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It didn’t really take me a fortnight to read those 89 updates. I was just really busy taking care of the one thing in my life that requires constant attention: my dissertation. ONLY joking. I’ve been doing Julian stuff. Dissertation’s on the back burner. I’m sort of regretting my internet-absence though. The blog hiatus meant missing the opportunity to do two things: deliver the line ‘May the 4th Be With You’ in a timely manner, and make derisive comments at the expense of the UK’s botched parliamentary/electoral system. I’m probably slightly more cut up over missing International Star Wars Day than covering the UK’s election though. The latter has always been a total joke. Maybe the Queen should stop munching crumpets and start running the country. Haaaaaaaa. But seriously. Clegg and Cameron? The DemoLiberal-ConservaTories? Double act of the century. Roll up, Roll up, pay extortionate income taxes so the UK can foot an EU bailout-tab for Greece and other attractions.

Anyway.

Andy took over the updates on the sprocket for a couple days there, not because I was catatonic with newborn-induced tiredness, but because I was tangled in a mass of tubes in the hospital for a while there. And because I was catatonic with newborn-induced tiredness. It wasn’t a priority to relay my labour experience to anyone when I had three inches of IV catheter dangling out of each wrist. The catheters meant that if I bent my wrists back, blood would gush up out of the IV canula. That would have been fairly hardcore though, bloodying a keyboard up for the sake of a blog post. Any by ‘hardcore’ I mean ‘plain stupid’. Moving on.

I’ve had a couple people calculating from Andy’s blog posts just how long I was in labour for and most of them have been bang on: I was in labour for approximately a decade. The midwives that delivered Julian told me that they don’t usually count the onset of labour from the get-go, rather, they start counting how long you’re in labour for from when you’re dilated to about 3cm. That’s nurse-speak for “YOU KNOW THAT LAST 14 HOURS YOU SPENT IN EXCRUCIATING PAIN? YOU DON’T GET TO COUNT THAT AS LABOUR”. Even if I only counted from when I hit the 3cm mark, I was in labour for a proper long time.

The Thursday before Julian was born I’d had some serious niggles. We drove over to Liverpool to pick Biery and Abbey up from their trip and I spent most of the journey experiencing freakishly strong ‘practice’ contractions. That night, we went to see Iron Man 2 (Boo Hiss) and I spent the film clutching a packet of Butterkist Popcorn with varying intensities, depending on when the contractions struck. I was up half of Thursday night feeling uncomfortable and angry that I couldn’t find any position to sleep in. Friday wasn’t much better. I was tired (but unable to sleep) and grumpy (from being tired and unable to sleep). We went out with Abbey and Biery in the name of distraction. I have no idea what we did on the Friday night though because that’s when things started to get weird.

You can probably tell this post is headed into the realm of labour and delivery. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can just stop here and look at this Yoda Cloud picture.

Otherwise, carry on. Make your own adventure. Labour and Delivery were pretty straight forward for me. Some of the details aren’t really blog material, but I’m down to answer questions if anyone cares to ask them. Also, having a baby has been the biggest single event in my life, so if this post turns into a series, cut me a break.

By my dates, I was 42 weeks pregnant when labour started. Good job too; I was getting desperate enough to take the internet’s advice on induction. Not really. But, that is one good thing about being 42 weeks pregnant: you are so sick of being pregnant that you actually look forward to busting a baby out. Thank you, Evolution.

By 1am Saturday morning, the contractions I’d had sporadically on Thursday/Friday got uglier and regular. I felt like I might be in early labour but I was hesitant to whip out the champagne at that point because a) I don’t drink and b) I didn’t want to jinx myself and turn out to be in false labour. By the way. ‘False Labour’ is another one of those stupid pregnancy misnomers, like ‘Morning’ Sickness. There’s nothing false about the contractions that happen in false labour. Anyway. 1am Saturday morning. The contractions were maybe 40 seconds long every ten minutes or so and hurt like the dickens. By 4am, when I couldn’t handle writhing around in bed anymore, I took a shower, ate a Saturday-Morning-Cartoon-Watching size bowl of Coco Pops, played World of Goo, and wandered around the house in a bathrobe. Probably the sexiest mental picture I could paint of myself (I know, I had you at the word ‘Bathrobe’). I eventually woke Andy to tell him that I thought I was in labour. He drove Abbey and Biery down to the train station (so they could return to the states) and then returned to time the contractions for a bit. By the time he returned, the contractions were lasting a minute, and coming every seven. On the clock.

Contractions are weird. They hurt, and while you’re having them you feel a bit loony, but in between, you’re fairly sane. Well, you are at first. Saturday Morning I was grimacing and squirming through contractions and feeling totally normal in between but by the afternoon (12 hours in) the contractions got more intense and closer together and so by that point I was alternating between catatonia and making muffled squawks into a pillow and trying not to flail around like a fish out of water. The game-plan was to labour at home right up until the last minute when Andy would get his Formula 1 on and race me to the hospital. We hit a couple glitches with that plan though and ended up going to hospital a little earlier, as it ironically turned out to be the less stressful place to labour. The drive to the hospital was a bit surreal. I was still semi-convinced I was just in some magnificent display of false labour and that I’d be sent home again, but at the same time, I definitely entertained the idea that the finish line was somewhere in sight. I don’t remember much about the drive, other than biting down on the seatbelt now and again to get a grip on the pain, vaguely wondering if doing so made me look like a total nutjob.

It took a bit to get into a room and be seen by a midwife, but when I did, I was pronounced hospitalisable since I was dilated to 3-4cm. If you’re uncomfortable with the word ‘dilated’ and its application to something other than pupils (or Peoples, if you like early 2000’s ‘rap’) you should probably stop reading now. Maybe go back to that Yoda Cloud picture and call it a day. Long story short, the midwifes did me a favour and let me labour alone in a room for a while. The contractions were a lot harder to get through by that point. They were lasting a minute and a half and coming every five minutes. I remember a contraction finishing, looking at the clock and feeling intense anxiety, anticipating the next round of pain. The fact they were so punctual almost made it worse since I could literally count the seconds until I’d be incapable of saying anything other than ‘Yiiiiiiiiiiiiikes’ or ‘Buuhhhhh’. By that point, I looked like this:

That’s me. Having a contraction/praying to the god of pain to remind him that I’m a featherweight.

Midwife (Bev) said something like ‘You must have a high pain threshold’ at this point, because I’d been in labour for 16 hours without so much as a paracetamol. I think I responded with ‘No, I am weak sauce’ and returned to inwardly crying. The pain, combined with only having had four hours of sleep in the previous sixty hours or so, started taking it’s toll around then, so I got hooked up with some gas. I think it’s nitrous oxide they were pushing. I’ll be honest, it didn’t even seem to take the edge off the pain, but I enjoyed chewing down hard on the mouthpiece when contractions hit, and the amplified sound of my breathing kind of helped me regulate it. I was wondering if the gas was just a placebo and was just a bunch of regular air, but then Andy held a couple lungfuls of it, and promptly started giggling like an idiot. At first I thought he was laughing at me (I probably looked crazy during contractions), then I realised his pupils were super dilated. I was kind of jealous that the gas wasn’t having that effect on me. I could have done with a laugh at that point.

I got into a giant bath about then. Giant Bath:

It was actually kind of annoying to be honest. At first, the weightlessness helped ease the backache that accompanies contractions, but to avoid scalding a newborn (in case you deliver in the water) you can’t have the water any warmer than ‘tepid’, so I got cold rather fast and ended up shivering in between contractions and that just plain sucked. I think that by then it was twilight outside, so… around 7pm. Andy and I were both optimistic the baby wasn’t too far off arriving – Midwife Bev kept telling me that if I wanted to push, to do so, and the contractions were coming so close together, we were sure things were progressing. Then the midwife shift changed, and a new Midwife and a student trainee took over my case, declared I was still only dilated to a 7, and told me not to push. Confusing, depressing, and basically like hitting the mother of all snakes during a game of Snakes and Ladders. I couldn’t believe I’d been having such intense contractions for so long with no progress. The pain level maintained itself for another few hours and by early Sunday morning, the fleeting desire for an epidural had solidified and I asked for one.

I’m a poor writer so two weeks on from the experience I’m having a hard time conveying how intense the pain was without sounding cliche and somehow this entire post sounds relatively sedate when the experience was anything but. I was tired from lack of sleep, and the pain was unbelieveable. I know I would have coped with the pain better, had I gotten some sleep during the two nights preceding labour, but even so, the pain would have been overwhelming. I was getting mentally exhausted too by then; I’d already been in labour for Julian longer than Andy’s mum had been in labour for all three of her children combined. I’d also spent hours having back to back contractions with very little progress in terms of dilation and I was starting to feel like I was doing the worst job of having a baby known to mankind. When I realised I was still only dilated to a 7, and it could actually be a lot more hours before he arrived, I knew I’d be too tired to push effectively, hence the desire for an epidural.

In retrospect, I’m surprised I made it through 24 hours of labour before I caved. The sole reason I made it that far basically came down to Andy’s involvement. Obviously it was a tiring experience for me but it was no picnic for Andy either because he was so involved. He was always busy doing something for me. Reminding me not to hyperventilate, applying counter-pressure (which is crazy hard work, especially when you have a busted up wrist like Andy does), talking enough to encourage me but not enough to exacerbate my frustrated, already overstimulated self, getting me drinks if I fancied it, anticipating anything else I might need. Being in labour added a new facet to how Andy and I interact, I think. Up until that point, I don’t think I’ve felt so unsure of myself that I had to look to Andy to get me through something and I don’t think he’s ever been relied on by me that heavily before either. When labour got really hard, I remember thinking that Andy would get me through it, which is kind of a weird thought but it got me through another hour of contractions at least.

Anyway. By the early hours of Sunday morning, I was so tired and sad, I asked for an epidural. The reason why I’d been avoiding an epidural is because they’re a big deal. They have to be well timed and well dosed in order to do what they need to do without causing a cascade reaction, wherein you end up tied on a table with your feet in stirrups while a doctor gets a collection of freakish tools, hacks away at places that don’t need hacking away at, and yanking out a baby. It happens. The thing was, I’d been in labour for almost 24 hours, was utterly shattered, and I’d been dilated to a 7 for hours with no progress. The contractions weren’t letting me have any time to get myself together in between, and I was starting to feel really disconnected from myself which sounds ridiculous but I’m not sure how else to describe it. Maybe it was a result of the pain. I’d felt like my pelvis had been tightly clamped between the jaws of some kind of prehistoric predator for ages, but around this time, the pain was so intense, I would have believed someone if they’d told me I’d just shattered my pelvis into a trillion shards of bone and they were making a bid for escape out of my skin. I had this weird experience where I felt like I wasn’t connected to my body anymore, and that I was dreaming, only the pain was there to remind me that was not the case.

I was praying like a madman that the doctor administrating the epidural knew what he was doing (as a sidenote, the doctor who administered the epidural was Nigerian and seemed super excited when Andy mentioned he’d lived in West Africa for 2 years. I highly doubt he’d met anyone in Wigan who’d spent any time in West Africa so Andy was kind of novel conversation since he’d lived with some Nigerians and knew a thing or two). I basically wanted enough to numb the contraction pains so I could take a nap. Which sounds insane, but wouldn’t you want a nap if you’d gotten less than five hours of sleep over the last three days? The epidural was a really scary experience for me. They had me sit on the edge of a bed and promise not to move while they whipped out a fairly long needle and inserted a catheter in my spine. I was hooked up to an IV and next thing I knew, the pain had dulled, and I was napping. I woke up around 3:30am (they have the hugest clocks in delivery rooms) because the contractions were back with a vengeance. I couldn’t feel my feet but I could feel everything else. The epidural had totally done it’s job, and miracle of miracles, I was dilated to a 10. I had a bit of a Dorothy moment, because when I woke up from my epidural induced nap, there were three midwives, a student, and Andy standing around the bed. I felt so bad for Andy who had not had an epidural-induced nap. Long story short, the contractions were hitting hard, and I was given the all clear to push. In case any other maternomorphs are reading this, I spend most of labour moving around the room, kneeling over stuff, that kind of thing, but I delivered sitting at that prime 45 degree angle. The pushing part was surreal. The contractions were highly painful, but I felt a lot calmer about handling them. Pushing was tiring, but not nearly as frustrating as just dealing with contractions and feeling like you weren’t getting anywhere. Here’s a visual, check out my chi:

After an hour of pushing, two doctors suddenly arrived in the room throwing terms like ‘forceps’, ‘vacuum’, and ‘episiotomy’. Apparently, if you’ve been pushing for an hour, it’s protocol for them to do an episiotomy and yank the baby out. My birthplan had two main points: I did not want to deliver lying down, and I did not want an episiotomy. I felt super frantic and angry that even though the baby was under no stress, I was being told that they were going to have at me with a pair of scissors and what Carrie appropriately called ’salad tongs’. The minute I saw them preparing a tray with a suction vacuum and sharp implements I kind of went into overdrive and started pushing like a demon. Maybe the doctors just pulled that on me so I’d hurry up and get the baby out so they could go on their coffee break, but it worked. I experienced a world of pain, then a midwife yelling ‘PANT, DON’T PUSH!’ and then someone saying “he’s blonde!” and Andy updating me on how far out Julian was, some nurse offering me a mirror (I didn’t really fancy seeing that though) and then suddenly the pain receding, and a heavy little mass being deposited on my chest and Andy saying “he’s here!”

I hadn’t really given much thought to the actual moment Julian would arrive until it happened. I didn’t have any expectations of how I’d feel, or what it would be like because I’d been wrapped up in trying to get through labour. When I first saw Julian, he opened his eyes and I just felt overwhelmed. I couldn’t understand how two cells had turned into this breathing, crying, baby and that he was physically a composite of Andy and I with life breathed into him somehow. I couldn’t connect the kicks and weight I felt and carried for months with the baby in front of me, even though he was literally staring me in the face. I didn’t so much feel a rush of the warm fuzzies as much as relief that he was whole, and he was mine and that we’d made it. You hear a lot of women talk about the intense rush of love they experience for their newborn as soon as it arrives, and I felt a little strange that I didn’t experience that. I later realised that I’d loved Julian long before he was born, so naturally relief was the dominant emotion when I finally held him.

I ended up staying in hospital for a few days because I had some post-partum complications. It really sucked because Andy couldn’t stay with me on the ward, and so I ended up waffling through the first few days of parenthood semi-solo. I was also on a ward with a woman who kept singing the line ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’. Kept singing it. And she was flat. Worst. Nights. Sleep.

I was pretty thrilled when I was discharged and we could finally go home.

Still Andy.

Andy here again.

Julian Andrew Martin
2 May 2010, 5:05am
8 lb 7 oz

This is Andy. In case you’re wondering, Naomi may not be posting for a while because she’s kind of in labor right now. The contractions aren’t super close, but they’re hitting hard.

Anyway, I’ll let you know if I hear a baby crying. In the meantime, back to Nintendo…

With midwifes refusing to do internals and their general confusion over my due dates, I’ve warmed to the idea of having this baby sooner rather than later. Placental deterioration doesn’t sound that jolly and since them healthcare professionals are more useless than a GPS on Pluto, I’ve started hoping Baby Martin picks a birthday and fast so I don’t have to deal with induction and all that. By my dates, I’m 41 weeks pregnant this Friday. Mmmmm. Fun.

The baby will arrive when he fancies, I suppose, but I was curious if there were any tricks of the trade that would encourage labour naturally. I vaguely recall some pregnant women I knew downing castor oil (buh) so, like any other 21st century idiot, I googled it, in hope of scientific proof that some natural formula would jump-start labour. I don’t think that the majority of pregnant women posting on forums care one iota for scienfitic proof though. They are quite happy with poor, anecdotal evidences, and swearing blind that the dumbest stuff kick-starts labour. After reading a few testimonials that sounded like ‘I JUST VISUALISED MY BABY AND ASKED HER TO COME OUT AND WITHIN 2 HOURS I WAS IN LABOUR!’ or ‘I ATE NINE SLICES OF Pizza Hut’s Spicy Meat Feast Extravaganza Extraordinaire Pizza AND WENT STRAIGHT INTO LABOUR!’ I was ready to give up. Before my will to live waned completely, I skim-read google’s results for any ideas that weren’t peppered with mispellings and decided that nothing I can do will bring labour on.

According to other maternomorphs lurking in their various internet caves, the following are meant to work:

• Visualising your baby and asking it to come out. I know I’ve already mentioned this, but seriously.
• Eat 7+ fresh pineapples in one sitting (erm? sure, if you want to deliver your colon instead of a baby)
• Down shots of balsamic vinegar (while yelling CANCUN?)
• Get your membranes SCRAPED. Yes. Scraped.
• Drink Castor Oil.
• Smoke/Eat/Do something with Blue Cohosh. Don’t worry that it has abortive qualities that could deform a formed baby.
• Eat ‘Jump-Start-Your-Labour’ cookies.

You read that correctly. Cookies. Sorry, ‘Jump-start your Labour Cookies’. The testimonial that accompanied the recipe blew my mind. Basically the woman claims that she practically started labour by HANDING her husband a plate of her ‘Jump-start your Labour Cookies’. Imagine that. Note the disclaimer in the testimonial though: the cookies will only work their magic if you are already ready to go into labour. Convenient, no?

So.

I have decided to perform a variety of actions repeatedly, so that when I do go into labour, I can claim one of those actions to have been the trigger. Even better, I figure if I toss in some brand names, I could perhaps get corporate sponsorship for doing so. Like:

“I was just using my HP 2344 all-in-one scanner/printer and BOOM, straight into labour!”

or
“I was purchasing a mammoth load of apps from APPLE to dump on my iPad and BOOM, labour started nine hours later!”

or even

“I was in the shower washing my hair with Pantene Pro-V Anti-Break Super Shine Shampoo for just £3.50 a bottle at Tesco’s and POW, labour started three seconds later”.

But yeah. Nothings really happening on the baby front so Andy and I are making the most of being babyless by doing whatever we fancy, whenever we fancy. I quite fancy going to see Iron Man 2 while we are babyless but it’s not out until the 30th April here and I’d rather have this baby right now, than hope he comes late just so we can watch a stupid movie. Well. Maybe not ’stupid’. I liked the first Iron Man.

One of the more productive things I’ve done while waiting for baby to arrive is sew a blessing thingy for the baby. It sounded more fun that starting my dissertation.
Behold, a crumply blessing-suit thing (it needs ironing):

That was the front, this is the back:

I was pretty proud of it because I don’t sew midget clothes too often and trying to gather a sleeve that small is a bit tricky. Well. For me and my limited sewing skills.
I wanted to make something for the baby to wear for being blessed because even though the baby has no idea what’s up, I’d like to think I made an effort with presenting him and putting his name on church records. I figured a onesie with robots on it wouldn’t quite cut it and found some white linen in an offcuts store.

Since I’ve kept decent photo record of every other week of pregnancy, I figure I might as well parade this dirty laundry in public:

How the devil do you come back from looking like you swallowed a novelty size beach ball?!

Anyway. My tummy looks a lot higher in that photo that it is in real life. I don’t know why. The baby’s been upside down for 9 weeks at least and ‘engaged’ for a month. A more sordid pregnancy fact is that the lightening marks around my belly button got weirder looking and more intense this week, I’ve started feeling like I’m carrying Shamu under my ribcage, and I have all the grace of a lobster on ice. I’m also getting restless. Partially because I can’t sleep and partially because I just want the baby to arrive already. All in all, I’m OK, though.

We finally got some sort of car seat thing. Given our situation (living here, flying to Franklin, driving to Philadelphia, going to Utah blah blah blah) we went with a fancier doohickey that functions as a car seat and bassinet in one. Get me and my mommy-bloggings, but it is pretty nifty. Along with going from car seat to bassinet, it slots into a compact pram frame for when he’s too heavy to carry in a sling. I sortof begrudge having to buy this stuff, I’d rather have just made a sling and called it good, but with all the driving and stuff we have to do, it just wasn’t feasible to avoid that purchase.

Anyway, if you made it through the last paragraph of this post you probably either work an office job, are bored out of your face, or are related to me so I might as well update you with some other random news:

• Emilie, Andy’s sister just got engaged with a wedding set for 7th August!
• The weather here is probably better than the weather where you are, unless you are currently in the Caribbean
• I came this close (really close) to being attacked by a goose the other day. I think he was mad we were feeding his harem of geese-babes mouldy bread.
• I screwed this site up and still haven’t really fixed it yet so I’m sorry if it’s annoying anyone else to look at. I did, however, fix Andy up a little shin-dig of his own for thebackgrounds.com.
• I’m doing my part for Earth Day by not eating any vegetables or natural foodstuffs. Peace, Mother Earth.

Buying one of these baby carriers will make you a rough variant of the Ninja Turtle, a male Ballet Dancer, a Jazz/Tap ShowChoir Member, a Barbie Doll, or an Orange Dude.

Photos of myself like this one creep me out a little bit. That shirt isn’t remotely designed for maternomorphs so it sticks to me like cling film over a pineapple, only without the fruit-appeal. Andy thinks it looks like I just shoved some sort of dome up my shirt and I’m inclined to agree. It doesn’t help that the zipper on that particular top slants wildly on occasion which just further demarcates where I exploded. My tummy is huge. When I’m sitting down, I swear it rests on my legs. I can’t help but think about morbidly obese people and imagine how weird it must feel to have fat rolls from your chin touching your chest or something. Washing under those rolls must be fun and games. Oh sorry, were you eating?

I think I’d subconsciously decided that the baby wasn’t coming until after Biery and Abbey left (they’re in Italy now), so now they’re gone, I’m feeling some pressure to get the house clean (erm, actually, Andy’s doing all the cleaning so technically it’s him feeling the pressure) and get sorted out/prepared for the baby. The idea of delivering a baby still seems ultra-surreal to me so I keep torturing myself with YouTube videos and freakish pictures of messy births thinking that will shock me into accepting my impending fate. Thing is, I’m starting to think that my attempt to desensitise myself with messy birth videos isn’t useful at all, and is, in fact, driven by the same morbid curiosity that drives me to skip straight to the HUMAN section of The Guinness Book of World Records: I think I just like seeing all the neat/horrifying things people can do with their bodies. I don’t so much care about the fastest cricket bowler in the world. More interested in how fat/small/long fingernailed/pierced people get.

So yeah. Birth. Like every other girl and her dog, I’d prefer for labour/delivery to go naturally. I’m keeping an open mind, but on the whole I don’t like the domino effect that things like narcotics/epidurals/blah blah blah cause, so yeah, ideally I’d like things to run their own course and for Andy to make sure I suck it up and deal with the pain for as long as possible. The only thing I feel strongly enough about to scrawl in capitals over my ‘birthplan’ is that I’ll drop-kick anyone who tries to get me to deliver on my back or perform an episiotomy without seriously good reason.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at in terms of the physicality of ‘having a baby’. Mentally/emotionally/spiritually/psychologically (however you want to look at it) there’s obviously a lot more to it. I’ve been nervous from the start about all kinds of pregnancy related things. Reading my dads illustrated medical magazines as a child obviously did more damage than good, and I think with respect to pregnancy, ignorance kind of can be bliss, to a degree. I’ve been scared of everything from ectopic pregnancy to gastroschisis. Since I’ve hit full-term and the last scan (about 4 months ago) seemed to show the baby was growing alright, I’ve started to worry about other things. What if he has Downs syndrome, or a disability I don’t know anything about, or God forbid, that he doesn’t make it? I can reduce myself to tears in a matter of minutes just thinking about it. I don’t know if you noticed (maybe it’s just because it’s on my mind) but there were two talks during conference that kept repeatedly mentioning still-births or the passing of people’s children. Fact of the matter is, it happens, and yes, it could happen to us. It’s a stark reality that I have a problem dealing with.

It’s true that of life’s uncertainties, we can at least have utmost confidence in death eventually claiming us all – whether the ‘wrong person’ at the ‘wrong age’ or at the ‘wrong time’, death comes to all of us. Accepting the unpredictability of death sounds elementary, but it’s sometimes hard for me to deal with. I often apply a picnic-mentality to life: I prepare well, I’ll avoid disaster. I’m a little overwhelmed realising that I can’t protect this baby from tragedy anymore than I can keep most harm from befalling Andy. I feel a bit helpless when I realise that in a sense, I can’t protect those I care about most. From this end of pregnancy, I feel a bit overwhelmed and have a panicky sense of sympathy for those who have had to deal with the birth of a still-baby. It surely is the most bitter paradox of life and death.

I think what I’m trying to say is that the expectancy of new life actually has me thinking about death.

Christians, or those who believe in God and/or ‘afterlife’, have interesting ideas/coping mechanisms/notions about death. Something I’ve heard a lot at funerals is the idea that “God needed them [the deceased] more than I did”. Personally, I don’t believe this to be true of death. I don’t believe that if Andy were to die, that it was because God ‘needed him more than I did’. How could a complete being possibly need Andy more than me? That said, I do believe that God’s ways are not ours, God does not micromanage as much as people would like to believe, God is involved in the course of our lives and cares about the tiny sparrow mentioned in Jeremiah. Apparently those beliefs can sound contradictory, but I think they’re entirely reconcilable; you just have to think about it. God’s ways just aren’t ruled by mans logic and He’s no less omnipotent for it’s misapplication.

Carrying new life, experiencing an odd sense of unfounded love for someone who hasn’t even been born, adding a new dimension to my relationship with Andy, and being very in love with the afore mentioned has me realising how much I actually have to lose now, (which I guess is what I was trying to explain in this post). This realisation is serving as a brutal reminder of how fragile we are. Whether you believe in God or afterlife or nothing; it’s an undeniable fact that we are frail. The harsh reality is that we might be picking milk up at Tesco’s one minute, and a cold, organic mass the next. If nothing else, this (amongst other less metaphysical things) instills a sort of panic in me: I waste a lot of time, I’m ungrateful, and I don’t try my best often enough. It also reiterates how strongly I feel about the path forged, by which a family can become an eternal unit, as opposed to a social construct for the duration of mortality only. I’m aware that this belief is often misinterpreted as a cop-out, a coping mechanism used to deal with the incomprehensibles of death and loss (or the ultimate yawn-retort: the result of ‘Blind Faith’). Unfortunately, any rebuttal to this criticism of faith essentially comes back to the nature of knowing, believing, and the relativity of truth, which is a debate much more intelligent people than I have rallied back and forth over. It’s kind of a Dodo topic, especially for this medium. But for the record, I believe it’s true, and not just because it benefits me to (I believe several things that probably wouldn’t benefit me in my current state).

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that my current preoccupation with death, and my fear of loss in the face of new life, has me concerned about how I’m living. I’ll do better.

I am more bump than person now. I’m somewhere between 37 and 39 weeks pregnant I think.

The bad news:
- I look really strange
- I’m tired and uncomfortable most of the time.
- I still have one 4,500 word essay and a 60 page dissertation to do for school

The good news:
- the baby’s head is ‘engaged’
- I know what ‘engaged’ means in this context

It portends nothing, but the fact that something new has happened makes me feel like things are progressing. I’m pleased things are progressing, but I’m not in a panicked rush for the baby to make an appearance. I mean, I’m excited and nervous about having a baby, but I’m far from making a checklist of Old Wives Tales on how to jump-start labour, even though I feel like I’ve been pregnant since the dawn of time. It’s just that it’s taken me a long time to come to to terms with the fact I’m actually pregnant. Now the baby’s hit what is medically considered as being full-term, my paralysing fear of miscarrying or delivering super pre-term has dissolved. There are plenty other things to be anxious about of course, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Andy and I are going to become parents sometime within the next month. Even though I’ve had a nine months heads-up on the probability of becoming a mum, it’s just starting to hit me now. I feel remarkably unprepared and that unnerves me since I’m usually well-organised and poised for whatever gets chucked at me. Which is why I carry chainmail and a shield in my purse.

We’re decently prepared in other ways though. We’ve bought some baby stuff and I have a toothbrush and nighty packed for the hospital. Our collection of baby paraphernalia is minimal at best I guess, but it’s definitely more than adequate. We’d both feel frustrated and wasteful if we were to buy even half the stuff people insist that the baby will ‘need’, so we basically bought a handful of basic sleepsuits in a sale and called it good. One or two people have gone as far as to intimate that my lack of enthusiasm for impulse-buying all manner of baby clothes is a reflection of how I feel about the baby coming in general. I kind of want to punch those people in the face. I wouldn’t even pass the buck and blame pregnancy hormones. I’d just do it and be like, ‘WHUT?’. Anyway. Babies are leaky and grow so quickly that I don’t see how I’d get any satisfaction from throwing my money at baby clothes he’d only wear once before they made it to laundry day, by which time they wouldn’t even fit him anymore. And while I’m on the topic of pointless babywear, I’m confused by parents who drape their newborns in things like jeans and Chuck Taylors minutes after their baby’s taken it’s first breath. First off, that’s a horrendously expensive venture and secondly, give the kid a break. Babies aren’t babies for very long at all and I’m not sure why you’d want them to look like miniature teenagers moments after birth. Maybe this is judgmental, but it always feels to me like the parents who do that either mistake their baby for a prop or a projection of their own taste. If I were a newborn, I’d probably want to wear sleepysuits all the time. But that’s coming from someone who wore a space-themed fleecy jumpsuit to bed during a recent Winter.

I made some blankets for the baby. Baby blankets are crazy expensive, so I bought some material from an offcast shop and made a couple instead. They look like this:

I still feel like there are a lot of bits and bobs left to do, (random things, like charge the camera battery, laundry, junk like that) but I feel waylaid by school at the moment. Boo. The one thing we have done for sure is pick a name for the baby. Although, since the sonographer was so useless and we don’t have an ultrasound picture, we’re not not 100% convinced it’s a boy anymore. So we picked a girls name too. Just in case.