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2004-08-05 - 11.04am��previous entry��next entry
26 weeks, 6 days - HOT
Thanks for all the nosebleed tips and sympathy! :) And I�m really excited to see a message from Tara � congratulations on your pregnancy Tara! I�m praying that this little bean will stick. *hugs*
Okay it�s�. Thursday? Is it? Yes, it is. So I�m 27 weeks pregnant tomorrow!! Wow! And this is my last day of my 2nd trimester, which is so weird. But I do feel rather 3rd trimestery these days, so perhaps not so weird. It just feels so� advanced! Can�t believe it�s happening.
I feel huuuuuuge these days. I keep saying that, I know, and I�ll probably say it most entries from now on! But I really do. It�s so hard to turn over in bed at night now. I wake every hour or so just to turn over, it requires full waking! My hips get sore lying on them for much longer than an hour because my pelvis is so heavy or something. So I wake up needing to turn over, and that is quite a challenge now! If I use any of my abs even slightly, I get round ligament pain, which believe me is well worth avoiding if at all possible! It�s very painful. So I slither from side to back, and then wriggle my legs round and then slither from back to other side. My bump feels like it weighs a ton when I�m lying on my side. Or at any time, now I come to think of it! It�s so heavy when I am upright. When I bend over to pick something up (no easy challenge these days!) I feel like my womb is going to break right through my abdomen and fall out, with its weight! There is more of a �shelf� effect where my womb starts now � about a couple of inches above my pubic bone it sharply juts out and then curves upwards, instead of the gentle curve it used to have. Arthur is getting to be a big boy!
I am also finding it increasingly difficult to step into clothes, like trousers, underwear, etc. I have to raise my knee out to the side instead of up to my body, and that is soooo awkward, my balance seems awful and I have to hold onto something just to put my underwear on, and somehow manipulate my knickers and my legs with the other hand! The only good thing about this hot weather is that I don�t ever have a reason to wear socks, because those are getting so hard to put on. It hurts my bump to stretch over it like I have to in order to get a sock on my foot. I think when wintery weather is here and I�m nearly due, Neil is going to have to put my socks on for me! Or else I will have to ask him to put them on me in bed before he goes to work in the morning, hehe! I do not know how I�m going to reach my feet by October. Seriously. Good thing I don�t care for painting my toenails.
Pfffffffffhhh it�s so HOT!!! Well, more to the point, it�s so HUMID!!! Yaaaargh. We had the most spectacular thunderstorms the other day. And flash flooding � flash flooding in London!!! People got hit by the lightning. The rain was fabulous! But it�s STILL hot and humid. I was hoping the storm would make things feel fresher but noooo. Yesterday I went out with a friend who I haven�t seen for a year. I drove half an hour to pick her up and then we drove half an hour to a park and spent the afternoon there. I got seriously overheated. I am not kidding. I sweated my clothes WET, not damp, and I did buy water and drink it, and sit in the shade and not move much, but I think the damage had been done by then and I had a good hour of lying on the floor feeling like I was going to either faint or be sick. It was so not nice. But my friend was really nice about it and didn�t try to talk to me or anything while I felt so crappy. I lay on my left side like the pregnancy books say, but I didn�t feel better really, which bothered me. Eventually my friend asked what I�d had to eat that day, and I guess I hadn�t noticed that it was lunch time and I had only had cereal for breakfast, and I�d done more with my morning than usual. So when I felt able to stand without falling over again (!), we walked to the very nice tea room at the park and I ate a puny ham and tomato sandwich, which worked wonders and left me feeling ravenous!! So I ate a giant cookie, and then a huge fondant-covered flapjack. Mmmm. I was sooooo much better after I ate. I guess I let my blood sugar get too low. But then I can be forgiven for thinking it was the heat, since I started feeling horrible when I got overheated earlier on.
So then we had a nice time and lay about in the shade. It really was too hot though. It�s the humidity that really gets me. And 2 seconds in the sun is just waaaaay too hot. The sun seems really strong at the moment. We watched children playing on the grass and babies learning to walk and things. The park is just Family Central in the summer holidays! My friend is very broody. She loved my bump, she said it was a beautiful bump :) She felt Arthur kick just briefly. He was very wiggly yesterday. I didn�t tell her his name, because I said we were saving that till he was born, so she called him Elvis for the day because he did so much rocking and rolling ;) She told me that some very good friends of ours are trying to conceive and not getting anywhere. They have been trying for years now :( My heart goes out to them sooooo much. They will make the most wonderful parents, and I can�t imagine how hard it is to try for that long and to see others getting pregnant all around you. When we were TTC it felt like forever and like it was just so awful and I didn�t know how I�d bear it another month, etc. But now�. It�s strange how when you are finally pregnant, the pain of trying is forgotten. Well, not forgotten exactly, but it now seems like such a small time to have been trying, and I forget just exactly how the anguish felt. It all pales into insignificance once you have your baby. I hear the same thing happens about the pain of labour and childbirth! It has certainly been true of morning sickness. It�s so weird how that happens. But nice :)
Arthur has been having hiccups quite a bit lately. Yesterday I could feel them for the first time against my tummy without putting my hand there. They are usually quite gentle-feeling. Just soft little blips. If I push my hand onto where they�re coming from, they feel like harder jolts. He had hiccups for nearly 10 minutes last night! It�s so cute. About an hour ago he had them again, but they didn�t last so long. Sometimes they start right after he has a huge flurry of kicks and punches when he first wakes up. I was sitting here at the computer and he woke and started kicking like crazy, and wiggling all over. Then he went quieter, and sure enough, there they were � blip, blip, blip� Soooo sweet!
I have been trying to hear his heartbeat with the stethoscope, since you are supposed to be able to from around now, but I can�t find it yet. You have to have the stethoscope placed right where his heart is, and I am not that good at figuring out which way up he is mostly, let alone exactly where his heart is! His back is usually on my right side. It was last night, when I felt the hiccups against that side of my tummy. Today�s hiccups were against my left side though. It�s so cute, when I push the stethoscope in a little bit to try to hear him, he doesn�t kick it, but he pushes a limb up directly underneath it, and the skin immediately under the stethoscope rises up like a little mound, about an inch or more, and then it just stays there!! Hehehe! It�s not like he�s trying to kick it away, it�s more like he�s going, �What�s that?� and giving counter-pressure to find out! Sweet boy :)
The other day he was kicking and wriggling so frantically that I got worried incase he was all wrapped up in his cord and struggling or something! I know that sounds paranoid, but seriously, he was freaking out in there or something. My tummy was more bumply than a waterbed with a toddler jumping on it. There were no gaps between kicks and wriggles, it was just constant, and almost always more than one limb at a time, several kicks per second, etc. It carried on for several minutes so I got worried. I decided to listen with the doppler because I figured if he was caught up then his heartrate would reflect that. So I was relieved to find his heartrate pretty steady, even with all that activity, at just under 150bpm. Phew! :) Good old doppler! I DID notice though, that although I could find his heartbeat, it sounded distant which it NEVER does, and I have read that a classic way to tell if the baby is lying posterior (his back to my back) is if the heart sounds are clear but not as close or noisy as usual. So that explained things � he must have been lying against my back, which is unusual for him, and therefore his limbs (of which he must have at least 15!!) were all facing up towards my tummy. So that must be the dreadful pummeling that my back gets every day when he�s in his normal anterior position!! Yikes. But I was more relaxed about his wild action after that!
He is very wiggly and kicky today. He kicks much less these days, which makes me think he is already getting a bit more cramped in there. He wiggles more than anything else, and when he moves his limbs I can see them shifting around under the skin, and my tummy wobbles about like a waterbed as he changes position! He is getting closer and closer to my stomach and ribs. I had my first kick to the ribs a few days ago, but only because I was hunched right over in a reeeally bad posture, so that my ribs were resting onto my bump! I also got my first kick to the stomach when I was similarly hunched, and that wasn�t so nice! I had air in my stomach, the type that makes a scrunching sound if you poke it (!!), and when he kicked my stomach it went scrunch! Hehe! I am trying to sit up straighter these days! I won�t have long before he�ll be all over my stomach and ribs no matter how straight I sit up, so I�m trying to cherish my last few weeks of freedom from that! He kicks me sometimes with his toes, or makes little nudgey movements with them, and they feel quite sharp to my tender stretched-out abdomen! He often pokes me in the side with them. They feel quite tiny and sharp to the touch if you feel them with your hand too, so we�re sure they must be toes. Yow. I am a bit nervous about the day when those sharp little bits are lodged in my ribcage!
What else? Ohhhh I can�t believe I didn�t say already!! � I have enrolled in an aquanatal class at the local swimming pool!! Yay! It starts Thursday 12th (next week) and I am the 7th pregnant person to book on the course so far. There is a maximum of 12. It runs for 5 weeks. I am so excited!!! Exercise at last, and even more exciting � it�s an exercise CLASS for pregnant women!!! Another milestone that I�ve envied others for since my teens!!! :) That�s one thing about pregnancy that I�ve longed to do � go to classes with other pregnant women, and actually BE one of the pregnant women!! Yay! So I can�t wait till next Thursday. I also have my next antenatal appointment with the midwife next Thursday, and my Anti-D injection. I hope it�s okay to get in a swimming pool after having a massive needle and Anti-D in my butt? I guess it is, but I�ll ask the midwife I think. Dreading the injection. The needles they have to use are so thick. Ow. But well worth it for my potentially-Rhesus-positive baby boy :) I�d do anything for my little man.
My hips and bottom continue to spread so that I am not fitting many shorts or trousers anymore :( So I have started doing leg lifts every day. It�s not much but it might tone my hips and upper thighs a bit, and that�s where the majority of the weight seems to be going (other than my bump). I lie on my side and lift my upper leg 10 times (well, I started at 5 times but now I have worked up to 10!), and then I do 5 where I lift the leg, bend it, kick back out, and lower it again. I learnt those on some workout video once, and they are easy to do � I am even lying down when I do them!! My thigh burned by the time I had done 5 at first (yikes!) but now it is already easy to do 10. So I am doing that till I get some proper exercise with my classes. I tried my maternity swimming costume on, and it fits so that is nice :)
Hmmm, I can�t think of anything else for now. But I need to update tomorrow (or the next day!) anyway for 27 weeks. I apologise AGAIN on the email front � I have had lots of emails lately, which I LOVE getting, but I am getting behind on replying again so please hang in there! Sometimes, especially when it�s so hot, I just come online to check eBay, read email, and update my diary, and replying to emails gets put off. I know it�s rude! ;) But bear with me. I will reply! :)
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