Friday, December 30, 2011

A festive freak-out

It’s Christmas – the one day of the year everyone eats so much that we all look 31 weeks’ pregnant. Hooray!

A good week, winding down to a fortnight off from work – fantastic! It suddenly dawned on me that I will be coming back to work for a little less than a month, and that will be quite tricky I imagine.

Only because I am now starting to feel the weight of, not the world on my shoulders, but this baby girl on my girth.

Good Lord, it’s difficult getting around and the sudden effort required to do so catches you quite by surprise.

Want to vacuum the house? Awesome, not a problem. Until you get half-way through and need to sit down and get your breath back, while saying to yourself that you’ll finish the other half after you’ve had a nap.

Want to drive to work? Easy. Do it most days a week. Until you try and get the seatbelt in a comfortable position below your enormous belly, all the while wondering what the hell might go wrong if you were in an accident and that belt snapped across your abdomen.

And getting out of the car? Just give me 10 minutes to pry myself loose from the driver’s seat. Brace against steering wheel, swivel, swing legs onto ground, grunt, push upwards, grunt louder, stand upright, grimace. I feel 108.

Then my lower back twinges, or my hips go numb, and I feel 208.

I am also starting to get some practical things done, like getting the car seat fitted, packing a bag for hospital (waa!) and finally organising maternity leave through Centrelink.

Doing these things, apart from making it all so bloody real, also reinforces how momentous the change will be for our family in 2012.

Soon and within the space of about six weeks, J leaves day care after four years, starts kindy and we welcome his new baby sister into the world.

I stop work for an extended period for the first time in my life and I become the main carer of a tiny baby girl.

I discard a comfortable routine that involved supreme organisation, accomplishing a stimulating variety of duties at work, multi-tasking and basically having control over every aspect of my life for what is likely to be a chaotic mess of sleeplessness, a crying baby I fear I won’t be able to understand and patronising piles of washing.

Oh. My. God.

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