Journal
Sign guestbook
Arthur's Mummy's Diary
Matthew's Belly Gallery
Nathan's Belly Gallery
Benjamin's Belly Gallery
My Fertility Friend Chart
2007-06-15 - 10.12pm��previous entry��next entry
5 weeks, 4 days - doctor's appt today
Thanks so much for the reassuring messages! :)
Matthew's birthday went well! I stopped spotting the night before, which was a relief, and I didn't spot at all during the party, but it came back again around 5pm and lasted through the evening :( It's the same, just brown and not too much of it. I need a pantliner though, but more to see more clearly what is on it than needing one. I'm not too crampy with it, but I AM uncomfortable. I can't describe it at all though. It's somewhere between my hips and above my pubic bone, but I can't describe exactly where or what the discomfort feels like. Maybe it's just normal pregnancy stuff?
Anyway. Today I have had more spotting, but a bit less than yesterday. I wondered if some of it was pinkish brown today, more than just brown. I went to the doctor's this morning while Neil watched the boys at home (he is off work today, and tomorrow it's Saturday).
The doctor was very nice and reassuring, but told me there's nothing they can do at this stage (obviously). She said that as it was weekend tomorrow, if I get any heavier bleeding or worse cramping, I should go to A&E and they might scan me there, or else book me for a scan during the week. They might consider me too early to scan. But I don't really expect to need to go to A&E, so hopefully that won't happen! It would be awfully scary if it did.
She said that it's good to know that I have had spotting in my previous pregnancies too, because maybe that's just what I do. But I AM nervous, because I only had one day of maybe/maybe-not spotting with Arthur - the big bleed was a subchorionic hematoma (yes, I should spell that with an a before the e since I'm British, but that's just the way it rolled off my touch-typing fingers and I can't be bothered to go back and change it!), and that was a specific "thing" and not the same as the usual spotting thing. With Matthew I did spot for a few days and it was light brown. I spotted barely-tan-coloured stuff a week later, and that was it. This time, although it definitely falls under the same category (which is thus reassuring), I am definitely spotting more than with Matthew.
I asked the doctor if it could still be implantation-ish happenings, and she said it was too far on for that. She told me I need to take advantage of Neil being home and REST. I shouldn't lift anything (crazy notion with 2 small kids!), and should be lying down as much as possible - proper rest for my body. I don't need to sleep - she prescribed going to bed with a good book while Neil took the boys to the park for a couple of hours!! I asked her to write it down on a prescription for me, haha! ;) BOY does that sound good! I don't think I have had that luxury in 2 or 3 years. Neil DOES take the boys out and he is wonderful with them, but I use the time to frantically catch up on things. I haven't forced myself to rest properly during the day in a loonnnnng time.
Neil was so eager to use this long weekend to really "get cracking" on the house stuff, in preparation for moving. I was nervous to tell him that not only can we NOT do the house stuff this weekend, he needs to look after the kids while I laze around reading and stuff! I told the doctor that he got the job he was going for, and that we'll be moving as soon as we can. I said we have soooo much to do to the house to get ready. She was so happy for us and told me to congratulate Neil, but then said, about the house stuff, "Not this weekend. You rest up."
So I guess I will. I feel horribly guilty about it for some reason, like I'm milking the situation or something. Especially when both boys are having meltdowns about something and I'm upstairs relaxing on the bed while Neil deals with it all. I haven't been in bed all day though. I have put the dinner on while the boys were at the park early this evening. Thankfully I had some meals in the freezer from double-portions that I made last week, so I just popped a meal in the microwave. I did bash together a fruit sponge pudding to have with custard though! ;) I have been downstairs a lot with the boys, but I have just made sure I am either lying on the sofa or lounging semi-upright. Maybe I have still been getting up and doing stuff more than I should? I don't know. It's not like it's BEDREST or anything, but I don't know exactly how restful I'm supposed to be.
The doctor said the idea is that I rest up this weekend and hopefully that will give my body the chance to get everything settled back down. THEN I should be able to get back to normal activity when Neil goes back to work on Monday. If the spotting starts again after that, I need to rest up more, again. She said that the further I can get into this pregnancy, the better. Every week that passes makes a big difference, as the pregnancy is more and more established week-by-week.
I will feel a whole lot better about the prospect of things when (if?) I get morning sickness at the scheduled arrival time of... where are we now? I'm 5 weeks, 4 days today, so morning sickness would normally show up for me the day after tomorrow!!! Yikes! I am soooo not looking forward to it, but if it does have to be here, I know I will find it reassuring. Even if I BLEED, as long as I feel hideous I will be able to have some confidence that Beanlet is doing okay. But I will need to rest. I remember the bleed with Arthur, the sonographer told me that I must rest until the bleeding subsided, and that it could make all the difference between keeping and losing the pregnancy. Scary. It was easy to do because he was my first baby, but I don't know how I'd manage to rest enough to give the pregnancy a chance with two little ones already!
I have picked Matthew up a few times today, and carried him upstairs once. I held him a few minutes before putting him in his cot before his nap, and before bed. I hope that's okay. When he woke this evening, I asked Neil to go to him and rock him like I normally would if he wakes in the evening. I wanted to do it myself! I love tending to my tiny boy when he wakes needing comfort. But it's beyond me to stand and jiggle at the moment. It does make me feel like Beanlet will fall out when I do that! And it's a bit disconcerting.
Well, other news! Is there any?!
I have had horrible IBS this evening, ugh. I haven't had the excruciating spasm-y type of IBS for aaaaages, but I DO get it in my 1st trimesters usually. It's so horrible, I wish I didn't get it! I find the pain of it so bad that I have to use breathing techniques, and then they DON'T work and I get panicky with how painful it is and don't know what to do with myself. Urgh. But anyway, it's better than it was now. I just have a tummy ache and feel generally yeurghy. Neil was anxious that I was mistaking bowel stuff for uterine pain, but I assured him I knew what it was! I have plenty of experience, unfortunately. And then I had the runs, which rather confirmed the above. Bleurgh.
I haven't felt great around food today! I have eaten anyway, and things have gone down alright. Neil brought me lunch in bed while I was resting this afternoon! He's so sweet! He brought me some toasted baguette with cheese, ham and salad on it! The ham made me feel a bit gaggy at times, but I ate it anyway. So did the tomatoes and cucumber, but not awfully, so I was able to eat them anyway.
This evening we had fish pie and I so did NOT want to eat it! I felt so queasy looking at it, but I did manage to eat it all without too much trouble, so that's good! I felt sick as anything getting the sponge pudding and custard ready, and said to Neil that I didn't think I could face it, but I ate a portion anyway! ;) It was edible, but I did feel a bit sick eating it. So maybe things are juuust beginning to shift in a morning-sickness kind of direction?? I HOPE I don't get it too bad when it really kicks in!
Yesterday at Matthew's party, we had cheese and ham and baguettes, and salad and sausage rolls, and so on. I was so hungry by 12 noon that my stomach was like a cramped up stitch, and I felt weak! I ate breakfast as normal in the morning though. I have had a noticably increased appetite for a week or so now, which is an encouraging sign. I am still peeing just a bit more than normal too, but not LOADS or anything. Mind you, my fluid intake is rubbish at the moment. I must work on that. Tsk.
Anyway, my mum helped us put the food out yesterday at the party, and she made me sit down and direct her - lovely Mummy! :) I asked her to make a tomato salad with vinegraitte! Anyone rememeber that craving?! There came a stage with Arthur's pregnancy where I had about 6 servings of tomato salad per day! I would wake at 6am and HAVE to go downstairs and make/eat some tomato salad - the key factor was the vinegraitte though. I could have DRANK the stuff, honestly. I did crave that a little with Matthew, but not anything LIKE as much.
So it's not a craving at all, but I haven't had it for ages, and Mummy makes good ones! So I asked her, and everyone enjoyed it! I ate lots of it. At first the vinegraitte was overpowering but it was fine in the end. I definitely would not call it a craving at all though, yet. I ate it, and it wasn't an aversion, but not a huge delightful substance thing either!
I've always said that vinegraitte is a BOY craving though, because when I had it with Arthur, people at UKparents (as it was back then) told me that was a real BOY craving. And he was a boy! And then I had it with Matthew, to some degree, and lo and behold - another boy! And then Jemma had it with her second pregnancy, and I told her it was a boy craving, and now here's Jove! :) So if I crave the stuff, I will definitely be thinking Beanlet is a boy. Nothing to report on that front yet, though!
Let's see, anything else?
I'm soooo tired out all the time. I'm excited about this rest thing, because it's what I'm LONGING to do at every hour of the day! I'm so glad that somebody has told me I must do it, when it's something my body is begging me for, even though the reason for needing to is a bit scary.
I get breathless very easily. I am out of breath from singing a children's song with the boys (like Wheels on the Bus) or walking up the stairs, and I get lightheaded easily going from lying down to standing, say after putting Arthur to bed on the floor-bed. If I have to stand for any length of time, I just sometimes get breathless from that, even though I'm not moving about, and fare best if I'm leaning right forward resting my head on something. Even so, I still breathe heavily till Neil comes to rescue me and take over whatever boy-related task I am attempting to do! The tired/breathless thing has been going on at least a week now though, so that's nothing new. I should go to bed earlier, because that will probably help a lot, but I also know that the crushing physical exhaustion of early pregnancy doesn't pay any attention to the amount of sleep you get.
Neil randomly said, "Abigail?" to me today :) I'm able to write that here because I doubt we'll use the name. I DO like it, but it doesn't do stuff for me that at least 10 other names do :)
Uh-oh, I just checked my older entries from Matthew's pregnancy, and found that, at 7 weeks pregnant, I had just had a WHOLE WEEK of the excruciating IBS every single evening. I sooooo hope that doesn't happen this time! I really don't care to feel that pain again tomorrow, let alone for the next 5 or so days!
It's now quite a bit later than when I started this entry, because I got side-tracked reading all the things I wrote during the first trimester with Matthew. So lovely to read it all back again! :) Also I got lots of tips that I had forgotten about dealing with morning sickness. For me, morning sickness has always been the most awful in the evening. It starts in the morning and gets worse throughout the day till it's just about unbearable in the evening and I can't eat my dinner. Things are different this time, in that we now eat HOURS earlier because we eat as a family with the boys, between 6 and 6.30pm. We used to eat anywhere from 9pm. So I'd have a head-start with the food maybe? Or, it would just be reeeeally hard to manage sitting with everyone and eating, and seeing the small people squidge their food and drool bits of it down their chins! ;)
Oh, that reminds me! Dribble. I can't BEAR it. Seeing dribble gives me an instant gag reaction. It's just soooo awful! Both the boys drool horribly at the moment, not at random, but because they both chew EVERYTHING in sight right now, even Arthur. He absent-mindedly chews his whole hand whilst watching Thomas the Tank Engine, or some other passive activity! And so drool runs off his hand and his chin. And I can't TELL you how much that makes me want to gag. It makes my throat feel all quivery! Matthew is on a new bout of teething right now and is rather drooly on his chin too. He is NOT a drooly boy by nature, whereas Arthur has always been so.
Anyway, back to the evening sickness thing - I found with Matthew, eventually, that I would fare best if I put Arthur to bed, ate what I could, brushed my teeth and went to bed as fast as I could. Even if I lay there awake, I didn't feel quite as grim as if I was up and about. So I think it's quite likely that I might end up doing the same this time. I'm tired enough all the time, and it would be good for me to get some decent catch up on my LONG term sleep deprivation. It would mean no real chance to update my diaries though, as it did last time, and I wouldn't want that. But we'll see how it goes. I know I'm sort of pre-empting things! But I soooo expect morning sickness like last time. I just totally do. I can't explain why.
I just ate pasteurised Brie. I'm sure that's still not really allowed, but oh my gosh it was HEAVENLY!!! I don't want to take chances with Beanlet, but it was pasteurised. I think last pregnancy I discovered something about soft cheeses not being a good idea even if they were pasteurised, but I can't remember why. I sort of don't want to know either (is that awful?!) because the stuff is just so wonderful right now. I ate biiiig thick slices of it on toasted baguette (leftover from the party - man I really like baguettes right now! Maybe I'll have to keep them on my shopping list for a while?!) and it was sooooo good. I felt queasy and not so much like food right before it, but eating it was so amazing, and after it I felt way better. I actually feel somewhat queasy again right now though, and I finished eating it maybe 15 minutes ago. It IS starting to feel/sound more and more like the start of morning sickness as the evening wears on, to be honest. But not anything as bad as it gets (or GOT, the other two times). But then I'm not quite at the stage where it gets that bad.
If it's exactly the same, I wonder if that means Beanlet is another boy? Hmmm...
Talking of Beanlet, I'm excited to read about his/her latest development! I think I will link to the various info each entry, instead of typing it all out here. It's so much easier, and you get to see the image of the embryo too, which is amazing!
I am 25DPO today, so Beanlet is at the end of Carnegie stage 11 (of Embryonic Development). That runs from 23-25DPO. Beanlet is now 3mm long! Amazing. There's lots more about it at the link above. We're just beginning Stage 12, which runs from 25-27DPO (so from today really) and Beanlet looks so different even since Stage 11! Upper limb buds appear at stage 12, already!! Isn't that amazing?! And the 3mm becomes 5mm. That stage will be completed in just a couple more days. Incredible.
Okay, I'm sure there's more, as always, but it's so late and I'm tired out. I'm going to bed! Thanks again for the lovely comments to reassure and support me! :)
Recent entries.....
Babies 7 and 8! :) - 2016-01-10
Babies 6 and 7! - 2013-02-17
Baby #5 !! - 2010-04-03
Nearly 3 months postpartum! - 2009-10-05
6 weeks old already! - 2009-08-25