32 weeks, six days
My plan has been to publish a weekly column on the baby and / or the pregnancy each Sunday. Yesterday, however, I just couldn’t come up with anything positive. I imagine that some hormones have been making themselves known and tears have not been too far away. When not teary, I would slip into fits of anger that would bring up pregnancy posts that didn’t feel right.
So I waited. Not exactly for the hormones to give me a break but just to pass enough so that anything I wrote was genuine.
In four weeks and one day I will be considered full term which means the baby could make an appearance at any time around then. My due date is seven weeks and one day away, my last day at work is nine days away and I still haven’t set up the cot. The baby bath arrived and so did the Moses basket where the baby will sleep for the first few weeks / months. The mattress arrived separately from the cot and it is light and measures 120cm x 60cm and the baby will spend a couple of years sleeping on it so that feels quite magical.
I woke up Saturday morning and my left hip / pelvic band (something like that) hurt. Apparently this is normal but since I couldn’t turn or put any pressure on that leg without it feeling like agony, it didn’t feel too fabulous. That might have been one cause of the tears although paracetamol helped.
Kris, the Big Issue vendor by Temple Meads, and I were saying goodbye for Christmas before the holidays and we got to chatting about babies etc. ‘Are you getting married?’ he asked me and I said no, ‘but you’re together with the father?’ and I replied no to that as well and it didn’t seem to make for a great start to the day. Then I was reading a book on HypnoBirthing and there was the following quotation:
Somebody said that no one
can love a child the way a mother can.
Somebody was never a father.
That didn’t help either. However, I didn’t give up. The chapters that followed were called ‘The Power of the Mind’ and ‘Falling in Love with Your Baby’ and I started to cheer up a bit. Staying positive and loving feels nice even when things look tough. I guess it helps especially when things look tough.
Of course it could be the hormones again but just on the other extreme of the dimension. My colleague was telling me about when she was at the later stages of her pregnancy and finding things hilarious. She’d spent 10 minutes laughing at the following Mighty Boosh line:
“I read a pamphlet”,
“So, I once saw a hedge, what’s your point?”
[see full conversation]
Still laughing.