Well, I think comfort is relative concept now. He really doesn’t have much space in there anymore. I’ve been wondering if he’ll be born with impressions of seams across his face from maternity clothes that are straining to hold me in these days.

The last few weeks have been a flurry of activity, getting everything washed and ready. Well, except for the two days I ended up in hospital for tests and observation – high blood pressure – but nothing untoward was found and I was sent home again and told to take it easy. Which I did. Kinda. As much as the nesting would allow.

Friday I went for a haircut and a pampering session of facial, manicure, pedicure and wax. Yesterday I stocked the fridge with quick meals to add to the bulk cooking Hunny did last weekend. And tonight Hunny and I are going on our last date night as a two-person family. We’re as prepared as we can be now, wish us luck and maybe next time I post I’ll have a sleeping baby in my arms. Or maybe a screaming one. It remains to be seen

So it’s Wednesday morning. The room isn’t ready, bags not packed, most stuff still isn’t washed … and I wake up with a terribly uncomfortable abdomen. I’ve had Braxton Hicks for a while now, but that’s usually a handful an hour, not every 4 – 5 minutes. And Junior has moved. He’s been head down and to the left for a while now, but yesterday he moved to the right where it seems there is less space, and turned his back on my belly button. Terribly uncomfortable, and much more difficult to feel his movements.

Concerned and uncomfortable, I spent most of my day counting contractions and trying to figure out with the help of Google how you know when Braxton’s turn into the real thing. By bed time I had decided that this couldn’t possibly be the reel thing because it had been going on all day with no baby dropping out. Still I packed what I had ready into a bag, and started washing the cot linens, just in case.

I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off, but awoke at 3.20 AM with really sore hips again (had that a few weeks back, but it went away) and contractions still on their 4 minutely schedule.

By then I’m thinking: I’m not that hardcore! I couldn’t possibly be in labour and not know it? This must be the false labour thingy that nurses around the world chuckle at, when first time moms and dads arrive at the hospital at 2 AM with bags ready, convinced that this is it! Only to be sent home and told to take a Panado or something.

I’m also wondering what it does to your client relationship if your pregnant business analyst’s waters break in the middle of the review session at the client’s offices.

I go to the meeting anyway. Doc is only in the office from 9.00 AM. Client review session is at 9.00 AM, so I may as well go to that and decide to phone the doc if still feeling crappy at lunchtime. The meeting is quick an uneventful, and by the end of it, Junior has arranged himself back into his old spot and I feel much more comfortable. I still stop at Baby City on my way back to the office and pick up the rest of the stuff I need.

So this is where I sit now. Thinking I was overreacting, but wondering if maybe I wasn’t. Adding to my dilemma is that I’m squeezed into a narrow window of availability with my Gynae. She’s away next week, back the week after (my C date) and then away the week after that also. And she’s not exactly close to home. Man I’ll be pissed if I’ve been driving all that way for 8 months to end up on the table under a different doctor’s knife. Then I may as well have gone to my local hospital! Kid, just stay put for now please?! You’re too little to be out here on your own right now anyway.

So, here’s my promised list of things I’ll miss when I’m no longer pregnant

• No-one looks at you funny if you eat a packet of chocolate chuckles on your own
• No-one looks at you funny if you eat a packet of chocolate chuckles on your own for breakfast
• In fact no-one makes any comments on your eating habits at all (except maybe your mother)
• Hunny is at my car door waiting to carry my bags in as soon as I pull into the garage
• He clears away the dinner plates before I can think of getting out of the chair to do it
• Junior’s movements. Those are pretty cool
• Having a ready excuse for a sleep-in in the morning or afternoon nap
• Having a ready excuse to take the lift up 2 floors
• Having a ready excuse to take the lift down 2 floors

Yup, that’s about it

Finish lectures – check
Finish work project – check
Write exam – check
Finish ante-natal classes – check
Submit final assignment – check

Have baby – getting there

If you’ve been wondering where I have been the last few weeks, there has been snow in Joburg in autumn. Not widespread snow I might had, just enough to keep me weighed down and working. But that’s all done now, yippee! I handed in my final assignment at 10:00 today and ended what has been one of my most busy times ever. I’m going to go home and celebrate with a non-alcoholic beer.

I’m not usually a beer drinker, but I’ve been craving a drink the last couple weeks, and this is the only think I could find that tastes like alcohol without being alcohol. I feel rebellious drinking it, so it serves its purpose.

Three weeks to the day till Junior makes his entrance, and that’ll be my next task: get room, wardrobe and self ready for that. I don’t even know what goes in the bag, never mind having it packed! I’ve been worried for the last couple of weeks that he might make an early arrival, and then my lecturers would need to score me the draft version of my final assignment that I submitted 2 weeks ago. And well, ‘draft’ was a generous way to describe what I submitted. I would certainly have failed had a lecturer marked that! But Junior behaved himself and stayed put, so all’s well that ends well

I lost my last vestige of femininity a few weeks back when my ankles disappeared. I always had skinny ankles and I was very sad to see them go. I’ve never felt as unattractive as the morning I woke up and they were gone. It’s a funny thing to think, but yeah. The lost ankles were what finally made me feel too large to still be pretty.

No more weird encounters with strangers wielding pee sticks in supermarkets, but I did have a fellow classmate tell me that you don’t bond as well with the baby if you have a C-section. She’s had both, and she didn’t bond as well with the C-section baby. Of course it couldn’t have been that she didn’t bond as well with her second child as she did with her first, or she that she didn’t bond as well with her daughter as she did with her son. It had to be because one was a C-section…

But before I give you all my news at once, I’m going to preserve some topics for another day and leave you with this little list of things I’m looking forward to about not being pregnant anymore

• Getting my ankles back
• Not being in a permanent state of overheating
• Being able to wear my rings again
• A chilled glass of red
• Getting back on my horse (eventually)
• Having two functioning nostrils at least most of the time
• No more nosebleeds
• Not feeling like I need to pee every time I walk up stairs
• Walking up stairs without loosing my breath
• Being able to pick things up of the floor without looking (and feeling) like an idiot
• Pants that don’t slide down off the bump all the time – the bump is bigger than the hips now
• Actually meeting the little guy I’ve been bonding with for the last 8 months

(I’ll do the ‘things I’ll miss about being pregnant’ list next time)

Thankfully he doesn’t do it all the time; here is a pick of me in all my round glory:

Any time I spent small and petite in early pregnancy I am making up for now. People can’t stop commenting on how big my mid section is. That part isn’t so fun.

Pregnancy is such a visible affair and it brings out tactlessness in so many people. I’m feeling more and more defined by my bump these days. Not from my close friends and family, they still recognize that I’m Alex first and then pregnant, hmm I dunno, maybe third or fourth. But to strangers and acquaintances it seems I am just a pregnant belly with some limbs attached.

I think this has been the most frustrating thing about my pregnancy so far. Just this morning I was singled out four times in a ‘congratulations on your promotion and where to from here’ meeting as having to make big decisions about work, career and work-life balance. There were several other people in the room with children and time consuming social pursuits but they weren’t pregnant, so they weren’t Mr. Managers on the fly case study. It took a lot of restraint not to say to tell the man that I’m not asking for any favors so to leave my personal life to me and just judge me on my work please!

Later that morning when I was stopping in at my nearest woolies for some cake to offer my colleagues ( It’s my birthday today ) I was stopped in the isles by a stranger who whipped out a home pregnancy test from her bag, showed it to me, and asked me if I thought she was pregnant! No seriously folks, I’m not making this up, this actually happened! I was totally amazed. And she had a toddler in her trolley! Surely she would know how to read these things as well I? The test had a rather feint second line, so I mumbled something about yeah, it could be, but do another test in a couple of days time and then bolted for the check-out line.

In other alarming news, I got hacked. Well, my blog did, but it doesn’t seem like they were very good at it. Read Hunny’s post about it here. It would seem that this is what has been wrong with my RSS feed, and I apologize if anyone was subjected to Viagra advertising through my site, though it doesn’t seem like the hack attempt managed to do anything.

Well, that’s me for today. I spent most of my birthday working or at lectures or doing some more work from home. Poor me. I plan to do something more worthy of my last twenty-something birthday on the weekend. Like sleep in or something, because partying isn’t much fun when you keep bumping your stomach into people and you can’t have a drink.

Here’s our little shy guy, hiding behind his arm and the umbilical cord.

I’m still struggling with stitching together the incessant wriggling under my skin with the concept of a real live kid that is mine (well, ours) to keep and look after, day in day out, whether I feel like it or not. I suppose that realization will only properly set in when the hospital sends him home with us.

I can picture me with a toddler or a young child, but I haven’t once been able to see myself with a baby. Like changing his nappy and stuff. I’m not worried about that yet though. I’m pretty sure the maternal instincts will kick in when Junior is born.

8 weeks and 5 days to go, and I’m pretty sure those are going to fly, given all the activities I have planned to pack in for a large part of that time. For 3.5 weeks at the end of August / beginning of September I have occupied my self for 4 of the 5 week nights. Mondays and Wednesdays are ante-natal classes, Tuesdays Hunny and I are involved in student ministry at the Midrand Graduate Institute, and Thursdays I have evening classes for the diploma I’m doing for work, wrapping up with an exam on the 5th of September and an assignment hand in on the 10th. At least after that there will be nothing much left to do until our C-Day on 1 October. Except of course work, which I’m planning on going on with until the 24th of September. So far I still feel fit and healthy, long may that last.

On another note, I’ve taking the long way around to get home this week, to avoid the intersection where 3 out of 10 drivers behave like law-ignoring A*holes. Usually I can handle it, I just do my best to prevent the road abusers from cutting in front of me and leave it at that. But the sterling (what sarcasm?) mood I have been in since my laptop started giving me a hard time on Monday has made me a prime candidate for a road rage charge. So I cleverly decided not to put myself in that situation. I also eventually decided to fix my own laptop, rather than have helpdesk spin me another line about what could be wrong with it, spend another half a day trying to fix it, and give it back to me only to have the problem recur. I’m no technical genius, but my gut feeling solution ended up fixing the problem. Alex 1 – Helpdesk 0.

But back to the traffic thing, why do people do that? Did they grow up with no respect for the laws of the land? This is South Africa; that could well be the case seeing as for quite a while 90% of the population was subjected to oppression via the law. Do they look at us folks sitting patiently in the queue, wondering why we don’t just run up the left lane and cut in to turn right at the top like they are doing? Bute we are 14 years into our democracy now and it just seems to be getting worse.

Or is it a superiority complex? Do these people think they are that much better or smarter or more in a hurry than the rest of us? I hate it, it makes me feel like a fool for obeying the rules of the road. Not to mention frustrated and some times red-angry.

Take a deep breath and let it out slowly … count to ten … okay now carry on.

Hunny got a new camera, an Olympus E-520, he is very chuffed with it. He has taken a ton of pictures; the good ones are available on his new photo blog.

This is one of my favourites. Hunny doesn’t like how busy the background is, but I think it captures the two boys‘ personalities well. Pickle all big and brave, and Dartmoor checking out the suspicious activity from behind his mate. I love my funny horse.

Ps. How dry and dusty is this winter? Can’t wait for spring.

Junior’s growing like a champ though. Our week by the seaside obviously did him good because at his scan and weigh-in last Monday, he tipped the scales at an impressive 921 grams, a full 300 grams more than the average 24 week-old, and looks set to make 3.8 kilos. His dad is very proud. Hi mom is a little afraid. I have no idea where I am going to put the remaining 2.9 kilos of him. I feel like I am stretched to breaking point already. Every time I burp / hiccough I get a little taste of whatever I just ate because my stomach is presently halfway up my esophagus… There is nowhere else for it to go. I think it’s found a little space between my heart and my left lung, but even that seem to be under threat. Junior likes to brace his feet against my ribcage for a good stretch; or that is what it feels like anyway, but maybe he’s just pushing my kidneys up there.

As a parting shot here’s by little cutie giving a thumbs up to the camera / scanner… Would you look at that bicep already?

I’m nearly 22 weeks along and up 6 kilos, with a pronounced Tum. It now hurts to sleep on my back, so I’m now forced to find an alternative. That’s not going so well. Two weeks back I slept funny and hurt my left shoulder/arm. It recovered okay, but two nights back I did a repeat on my right shoulder/arm. If I want to lift my right arm from the shoulder (ie, not just elbow) I actually have to use my left arm to do it. It makes getting ready for work in the morning interesting.

Still on the sleep topic, I’m dreaming up the weirdest bunch of rubbish. Two dreams about armed robbery, in both instances I was one of the robbers. I held up a canoe & kayak shop. I have always wanted to take up canoeing, but this is a bit extreme. In another dream I mistook a puppy for my baby. I was still pregnant at the time, but was convinced I’d had the baby, and this Jack Russell pup was my kid.

My blood sugar levels are now more volatile than ever. I nearly passed out today after 2 cupcakes. The low GI diet my doc recommended really helps, but what good is it being pregnant if you can’t over-indulge on all the good stuff?

I can now most definitely feel Junior move, and he’s quite an active boy! There are rarely more than 1.5 hours between his wriggles, and for now anyway, it never fails to make me smile. Of course, if he has a quiet day it makes me panic … We had a fetal anatomy scan last Friday. He is looking great. Everything measures up well, but he already has really long legs. His dad’s child

As for work and studies, one word defines: Chaos! In a wonderful synchronization of utter madness, I had to complete work on items for a major release for our client in the same week I need to finish and present an assignment for my part-time studies. I’m still trying to recover. Thankfully I have a week by the sea side soon to help me relax. I return to move into a new role at work, so nice clean slates there too.

In other news, I have been riding a little, but it’s getting a bit awkward. I have a belly support band and that does help, but I’m running out of ingenious new ways to make my riding clothes fit. My friends will breathe a collective sigh of relief when I let them know I have stopped riding.

I’ve also lost the spring in my step. Literally. I discovered this quite alarmingly when trying to leap across a stream. My leaps just aren’t what they used to be and I narrowly missed landing rump first in the stream. Taking stairs two at a time is also something I can no longer manage.

Signing off now with more promises to update more regularly, but to make up for my bad behavior, I’ll post some happy snaps from the life of Alex.

We took the dogs to a local cross-country venue to stretch their legs and play in some water.

waiting in the truck, can we go now?

what a handsome boy!

in the water is the only time Cilla can beat George fetching sticks

throw the stick! throw the stick! throw the stick!

So that’s my Tum at 18 weeks. Hunny says we can’t call it a tummy anymore, it’s too big. Junior is roughly the length of my hand now, and making his presence felt. Usually when I have been sitting still at my desk for a while; seems Junior doesn’t like me to keep still already. His movement makes it so very much more real though. Well that, and the fact that I can no longer see my toes when I look straight down …

Truck made a full recovery. We went to pick him up last Tuesday, and he’s been on his best behavior ever since. Maybe he’s learnt his lesson. Bonus point: the mechanics finished Truck a whole day earlier than they originally said they would. How cool is that?

Otherwise the life of Alex has been rather boring. Work has keep me up late at night, woken me up too early in the mornings, and kept me behind my PC all weekend. I haven’t pulled work hours like these in very many years and my body is complaining terribly. It should all die down this week though, if things go my way …

Last happy snap for the day: this is the reason why I think I’ll need a bigger bath mat this winter …

The only exception is my very first car, the extra-ordinarily cool Nissan Exa, red, with pop up headlights. That car took more abuse than it gave, and ultimately paid with its life in a head-on collision with a drunk driver while heroically sparing me anything worse than a few bruises and emotional trauma.

(Nissan Exa – mine was in better condition than this, but you get the picture)

If you traipse through this blog and my old one, you may find references to tales of woe about my experiences with my Renault and of course, the Greenie story. I don’t think I posted about my trucks prop-shaft repair and clutch replacement last August, but yeah, that happened too. I like Truck, so I was willing to give him another chance. I tried hard to treat him right and make him feel loved but alas, he too seems to want to move on to greener pastures.

It started with a little whining noise in his engine last Wednesday, accompanied by some bubbling in the engine. We topped up the water, which wasn’t empty, hoping that would do the trick, but when I drove around to my folks on Thursday, the temperature gauge flipped right up to max within a couple of km’s. With the long weekend there wasn’t much to be done but leave it till Monday, so Truck spent the weekend at the folks outside in the cold, so he could take some time to contemplate what he’d done, and perhaps show some remorse.

Sadly, that didn’t work. We took Truck to his doctor (Mitsubishi Garage) on Monday. Freek (yes, that really is his name) from Mitsubishi phoned me at around 10:00 AM and started to describe to me in heavy Afrikaans – because of course mechanics are all Afrikaans here – that I have a cracked cylinder head gasket and the quote to heal Truck would be 60K. Yeah, that’s right, R60 000! That’s more than half the value of the vehicle! Of course I promptly told him to phone my husband because I don’t have anything like that kind of money available because he is also Afrikaans.

Now this would be the reason why I love my Hunny so much more this week. Not because he speaks Afrikaans or because he’s great at keeping money aside for emergencies, but because he is totally unflappable. He calmly asked Freek to fax him the quote so we could make sure that they weren’t quoting to replace the whole front-end of the truck. Well, it turns out that they were. As with most dealerships, they don’t fix anything; they just replace the broken part and any part that links to that part and half the parts that link into those parts …

Hunny then calmly phoned me and said: well, if that’s the case then so be it. But we can’t get that amount of money together today, so lets go and fetch Truck, and see what else can be done.

Freek kindly explained to us why they replace everything under the bonnet when one part breaks, something about dealership warranties, and told us that this may not be entirely necessary. He also said that we’d easily find someone else who would replace only the necessary parts and fix anything that can be fixed. I’m pretty sure his being so forthcoming with information has a lot to do with the fact that Hunny spoke to him in Afrikaans.

Hunny has since found someone else who has given us a much more pleasant looking estimate over the phone, and collected Truck to do a proper assessment of damages. Of course, they may just have stolen Truck and taken him somewhere to be chopped down for parts, but I have no problem with that. We’d probably score more claiming the insurance.

So the saga continues, but that wasn’t supposed to be the point of the post. The point of the post is what a wonderful effect my Hunny has one me. At the best of times I lean towards melodrama (No! not me?! Surely not…) and a situation like this would usually have had me in tears and regretting the day I ever got a drivers license Instead I took my cue from my husband and the pregnant chick that just got a motor vehicle repair quote that would make an Oppenheimer flinch, just took it in her stride. We’ll find another way to get Truck running again. We won’t have to re-mortgage the house for this, and even if we do it won’t be the end of the world. This man really does have the very best effect on me. I love him more daily.

On the pregnancy front: I’m 16 weeks, but AJunior isn’t making his presence felt yet. Tummy is beginning to look less mistakable for fat and I can see the “is she or isn’t she pregnant” questions in people eyes. Or maybe that’s because this week I actually started wearing maternity clothes …

My new challenge is getting myself to fall asleep – and stay sleeping – on my left side. Apparently that’s the best position to sleep in when pregnant. It doesn’t squish any organs or cut off arteries. I sleep on either my right side or my stomach as a norm. Sometimes I sleep on my back or roll onto it during the night. I never sleep on my left side. This is a challenge. I had partial success last night, but woke up with knots in my shoulders. Ah well.

Otherwise weight is pretty much the same, around 65 kgs, although energy levels are low and I’ve been getting a bit light headed. I suspect I might be having some low iron issues. There is iron in my pregnancy vitamins, but maybe not enough. I’m loath to take extra iron supplements though, because the side-effects aren’t pleasant. Anyone who has taken iron tablets will know.

My Granny is sending us some UK Pounds (at R15 to the ₤, whoo hoo!) which we’ll use for a cot/crib. We have some clothes, diapers, a car seat, a stroller and a compactum, so we’re sorted now, right? Naivety is cool.

That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for more updates on Truck recovery.