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.

Third trimester, here I am

Welcome to the third trimester. 27 weeks. Eeek.

Feeling really well still, although alarmingly like I have been pregnant for about 15 years.

I think it’s just the anticipation of meeting our baby.

Now that my family and I are feeling her kick (a lot), there is a renewed sense of impatience at seeing what this little thing causing such comedic belly protuberances actually looks like.

It’s human nature, isn’t it? You hear a noise, you feel something brushing against you – your need to know needs to be satiated, your curiosity must be satisfied, no matter the cat-killing consequences! And besides, I've always been a dog person anyway.

To that end, we are psyched to have a 3D scan done at 30 weeks. The last time we saw our baby in 3D was at the 18-week morphology scan and, frankly, she looked like an embryonic kangaroo.

Mama, can you hear me?

So, personally, I would like these new, updated images for a teeny bit of peace of mind and some assurance that I am not, in fact, giving birth to a hopping marsupial. Although I am sure I will be able to provide it a roomy pouch, given the frightening stretch of my stomach skin right now.

We often say how J looks so like his 3D images even today, when we might sneak a stare at him while he’s sleeping or watching TV.

So it would be nice to recreate that with our daughter.

I am not feeling uncomfortable really at all – even while camping in some pretty stinky humidity and near-summer yuckness over the weekend. It was camping with benefits (ensuite, swimming pools, convenience store 40 seconds away etc) but camping nonetheless.

My head almost exploded while helping to put the tent up and I was worried that I hadn’t felt the baby move much that day, but as T reminded me: think of the pregnant women in Africa hauling clay pots of water or rocks or whatever they do at sun-up and sundown, while sweeping their huts out with stick-brooms so short they are forced to bend at an inhumane waisty angle while picking cotton or delivering blocks of salt up 25 flights of stairs or...actually she didn’t say that, but I got her point.

A few minutes’ exertion hammering in three tent pegs in the midday sun was not going to harm my baby.

I am experiencing a bit of heartburn but it’s probably a good reminder to ix-nay on the alarming quantities of Milo I am consuming.

Straight. Neat. Out of the can. I cannot get enough of it.

I am seeing a physio every few weeks, who is giving me new stretches to do each time I visit.

I am really forcing myself to take some time, even if it’s 10 minutes a day, to do these exercises strengthening my pelvic floor, transverse abdominal, back and leg muscles.

I squat, I pull my legs up and out in very unattractive hip-widening positions, I do yoga’s child, happy baby and cat and I sit on the fit ball while doing bicep curls with hand weights (must do that tonight) because I am convinced that it will make some sort of difference when it comes time for the labour.

And it is certainly making a difference in terms of managing my back pain in the meantime, so I think it’s a good thing. I probably should be doing more, but it’s better than nothing.

Plus I am wearing an SI belt, which stands for the fascinating term “sacroiliac”, a joint in the pelvis that supports the spine. I wear it all day at work and when I exercise after work. Sure it looks kinda funny under some clothes, but I reckon you can get away with a hell of a lot when you are pregnant – and I don’t much care that I have this thick beige elastic band sitting low around my hips: it has helped support that dodgy left pelvic bone.

Otherwise, there is enormous relief at reaching this point of the pregnancy. The point where, if something disastrous happened, our baby would have a very good chance of survival outside the womb.

But, of course, anything can happen.

I can never have 100% faith that all will be well, certainly not after what happened to us last year.

But every day that passes in this pregnancy makes that uncertainty a little less intense. And that is truly wonderful.