informed that babies are also super good at amassing bits and bobs too, so hopefully all our clutter will be replaced by shiny new and exciting baby clutter which sounds infinately more fun to play with.

Baby kicks all the time now – probably 30 mins each period, about 6 times a day and a couple at night.  Apparently they know their sleep patterns now, so this could be a good indicator for what to expect.  In which case, baby will want feeding at 8am, 10am, 3pm, 6pm, 8pm, 10pm, 2am, and 4am.  We’ll see!

First kicks felt!

It was my birthday this weekend, yesterday in fact. I am now a big fat 28, in every sense hehe! My baby decided to give me a birthday present, and kicked my hand through my tummy, at around 10pm last night. It was an amazing feeling – I’d felt the kicks in my tummy, but wasn’t really 100% sure if they were kicks or wind or something else. So feeling it unequivocally like that was just so lovely, and a real boost to knowing my baby is developing as it should. Feels like there’s more personality there now too. Almost as if baby knew I wanted something on that special day.

Baby dad was away (again!) this time in Edinburgh for a stag do. He’s back now but has been fast asleep since about 7pm after three heavy days away without much kip. So I’m sat here writing and baby is once again kicking, but it’ll be tomorrow before baby and I can show off to him with our new trick – it seems baby is a night owl and sleeps through most of the day right now, only to kick off as it were around 10pm. A sign for the future, I wonder?

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

Goodness, it’s been a long time since I posted! The scan was absolutely fine, and I went off and told then world in a blog post you can read here, on my other blog. As you can see from the comments I have a lot of support in my community of online professionals, so that was a wonderful “outing”.

Since then there’s really relatively litte to report – I am in week 16 now, about to start week 17 tomorrow. All the nausea, food fun, sore boobs etc from the first trimester have vanished (horay!). The only new things I’ve noticed are a higher emotional state from the hormones, and a bigger belly! My tummy is really starting to show now. It’s in a weird place where if you know I’m pregnant, it looks very obvious, but if you don’t I look pretty fat, haha. I find myself touching and holding my belly a lot now too, a sort of maternal instinct is how that feels. It’s also like a self re-assurance mechanism. If I’m feeling anxious or tired or sad, I give my tummy a rub and it reminds me that there’s so much to look forward to, and gets me started on thinking what baby is up to right now.

Work has been super stressful, so I quit a lot of the projects that were becoming too involving. Baby first all the way for me. No amount of money or professional respect is worth my baby feeling stressed, so I feel much better now pottering about the garden and house, nesting away and making things clean and tidy for me and baby Dad

We have a holiday coming up, and around the same time our 22 week scan, where we will find out if it’s a boy or a girl. I can’t wait to know. It will be great. So lots to look forward to.

I will try and update more, but right now there’s not a whole bunch to say, I feel like I’m in the calm before the storm that is third trimester, labour, birth and babies! Eep and yay!

1 week to go until I can tell the world!

Cor, its really hard waiting for 3 months to tell everyone you’re pregnant!! Especially for someone as talkative as me. Still, only 1 week 2 days to go now and then I have my next scan. Assuming everything is fine there, I will be shouting it from the rooftops

I had an appointment with my blood specialist today, as I have a genetic blood disorder (Factor V Leiden) which means there can be complications for me and the baby during the pregnancy. However, none of the 6 blood tests that were done 3 weeks ago have come back! So the appointment was actually a waste of time. Shame the consultant couldn’t tell me that before I took the day off. Grrrrumble. Still, it’s a lovely day and I’m having lunch with a friend, so it’s not too much of a bother. My next appointment with him is now in another 3 months, so let’s hope all the blood tests are back by then.

Other news: baby Dad has been called up to visit Boston with work which is super exciting. Sadly, it means he will miss the week 12 scan. I’ll email him all the details straight away, but it will be sad not having him there with me and baby to see our developments. We’re very excited for him though as he’s never been to America so it’s a fantastic opportunity. It’s been bad timing all round so far this year really, as baby Dad’s also away on my birthday this year – it’s his best friend’s stag do, so can’t really argue with that.

And finally, I’m glad to report the nausea is almost all gone, my boobs hurt a lot less and I’m getting more energy back, horay!

What a palava! Baby bumps, pains and emergency rooms

It’s been two weeks since I updated. Week 8 went by without much change from week 7 – essentially more sickness, quite a lot of food aversions, and even the beloved pineapple vanished from my enjoyment. Thankfully it was replaced by a new found love of jacket potatoes and cottage cheese. Yum.

Week 9 on the other hand… Woah momma. We started off week 9 really rather tired – bed by 9pm every night, and still feeling snoozy 10 hours later at 7.30am! The nausea got a whole lot worse at the beginning of week 9, to the point where one morning I was so scared I would be sick on the train I took a plastic bag with me. Thankfully, it didn’t get used. Towards the weekend just gone, everything seemed to be getting a bit easier, a bit less sickness, food aversions getting less, and generally feeling physically better. Mentally though, it was all starting to get a bit weepy come Sunday. I felt really rather low, and withdrawn. Nothing in particular getting me down, must just be the hormones going for gold in my system. When you start feeling like crying during an episode of Eastenders or somesuch, you know it’s your lady’mones.

Yesterday was by far and above the worst day of pregnancy so far. Absolutely terrifying. Around 8.20pm I started getting some rather painful stomach cramps and dull aches. It spread to my lower back within about ten minutes. About half an hour later I was shaking and crying on my bed, hot water bottle clamped to my tummy as waves of pain scorched through my pelvis and down my legs. I was so scared. I really felt like this Wasn’t Right. Another 20 minutes in, the pain had subsided and we decided it was just one of those weird things that your body does sometimes.

My body had other ideas. Within an hour, the same pain returned; this time even more ferocious and nauseating. It got so bad within about 15 minutes that I could hardly breath, and felt as though I was about to pass out. I could hardly see anymore, and my hearing started to go. I was lost in a world of physical pain and mental anguish. At this point, Jake called an ambulance. They arrived very quickly, within 5 minutes, and as the second wave of hell started to pass over, I was rushed to A&E. We had to wait for 2.5hrs to see the doctor, but thankfully no more pain had come in that time. Also, I hadn’t bled at all, which seems to be the big thing everyone was concerned about.

At 1am we made our way home, after lots of prodding and questions from the doctor. She booked an emergency scan for today, and so finally hitting the pillow at 2am, we both attempted sleep. I think it’s safe to say we both had one of the worst night’s sleep we’ve had in ages. Not knowing if you’ve still got the little one is a really rubbish experience.

Finally, some good news. We got a scan at 11am today, and after no waiting at all we were shown our rather cute looking blob on the monitor. There s/he was, minding her/his own business without a care in the world. Little heart beating away, oblivious to all the fuss and bother the rest of the family had been going through. Hehe, well done little bump, very good April Fool.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my Prime baby, aged 9.5 weeks and a whole 2.6 cms big from crown to rump

Seven & a half weeks pregnant

So one thing I’ve really noticed is how s-l-o-w-l-y pregnancy seems to go by. Especially trying to get the the 12 week part, so I can breath a sigh of relief and know we’re through the most worrying phase. I think just getting to the ultrasound will really help, but everyday I think about it it feels like a month has gone by!

I’m having some really odd sensory stuff happen now, that’s really just started in the last week. It started with an extraordinary sense of smell – even someone just opening up a sandwich across a room is detectable, along with perfume, aftershave and sadly for my commute, bad breath. This then progressed to cravings, which started with anything fresh, and have now developed over the last few days into only being able to stomach pineapples, bread, cheese and yogurt. And small amounts of chocolate. Cooking is starting to get harder now too, as smells and the thought of foods makes me feel really nauseus.

Cooking roast today was particularly tricky, as I couldn’t handle the thought of the vegetarian nut roast we usually have, and by the time I’d finished preparing and cooking the veg, the only thing I could eat was a few roast spuds. Didn’t put Baby Dad off though, he finished off his giant stuffed Yorkshire with no problems

Other than the nausea, it’s all going well. I am anxious how the growing nausea will affect my work, as I currently have a very hectic consultancy job that involves lots and lots of face to face meetings, with little time for breaks or food hunting. I shall report back.

We noticed a very small but visible bump this weekend in the photos we’ve been taking. That could be down to the rather amazing amount of chocolate I managed to pack away during weeks 5-7 though

Hello world!

First post. Woooooo, these are always so tricky to start, but I’ve started, so hurrah.

I’m pregnant. 7 weeks right now, to be precise. Okay okay, so actually I’m the first day into the 7th week, but it feels like I’ve been pregnant forever, so spare me if I get over excited about the amount of time.

So much has happened since I fell pregnant to my body and mind, as well as soul if I’m honest. The biggest symptom so far is definitely tiredness. I just feel like I have a crappy cold the whole time, but with no symptoms. Oh, and eating. I am eating enough for ten it feels, even though I’m fairly sure I haven’t put on any weight. I feel like I have, but my clothes aren’t any tigher.

My boobs are getting bigger now, well, I say now – they have been since week 2! Or week 4, if you count the way that normal doctors do. So, you take the day of your last period, and then count the weeks from then. So I’m 7 weeks pregnant, although my baby has only been a fusion of my boyfriend and me since I estimate, 8th February 2008.

Well, that’s probably enough for a first post, I’ll be updating more as I get chance. There’s a whole stack of things I have to write about, so I’ll look forward to sharing more.