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2004-04-01 - 11.32am��previous entry��next entry
8 weeks, 6 days - lonnnng update!
Aaaaargh it's been almost a WEEK since I updated!!! Stupid modem broke and we had no internet for 3 days, and then finally a BT person came round and gave us a new one yesterday afternoon, but I had a headache in the evening so I didn't use the computer.
But here I am!!! Yay! I've been absolutely itching to write in my diary all week - both my diaries actually, for once! I think it's because I have been out of the house and also I am starting to settle into being pregnant more now, so I have started to find some non-pregnant things to write about again! My poor other diary. It's only had about 5 entries since I got pregnant! Anyway I will write in there later, but I simply MUST update here first!!!
Thanks everyone for the guestbook entries while I was "away". I will try to get back to emails but I am sooooo behind on those right now.
Tomorrow I am 9 weeks pregnant!! Wow, can you believe that?! Then next week I will be in double figures, and a quarter of the way through my pregnancy!! So amazing. Time is really starting to pick up speed lately, I've been noticing. I feel better in myself and I think that helps.
I am still queasy any time I am awake, but it's SO managable now. I am amazed at how bad it was when I wasn't eating. The more I eat, the better I feel. It's taken time to build up my eating but now I am eating normal meals and other stuff whenever I get hungry/nauseous without any problem. I like that I get nauseous if I start to be too empty, because otherwise I worry that something isn't right. The queasiness is very reassuring. Yesterday morning I held off on breakfast just to get the queasy feel kicking in properly, and then when that yucky relief arrived, I ate. So crazy! But I only care about my Bean being okay. Sometimes the queasiness is more bothersome and I feel sick and horrible the whole time I am putting food in my mouth, and afterwards with a full tummy too. But I just have to put up with that. I don't get sick. I am so glad of that! I just have to keep eating, and that's the only big rule!
I am having constant trouble with my nose - I need to blow it frequently and I have a permanent post-nasal drip which aggravates my nausea. Yesterday was my first headache of pregnancy, and I think it was stuffy/sinusy because my nose had been that bit more bothersome yesterday. I think it's my most annoying symptom, the nose thing. It bugs me even more than the nausea. Mummy had a completely blocked nose though, and that sounds FAR worse! She said it unblocked right after she gave birth. So I guess I have to just get on with it and try not to think about it too much, if it's a long-haul thing. When I am less queasy it will be easier I think.
I am super-constipated, I mean like never before! I am gonna try to drink lots more water and eat more brown bread instead of white, that sort of thing. I eat veg and fruit okay at the moment, and some of it makes me feel yacky so I don't want to force myself to eat lots more veg unless I get really desperate. I don't want to take anything for it either. Progesterone is only going to increase further, and it's the cause of the constipation, so I'd better improve my dietary habits and hope that helps!
I now wake to pee twice each night, usually around 2am and 5am. I like it! Everytime my bladder feels that pressure of needing to go when I would NEVER normally go, it's like the nearest I can get to feeling where my baby is. I know it's my baby in my growing womb putting pressure on my bladder, so it's exciting to need to pee more frequently! :)
I have discovered ready-made meals for my lunch. Things like lasagna and cottage pie and that from the supermarket. They were on offer at 88p this week so I bought some, thinking they might be yucky and I should be making real food, etc, etc, but it worked out just like I hoped, because yesterday at lunch I was feeling sick and did NOT feel like preparing anything to eat, even though I knew I needed a meal. So I got out a ready-meal, stabbed the film on the top, microwaved it, and ate it - just like that! I did boil some green beans and have some bread and butter with it though. But anyway it was surprisingly yummy, and so I got a pretty good meal without the nauseating preparation part!! Yay!
This morning at 4am I woke up hurting with hunger! I tried to sleep until 4.30 when I realised it was no use, and went down to the kitchen to eat a banana and some cereal with milk. So I thought, well I will probably not be too hungry for breakfast when I wake up. But at 9.30 I was ravenous, and ate 2 pieces of toast and marmite and a big glass of milk. This night time hunger thing is becoming more frequent too.
Ohhh Bean is doing bones right now. I knew this before I found out from books and websites though, because about a week ago, maybe just less, I started needing to drink a LOT of milk, and having yoghurt and cheese a lot more. It's not a craving, I really haven't had any cravings so far, but I just had a big appetite for milk and other calcium-rich foods. It's continued all week. We had 10 pints of normal milk and 4 pints of chocolate milk in the fridge this week!!! I drank a litre of milk one day this week. Yikes. Can you drink too much milk? I don't want to overload my kidneys with calcium. But anyway, Bean is obviously working furiously hard on her bones.
I say "her" because I feel sure we are having a girl. I don't know why, I just do. I had my first baby dream this week (very weird dream!) and it was a girl. I had another one a couple of nights ago and it was a girl then too. I have this favourite name which I LOVE for a girl, and Neil has always said it doesn't do much for him. But last night we were talking about names again and he said the name was starting to grow on him, so we should say that if it's a girl, that's the name we'll use, unless *I* change my mind!!! Yay! Isn't he lovely?!! Of course you can't know what it is yet, because it's a secret :) I don't want anyone else to use it first! We have a favourite boys name too, but it's a name that a good friend of mine chose for her baby if it was a boy, so I would like to ask her if it's okay for us to use it first. I just think I would mind if I was her, so I want to ask incase she minds. But I don't think we're having a boy so it probably doesn't matter.
I feel so attached to my baby lately. I am starting to feel better about this pregnancy, and much less scared about things going wrong. I know I have a few more weeks before the perils of the first trimester (!!) are past, but each week that goes by is looking better and better, and I am hoping for the best. I still worry a lot, or I WAS worrying a lot. I have started to pray a lot more and feel a lot closer to God lately. Just suddenly really. No particular trigger, except that one night I asked God to draw me close to him again, and well, now it's like I can't stop singing church songs and feeling in love with God. He's the greatest.
Anyway I was praying that everything would be okay with my baby one day - well, you know, more like I was worrying like crazy that things WOULDN'T be okay, and praying kind of feebly that they would be! I said to God out loud, "Please let all be well with this pregnancy." and right then I looked down at my feet on the carpet, and there was a ton of clutter that I have since cleaned up (yay, housework is back again!) and right next to my foot was a little card that a lovely friend sent me a few weeks ago which I had completely forgotten about. It has a picture of a sunset (or sunrise?) on it, and just the words "All shall be well" printed across the picture. It's just the way I'd worded the prayer and how I saw it immediately, and since then I have hung onto that as an answer to my prayer, and I am believing that all shall be well with this baby and this pregnancy. Which is a huge relief! I hope.
On Tuesday I went out for the first time in weeks!!! I went to the library in my car because I found two very overdue library books when I was tidying up the living room! It was nice to take them back though, because one of them was a book on fertility and conception, and handing it in sort of felt like graduating something - weird I know! But it was a nice feeling :)
Then I went to the cemetery and told Cameron I am pregnant. I will write about that in my other diary. Then I came home and flopped out for a while. It was soooo nice to get out of the house and there is spring in the air and it was lovely to feel some air and sunshine on my skin after a while indoors. I am becoming increasingly aware of a baby in my womb, just when I walk about. It's like a delicious secret when people are just walking all around me in the street and they don't know of this miracle that's taking place deep inside me. Nobody knows. Only me. And my baby with its beating heart and squirmy little movements. Nobody knows. It's delicious! I can't wait to show and for everybody to know just by glancing at me, but I love this delicious-secret stage as well.
Anyway later that afternoon I went to the supermarket and the butcher!!! Yay me!! It wasn't bad, I didn't feel too sick. I just ate before I went out and tried to keep it a brief shopping trip. I was exhausted by the time I went to pay though, and the lady had to help me pack my bags. When I was pushing the trolley back to the car, it was kind of hard to control because I was so much more tired by then, and it swung into the end of a checkout counter, and the handle of the trolley rammed me in the stomach really hard. I worried about Bean at first, but I know he/she is well cushioned and has a pretty good swimming pool by now too, for extra padding! So I am sure it's okay. When I spoke to Mummy about it on the phone, she said she fell over when she was expecting me. She was teaching a class of teenage girls how to dribble the ball in hockey (she was a P.E. teacher for 20 years!) and completely lost her balance and fell down! The girls laughed their asses off, but she said she laughed too so it didn't matter. I would have loved to have my mummy for a teacher. She was really good. Anyway she said before she told anyone about being pregnant with me she used to take the 6th formers for rounders, and there were so few of them that she had to join in, and you had to run all the bases in one go if there was going to be someone there to bat at the next turn! She did that every week all summer, and she said the baby will be just fine, even if you have to exert yourself a bit, or you have the odd knock or fall. So I felt better after speaking to her! :)
What else did I plan to say? Oh my weight is finally back to normal!! Yesterday I was 7 stone 9lbs, and today I am 7 stone 11lbs!!! Yay!! That is my normal pre-pregnancy weight. I have a feeling my weight is about to sky-rocket, but who cares. That's what happens when you're pregnant. I don't eat bad stuff or more than I should. My weight will do what it will. I'm not gonna blow up like a blimp because I'm only 110lbs to start with. So off you go weight! Do as you will, and I'll keep Bean happy with various food and drink!
I am back on sweet foods. It's been kind of gradual, but I'm not at ALL interested in actually sugary sweeties, or chocolate bars. It's just that I am happy to eat dessert sometimes, or I get hungry for chocolate milk. Ben and Jerry's have a new ice-cream flavour over here - A Piece of Cake. It's strawberry cheesecake ice-cream, and I got it for us to try, and OH MY GOODNESS that stuff is heavenly!!!! But I have only had one serving so far. Things are not out of hand with sweet foods. I think I am eating really healthily in general. And I have been back on my prenatal vitamins for a week or so now. I hate that I missed taking them while I wasn't eating for a week, especially at such a crucial stage for Bean (folic acid particularly). But I can't take it back or do anything about it so I just have to hope no damage was done.
My kissaluvs arrived from the States!!! Ooooh they are gorgeous!!! I have a lot of nappy washing to do before the baby gets here, because lots of my new nappies are made of soft sherpa fleece, like the inside of a tracksuit, and they are unbleached as well, so they need several hot washes to fluff them up to maximum absorbancy. I'm not gonna do the washing just yet though. I don't want to do things too soon.
I made a huge list the other day of everything we need to buy ready for having a baby. Yikes, there is SO much stuff!!! Even with all the things I've managed to get from eBay and UKparents so far! Well I think I have a complete list, so we can work at that gradually. Some things are really big, like a travel system, but my parents have said they would like to buy us one of those :) Yay for my lovely parents! But then there's other little things like a top and tail bowl, a changing mat, baby nail scissors, etc. It's amazing how much stuff we'll need! And where are we going to put it?! That is something we haven't quite figured out yet, but we'll get there.
I told the BT man I am pregnant. That was so much fun! :) I love telling people. But we haven't told many yet because it's early days. I can't wait to tell people. But I'm glad we are waiting till nearer the time when I will start to show. I would be soooo impatient for people to SEE our news otherwise!
Ooooh exciting news to finish with! A couple of nights ago (8 weeks, 4 days I think), I was lying in bed, and I noticed my pubic bone wasn't so obvious to feel as normal. It's like there is about an inch or two above it that is kind of firm and springy. I had been to the toilet so I know it wasn't my bladder. I am quite bloated from my bowel but this is different. Where I'm bloated I feel sort of squidgy and pudgy. But just this inch or so above my pubic bone is firmer. Still softish, but like tough and springy. It's not the top of my womb because a) it is about 3 weeks too early to be feeling that yet, and b) I have felt hundreds of funduses (the top of a womb) in the past and I know what they feel like - much much firmer, almost hard, and obviously muscular. This is like a pushed up springy firmness, but not my womb.
Today and yesterday I have noticed it a lot. If I squat down on the floor I can feel a little resistance on my legs that are pressed against my lower abdomen. Not the squashy type that I'm used to with bloating, but real resistance. And poking at it last night, I realised I couldn't locate my pubic bone at all for a moment, which is really weird for me since I usually cave in easily behind bones like my pelvic bones. I mean, I could normally push down on TOP of my pubic bone, now I am having to look for the front of it. I am so excited, even though it's not actually my womb that I can feel. It's whatever is above it, the tissues surrounding it or whatever, but it's thrilling to me because my baby is growing, my womb is swelling to accommodate it, and I am starting to be able to reach down and touch where my baby is. Which is soooooo amazing!!!! I don't think I will ever get anything done when I actually have a bump - I will just be touching it all the time! I can't stop touching this little bulge already. It's not even visible, I still look fairly flat (just a bit bloated, but not from a bump yet), but it's the way it feels to the touch that is different.
I can't WAIT to show!!! I am so impatient!!!! Hehe! I am one of these women who hopes she carries HUGE and early! I hope I hope I hope I show early and carry big. Even though it will be hard in the last few months, I would much rather look pregnant for as long as I possibly can. I can't understand women who dislike their changing shape or who say they look fat or long for their figure/normal clothes. My pregnancy book is full of reassuring stuff for women who feel that way, and I can sort of see where they are coming from, but I am just not someone who has that mentality built in. I have always considered pregnancy to be the most flattering shape to a female body. I think it's so beautiful to be ripe with child. I've never been one for all this image/fashion crap either. So the result is I can't wait to look pregnant and preferably for as long as I can get away with it please! I WANT to lumber about hugely! Remind me of this when I am complaining of the pelvic discomfort and breathlessness in 6 months time! ;)
Okay lonnnnng entry but I think I am done now. I will try to update much sooner because I seem to have plenty to say lately! I have a link to post where you can see an ultrasound in motion. It's of a baby measuring 8 weeks and 6 days. That's how far along I am today, but Bean seems to be 3 days behind me, so I will post it in 3 days so you can see accurately how Bean will be looking at the moment. It's the cutest thing. The baby is moving a lot and everything. Anyway, 3 days. Remind me if I forget! :)
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