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2004-04-29 - 11.55am��previous entry��next entry
12 weeks, 6 days - bleurggghh
Urgh, sorry no update all week but I am sick AGAIN. I have another really nasty fluey coldy virus (the second one since I've been pregnant and I'm only 13 weeks tomorrow!) and it's.... what's the day? Thursday? I've been in bed since Saturday evening. Blech. I had four days of scratchy gaggy throat which is extremely drawn out but then if I get a virus it seems to totally kick my butt and last as long as it jolly well pleases these days. Anyway yeah and I was fevery and weak and blah so I just didn't leave my bed. Neil fetched me food but my appetite was all gone so I (STUPIDLY) went, "Okay then I'll just eeease off on the eating, since that's what my body wants..." Biiiiiiig no-no. Girls, here is an opportunity to learn from my mistakes ONCE AGAIN! Back came the morning sickness, full force, and the less I ate the worse it got. In fact it got worse than ever before, and oh I can't remember which night it was but there was one of them back there where I was up at 2.30am retching over the little cardboard bowl I brought home from the hospital a couple of months back. Yup. Me, retching, real retching!! Of course there was nothing in my stomach so I wasn't actually sick. I haven't been sick or anything like that for 10 years (this month) and I am terribly emitophobic, so this was a huuuge deal for me! But I survived and amazingly enough it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. That was quite a surprise. Actually it was much worse to FEEL so sick right before the retchy bit started.
Anyway next day I phoned my mummy and she said for goodness' sake EAT!!! So I started eating. She reminded me of how bad things got and all the weight I lost the last time I didn't eat and felt awful. So I started on crackers and then toast, and sips of milk, and so on. Now I am eating fine again and the nausea is completely gone unless I haven't eaten for a couple of hours - then it comes back. My baby is having a growth spurt this week so I guess it's extra important to be well-nourished.
Well anyway, the cold kicked in yesterday which is good because that's usually when you stop ailing and feeling fevery and virusy, but bad because man this cold is nasty. I can't sleep at all, I just fall asleep by accident for a while here and there, and then I wake up choking on goo in my throat. Bleurgh. I steamed my head with menthol at 3.30am and that helped so maybe I will do that some more today.
I haven't minded being stuck in bed at ALL, which is not like me! I have been reading, mostly children's books which seem to all make me cry at the moment. Oh but I read Little Women and that made cry buckets. And I do word puzzles. And I have been listening to music from my "youth" (!!) - namely chart music from the late 1980's. Some of it is sooooo cringeworthy but other than that I love it and I've been enjoying hearing it all again.
I have only a squeak of a voice today and I'm so bunged up, but I feel soooooooo much better now that I'm not nauseous, and now that I'm thinking this cold will be out of my system in a matter of days. Phew!
Soooooo that's my week. But I had to come down and use the computer to update here today, because it's my scan tomorrow and I'm SOOOOOO excited!!!! I wanted to write an entry before then so here it is. Earlier in the week I was worrying that I wouldn't be well enough, but I am sure I'll be fine now that the bug has turned. Full of cold but perfectly able to go and watch my very own baby bean wriggling around inside my tummy!!! I am absolutely beside myself with excitement and awe and disbelief that we are actually going to SEE Bean in action tomorrow! I don't think I can even express to you HOW excited. I have been counting the hours and the number of sleeps (!!) till the scan this week. Every day I listen to Bean's heartbeat with the doppler. My womb is so much easier to feel now and I lay my hand on it and talk to Bean (a new phenomenon which is making me seriously gooey over my unborn child!) and tell her/him that I just CAN'T believe we're really going to SEE him/her on Friday! I am bowled over with love for my baby these days. Neil gets home from work and Bean is all I talk about, it's crazy. I guess I'm going through a phase. Or else this is motherhood! Yikes, I'm gonna bore people silly if I keep this up! ;)
Some ridiculously naiive part of me is actually STILL not quite able to believe that there is really a baby in there. I know that part of me will be put to rest tomorrow at the scan. It's so crazy to hear the heartbeat every day and feel my womb growing but STILL not believe there's really a baby there! I guess it just all seems too amazing and impossible for little old me to be doing something so incredible.
I can't WAIT for the scan! I am so excited! I will update when I can after it (depending on how yucky I feel, but I imagine I won't even NOTICE my cold when I'm walking on air like I will be after the scan - if everything is okay), and I'll post the scan picture of course! I have to email it to my parents and copy one to send to Neil's family in the post, and my grandparents are in America at the moment staying with friends so I have to email one of their friends with the picture and the news :)
Oh oh, something else before I go! For the last week I've been wondering something. Okay maybe just a tiny bit more than a week. A week and a half, or something. Everyone's gonna tell me it's impossible because it's my first baby and I wouldn't know, and it's too early, blah blah blah, but I am sure I can feel my baby. Not movements, it's way too early for that I think - especially with a first baby. But pushes and shoves, that sort of thing. Stretches. See, my womb is so so high up now, it's odd. In the mornings it's always a lot higher after lying in bed all night than after I've sat up. Is that normal?! This morning it was an inch below my belly button. But it's still flatish. Just very firm and obviously my womb. Anyway, the rest of the time it sits about an inch and a half above my hairline/bikini line. Now, you know I mentioned recently that there was this little lump that had a heartbeat? Well over this last week that lump has become more and more obvious. It changes place all the time, it's never in the same place for like 2 hours running or anything. It mostly appears on my right abdomen, but often it's central too, and yesterday for the first time it was slightly to the left.
It also changes in shape. Sometimes it's like an inch all round, and other times it's lying across me at my hairline (quite a common one, that), about three inches across by an inch or two. Not square, like a thick tube. A new thing that started during the week is that sometimes I am lying in bed and I feel this almost uncomfortable pushy sensation, like my skin is pushing out and my instinct is to reach down and push it back or rub it to soothe the discomfort. Well at first when I reached down and touched the place where I felt the pushy sensation, I was amazed to find quite a hard lump, big enough this week to visibly see poking out of me about an inch above my bikini line! But now it happens several times a day and the lump appears in all different places, never exactly the same. Although it's most uncomfy when it's far over to my right. I now recognise the feeling and reach to feel the lump straight away, which is always there after such a sensation. Neil and I have been checking it a lot this week, and the lump always has a very strong clear heartbeat, sometimes clearer than I've ever been able to get it with the doppler so far. So we are convinced the lump is the baby, and that the baby must be making stretchy movements and changing position, and for some crazy, not-supposed-to-be-happening-yet reason, I can feel it.
I tested things out just to see, and I absolutely can't feel a THING of actual baby movements yet, other than the pushy feel. Mummy said that me and my brother both moved like that for her entire pregnancies. We apparantly never pummelled with feet or hands. We made slow stretching movements, and she said she and daddy would watch her tummy slowly change shape as we rolled into a new position, or stretched out a limb slowly and then held it for a moment and pulled it back.
I looked at diagrams of the baby in the womb extensively last weekend before I got sick, and in my books this week in bed. It's entirely possible that if the baby is curled up in the womb, say with the back of it's slightly bent-over head up against my abdomen, facing forwards, and it decides to push it's legs out into a "standing" position instead of being curled up... well then obviously the head will push up and stretch on my tummy won't it? Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what is going on but something is definitely moving and pushing me in there, yes, even at 12 weeks, and it's not my bowel!
So this has increased the sense of bonding and love for the baby, for both Neil and me. Neil has started kissing my belly, and laying his hand on the bump that is my womb a lot. I am showing a tiiiny bit more now but mostly it's bloating again. I didn't plan to take another belly pic till 14 weeks because nothing is really any different from the last photo yet. I should pop out soon. If I suck my belly in as hard as I can, there is a tiny bulge now that I can't suck in. There's even a little dimple over the top of it, where the womb ends and my poochy bloat begins! Hehe!
Bean is now 7cm, crown to rump!!! Wow!! Sooo much growth since 11 weeks! So nearly 3 inches, and that is actually getting quite big when you hold up that distance between finger and thumb and think about legs being added to that! Bean's heartrate remains between 160 and 170, and yesterday when we were listening in, we heard a very active little Bean in there! Lots of bumps and splatches on the doppler. I particularly like the little ones that sound like gentle taps on a live microphone, because I know those ones are limb movements, and I feel such a swell of pride and joy when I think I have a baby in my womb flexing its arms and legs - how human it must look now! Not like a little blob anymore, but a real miniature baby! Like I keep saying, I can't believe it, and I'll need the scan tomorrow to really bring it home.
I have to stop now, I am breaking out in a really strange sweat and I think I should go back to bed. But yay, my scan is tomorrow, my scan is tomorrow!!!! I can't WAIT to see Bean!! I will still listen with the doppler in the morning before we go (it's at 11.40am) just to reassure my paranoid self that Bean is alive and well and we won't get a nasty shock when we get to the scan. I just hope everything else is okay with Bean. We'll find out tomorrow, and I'll update then! :)
Oh! I almost forgot - thank you so much for the guestbook entries and also I had some lovely emails that I just found this morning. I am so grateful, but I'm sooo not up to emailing or anything just yet so please forgive me for the delay! And huge congrats to Lizzy whose diary I read last year when she was pregnant with Blake, because she is pregnant again!! And due in November like me! :) Congrats Lizzy! xxx
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