On top of the world, and bottoms

This past week I have felt incredibly well.

I am probably the healthiest – and funnily enough, the heaviest – I have been in my entire life.

I managed to have an entire week of stunningly wholesome lunches. There were kidney beans, nuts, tuna, herbs, bran, grains, a mountain of salad and vegetables and very little dodgy snack food.

In fact I think we went an entire 10 days straight without having cake in the office...clearly the petty cash reserves for sweet treats are dwindling. If that isn’t proof that the GFC is well and truly still with us, I don’t know what is.

The cake sits right next to my desk. Like, RIGHT NEXT TO IT. I do not have to move anything but my right arm if I wish to partake in a slice of something containing more sugar and preservatives than a hot dog in a Coke factory.

So thankfully, no temptations this week.

I felt like I was buzzing with vitality and it was noticeable. I remember driving home one day actually saying that to myself, “I feel fantastic”.

I must also get my paperwork in order for my maternity leave stuff at work.

According to an email I got from my manager, this is what I have to provide: 10 weeks notice in writing of my intention to take maternity leave (seems a little extreme), four weeks notice in writing stating when I wish to start the leave (um, how will I know that?? when the baby is born, d’uh, hopefully a week before), a medical certificate stating I am pregnant (and not doing a Beyonce) and giving the expected due date, if my spouse is taking paternity leave and a stat dec if they are taking more than one week (so we don’t double dip on the system) plus any accrued leave entitlements.

You want to know why I have put this off for so long? READ ALL OF THE ABOVE.

I hate paperwork. I am allergic to it. I detest trying to put my hands on membership numbers and passwords and credit limits and usernames. I know my birthday and my tax file number by heart, but ask me for any other personal information and this is the soundtrack in my mind: “beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep”. I am the person who has my own mobile phone number listed in my own mobile phone under “Me”. I am the person who always has to check what the bloody name of our bank account is.

I don’t even know what my salary is, let alone my damn leave entitlements. You’re the pay office, you find out!

Anyway. My favourite is the certificate stating I am in fact pregnant. Just take a look at me, take a picture, I am expanding before your eyes! No woman would ever fake this! Beyonce, respect. (I think that’s total crap, by the way, of course she is pregnant. See girlfriend waddle?? Hello!)

This past weekend was the first time I actually felt uncomfortable about my girth, physically. Australians all, let us rejoice, for I am girt by me. There is me, then there is this whole other layer of me, bellium rapido expandius.

Also, I have experienced heartburn and indigestion for the first, quite revolting, time. Stomach acids rising in my throat are trying to send me a clear message: six small meals a day, rather than three big ones, just like the books say.

But I don’t listen.

Exhibit A. Lunch, Sunday: chicken, hommus and salad grain roll, quarter packet leftover sweet chilli chips, handful peanut M&Ms, two bowls cereal.
Afternoon, Sunday: overfed stupor-induced nap for 1.45 hours.

It’s weird. I eat perfectly good meals and then feel quite hungry seconds later.

I am incredibly conscious of being active to balance all this, so I walk most days or ride my bike. Plus we went kayaking yesterday and I pulled J around on the body board in the lake shallows for a while.

This second trimester I am discovering is all about extremes. Extremes of mood, eating, sleeping, feeling fabulous, then feeling like shit when you don’t sleep for various reasons.

Oh, and extreme back pain. What’s with that? I have never ever had back problems at all. Good lord, I now pity all of you who have.

Extreme emotions too, but that’s a given. We moved all our bedroom furniture out over the weekend to get the carpets cleaned. Stacked under a tallboy was all the scan images, paperwork and condolence cards from the time we lost the baby last year.

We only had a 3D scan done for this pregnancy three weeks ago and I picked up one folder that looked like it, only to flip it open and suddenly see a 3D image of our baby boy.

I snapped it shut straight away, confronted. Bloody hell, he was gorgeous.
That hurt, that really hurt.

But it’s in the past and happier memories are forming protectively around it, fairy floss enveloping a dark jagged rock.

The Pants Gazette

A week filled with music, family, the beach, laughs and cake.

Oh, and a three-dimensional movie of our baby currently growing inside my belly.

We got a few discs from the doctor when we had our 18-week scan but we hadn’t watched them until my mum visited for her birthday over the weekend.

Doesn’t that sound terrible? We hadn’t watched them.

The reason? 99% because life just takes over and we had seen our baby girl wiggling around on screen before our eyes anyway while the scan was happening, and 1% because I think I am still a teeny bit afraid of bonding.

I know this is a boring, tired old theme – and I am sick of it myself – but I cannot deny what I am feeling. And that is still an element of anxiety.

Anyway, 1% or .000001%, let’s accept it is just there.

The baby is moving quite a bit, although I rue the day I read on the hospital admission forms that I could call the midwives at any time if I had certain concerns, among them reduced movement from my baby (less than 10 – 12 movements per day).

It actually said that, in brackets, in black and white. 10 – 12 movements. Per day.

Why did they write a number? Don’t give me a number! Don’t set me medical parameters that cause me to either relax if I comply or freak out if I don’t!

Now I am bloody counting all day! If I wasn’t so busy at work, and mostly sane for the majority of my waking hours, I would keep a running tally sheet every time I felt a flutter and then either collapse in a heap or rejoice in happiness at the end of the day once I had revised that day’s count.

But mostly it’s all good. The sun has started shining with a bit more intensity, the damn bugs and spiders are coming out and we are forced yet again to utter our Spring refrain “when is the bloody pest control man due again?”: a sure sign summer is on its way.

I am suddenly asking myself seriously what type of attire I shall be able to wear when swimming at the beach and pondering whether I can be brave enough to just let my bare belly see the sun’s rays, unburdened by the ubiquitous rashie I have felt compelled to wear since my late 20s when beer and fine food of the brown, chocolatey variety conspired to gift me a generous spare tyre.

T and I went to the local music festival on the weekend and spent a glorious eight full hours together without our three-year-old.

How strange it was to sit and read the paper in the shade while we waited for bands to set up. How unusually peaceful it was to place a lazy body on the grass and stare at the cloudless sky until even lazier eyes dozed shut for a few precious minutes.

How bizarre to not have to endlessly ask each other if one of us needed to go to the toilet, if we had brushed our teeth or, over dinner, if we could please eat two more spoons of rice before we could have any sweets.

The festival was awesome. We saw The Baby Animals, Missy Higgins, Paris Wells, Watussi, Diesel and Little Red. Bloody brilliant. Although tough to do sober!

Speaking of pregnancy wardrobe, and I know this has emerged as a common theme, but let me leave you with some more news on pants.

The festival marked the second time in a fortnight I had ventured to a public event with my pants undone.

Not just a fly open, or a button missing its loopy mate by mistake. Pants completely and utterly open.

See, I have jeans that fit well, leg-wise and length-wise. But from the bottom of the zipper to the top, there is no way on this earth those two flaps of material will ever meet across my belly.

Ever.

Where they should be the letter I, they are doggedly the letter V, with __ leanings.

But luckily, or not, the good lord of genetics has afforded me with quite a sizeable inner thigh circumference, such expanse of skin that acts as quite a handy magnet to most pants at that point of fabric join. Pants are at their most taut at that stage of my leg, let’s put it that way. Like most humans I guess. Um.

And thankfully, the good lord of fashion has brought back enormously long shirt lengths, hopefully thereby banishing for good those atrocious midriff tops we all wore in the 80s when we had waists and zero belly flab.

Put on one of those 80s length shirts now, after the inevitable middle-age torso spread has woven its wretched magic, and people think you are wearing a scarf with sleeves.

So, I am fortunate for the moment to be able to couple my undone jeans with an almost knee-length top, add a few more layers and whether monster trucks or music festivals, no one knows the difference!

Genius.

Until the wind blows...

Movement At The Station

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
The Marshall baby girl had got away
She had joined the wild in utero babies – she was worth more than any treasure found
So all the expert doctors gathered at the fray.
All the confusing and noted feelings in the belly these past few weeks
Had fluttered authentically at last overnight
For the hopeful mum loves to feel the tiny form inside her tweak
As she finally and happily realises possibility with delight.

Thank you for the inspiration, Banjo Patterson. His original first verse below. I decided against reworking the remaining 12 verses – you’re welcome.

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses - he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.

In case you didn’t already gather, I am finally feeling movement for the first time.

There have been flutters and weird lumpy shifts in my lower belly these past few weeks, but in the most recent four days, there have been full-blown liquidy bumps. Obviously baby.

And even T felt one for the first time last night. I can't wait for J to feel it too.

At this point, they are most common mid-way through the day and late at night, just before I go to sleep. She almost always moves when I am on my back, a position I do not hold for long as I feel like I am stretching my belly skin like a centimetre of glad wrap over an elephant, frankly.

Today also marks the half-way point, weee. 20 weeks. Last night I filled out my hospital pre-admission forms – and briefly contemplated establishing a business consulting with others that require people to fill in forms, to overhaul their form templates to ensure people can, gasp, actually understand and complete them easily – and sent them off today. Whether the condition is bullshit or not, you are dealing with people who are in the peak phase of baby brain, do not ask them what their private health cover excess is (who ever knows that?), when exactly any previous surgeries were, what their freaking GP’s fax number is and if they had ever been to a SARS country. Yes I have, but it was four years ago, do I really need to “immediately inform the Infectious Diseases Co-Ordinator”?

And another thing, is it really necessary to use that daggy old shiny paper? It has the type of texture that any pen you use instantly smudges if you so much as look at the words the wrong way. God help you if you, like I do, leave some sections blank to return to later after you have filled out the remainder.

You’d better leave the form in a hermetically-sealed drying room for up to five days unless you want to smear every word and number you’ve ever written across the great expanse of white shininess.

Sigh. I considered attaching a note to the form to eliminate the possiblity that the nurse reading my form and trying to enter my blotchy details onto a computer might temporarily fear I had been assaulted as I filled it in and was dragged, clutching vainly at the paper, across pages two through six.

Anyway. Weeee. It’s all becoming a bit real. A reality I wouldn’t have dared to contemplate even a fortnight ago.

This is pretty cool.

The Best Week Yet

Easily one of the best weeks of my life, even if it featured the ubiquitous emotional rollercoaster.

We had our 18-week scan last week and one word sums it up: normal.

I tell you, after the hell we endured last year, that is the best and only six-letter combination we wanted to hear.

The fact that we also found out it’s a girl was icing on the cake, really, and we are just so happy.

I was incredibly nervous in the days leading up to the scan. The day before, I had even readied myself for bad news. Looking back I cannot believe I wasted so much energy imagining the detail of being ushered into a side room to be told there was a growth or an abnormality or that something anatomical wasn’t where it should be.

I didn’t think it would be as bad as before (Downs Syndrome, serious heart defect), but I did honestly think it would be something big enough to cause us to worry for the next six months.

Something even that might require surgery in utero – yep, these are the extreme places my mind goes at night.

I think I have to accept that worry is unfortunately part of my make-up now. It is how I am drawn.

Day to day, I just need to learn how to handle it, control it, not let it get the best of me. But this time, I just expected something else to give me reason to worry.

The three of us finally entered the scan room, late, and our baby suddenly appeared on the screen on the wall.

This was exactly the same room I was in a year ago to have my amnio. This was almost exactly the same image I was looking at back then when I suddenly caught myself and told myself to look away, not get too attached or connect with this tiny being’s movement too much, because I just knew it would all be taken away.

A year ago, on the very day we went in for our scan, we were in the same hospital a few hundred metres away preparing to terminate the pregnancy. (More freaky coincidences here.)

And yet that day, last week, I was trying to push those thoughts far away with as much force as I was remembering them.

The tug-of-war had me exhausted at the end of the day, utterly depleted.

But there was much to celebrate as the three of us sat in silence watching the doctor measure and scan and press popping buttons on a computer.

J was intrigued, T was in awe and I, after asking if everything was alright (give me something!), burst into tears. Of course.

The scan was temporarily interrupted as my stomach heaved as I let out a particularly intense sob, causing the wand thing to lose contact with my contracting belly. But all was well.

Later at home, J and I played while T went to work. I noticed J started getting a few of his toys and calling them his own babies, holding them and feeding them bottles. It was so damn adorable, the little man.

I took him to our local lake by the beach and we had the best time splashing in the shallows and building sand pools and castles. I think I was still walking on happy air at that point and he no doubt picked up on the vibe.

Just then, as the sun set and the light in the sky changed, the unmistakable squawk of the black cockatoo emerged from overhead.

I looked up and five of the massive, majestic birds silhouetted the clouds, right over our heads, their yellow cheeks flashing like war-plane markings as they flooshed through the air.

These are the same birds that appeared a year before when our baby died. I have felt a strong, ethereal connection to them ever since.

And here they were again.

Letting me know everything was right in the world.

Elastic waistband

Well I am finally starting to look like a pregnant woman.

And about time too!

I was starting to get worried people at work, watching me consume large amounts of food every two hours (at least), were simply beginning to think I was channelling Toni Collette: the Muriel’s Wedding version, not United States of Tara one.

I am eating a lot. Mostly it is good things, as we are healthy ordinarily anyway. We have a veggie garden out the front with everything from herbs and peas to broccoli and citrus (not yet fruiting, but soon).

I remember my appetite being crazy in the first trimester, and while it’s nowhere near as extreme as back then, I do feel it’s returned with about 75% vengeance now.

We went to relatives for dinner last night. There was roast chicken, approximately 345 vegetables and gravy, all followed by meringue nests with fruit salad.

On the way out, they gave us four marzipan tarts they did not like. It’s marzipan, are they nuts? I adore the stuff.

Anyway, we get home to put the little mister to bed and we have a cup of tea. I would say within less than two minutes, I had eaten three of the tarts before sheepishly asking Trace if she wanted one.

I will often get to the end of dinner, and quite a large dinner, and inexplicably drift towards the pantry to fix myself one or two bowls of cereal. It is crazy.

So, obviously, my belly is popping out, but I think (I hope) it has a decidedly pregnancy-inspired rotundness.

Initially, I made the stupid assumption that some clothes I had pre-pregnancy that were on the hipster side, and sat low on the belly anyway, would be fine to wear even as my belly grew.

I think that was back in the days when I was convinced I would be one of those Posh or Nicole Richie pregnant ladies: essentially a toothpick with an apricot belly. Fat nowhere else.

It was really hot today, spring’s first blush, and I put on shorts that fit the above category. I could just get the button done up, but they were painful and they bunched uncomfortably toward the zipper, a zipper that about 10 minutes later gave up trying to play along with my charade and eventually burst.

They were my oldest, most favourite pair of denim shorts. I had literally had them for about 15 years. And your body changes with age, a lot, in that time, but I could always count on them to fit perfectly. Old reliable.

As I tried to unzip the broken zipper, the little metal tab that had opened and shut that faithful, ingenious fastener more than a thousand times in its life, gave a last gasping snap as it came free in my hands. Broken.

I was shattered. Then I was confused and then I was scared as to how to extricate myself from already-tightly fitting shorts that had been zippered up when the zipper broke.

Somehow, I managed to peel them off, but I will leave it up to your imagination if my knickers came on or off at the same time.

Other than hilarious sartorial adventures, no movement from the baby that I can discern as yet. There have been tiny little lumpy feelings, like a pulse in my abdomen or like food moving through intestines. But who knows? That could actually be my pulse or digestion...

This week is enormous for me. This Thursday is the one-year anniversary of the day we lost the baby.

It is also the day we have our 18-week full morphology (anatomy) scan.

The coincidences continue.

Milestones and mill stones

This is going to sound riveting, but I have a whole lot of nothing to report from this past week.

Wow, what a way to entice you to keep reading, huh?

I have been trying to deal with this in limbo time until the next peace-of-mind scan by distracting myself with work and family stuff.

And I thought I was doing alright until I had a meltdown over the weekend. I am pretty sure you can put it all down to tiredness, hormonal-ness and general freaked out-ed-ness at surpassing at last the 16 weeks and four day mark of this pregnancy.

Oh, and Jay was sick. Throwing up sick. Which is never nice.

I was worried about reaching that date in the days leading up to it, but funnily enough, on the day, it wasn’t until about 2pm that I realised and remembered. And then I kind of felt nothing; a little relief, but not the huge emotional tsunami I was expecting.

A few days later though and perhaps it hit. First of all, let me say, Saturday it blew like a howling gale, all day, very destructive winds. And Saturday night was a full moon. Both of those things make people crazy – just ask the cops. Hell, our local paper on Sunday had a front-page story about a guy who randomly walked up to the scene of a car accident and threw a python at police.

That’s right, a python. Like I said, last weekend just made people go loco.

I felt disconnected from things, from happiness, and very irritable. Jay was up well before 6am both days, and he was sick. Normally I can go back and grab a few extra hours to catch up, but I could not switch my brain off from thinking dark thoughts if I tried to nap.

I was dazed, headachey and nauseous but strangely unable to really feel any of that truly. It was a really bizarre state of mind. It’s happened in varying degrees before, but pregnancy and that “milestone” exacerbated it this time.

Anyway, I feel much better now, although I have had a headache for two days, but it’s dissipating. But I think I know why I felt nothing. Because even though it is great that I held onto this pregnancy for longer than the last one, so far, there is no great woot-woot celebration that comes with that.

This is a completely different pregnancy and a completely different baby inside. It is unfair to compare and hopefully I can stop now.

Well, I have never experienced a pregnancy this far in as yet...so I might as well try and enjoy, rather than curse, the changes in my body and feeling the baby kick for the first time (nothing yet).

Trace and I also agreed on a new girl’s name after I panicked and realised the one we had chosen was really not suitable for a girl beyond the age of five. But we are keeping this new name a secret, although we will tell people the gender when we find out next week.

Next week! Eeek.

Hmm, I did have stuff to report after all. Put it down to the scrambled eggs currently disguising themselves as my brain matter right now.

Coincidence much?

I remember being really struck by a particular book when I was in my teens.

Sure, there was Shakespeare and George Orwell and Harper Lee, but one of the most memorable was a bizarre little paperback with a light blue cover all about coincidence.

It was a dog-eared collection of anecdotes from around the world about the unexplained phenomenon. Some called it fate, the book’s intro said, others thought it more mystical than that, but the stories of coincidence it contained proved that whatever it was, it was real and quite jaw-dropping.

I think I found it for 50 cents in a second-hand shop somewhere random. The ominous lightning strike on its cover appealed to my teenage mind. Back then, I probably thought it was edgy and hoped mum would think I was into the occult.

There were all sorts of stories of a long-lost family heirloom that is suddenly found after a relative’s favourite flower grows in the exact spot where it’s buried; or the twin feeling the other twin’s pain at the same moment, on the other side of the world; or of certain meaningful things happening on key dates, centuries later, auspicious and freaky.

In the years since, I do pay particular attention to those moments that happen in life...like someone popping into your thoughts minutes before they ring you on the phone, dreaming about something a few days before it happens and things like that.

With this pregnancy – see, there is a link in here somewhere – I know how real coincidence is in my life, but I am not sure of its meaning. Or even if it has one.

By some random eventuality, the embryo that is now the baby I am carrying was implanted in me on the very same date as our little boy’s was in Tracey, four years ago.

To the day.

There is no way we could have orchestrated that or manipulated that if we tried by lining up cycles and doctor’s visits and hospital theatre schedules and chance.

I am due on my partner’s birthday.

I found out today that our OBGYN is taking a week off right around my due date. The number three came up a lot early in my pregnancy. I was in theatre three, we sat at table three the night we had our embryo transfer to celebrate with dinner out and our little boy is three. It prompted T to surmise that I would probably go past my due date and give birth on the 3rd of the 3rd.

Our OBGYN is due back from his leave on the 3rd of the 3rd.

Over the weekend, we realised another freaky coincidence.

Our 18-week scan – the one we are counting down to so desperately – is on September 22. They day we lost our baby last year.

Tracey said to me “Do you think it’s trying to tell us something, that everything will be ok this time?”

I don't know what in tarnation "it" is, but sweet lord, I hope that's what it's saying!