archive.

Ok, to catch up and not leave mahoosive gaps without taking forever – here’s an archive of blog posts that mark the last three years of motherhood.

 

March 2009

Sleep Sleep Sleep

the Long and winding road

 

April 2009

Smelly nappies and singing prayers

Could this be it?? (goodbye dummies?)

Dens, Time-out and Hide-and-seek

I ate humble pie and it did not taste good

 

August 2009

Nearly more than nothing

Thankyou tikabilla, thankyou milk

 

January 2010

spidergirl

Magnet to Mayhem

What a Week

 

March 2010

A not-so-great adventure (navigating your way through a baby having a seizure)

words

 

April 2010

Meringues, emulsion and board-games

 

May 2010

Does my bum look big in this?

stolen moments of ruby love

Unremarkably remarkable

 

June 2010

some lessons learned

The ULTIMATE life lesson

 

July 2010

Doctor Doctor

Tears that sting the eyes

 

August 2010

Summer Lovin’

Accident and Emergency

Insecurities, stitches and babies

 

September 2010

Letting go

for the love of all things selfish and irresponsible

School girl

 

October 2010

Sofas through the window

tutus on the beach

 

November 2012

Green Griffins and Yellow Unicorns

Gratitude

 

January 2011

You know you’re getting old when…

Sometimes

2 yr bloggiversary

 

April 2011

Easter weekend

royal weddings and chicken pox scabs

 

May 2011

You can’t escape the pox

Concussion

 

June 2011

Doing nothing and thinking too much

Day tripper

Sunshine

 

October 2011

Diets cupcakes and stacey solomon

 

March 2012

Mosey down memory lane 2006

 

June 2012

Nappies, seedlings and bare walls

 

August 2012

Rested and recharged

2032: a letter to a 24 year old Ruby 

Validation

 

September 2012

I ate a salad and I liked it

bad chocolate cake and a letter from the queen

 

Yellow.

These were some words posted in my first ever blog back in February 2009 – wow, more than 3 1/2 years ago…

Chloe, my 2 year old is obsessed with the colour yellow.  If she’s making a painting, it will be yellow. If she’s choosing a cake it will be one with the yellow sweetie on it.  If I’m making play-dough three guesses what colour it will be.  I have no idea why yellow is the ‘chosen one’ as I’ve pretty much kept to the stereotype and covered her in pink and purple since she was born.  No frills, but ‘girls’ colours nonetheless.  But yellow it is and it doesn’t look like it’ll change anytime soon. Yellow is now a familiar friend.

Why is it that we stick with the familiar, bask in it, even hide in it?  There are those that revel in new experiences and unexpected change but I think they largely take us way out of our comfort zone.  I don’t mind the actually avoidance of the unfamiliar, each to their own, but I can’t help but think and chew over the reasons why we do it.

The unfamiliar is uncomfortable.  They are all over the place now but while I was at uni, pumps became the shoe to wear for us girlies.  So with adrenaline racing, I purchased my new pumps from Dotty P’s.  And wore them.  Hmmmm, they felt different from my old shoes.  My feet didnt feel right in them.  In fact they blooming well hurt and my ankles developed the most magnificent blisters.  But I soldiered on in my vanity as I knew the discomfort was temporary (stupid girl), and eventually the blisters healed and the shoes softened, making friends with my feet.  I wore those shoes for 6 years, ironically because they became my ‘comfortable’ shoes.  I guess all I’m saying its its probably quite normal for something new, even things that are good for us, to feel uncomfortable at first.

The unfamiliar can leave us feeling vulnerable and exposed.  New places, new people, experiences in which we don’t know how we’ll feel, cope and even look.  A lot of us care, even become preoccupied by how we appear to others, and cringe at the thought of embarrassing ourselves in front of people.

A little story for you.  I studied Youth and Community Studies at university and being a course with quite radical ideas, it attracted quite radical students.  Or at the very least students with strong character and values.  I applied for the course by default.  My sixth form teacher didnt agree with me when I said university was not for me and so sought a compromise on applying as a backup, and suggested this course.  So when I did change my mind (God bless Mr Mullen) I had no idea what I was letting myself into.  On my first day I walked into a room of over confident youth workers and seriously considered commando crawling under the chairs to the far corner, out of sight.  No such luck.  Ice breakers.  If you’ve played the ‘chair’ game you’ll understand it is, in fairness, one of the milder ice breakers one can play – you pretty much sit in a circle and someone standing in the centre calls out something and if it applies to you you have to stand up and find a different chair, the last one standing would then have to call out something else.  My nightmare.  Everybody else seemed quite happily confident in standing in the centre of everyone, while I was manically working out strategies for making sure I’d find an alternative seat when needed.  And so when something was called out which applied to me, I shot up out of my seat, eyes fixed on a chair at the other side of the circle and galloped towards it.  As I approached the seat, someone else appeared out of no-where and began to sit on that chair – but it was too late, I was going too fast to slow down.  I crashed between that chair and the one next to it (my aiming has never been great) and took out the young lad with me.  Blend in on that first day, I did not.  Look stupid and embarrass myself I very much did.

Had I not been so desperate to be invisible, so bothered about what other people might think about me, I probably wouldn’t have charged at that chair with such fortitude.  I think there’s a freedom that comes in making peace with looking silly sometimes.  Lets look silly more.  It might be fun.  Lets question why we’re scared to try something new and let’s have more confidence in ourselves to approach the unfamiliar.

A little ball of dynamite.

Following on from this post about my third pregnancy and going into labour…

We got to the hospital around 2.  I think.  I struggled through two contractions from the short walk from the car to the door – and was guided straight into a delivery room.  A midwife popped her head in the door and said that there’s some who is very excited and had claimed me.  I was over the moon to see my midwife Janet walk through that door!! She was so relaxed and gave me my own space.  She got me some gas&air before she examined me – she knew me well.  Before hand I told Rob he should try it but now that I was in labour I wasn’t letting go of that mouthpiece.  A little while later when she told me I was 6cm, nearly 7cm dilated – through the haze of the gas&air I asked if she was teasing me.  This baby was on its’ way! It got really intense and even my beloved Entonox wasn’t helping me anymore.  I was desperate and wanted Janet to hit me over the head with something hard; She said she’s axamine me and see if we had time to try something different.  Turns out there was no time, and I was ready to meet my baby.  Those bloomin’ pushing urges came almost immediately after that and then in flew my mum, just in time.  At 4.10am, 5.5 hours after the first contraction, Ruby Elizabeth Steward stormed into the world.

Looking back, my girls totally match their birth stories.  Chloe, who took 30 hours to make an entrance, is cautious and slow to act on anything new; she needs to do things in her own time.  Ruby, whose’ entrance was quick and brutal is my little ball of dynamite; confident and very quick to jump into anything!

More nausea and a little bit of hope.

Following on from My miscarriage…

The Husband and I made the decision to foget about ovulation tests and ‘windows of opportunity’.  Perhaps we just didn’t have the capacity for more disappointment.  So when I didn’t get a period a month after the miscarriage we were very surprised!

You can understand why we were wary, feeling a little fragile and anxious.  I was relieved to experience nausea pretty much from the onset of the pregnancy – something that was absent from the last pregnancy that wasn’t meant to be.  We met Janet Grundy, possibly the best midwife in the history of the world.  She understood our fears and made us feel like we had a right to feel that way.  She organised an early scan so met got to see the baby for the first time when she was I was only eight weeks pregnant.

Morning sickness sucks.  I mean, it just doesn’t let up.  But I now had a new respect for it, not taking for granted those pregnancy harmones flying around my body, keeping the baby safe.

The main difference in this pregnancy was the little toddler running around at home.

Over Christmas we had a massive family get together in a gorgeous hotel – and I although I got to be there, I missed out big style.  I was sick through the day and exausted before Chloe was even in bed.  But hey, those experiences make you really appreciate opportunities that don’t come round that often.

Once the nausea passed at around 4 months the prenancy was pretty normal.  If I’m honest I don’t remember that much of it, don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing!  At the 20 week scan we really wanted to know if we were having a boy or a girl.  We asked.  The sonographer looked.  And looked.  Pulled a reluctant face and told us she wasn’t 100% sure so she didn’t want to say.  She then said she was 60% sure it was a girl.  What on earth does that mean?! 60%?! I was gutted.  There was a leaning towards another girl but really we couldn’t be sure.  After a tearful tantrum I calmed down and accepted the unknown.  Though people didn’t believe us when we said we didn’t know if we having a boy or a girl!

I was due on the 14th August.  A couple of days before, mid evening, I started having contractions; painful enough to put on the tens machine and regular enough to take it seriously!  we called family and, because chloe’s birth was soooooo long and drawn out we settled down and tried to get some rest.  Well, we woke up the next morning so guessed things had things had slowed right down through the night!

We got on with everyday life, approached and seemingly passed b y my due date.  I didn’t hold much expectation of the baby being born on its’ due date with Chloe going over four days over.  We settled down to bed around 10.30pm but ten minutes later a strong contraction stuck and lasted what seemed like forever.  When the next one came around I accidently clung onto The husband, waking him up. Once I had my tens machine on I truly did try to rest but they were just coming thick and strong.  It didn’t feel like this labour would go the same way as it did first time round.

Looking back I was so much more confident.  I focused through each contraction, trying so hard relax my body.  It didn’t look like things would slow down again so we made phone calls to parents in the north east,the parents around the corner and my brother and sister-in-law (My sister in Laws’ birthday was the 15th – the following day so she was excited to be potentially sharing it with her niece/nephew). My mum downed like five cups of coffee and set off down the A1 to hopefully get to us before baby arrived.  Arrangements had been made for The Husband’s parents to come and sleep here if things started through the night, so they’d be here to look after Chloe.  After a couple of hours I called the Maternity Ward and when I dropped the phone through a contraction they told me to come in as quick as I could.  Charles and Mary came over and went straight upstairs while I was cuddling my gym ball in the living room…

To be continued.

Loss.

Continuing from here…

The days turned into weeks and I became so aware of myself.  I saw my body as this baby’s cocoon and wanted to protect it as much as I could.  I couldn’t wait till the 12 weeks scan to see that little heart beat fluttering away and feel the relief that the baby was well.

So when, after about three weeks of excitement, I woke up on the 31st October and saw that I’d started bleeding, my world turned upside down.  We were rushing out to the dentist and I was meeting The Husband there.  I just had to just get on with it, with my 18 month old Chloe in tow.  It felt surreal; like it was happening to someone else.  It had to be happening to someone else. Please, just not me.

We went to see the GP and I was told I had to wait a week until I could be scanned.  So I just waited.  And bled.  And said goodbye to the baby I’d never meet.  There was nothing I could do to stop it.  Its awful to be told that you have lost a baby – but the pain I experienced in knowing that I was losing my baby – standing on the sidelines, watching it happen – was crippling.

The day of the scan came and I although I’d been told that it really looked as though I’d miscarried, I held on to the hope that things might just be ok.  These things did happen sometimes.  Bleeding can happen and it be ok.  I just wanted it to be ok.

They did an internal scan and the room was silent.  The lady finished and just looked at me.  She asked me to look at the screen and tell me what I though I could see.

“Nothing”.

There was nothing left there.  They took some blood to confirm a miscarriage and I was to call back that evening.

I needed to get away.   To just not be here.  My mum drove to get me and Chlloe and took us back to theirs for a few days.  I called the hospital and they said I still had levels of pregnancy harmones to confirm a miscarriage.  I asked what now and she asked what I meant.  What did she mean, what did I mean?? I meant, what now?? She didn’t say anything – just to let my cycle settle before starting all over again.

Miscarriage is common. NHS claim its one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage – 3/4 of those in the first twelve weeks.  That means nothing to you at the time.  when its’ you that’s grieving.  For you, you’re the only person to feel this raw pain of loss.  It selfish, I know.  But its’ true.

Time helps.  At some point you feel like you can really breathe again.  Women deal with it in different ways.  And that’s ok.  Its got to be ok, because no-one can tell you what or how to feel.  You just need to navigate it the best you can and in a way that works for you.  Me me, altough my baby was so tiny at 8 weeks, it was still may baby.  Nothing will undo that.  So for me it helped to acknowledge that, so that I could say goodbye.

Shooting forward in time – a little while ago Chloe asked something about babies in tummies or something – I don’t remember.  But I was able to explain that she had a baby brother or sister in heaven.  And even years on, that helped me.  It helped me to make sense of the pain and the loss and the confusion.

It never fully goes away. And that’s ok.  It’s ok that it becomes part of who you are.  There is so much support out there for those suffering from a miscarriage – for the whole family.  Below are a couple of really helpful sites:

http://www.tommys.org/miscarriage?gclid=CMHix7jF7LICFaTKtAodrXkA-w

http://www.nct.org.uk/pregnancy/miscarriage-support

If you’re in the thick of this, grab all the support you can.  That doesnt mean you have to talk when you dont’ want to talk.  It just means you can lean on those who love you.  Don’t shut them out because they can walk through this with you and it makes it a lot less lonely.

Another baby? Sure, easy peasy…

There were 2 beautiful years of motherhood before we had Ruby.  So much to say about it.  The steepest learning curve of my life.  I’m a little sad that I don’t have the time to relive ot all over again to keep hold of those cherished memories.  I onlt started to write a blog a couple months after Ruby was born so there are no written records of this time.  But if I did that I’d still be writing about 2006-2007 in 2013, and then even more stuff would have to be told in retrospect.  And I don’t want that.  I want to be recording the here and the now, as I grow as a momma and my two girls grow through childhood.

No doubt I’ll throw in some flashbacks b ut for now I’m trying to navugate my way through the years to get up to date.

After about a year of parenthood both Theu Husband and I started to think about a second.  I remember before this time being convinced I couldn’t possibly have another because I wouln’t be able to love somone as much as I loved Chloe.  And would it mean havning to love Chloe less, dividing that love between her and a sibling??

As you can see here that we didn’t have to wait long to get pregnant.  So I figured it would be the same second time around.  But as the months passed by with negative results each time, it was a bit of a shock to the system.  Surely nothing could have changed within a couple years.  According to the ovulation sticks, I wasn’t ovulating.  It didn’t stop me taking pregnancy test after pregnancy test.

Using pregnancy tests became a part of routine life.  Because all women know that one test is never enough, regardless of what the stick is telling you.  So that time each month would roll around, I’d pee on a stick and then search for a pink line from all angles.  I was looking for the faintest mark to give me some hope.

Then one month there was the faintest line.  Ridiculously faint.  The Husband and I anaylised it for ages, jumping between nah it can’t be we’re just imagining it to we just might be pregnant. I don’t remember if we waited a while or did it the same day, but we splashed out on something we never have before.

A digital pregnancy test.  And there is nothing more affirming than to see those words…

We were walking on air.  We took chloe to the park and then to a coffee shop.  I took delight in turning down a baguette with bacon and Brie.  I couldn’t eat it now. I was pregnant.  I mean, we were over the moon when we found out we were pregnant with Chloe.  But there’s something special when you’ve had to wait for something.  Yearn for something.  It certainly makes you appreciate the miracle that has just happened in your own little family.

 

 

 

 

Seriously baby…come on out (C’s birth story part II)

…At 6cm they finally thought that I was getting somewhere.  Right then all I was bothered about was making sure there was plenty of gas and air for me.  After over 24 hours I was glad of the pain relief.

Time meant nothing to me.  It neither passed by too fast nor did it drag.  It was like I was in a time vacuum.

There was concern over the baby’s heartbeat after each contraction.  I was vaguely aware of more people coming into the room.  They got my feet in stirrups and, draining my bladder first (I know, ewww), took a sample of blood from the baby’s head to test it.  Whatever they were testing came back ok so, I presume, they were happy to see how things would go.

And then I had the most ridiculus urge to push.  We all hear about this and it’s not even like you’d expect.  Urge isn’t really the word – it makes it sound like you have control over it! Beause you don’t!! So I’m pushing away not and they’re all “no no not yet!!”.  I was all “oh really? Ok thats no problem at all I’ll just pull back on that completely INVOLUNTARY activitiy then!!!!”.  In the haze there was a eureka moment.  Oh, thats what the panting thing is about.

I think in the end I still wasn’t quite ready to push but they said go ahead anyway.  I have absolutely no idea how long this part lasted.  I remember moving around so I was hugging the back of the bed.  I remember hearing the midwife tell me that i really needed to push baby out now because it was getting very tired.  My mum has since said that they were getting ready to intereve but then, just after 10am 06/05/2006 out shot baby just in time.

Baby was a girl.  Although we had three girls names and no serious contender she was Chloe almost immediately.

And that was it.  We were in love.

…Get set…..get set….come on baby, show yourself!!

Some women go weeks over their due date.  Really, hats off to them.  Because when your time has come, although you are seriously petrified, you’re ready to…not be pregnant anymore.

I only went over four days before I went into labour, the waiting started when the contractions showed up.  After 30 hours the midwives and consultants were ready to intervene if I didn’t get the baby out very soon.  But first back up a bit…

The contractions started at 4am.  I was so excited.  They came through regularly straight away – every 7 or 8 minutes.  After a couple of hours they were coming around every four minutes and by 8am I could not imagine the pain getting much worse.  We headed, through rush hour traffic, to the hospital, worrying that we’d not get there in time.  A midwife led me to a room and examined me.  I HAD NOT EVEN STARTED TO DILATE.  The midwife said she did a sweep to help me along.  How very kind of her.  Within minutes we were out of there to take it easy back home.  Via Macdonalds for a drive-thru breakfast.

Bear in mind that the contractions are still coming through every four minutes.

looking back that whole day was a blur.  What did we do?? What I do remember is that these contractions were not slowing down so I was gettting pretty worn out throughout the afternoon – only I couldn’t rest.  By tea time we’d had enough and called the maternity ward up to ask if we could come back.  I don’t know why we choase rush hour again.  I was relieved to get back there and onto a bed.  A midwife came in, checked me over. TWO FLAMIN’ CENTIMETERS. I acknowledge – at least my uterus is starting to co-operate.  But come on! I though I was minutes from sneezing the baby out! I had the choice to go upstairs onto the women’s ward or go home and I chose home and very soon thats where we were heading again.  Via the fish and chip shop for tea.

At some point in the day my parents must have left the north east to bomb it down the motorway into Lancashire to meet their first grandchild.  They were home by the time we got there with our chippy tea.  And oh my life, I remember struggling by this point.  Each contraction coming thick and fast.

I remember trying to have a bath but just writhing around in us for a matter of minutes before I had to get out.  It must have been toward midnight that my mum made the decision to head back over to the hospital.  I remember thinking that the next time I came back through our front door would be with my baby in my arms.  I remember the next midwife.  She was called Anne and she was very…Old school.  No messing.  I was given gas and air this time but it didnt help at all.  Another thing that didn’t help was being told that after 20 hours of pain you’re STILL ONLY TWO CENTIMETERS DILATED.

Anne told me I was panicking, tensing my body and creating ineffective contractions.  She also told me it was a back to back labour and this means more intense back pain.  She told me to close my eyes and find my happy place.  My first happy place was hitting this woman over the head with something so I had to find a second happy place.  She showed me how to ‘dance’ with The Husband, draping my arms around his neck and swaying side to side through the contractions.  Then she told me to go home.  Again.

To be fair, I was approaching the contraction completely differently now.  We got back home in the early hours of the morning, and we all went to bed to try and rest.  As I lay next to The Husband, listening to his rhythmic sleepy breathing, I concentrated on each wave of pain, trying to relax my body through it.  After an hour or so I had tried lying on my side, lying on my back, kneeling against the bed and standing up.  I went downstairs and The Husband joined my in our living room.

I stood Rob up so we could ‘dance’ and as the pain rose, I remember thinking that I wanted to die.  I’d had enough.  Perhaps the hospital could give me something that would knock me out so I could rest.  I looked up at Rob and he’d fallen asleep on my shoulder.  A ‘gentle tap’ woke him up and he decided enough was enough.  I bit onto the seatbelt throughout the 15 minute car ride back over to the hospital.  I had fully decided that I would chain myself to a bed if I had to.  I was not going to be going back home pregnant.

This time when I tried to the gas and air it brought immediate relief, and in those moments I forged a lifelong love for the stuff.  They kept telling me to just use it as the contractions were coming.  Stuff that, I breathed the stuff in and out like it was oxygen.  In the haze of pain relief I heard distant relieved voices and someone saying that I wasn’t going anywhere this time…(to be continued).

Get Set….

Before I became pregnant with Chloe I had no real point of reference.  We have a pretty small family and The Husbands’ is even smaller.  All I’d seen were the glowing images you’d see on TV ads and in magazines.  Boy was I in for a shocker…

By the time I was five weeks pregnant I was ill.  I don’t remember it starting but it must have been quick.  It’s funny that your body and your brain forgets whats it’s like and I have to think hard to remember.  I couldn’t move and I certainly couldn’t eat.  Thankfully I held down enough fluid to be just hydrated enough, although I was constantly lectured by my GP that I’d have to go into hospital if I stopped keeping down fluids.  Thinking hard to remember, ice lollies really helped.  And Wham bars.  Oh those dear wonderful Wham bars.  And in those early days thats pretty much it.

When I was around twelve weeks pregnant I was bridesmaid at My brothers’ wedding.  A couple of weeks before the wedding I right in the thick of the nausea.  We travelled up to the North East to be part of the hen and stag parties, vomiting in a bowl and over the side of the car the whole way.  The Husband was awesome, and didn’t bat an eyelid of dealing with the grim side of a nauseous pregnant wife.  I was bed-bound at my parents and on the afternoon of the hen party mum drove us over to Newcastle and I had my head in the bowl the whole way.  I didn’t last very long.  I couldn’t stay away from the bathroom and I couln’t really even sit up properly.  Ah, well at least I tried.  By the time the wedding rolled around I was feeling a little better. I wished I could have been able to enjoy the day a bit more, most of the time I was concentrating of controlling the qeasy feelings.  After the ceremony those dreaded pangs started rising up.  There was a wall surrounding the country church and a pub next door to it.  As soon as was remotely appropriately I hopped over the wall and ran into the pub in search of the toilet.  God bless that Pub.

You know when you see really great ideas and wish you’d thought of them or at least spotted them from someone else and nicked it?  Pinterest plagues me like that.  It’s not quite an original idea because it’s been done so many times now but I love that women have taken a similar picture each month with details included onto the image.  When they’re all together they look awesome.

I was tiny.  Even through i’d want to kick anyone who pointed it out, I knew they were right.  I don’t know what it is about your bump but it’s definitely part of your identity as a mum-to-be.  Being told that there wasn’t much of an bump translates to a pregnant woman that they’re not that much of a mum-to-be.  Seriously.  Don’t underestimate those harmones.  To that woman it makes complete sesnse.  Having a small bump though did not stop that little piece of dynamite moving around.  Because the bump was all baby you could see full limbs as she moved around.  Most of the time my tummy would be pointy.

Whe I was five months pregnant we werev visiting my parents up in the north East for christmas.  We spent boxing day with family and I was designated driver.  I drove everyone back in the evening and something happened when I turned to get out of the car.  Searing pain bruned through my back.  I was in so much distress that at first my dad thought I’d gone into early labour. I was on all fours because I couldn’t lie down and I couldn’t sit up.  I never found out what happened to my back.  Doctors presumed it was a trapped nerve.  I couldn’t take anything other than paracetamol.

We had plans to visit my in-laws over the christmas holidays to so we made our way down to the midlands.  I worked out that heat really helped so I contantly had heat packs on my back.  Over that week we also decided to move house.  You know, we didn’t have anything else going on or anything…! I loved that first house we owned.  We’d rented before so we couln’t call it our first home but it was very very dear to us.  It was old and had heaps of quirky character.  We worked out that we could push our mortgage up a bit so why not move into a house with a 3rd bedroom.  It all happened pretty quick – and we visited a mortgage near to the Husbands’ parents that week.

The house was only on the market a couple of weeks.  I remember the couple that bought it in the ende wanted to come and have a 2nd look around but we had to cancel because I couln’t move off the bed because my back hurt so much.  We’d moved the microwave into our bedroom so we could keep warming the wheat bags through the night.  One afternoon I was in the bathroom of a supermerket and I caught sight (I really don’t know how!) of a mark on my back.  Being six months pregnant I popped into the pharmacy within the supermarket to ask the pharmacist what it was.  He told me it looked like shingles.  You do not want shingles when you’re pregnant.  I got an appointment with an emergency doctor who had a look at told me it was a blister.  From a burn.  Had I put something really hot on my back? Erm…Only my wheat bags. the doctor told me the wheat bag must have been insanely hot to make this kind of burn.  I hadn’t noticed.  The heat just took away the pain from the trapped nerve.  From then on The Husband was in charge of heating that wheat bags…

We locked the door on the old house whn I was 8 months pregnant.

Yep.  That’s my eight month bump. But hey – that eight month bump cracked a pane of glass on the top of a set of drawers when I sat on it.  So I just sat on the floor out of the way…

I was due on the 1st of May and I remember going out for lunch with my mum and the look on the waitresses face was priceless when I said I was due that day.  As if my water would break that very moment and flood the whole pub.

But my waters didnt break that day.  Chloe kept us waiting for five days…

On your marks…

When I was thinking about how to launch this blog into outer-cyber-space, I guessed it would be with my birth stories.  But then I realised that it all began way before then.

If I’m completely honest I hadn’t thought much about having children when I was younger.  I was married just a couple of weeks after my 21st birthday.   People told us we were insane to get married so young, but this didn’t bother us one bit.Not long into our marriage there was a wee ‘scare’ and we fell into manic mode.  Surely we were too young to be parents!? I didn’t turn out to be pregnant and its interesting to look back and know that, for us, deciding to have kids was not just a passive, automatic thing.

There was a distinct switch from the idea of being pregnant making me panic, to thinking it would be really quite wonderful.  I figured it was nothing to do with age, you just know when you were ready. Suddenly I saw Pushchairs everywhere.  Where did they all come from because they weren’t there before…?

We had group of close friends around us that had been married a little longer than The Husband and I.  Maybe they were part of the switch, bringing the idea to the forefronts of our minds.  I remember,we’d been married for one year, and we were sitting on the beach, talking seriously about having a baby.  We were excited and petrified in equal measures.

If I do something I like to do it properly.  Nothing’s done by half in our home.  So when I say we prepared ourselves, I mean we really prepared ourselves. We walked from the beach over to WHSmiths and boought Zita West’s Fertility and Conception book.  I didn’t realise how much we didn’t know until we opened that book…!  Between our new baby-making encyclopedia and the whole load of resources available online, together we decided what was useful for us and what seemed non-sensical.  We knew we lead a pretty healthy lifestyle and so didnt see the need to suddenly become gym bunnies or stock up with oily fish (oily fish is so healthy, but neither of us like it!).  The Husband did decide to cut out on caffeine because we read that it caused sperm to become genetically mutated.  We didn’t really like the thought of that and thought it wasn’t worth the risk (!) – so he went through the headaches of caffeine-withdrawal to do all he could to make nicely shaped sperm 🙂

 

We read that it can be very ‘normal’ to take up to a year to conceive.  So we were really surprised when, three weeks later, the first pregnancy test we ever took, sitting on our bathroom floor, showed two pink lines…