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2004-03-03 - 1.54pm��previous entry��next entry
4 weeks, 5 days
Another of my daily entries! Thanks Meg and Valerie for your guestbook entries! :) I am always glad to hear reassuring things at this early stage of pregnancy.
I would probably have more to say if I wrote in the evenings at the end of each day, but I have noticed that's when I'm at my most pessimistic, and also my body seems to be the most complainy so I get worried about all it's aches and stuff. So it's probably best to keep updating late morning or early afternoon, then at least I'm cheerful!
If I had written last night I would have been highly morbid and depressive, so I'm glad I already wrote yesterday afternoon and decided to wait till today to write again! I had a lot of low back pain yesterday afternoon and particularly in the evening. In the evening I also had low abdominal discomfort, not really like cramps, but very uncomfy. Of course I freaked, since these are classic signs of impending miscarriage. Everything I searched online was saying miscarriage, under low backache, etc, and I know Sam had a miscarriage which started with low back pain. So yeah, I felt completely out of control of what my body would do (which was actually good for me in a way, since I just let go of the anxiety over it) and was just feeling unhappy and waiting to bleed really. Soooo negative! I wasn't panicky though, not at all, which isn't like me. A good thing though! :)
Anyway, today my temp is where it always is these days - 36.9, nice and high, and I woke without any back pain or anything. I have a little now, but it's just uncomfy, not actually painful. I've had a few encouraging messages from people who are pregnant, saying that they had low back pain in the early weeks too, and cramping in the front, and are still healthily pregnant. I found one or two articles written by midwives or whoever, saying that cramping and low back pain can be normal and common in early pregnancy, as the pelvis and ligaments are adjusting to the womb swelling, and pregnancy hormones. So I am trying to relax about it and doing fine at the moment.
I am not spotting at all today, and I did not spot yesterday either, so I'm hoping that previous day was either me thinking it was spotting when it wasn't, or just a one-off.
Two more days till I am 5 weeks pregnant!! It is exactly one week today since I found out I am pregnant. Wow it has gone by sooooo slowly!!! I hope the rest of pregnancy is not gonna drag by like this!! I'm sure it won't though. It's always slower when things are up in the air or uncertain. I am keen to just get on with whatever morning sickness I am going to get now. Anticipation isn't helping my anxiety about it. I mostly do not think about it, as that is unhelpful and I don't need the extra anxiety. If it does cross my mind I focus on all the possible aids I have got ready! I have a Morningwell tape (see my pregnancy links for more info), seabands (although I can't remember where I put them at the moment), and books with a zillion tips and helpful hints. I plan to eat whenever I can, if I do feel really sick, to try and keep my blood sugar up so that the nausea doesn't get worse. I think that will be REALLY hard if I do feel sick. I hate eating when I feel sick. It just isn't natural!
Anyway, apparantly the most common time for morning sickness to start is between weeks 5 and 6, usually somewhere around the end of week 5.
I want to know what my exact HCG count is. All my American friends at FF who are 4 - 6 weeks pregnant have had a zillion blood tests which give them an exact count of HCG to tell them how secure the pregnancy is. Betas, I think they're called. We don't seem to have such a test here. Or at least the NHS does not care to spend money on that kind of test when a basic pee test to say "yes" or "no" will do. Pfthth. I don't NEED to know, unless I am showing obvious signs of miscarriage, but I really want to know, I'm curious, just to see if my numbers show my Bean is growing well. They all post their results and compare them excitedly, and I feel left out, Miss English over here :( But oh well. I hope my Bean is growing nicely!
If I had a scan now, it isn't likely that my Bean would be visible still. Around 5 weeks it should resurface, and you could probably see a gestational sac in my womb. By about 5 1/2 weeks you could see the yolk sac in there too, but the embryo would still be too small to be seen on a scan. Bean is now called an embryo this week, by the way. I'm very proud! :) I feel like he/she just did something really clever at school!
Bean is no longer a bunch of cells. He or she - no wait, I hate saying he or she, it drives me crazy and it's hard to work the rest of a sentence around it! So for now Bean is "it". Less personal but never mind! Bean is almost 2mm long now, and has a groove forming down it's full length which will become the spinal cord. It has a bulge developing which will become the brain at one end of the groove. FF's pregnancy site says stuff I truly do not BELIEVE for this stage of my pregnancy - it says that a heart plate (whatever that is) is forming and blood vessels are starting to form near it. It says that by the end of this week (ie in 2 days) the heart will begin to beat, even though it is little more than a single tube with a slight bulge to it. I am not sure I believe this (honestly) as I thought it was NEXT week, during the 5th week, when this happened. I know I am nearly 5 weeks, but still, it seems.... just too amazing to be truly happening! And how could a heart beat in a tiny human that's only 2mm long?! How is that possible?
If I think about it deeply I get the weirdest feeling in the WORLD that I never felt before, and I don't know how to describe it. If I can grasp for just a millisecond that I have a baby in my tummy that is only 2mm long and has a little tiny heart that's beating (well, in a few days anyway), then I get a feeling like my insides went soft and pulpy, literally, and also my eyes press up with tears. But it's the most amazing emotional feeling as well. I love this 2mm little pulsating being like I can't even describe. Something inside me is yearning to.... see, I can't even describe what. I thought I could imagine being a mother but I think I must have been wrong, because if this is part of it then I sure couldn't have imagined this feeling, even if I had it described and tried my best to feel it. So amazing.
But at the same time, feeling it makes me scared because of how intense it is and how I am not yet feeling 100% secure that Bean is sticking around for the long haul. I truly hope it is. I can't wait to love it like I'm beginning to now.
Well other than that, everything is pretty much the same. I got a ton of fabrics in the post from America for making nappies, so they are all being pre-washed at the moment in batches! Exciting! I have some REALLY cute fabrics in this batch. This morning I was upstairs where the baby clothes are just EVERYWHERE all over the spare room, and I picked up those tiny baby blue dungarees with the teddy on the pocket - the ones I posted a photo of recently. They were on the top of a pile. I held them to my tummy, and suddenly got this HUUUUGE wave of excitement!!! I told Bean, "Ooooh I hope you're a boy!!" because I have to say I am longing for a little boy, but I also made sure to say, "But if you're a girl I still love you just as much" because that's true as well. I then held a pink pair of dungarees to my tummy just to prove my point to Bean! :) I am ready to be a mummy to either, a boy or a girl. I don't mind. But if I had to choose I would not hesitate to choose my little boy. Having said that, I would be sad if I did not also have a little girl I think. I am greedy. I want both! ;)
My parents told their closest friends in France on Monday. They had 10 of them coming round for dinner that evening, and Daddy printed out my latest test photo (the Clearblue one with the really bold line). He wrote on it in French, "What does this mean?!" and left it on the table for everyone to see. Of course nobody guessed (d'uh?) because they never saw a pregnancy test with blue lines forming a cross before, only 2 lines side by side that are pink or red! So they asked what it meant, and my parents just said, "Mami et Papi" (which is what French children call their grandparents) and then everyone got it and they were apparantly really pleased :) One of their friends looked at the test photo and said with great confidence, "It's a boy!" Hehe! She is apparantly convinced. Well strangely enough we have had quite a few people saying what they think the baby's sex will be, and nobody, not one person, has said girl yet. Interesting.
I am eating well - I had 7 fruit and veg yesterday and all my supplements, 3 meals and a lot of snacks! Still hungry a lot, but generally less so due to erm, kind of getting a bit backed up now! Sorry, but it's pregnancy news, I have to write it! ;)
I did not take a nap yesterday afternoon, but I regretted it by the evening, I was sooooo tired all day, and therefore irritable with Neil by the time he came home in the evening.
Ohh - something weird!! I don't know if it's a pregnancy thing or not, but I had to write about it because it is truly SO weird for me, I can't tell you how much. I am a serious garlic nazi. I seem to be really sensitive to the smell of garlic on someone's breath - okay EVERYONE is, but I am super-picky about it. It's so gross and I find it such a strong smell. Neil can repel me with garlic just from eating a bag of roast chicken flavour crisps!! He absolutely denies eating any garlic but I swear he must have because my nose NEVER lies about garlic, I can smell the tiniest amount across a room. Anyway, when he checked the crisps they had garlic powder down as the LEAST ingredient!!! So my nose is super-sensitive to garlic. Yuck.
Wellll, yesterday Neil came home and after a while he said, "By the way, did you notice I had garlic yesterday?" And I hadn't. We racked our brains to think of why I might not have smelled it, but I had not had anything with garlic in it at all myself, and Neil said he had been out at lunchtime and had something or other in GARLIC BUTTER!!!! And yet I did not detect a THING from him the whole evening/night/next day!!!! This is completely unheard of so I figured I'd better write it here, since the only major thing going on with my body is pregnancy, so that must be the explanation. How weird!
I have to pee now so I'm going. I have peed 4 times today and it's only lunchtime! Yay! I love signs that I'm really truly pregnant! I normally hardly pee at all, so I like this :) It isn't annoying me yet. I will write again tomorrow.
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