The interminable second trimester continues

25 weeks 3 days

Ow. My hips hurt. I think this is sciatica and I don't think much of it. Bouncing on the exercise ball makes it stop, but I can't do that all day.

[Urgh. George Bush is on the Olympics. Bring back the gymnasts. I can't listen to him.]

Otherwise the baby continues to seem more docile than the previous incumbent, and I continue to unreasonably feel as if it's a girl. Gotta get over that. Unless I don't. It really doesn't kick much, just a poke here and there to remind me that it's along for the ride.

Arr matey

23 weeks 1 day

If I had a blog, no doubt I would have recorded thrilling events like coming back from our big trip to Europe to find the living-room ceiling had fallen in and there was mould growing up the walls, or the 20-week ultrasound in which the doctor said I had a beautiful baby and I said "I bet you say that to all the girls" but he didn't hear me (and we didn't find out the sex), or all about how Monkey is talking more and more every day and revealing amazing powers of intellect and a penchant for pirates. (Yesterday we were in K-Mart trawling the toy aisles, just to pass the time. He asked me what a particular Pirates of the Carribean toy was, and I said "It's a skull." "Arr," he agreed.)

But obviously I don't have a blog, so I can't tell you any of that.

Welders

Fifteen weeks 2 days.

My (new) baby already has fingernails. Isn't that incredible? No wonder they're ready to scratch holes in you by the time it's born.

In other news, Flashdance is on.

Nothing to report

I am a disgrace. You'd think I didn't care about this diary. The one I so fervently promised to keep faithfully. Well no, I don't care right now, and though I know that in The Fuchure I will care, and will wish I had cared, that's just not getting me anywhere right now.

I always feel as I don't have anything much to say. Pregnant. Almost 15 weeks. Yay. Nothing else happening. I'm waiting to feel the first movement: so far I've sometimes persuaded myself that I feel the fuzzy buzzy feeling it was before, but I think I'm just kidding myself. Next week, maybe.

But now I look back and see that I haven't updated for yonks, and we had the heartbeat and the ultrasound and went public and everything, so I can't say that nothing's happened. The heartbeat was fine, though it took the (male) midwife forever to find it and he was starting to look worried (I wasn't: I was more concerned with Monkey keeping himself out of trouble while I was pinned to the table with jelly on my stomach). Anyway, he finally found the little blighter hiding down in the bottom left quadrant, heart swishing away.

The next day we went for the ultrasound, and yes, it's a baby-shaped baby in there, flipping around like a goldfish and already putting paid to my notions of a nice quiet placid baby this time round. It even waved for the photos, which was nice.

Randomness

Ten weeks, four days.

Clearly an update is overdue. And we won't even mention my lovely paper diary with its delightful stripy cover and about three pathetic little entries. Well, it was an experiment that didn't pan out, that's all. Apparently updating online is easier for me, and updating in two places was just confusing.

(My memory, by the way and not even when influenced by pregnancy, is appalling. I'm watching Matt Damon on Inside The Actor's Studio and they've just shown a clip from The Good Shepherd. I know I've seen it, and I recognised the clip, and I have no clue what it was about. I get a lot of mileage out of reruns and re-reads, as you can imagine.)

These days I feel queasy a bit and it's been a lean weekend for poor B in terms of dinners, since I couldn't really muster the interest to plan anything for Friday, Saturday or Sunday nights. (In my defence, I was busy planning and making cupcakes for a two-year-old's birthday party, which took up all my food planning brain cells. Also, the party filled us up pretty well for Saturday night.) Then we had 5 Guys burgers on Friday evening and I had indigestion all night, so I decided I'd rather go to bed a little empty than too full. Basically, I haven't got to a part of the pregnancy where the baby actually needs extra food, and I'm not nursing enough for it to be going that way.

Monkey was sick the previous weekend and it took a week to get his sleep and eating back to normal, but I think we're back on track now. Today he had (and loved) peanut butter for the first time.

(Who is this Kimora person? And why should I care? Oh wow, there's going to be another season of Top Cut. No, what was it called? Project Shag? Step it up and Bang? Shear Genius, that was it. You wouldn't believe how long it just took me to remember that.)

Right. I have thank-you cards to write and photos to send to grandparents. And early bed to go to.
Matt Damon. Good. Mmm.

Faintly symptomy

What, 8 weeks and 4 days now. Woot. I have a gummy bear!

I've sort of decided the sore boobs aren't going to show up, since they were practically my first symptom last time, and so far no dice this time. For which, grateful. Though I'm also very glad I regained as much autonomy over my breasts as I did in the expectation that I'd have to stop nursing altogether one of these weeks.

It's really nice now to be able to play with Monkey on the sofa or the floor without his pulling up my shirt as soon as he gets within range. It's almost as if he loves me for more than just my milk-producing capabilities. And even if he is still waking just as often at night, he's not hanging on the boob for hours at a time any more - I push him off when I've had enough, and he either goes back to sleep (yay) or doesn't (woe).

In other symptoms, I've had a few days of being very very tired, but that's hard to divorce from how little sleep I may have got the night before, how early I was up (he's in a 5am phase again, oh joy) and the fact that I just caught a cold. And I feel a bit queasy most days in the afternoon, making it hard to want anything for lunch, but really not even enough to call it feeling sick.

I've gone off coffee (after sentencing B to a whole jar of decaf Nescafe) and don't really want anything sweet to eat, which is good. I don't get cravings, as such, I just have very specific feelings about what I want or don't want to eat.

Midhusbandry?

Seven weeks, four days

Today I had my first appointment at the birthing center. They were nice, I met a male midwife, which I believe is a pretty unusual thing, and my uterus was pronounced to be just where it should be and of the expected size (about the size of a small plum, or a key lime, I'd say).

I felt a bit blech yesterday but am fine again today. Saturday night was odd though; all the extra blood was rushing round my body like mad, I think, and I felt exactly the way I would have if I'd had several beers too many at the cherry blossom party we were at earlier in the evening, which was very unfair when I hadn't even had a sniff of the saki let alone anything stronger than pomegranate juice. I woke up in the middle of the night with a thumping headache, roasting hot, and parched with thirst.

Pregnancy's funny stuff.

Sibling potentiality

Honestly, I'm so symptom free that I have to keep reminding myself that with no signs to the contrary, it's highly unlikely that it's just worn off and in fact, yes, I am still pregnant.

Probably tomorrow I'll be sick as a dog and regretting even writing this.

When I think of my second child (!) it's still mostly hypothetical. It's very very hard to believe that it's inside me right now, that its gender is already determined, and that in a couple of months it'll be making its presence felt in person. What on earth will Monkey make of something banging on my tummy from the inside? Will he be worried that the baby can't get out? Will he have a clue what we're actually on about when we say there's a baby in there?

A couple of friends are pregnant with their second babies, and I'm hoping that as they get (even) bigger and then when Monkey sees his friends becoming a big brother and big sister, I'll be able to explain what's going on and he'll understand more easily and be more likely to accept it as normal when such a thing happens in his house.

Pulse

My baby isn't the size of a gummy bear yet. I want the gummy bear. I think I'm at the lentil stage, which isn't quite as cute.

Got a bit whomped by fatigue yesterday, and a headache, which could have been contributed to by the very heavy weather. I took a two-hour nap and felt worse when I woke up.

Today, all efficient and full of beans. Sorry, lentil.

Plans

Today I am six weeks pregnant and we're going for a tour of the birthing center I hope to use. It's been recommended strongly by at least three friends, and having done the hospital thing and had a straightforward vaginal delivery, I think I'm in a good place to know what I want and choose a birthing center. Anyway, they're right around the corner from a perfectly good hospital, should the need arise.

I'd love the opportunity to have a water birth, or at least try labouring in water, and to be not hooked up to an IV and monitors (no matter how much I tried to avoid it, once you're in hospital it's par for the course, especially if your waters have broken, as mine had) would be so nice. And they do have pain relief available, so I wouldn't be committing to totally natural birth - though I'd like to give it a shot because I'm still unclear about how much of Monkey's sleepiness (and therefore not eating and possibly being dehydrated, though I think the doctor was just being a drama queen) in the early days could have been due to the narcotic I was given. I could probably ask them about that too. And they have a good lactation consultant so I might just run things by her in terms of how much we're still nursing and my plans (hah) for weaning.

Zen hormones

I thought this pregnancy would be a much worse kept secret than the first, but so far it's turning out about the same. I like this time, when phase 1 is complete but I still feel like it's really just a holding pattern until we get to week 12 and can count it as (hopefully, knocking on wood and not tempting any fate or anything) a really real thing, not just a potentiality.

Rather than being frustrated and impatient, right now I'm enjoying the incognito aspect of it. I'm underground pregnant, if you will. I don't have to talk about it, I don't have to make decisions (mostly; I'm happy with where and how I want to do it, and we're going to see them on Thursday), it's just a nice little secret we have that will, with luck, blossom forth in due course. Ooh, it's a Spring metaphor.

Quite possibly I'll be frustrated and impatient tomorrow. I just have zen hormones going on today.

The prince and the sesame seed

Five and a half weeks and still, seemingly, with embryo. Yesterday I felt sickish when I woke up, and had a stitch-like twingey pain for a while in the morning, and on Saturday I was very grumpy in what I will describe as a bout of hormones: those have been the only symptoms so far, and today I feel perfectly normal again, thank the deities.

We got a full-size futon from Freecycle and set it up yesterday as Monkey's "real" bed, with a cute little red IKEA lamp overhead and everything. He thought it was great, and it wasn't any harder to sneak out of in the middle of the night than the mattress-on-floor arrangement. (Why no, it didn't inspire him to sleep through the night like a big boy.) The futon mattress is not very comfy, though, so I've now piled the other one (which is annoyingly non-standard sized, somewhere between a twin and a full) on top, a la princess and pea, and I think it'll do quite nicely.

I'll put a comforter below for a while in case he rolls out, but it's so big that I don't think that should be a problem. When I checked on him before I went to bed last night, he was sleeping horizontally, but it didn't seem to be doing any harm.

More parenthetical than not

4 weeks and 4 days, which officially allows me to say four and a half weeks. I rang the birthing center and made an appointment for a tour. This part is much easier than last time, because I know what sort of birth I want and where to find it. (As my friend pointed out, of course this means that we will now be whisked back to Ireland where the maternity system is in crisis and you can't find a midwife for love or money...let's hope not, just for now; if I have to do all my childbearing in the US, that's not the worst thing in the world. On the other hand, if I could do it in Germany - or the UK or Sweden or many other places in Europe - it would probably be even easier to get what I wanted and be free as well.)

I feel bad talking (to myself) about the "new baby". It sounds as if this one will be new and improved, to replace the old and inferior one. It should be "next baby" or "other baby" or "smaller baby". Monkey constantly refers to himself as "Baby" now, which is partly our fault for addressing him as such, and also because his own name is harder to say. When he says "Baby?", meaning "I want to do something", I try to respond with "Yes, you are a baby. Your name is [Monkey]." And I'm trying to tell him how he's a big baby and there are other, smaller babies around too.

Someone brought a big pack of plain cookies to my house for playgroup on Friday, and now I'm stuck with all these boring biscuits. Gah. I nearly asked her to take them home with her since they weren't eaten, but I suspected maybe she was trying to get rid of them. Or maybe that's just something I would do. (We still have a bottle of very cheap Chardonnay in the cupboard that I can't bring myself to palm off on anyone else. The fact that it's not even in the fridge shows you how unlikely I am to drink it myself. Oh. If I weren't pregnant, that is. Darn: I had just started thinking how nice a pinot grigio would be now that the weather's getting warmer.)

Anyway, phase two of the weaning process has been implemented today, as we strollered to sleep for naptime instead of nursing. He didn't object and was asleep in no time flat. If I can keep it up all week, it should become second nature, and hopefully will inspire him to eat something more than cereal/crackers/waffle during the day. If I can get this established before my boobs really start hurting (assuming they're going to), that will be great.

...Aaand we're off!

So, yeah, pregnant. Two pink lines plain as could be this morning (Friday), making me officially 4 weeks and 1 day pregnant. Just 8 more weeks before we can tell everyone.

Hmm. I have a feeling this time won't be quite such a well kept secret as the last. But I suppose if we can keep the news to this side of the Atlantic for the time being, it would be a start.

To be honest, I haven't told anyone yet (save B, by most unsatisfying e-mail), because my playdate this morning where I was going to spill all to my friend was cancelled because her daughter spilled all all over her in a much less appealing manner.

I think the super-bionic sense of smell might have kicked in, but other than that I'm basically delightfully symtom-free and all inspired to eat nice healthy things. I'd better go with that while I can, because who knows when I'll be jumping on the all-chocolate-and-I'm-pregnant-so-I-can train to Muffinsville.

Ghost of a chance

On Tuesday I took another pregnancy test. It was way too early to know anything, mostly, but B. was headed off to conferency stuff for 9 days, so I thought if there was anything to know we should find out before he went, even if all we could know was a resounding Not Yet.

Which, I suppose, is what I got. As I watched the first pink line appear, I could just just faintly make out where the second pink line would be, if it were there. Several minutes later, when the first line was dark pink and definitely all done, there was a hint of a shade of another one beside it.

Hmmm. I know what that really means is "Ask Me Later", and I will, on Friday or even Saturday if I can last that long. But having read in several internetty places that no matter how faint the line, if it's there at all that's a positive, my mind has jumped straight into "I'm Pregnant" mode.

Whoops. I vowed last night that I certainly wouldn't do anything so forward and fate-tempting as looking up a due-date calculator until I got a definite positive. I can wait a few days before getting that serious about it. November 20th. Oh, sorry, did I write that out loud?