madelinekelly

Hello!

This lj entry is really just an excuse to post lots of baby pictures. :D

( Lots of pictures from March under the cut. )




In terms of development, she's doubled her birth weight and is now around 13.5 lb, grown 11cm in length, and 5cm around her head -- all of which puts her on the 25th percentile. She can lift her head up (but has been able to do that from almost the beginning), has pretty good control of head and limb movements altogether, can roll from her back to her side, smiles, occasionally laughs briefly, grabs things and puts them in her mouth, is tantalisingly close to sitting up unaided, tracks and responds to sounds as well as sights, has grown to really love her toys and baby gym, is definitely right-handed, very sociable, sleeps 5-6 hours most nights (and has done from the beginning), and can coo and growl and blow raspberries and make hilarious fake sneeze noises.

We've been very lucky.

The house is progressing frustratingly slowly. At this rate we'll have the render finished by the weekend, but that leaves Matt with basically no time to get all his scaffold-worthy jobs done before the baby is due. He is understandably stressed and upset by this. I am trying to stay focussed on having a happy birth, and not getting sucked into worrying about the house again. We're not going to be able to live there until next March anyway so it's all moot.

Baby update! I had potentially my last midwife appointment today. My blood pressure is still low, which is great. The Braxton Hicks contractions have been doing their job of shifting the baby into position, and now she is apparently perfectly positioned for birth. Three-fifths engaged as well (which just means that her head has sunk so low into my pelvis that only two-fifths of it can be felt from the outside). This makes me really happy because I'd been worrying that I'd start waddling when she engaged -- and I haven't at all. I've been feeling a lot of twisting/turning low in my abdomen, which is also good according to the midwife: it's the baby trying to get her head at exactly the right angle.

Last week I had glucose in my urine sample, which got the midwife worrying about gestational diabetes. If I'd had the same thing this week then I'd have had to do the horrible fasting/overloading-with-sugar blood test tomorrow. And if that had turned out positive then they would probably have induced birth within a week. Induction is unpleasant so I was really worrying about this. But luckily I had a clear reading today. Hurray!

And that's how things stand at the moment. :)

Further to my other post on all the various side-effects related to pregnancy that I'd had -- which I think took us up to week 29 -- I thought I'd get you all up-to-date on how things stand at 38 weeks. ( Details under the cut. )

I'm 29 weeks pregnant now -- only 11 to go! -- and I thought it might be interesting to at least a few of you if I wrote down the various odd changes that I've gone through since we conceived in February.

So. What follows are side effects that have been reported by many pregnant women, so I know it's not just me. :) I should say that, although I've written a lot here, the majority of side effects have been entirely trivial. The only really bad things have been the nausea and the exhaustion through the first trimester.

( Mammoth post under the cut. )

1. Matt passed his driving test on Monday! First time! YAY! I am so proud and so delighted and so excited for him. I remember the way my life changed when I suddenly had independence and could go wherever I liked (very important when you live in a rural place with a rubbish bus service like my rock) without having to ask for a lift. Oh joy. It's going to change his life.

2. Baby is kicking like crazy, every four hours. Not sure what this means, but I'm hoping it's an indication she'll be easy to settle into a routine once she's out in the open air. Also, I suppose it means she's going to be one of those wriggly, active babies who don't like being held, ie. nothing like me. Oh well.

3. House continues to be an entertaining train wreck. We tried to get the chimneys swept last week, but the sweep couldn't do it because it turns out that the visible pots on the stack actually belong to our schizophrenic neighbour, and our flues have been capped with concrete paving slabs. I really wish I could go back in time to the 1970s to watch the crazy builders who did so many awful awful things to this house. They must've been easy-going, happy chaps, really.

4. I still have insomnia. Boo hiss.

5. Trying to do a bit of yoga every morning, which is fun and lovely. Matt joins in sometimes.

6. Might be moving into the house this weekend! Eeeeee! We've got a bed and everything (and by "everything" I mean "sofa and chest of drawers"). I shall post photos once the room is set up to my satisfaction.

7. My bump is impossible to ignore now. A photo will be forthcoming once I've stopped freaking out. :D

8. We've thought of names! ( NAMES! )

We had the 20-week scan today, and the baby is apparently perfectly healthy and normal, and is probably a girl.

At one point during the scan the nurse got her face-on, and it was so horrific that I instinctively recoiled from the screen. Two empty black holes where the eyes should be, a skeletal slice of nose, no lips, and a mouth stretching from one side of the skull to the other and seemingly full of teeth. And that's one of the images the nurse chose to print out for us!

Can anyone think of a name? We're totally stuck, and can only think of jokes. Her surname will be Kelly Brown.

Turns out this baby is a kicker. So far it's reacted most strongly to a Brahms Intermezzo, although whether it was kicking in approval or protest...

Still pregnant.

I've just reached 16 weeks and, amazingly, almost don't feel queasy at all anymore. Hurray! Overwhelming fatigue also mostly gone, except for the general daily tiredness caused by my insomnia. This is good. I've managed to prepare a few more meals, and have stood in a kitchen while food was being fried. Progress, my friends, progress.

Had a mild freak-out over the weekend about the reality of this situation: that there's a little living thing squirming around in my uterus. Weird. Feeling quite apprehensive about the 20-week scan.

It's time now to get on with sorting things out. For a couple of months it felt like I was sleep-walking through my life. Important things weren't getting done, and even picking up the phone felt like an impossible task. Now, I'm phoning people every day (house and teaching stuff), drawing scale diagrams of windows, arranging to go out and see friends, pratting about with Matt. It's good to feel like me again.

As for the house, progress has been slow. Matt's been up there a lot while I've been teaching, but the task he's taken on is a fiddly one: raking out all the loose mortar from between the stones. The amount of dust he's created is phenomenal. I had to go and buy him a special gas mask! Various implements have been used in this job: knackered old chisels, screwdrivers, paintbrushes, cheap dustpan and brush, bristly broom, knackered old vacuum cleaner, bicycle pump, hair-dryer. His ingenuity in the face of disintegrating implements is impressive, I have to say.

And this is the result:



That's only a bit of it. He's also done all the other walls in that room. We were hoping to repoint and move in during the next couple of weeks, but our lime putty supplier has let us down so we're going to have to make our own, which apparently takes two months. Oh well. The new plan is to wash all the surfaces down to get rid of as much of the persistent dust as possible, and then move in anyway. I'm sick of living in other people's houses.

Over the weekend I bought an outdoor table/chair set so that we'd have somewhere dust-free to eat our meals (on fine days). I'm beginning to feel excited about the project again!