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2004-11-03 - 10.44am��previous entry��next entry
39 weeks, 5 days - still waiting for little Arthur...
I'm really sorry I didn't update yesterday! I intended to update every day at this stage, but yesterday I was so so so so so so (etc) tired out, I had no IDEA how tired I could feel (must have forgotten all about being ill with M.E. all those years back), and I just had no energy to update once I remembered about it. But here I am! :) Thank you all sooo much for the guestbook messages - they reassured me such a lot! :) I am feeling better about things now, so thank you!
Still waiting for Arthur. My due date is now the day after tomorrow, and I feel like this time next year I could still be waiting for him! When it boils down to it though, you really are left with no option other than to just go with the flow and wait it out. Some days I do not deal with that well, and other days I just flop around watching TV and stuff, and the hours seem to tick by and another day is done and out of the way. It's no fun though. But I still love that I'm pregnant!
I ache ache ache ache ache. Every muscle on my body aches, except my uterus (wouldn't you know?!) - well, yesterday that was the case. Bouncing on my birth ball so vigorously seems to have awakened some muscles (okay, ALL my muscles!) which are now very flacid and puny and unfit, so they are now complaining at me a lot. My thighs hurt all down the insides like I have just spent two days doing star jumps and stretches. Just from the birth ball!! I do sit on it and roll my hips with circles as big as I can make them, so that will be stretching out those inner thigh muscles I suppose. Also my lower back is sore and stiff. And somehow my arms too. My pelvis just hurts more every day but I don't know how much of that is down to using muscles from the birth ball. I am continuing to bounce on it though, because I guess I'll work through the initial muscle unfitness pretty soon, and it's good for those muscles to be toned a bit for birth. Plus I want to keep Arthur as low as possible! He seems to feel a little higher every morning when I've been lying down all night. I can move a little easier and pee a bit easier in the mornings.
The night before last I went to bed sooooo tired out, and for some stupid reason I proceeded to have the crappiest night's sleep ever. At least I slept, but it took me 2 hours to get there, and then I woke 3 times every hour. I didn't dream or feel like I'd got far beyond mildly dozing, and then at 3.45am I woke up and that was it till around 7am. I just lay awake feeling knackered and frustrated - it really doesn't make sense that my body is doing this when everything should be pulling it to stock up on sleep for what's ahead! Anyway I got up for cereal at 5am, and managed to fall back to sleep after 7am, and I slept great for 3 hours, which was good. But ohhh man I was so tired yesterday. I felt sick and dizzy with tiredness, and breathing felt like an effort. I haven't felt like that since I had M.E. But I knew I wasn't ill, I was just that tired.
So I just lay on the sofa and watched some TV, and then I read more of "Three in a Bed" till my eyes went boggly. Then I watched more TV. Then I took a nap (which actually means I lay in bed hurting with exhaustion, totally unable to approach anything resembling sleep due to over-active brain issues!). Then I got up again still feeling just as tired, and then my mummy arrived for the evening. Neil got home from work, and we all watched Shrek and they had pizza. I didn't want pizza so I had spaghetti bolognese. The house is swimming in that at the moment! I made four meals worth the other day. Today I am making the sausage casserole to freeze. I put some birth supplies laundry on yesterday - all the old towels and things, just to make sure they are super clean and not musty from storage or anything. They are taking for EVER to dry in the machine today.
The midwife is coming round this afternoon between 1 and 2pm, and my mum is going to come round for 1pm (she's shopping in town this morning) so she can be at my appointment and meet the midwife, etc. That's nice :) It's been soooo lovely having Mummy around. She is being great. She keeps cleaning my kitchen and doing the washing up and loading the dishwasher and asking where the cleaner is for the oven, etc! :) I don't want her to do too much because I just like her company and I wasn't necessarily expecting her to visit England for the first time in a year and clean my house! But I guess I have to take help where it's offered, and she is happy to do it, so that's great. She is going to vacuum today, but I like to just sit and chat with her. We can chat for hours!
Yesterday I had lots of Braxton Hicks contractions in the evening. That is becoming quite a norm for the evenings, so I wouldn't be surprised if I went into labour during an evening. Not very convenient since I will then miss a night's sleep in labour! But oh well. The BHs are getting much stronger these days. Arthur has definitely been fully engaged recently, whether he is today or not, because when I get a good strong BH, the pressure is immense. If I'm sitting up then I feel like I am sitting on his head and it is a HARD head! Last night after a few contractions like that I started asking Neil if maybe I should be sitting on some thick layers of towels when I am on the sofa, incase my waters break (yeah, we say "waters" and not "water" over here). Our sofa would be ruined if I flooded it with amniotic fluid, and I spend a lot of time on it at the moment. The cushions are sewn in so there would be no way of laundering it. It's just that the contractions are pushing Arthur onto my cervix with such pressure that it feels like my waters would just pop everywhere at any second. Which I guess is a GOOD sign, because it means my contractions are getting stronger, and hopefully more useful therefore! I am going to put a shower curtain onto the sofa and a towel or two on top from now on when I sit there. I have contractions a lot, on and off all day, so I don't want to risk one of them breaking my waters and flooding a very nice sofa!
Last night I slept a bit better - it took me till 2am to sleep, but once I slept it was dream-filled and much more refreshing than the previous night's sleep. I woke at 7am though, and haven't been able to get back to sleep. I know I'll need to try to nap later on because my eyes are stinging already. But I'm just so glad I slept! When I woke up I was kind of excited because I had period pain. And I don't mean, ohhh I feel kind of crampy, sort of like my period is due. Nope, this was PERIOD pain!! Yay! It hurt. It felt like I had my period. I couldn't say it was a contraction though, because it didn't seem to go away completely, and there was no pattern to it or anything. It ebbed and flowed, sort of, but didn't feel like contractions. But it's a great sign that I felt like I had my period! I hope it means labour is fairly imminent. Neil said a lady he works with had a dream the other night that I went into labour and gave birth on Wednesday night. Today is Wednesday. Neil has told nobody at work what Arthur's name will be, and they are having some sort of pool on what his name will be. This lady has picked Arthur! So I am hoping she was right about Wednesday night, because I do not want to reach my due date! Today is also the gestation day that I was born (39 weeks and 5 days), so my mum has never been more pregnant that I am today, because both her babies had been born by now. So tonight would be lovely :)
I do still feel crampy, but not like I have a period anymore. I am not sure what to do with myself today. Or tomorrow, or the next day, for that matter. It's so weird knowing that something huge and life-changing is around the corner, like maybe tomorrow we'll be on the other side of that corner already, but you can't look ahead even one day because you don't know if you'll be there by then, or if life will still be bumbling along as you know it still. You can't plan. Not that there's anything to plan when you're this huge and waiting for a baby! But it's just weird to wait for something this big and this imminent, that's all. Life feels weird and like someone pressed the pause button. You know on TV and in movies a lot these days, you get scenes where say someone does a high kick and right as they are in mid-air, the camera freezes the action, but the angle moves around wildly before the action resumes again? Well it feels sort of like that. Like the "action" of life has frozen in this waiting-time, but the angle is still reeling around, and it's all weird and surreal waiting for the action to click back in again. I know that once the action does start again, I will probably not be able to remember that things were ever paused, or what it felt like to be there.
Arthur seems to be doing fine in there. He is quieter during the day now as a norm it seems, but he gets very active in the evenings every evening now. He squirms his whole body, and I can really feel his head and shoulders as they move about. He pushes with his feet in my side, and his little hands jab and punch sometimes too. He continues to have hiccups once, maybe twice a day. More than that is unusual now though. His position is unchanged, which is good. At night when I wake, he is usually pretty active, so I guess his habits are changing a bit, and he may end up being a sleepy boy during the day and full of beans during the night! Oh dear! All I can say if that happens is, thank goodness we are co-sleeping! It will save me getting up and down with him all night if he is an active boy at night-time.
I have four nursing bras - yay! The second one I bought at eBay arrived today. I hope four will be enough, because I am not likely to be that great at keeping up with laundry for a while after Arthur arrives!
What else can I tell you? My Week 40 update arrived in my inbox today from Babycentre. It's the last one!! Next week I'll get one about the first week with your newborn. Ugh, I am going to be soooo thrilled with that if my newborn is still wiggling around happily in my womb at that stage!
I want Arthur to come ouuuut!! He's got to weigh 8lbs by now. I know it's bad to think it, but I always wanted to have a teeny tiny newborn, and it doesn't look like he's going to be one! I think if I have a girl in the future, she is likely to be teeny tiny though. They say girls are on average 1lb lighter than their brothers. So maybe we'd get a 7lb girl? If we ever have a girl, that is. I hope we do. Oooh my friend Cristie had her ultrasound and she's having another little girl!! I am so excited for her! I am useless at emails right now and I know she doesn't have a guestbook but she reads my diary, so I wanted to mention here how excited I am for her! :) Congrats Cristie!
Well I am having a BH which is making things feel like Arthur might crown at any second (!!), so I think I will stop writing for now and go and... do something I guess. I don't know what though. I am just so listless these days. I have no idea what to do with myself. I get breathless with exhaustion just picking something up off the floor, so pottering around the house or doing housework is a no-no. Plus I am still wanting to mainly rest so that my blood pressure isn't a concern. I think it will still read high when the midwife takes it though. I just hope she doesn't get all concerned and send me into hospital again. I guess she may do, and then I'd just have to go in again this afternoon and have another BP profile done, and maybe more blood taken. I hope not though. I hope I will go into labour instead and have a baby!
I will keep you posted, even if it's only a few short lines to say, "Ow. 3 minutes apart. Will update asap!" - that kind of thing! :)
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