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2006-06-08 - 9.31pm��previous entry��next entry
40 weeks, 1 day - crappity crappy crap
Here's the regular evening update again, but you guys are going to be sorry you're reading it! I'm in the most crappy mood ever, mainly because I have had what feels like a really crappy day. It hasn't been ALL crappy by any means, but ugh, everything feels like it has been too much to deal with all day, even little things that AREN'T actually too much to deal with. Everything is blown out of proportion and even though I SEE it, I can't seem to do anything abut it. I have no idea what to do now it's evening, to try and make myself feel happier or more upbeat, so I'm hoping that getting things off my chest in my diary might help. Otherwise I am doomed to crappiness for the rest of the evening, and that sucks.
It's too �*$&% hot and humid and muggy and nasty. I HATE hot weather. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I have managed to keep cool enough most of the day, as we have stayed in with the windows open, and thank God for the breeze at least, even though the air has been warm and close. Hot weather not only makes me feel physically ill, it makes me feel all jangly in my head, mood-wise, I mean. And things upset me WAY more easily. I do not cope well in any way with hot weather!
Arthur has been such a lovely boy all day, so good, and of course we have had Nana here to help me with him. So I have nothing to complain about there. The only things that have seemed hard to deal with (even though they aren't actually hard to deal with in "normal" life!) have been that he seems to want to breastfeed ALL the time today. Which is fine. Except that it coincides with a fairly rare day that my nipples are hurting way too much to nurse him frequently or for very long at a time. I hate saying no to him where breastfeeding is concerned. I never do it unless I have to, but I have had to today. He has seemed quite clingy today and it's been harder than usual even with Mummy's help.
I think he may be teething or something (though which teeth, I'm not sure - he only has a few left to get and they aren't meant to be arriving for a while yet! Plus there's no actual SIGN of them in his gums), because he is biting things a lot and gritting his teeth so hard that I hear them CRACK - and let me tell you, that sound REALLY gets under my overheated nerves at the moment! I am fed up with telling him not to bite the furniture at the moment! He won't bite much on teething things. He prefers my clothing or the furniture. *sigh*
Anyway, the main thing is that his poo is SO indescribably horrible at the moment. It's just mush, and stubborn mush at that - it won't come off the $(�"&$^& nappy when I try and shake it off down the toilet! Lately the very ordeal of having to do that has been making me tearful, and Neil even suggested putting him in disposables today! But there is no WAY I am doing that. He has never worn one, and what worse time would there be to do that to his bottom?! His poo is giving him an evil rash, it's hot and sweaty weather, and the LAST thing he needs is to put a pair of plastic/paper undies on for the first time in his life. Yuck. That's without mentioning the hideous chemicals in them, which is the main reason they are never going near my children's bottoms. So anyway, the poo. It's soooo bad. He is sore if he poos, and not at all sore if he goes a day without pooing, so I know it's the poo. Teething poo - a horrible thing for a little one!
So today I shook pooey nappies over the toilet in a rather emotionally unstable way, and also pretty much in vain as the stuff wouldn't come off, and then the third poo was just the most enormous and gross of the lot. It wouldn't come off, and it went everywhere, on the loo seat, on my hands, evvverywhere. I was just so piddled off with the �&�&$% nappy that I wanted to stamp on it and throw it in the bin, I just felt so stretched already with my mood and the hot weather! Anyway, then I came back downstairs with it, convinced that the only thing to do would be to put it on a heavy-duty wash on its own and then wash it as normal with the other nappies. I pulled out the wet nappies from this morning's load that had also been pooed on and needed to be washed again since the poo is THAT bad these days - usually it is really not hard at all to launder pooey nappies! And I threw in the revolting nappy and equally yeurghsome wipes and stuff, and lo and behold, the washing machine is completely bust. Yes, it's true. It has never broken down or even behaved mildly out of character in the whole time we've had it. Of course last time I was literally about to give birth, our tumble dryer broke down and it took us MONTHS to get it sorted out. So I was more than a little piddled off about what appears to be Sod's Law, to say the least.
THEN I couldn't find the manual to try some troubleshooting, because out of all the household manuals that we own, the only one NOT in the correct drawer was (of course) the one for the washing machine. By this time, Mummy was trying to make rational suggestions and I was just tooooo far gone to be comforted by rationality - it just made me want to scream at someone! I sat and didn't know what to do, and felt like the end of the world was nigh, etc, etc, and Mummy just reacted by getting grumpy with me and implying that I needed to pull myself together. Which, of course, in any NORMAL situation, I should have. But I felt ultra-sensitive to the fact that she didn't take into account the 40 weeks of pregnancy that I recently completed and the associated hormone levels, etc, and be more sensitive to how I was feeling. So I cried and sobbed and completely lost it. Arthur was so good, bless him! He didn't bat an eyelid while I cried and cried, as though it was a perfectly normal sight for him (which, let's face it, it HAS been over recent months and weeks!). he just smiled his nicest smiles at me to make me feel better (which made me cry more - stupid hormones!) and played quietly for a while with his toys. And Mummy hugged me and said much more comforting things, and we finally found the manual and the troubleshooting section didn't cover what was wrong with the machine. So I phoned the hotline given on the manual and someone is coming tomorrow afternoon to take a look at it. I feel pessimistic about it though, with my mood and our history of laundering machines messing us around for many weeks on end whenever I have a baby! I told the guy on the phone that I was due to give birth yesterday and I'm having a homebirth! He said, "Hmmm, that could be interesting for the engineer!" hehe! ;) Anyway, someone is coming tomorrow between 12 and 5.30pm. Of course I am now almost GUARANTEED to be giving birth tomorrow afternoon. Plus it's the 9th tomorrow. The date my parents calmly informed me (much to my annoyance at the time!) that they had "pencilled in" for Matthew to arrive! And it's 2 days after my due date tomorrow - the day I started contracting in pre-labour with Arthur. So, of course it will be tomorrow. And they'll look at the machine and say, "Oh it needs such-and-such a part, and we'll have to order that in, and it won't be here till the 24th." And then I will give birth crying and with high blood pressure.
*sigh*
I'm hoping they'll be motivated to help us out QUICKLY when they open the washer door and smell the awful poo inside, hehehe! Then they will surely see how much of an emergency it is?! Hello?! I am on the very brink of having two children who are full-time in cloth nappies, and both will be pooing for England. I NEED my washing machine to function, like TOMORROW! Aaaargh. It has just been so frustrating.
So although we at least got the ball rolling on that, I can't go in the kitchen because the sight of the washing machine just makes me want to cry and throw things. I know that probably sounds like I'm exaggerating or being funny, but I promise you I'm being honest! Everything is just soooo unmanageable today. Or, I am just soooo over-sensitive to everything today. Or both. Or something.
So a nice soothing thing to do was to make up the sweet little Moses basket with the fresh sheets that I'd washed a couple of weeks ago. Then I could place that in the freshly-made cot bed and Matthew's potential sleeping place would be all cute and ready for him. All that would be left was to make the bed safe for co-sleeping, with the double bedguard. So I retreated upstairs to stroke baby bedding and lovingly put it on the teeny tiny mattress and all that. Only to find that ALL the $(*"&$% Moses basket sheets have magically disappeared from where I had put them. And anywhere else that I crossly rummaged through. In fact, I rummaged through SO many possible places that there aren't any left, and I am now doubly pee'd off this evening because I can't find the darn sheets to the point where they just can't possibly BE anywhere else (which is about one of the most infuriating things ever!), and I'm left with an unfinished, unsleepable-in Moses basket, when I could have a baby who needs to sleep in it at ANY given time from now. Urrrrrrrrrgh!!!! I just feel so tight with hi-volume emotions that I feel like I'm constantly trying to restrain myself from screaming and thrashing about hitting and breaking things at random! I hate feeling like this, it's such a crappy way to feel. The worst part of it is how OVERWHELMING it feels, and how completely incapable I feel over having any control over it. It's just a huge hormonal overheated surge that is way beyond my strength, and I don't know what to do with all the feelings inside me or how to feel better tonight. I know if I try playing an escapism computer game or something, I'll just end up getting angry with something in the game and breaking the computer or something! ;) I guess I should try and be still with God and pray or something, but I just feel like I would burst out of my own skin if I try to make myself still and calm, and I'd only end up being rude to God or something! Which I don't want to do. Tsk.
OTHER than all that, let's see what else I can write about that's more normal and soothing. I had more energy this morning than usual. I drove with Arthur to pick Nana up from my brother's flat, which is about a half hour drive. On the way back to our house I decided we needed to stop at Tescos and do some food shopping! Arthur fell asleep in the car and ended up taking a 45 minute nap in there - so rare for him, he must have been tired out! Mummy stayed in the car with him in the carpark, while I did the shopping. I managed to get a parking space in the shade and she sat with the doors open till he woke, and then brought him into the supermarket to find me. I waddled uncomfortably around the supermarket and got sidetracked by toy trucks and emergency vehicles (Arthur is crazy about these at the moment, so I ended up buying him some and he LOVES them!), and then got various bits of groceries and stuff that we were getting low on. It hurt me to walk and I had to go very slowly. Mostly my lower back felt very tight and stiff and sore. When we were at the checkout, the lady there said it couldn't be long to go for me now, and I told her I was due yesterday :) It was quite a proud moment! I love making people's eyes go big over pregnancy stuff, hehe! She said congratulations, which was nice to hear for some reason, even though it's not really time for those yet.
I soooooo want to do some baking but either the day runs out of time, or I get too tired or hot to get it done. I made banana cake last week but it's all gone, and I am desperate to make some ginger snap cookies for some reason. I want to have Arthur help me with the cutters to make them into shapes before putting them in the oven. He is really into cutting shapes out of his playdough with cutters at the moment, and I think he'd love doing it and then having actual cookies to eat in the shapes he made afterwards! Also I need to bake something chocolatey. I ate a whole bag of chocolate-covered raisins today, yikes!
Ohhh I got on the scales this morning before breakfast (so pretty accurate to check my weight gain) and it has happened. I have hit/passed the TWELVE stone mark! Oh my gosh. I weighed 12st 1lb. That gives me a grand total weight gain of 50lbs exactly! Only 4lbs short of my total weight gain with Arthur, so spot on really. But I weigh MUCH more now than I did at the end of my pregnancy with Arthur. I finished at 11 stone 5lbs then (there are 14lbs to a stone, for any American readers wondering what I'm talking about!). Man, these pregnancies are SO the same!
Today my crappy mood has totally contradicted everything I said in my last entry, lol! I was saying yesterday how I love being pregnant and don't love my body any less, blah-blah-blah (which I still hold to, in my head and in more rational moments!), but today I have felt so moody and different about all that. My legs just look soooo horrible in the shorts I'm forced to wear due to the weather - they are just so enormous and lumpy and I have stretch marks behind my thighs near my knees :( They are not nice looking legs at ALL. I just don't look nice at all any more. Except for my pregnantness - which will always be a lovely way to look! :) Also, today I have just felt FED UP of being pregnant, which I hate to admit and honestly don't feel that way when I am in a normal mood. But it wasn't that I wanted to stop being pregnant and have my baby. I neither wanted to be pregnant NOR have a baby. I just felt like both seemed too overwhelming to deal with. I didn't want to be hugely pregnant any more, and I didn't relish the prospect of giving birth at all. And I just wanted to hide from the very idea of having a newborn baby all of a sudden, to take care of and be "left with" once the birth was over and everyone disappeared off to their normal lives to get some rest and stuff! I just wanted to crawl into a hole and hide from all those possibilities today. Everything just feels too much to deal with, and there aren't any options out there that I feel relaxed about. I just feel soooo stressy today. Urgh.
In more physical news, I haven't really shown any signs of impending labour. I'm not checking my cervix tonight because I'll just get cross with it (!!), and I have had a few quite bad period pains and cramps today, and some strong BHs (including my first actual painful contraction - yay! But only the one, and that was hours ago), but nothing much else.
I guess I will go to bed once again and just wait and see what tomorrow brings. I feel deflated and pessimistic about tomorrow now, but I hope I will be in a WHOLE different frame of mind when the day actually comes! I HOPE tomorrow is the day I go into labour. I'm not sure how much more of this I can take, and the weather is only going to get hotter and hotter and more and more humid and muggy. It just makes me want to cry to think of giving birth in this kind of heat. Yuck. I'm also getting increasingly worried about AFTERWARDS, with how on earth I'm going to keep remotely comfortable and cool when I'm looking after my newborn baby. Breastfeeding is surely going to be sticky and uncomfortable, and I'm beginning to get scared about having the temperature of the house safe for a sleeping newborn. We don't have any means of getting the house temperature down below 80 degrees when it's hotter than that in the day, and at night it's oppressive inside. I only cope with it by having the fan on full blast, directly on me, and no covers or clothes. I can't put a fan on a baby like that though, so how on earth is it going to be safe for him? How I HATE the hot weather! It's such a total pain in all directions! Tsk!!
Anyway, with that I think I will put you out of your misery and finish this grumpy entry! I hope I'll be in a MUCH better mood next time I update, and with happy news about the washing machine AND the Moses basket sheets! Those things being sorted would probably do wonders for my mood, even with another hot day! As always I promise I'll update at least briefly with any news of the start of labour, but otherwise expect a potentially increasingly emotional and grumpy Alice to give you the usual evening "nothing's-$&!$*&-happening!" update!! I should go and count my blessings now. I know I have LOADS of them to count, and it would do me some good to remember them. *sigh* Sorry for the grumpy entry, and thank you for the sweet uplifting messages! :)
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