Week 27 of this pregnancy has been a pretty significant one for me – for no other reason than that it’s the final week of the 2nd trimester. In fact, by the time this post goes live, I’ll be just embarking on the 3rd trimester, and, I mean, WOW, how trippy is THAT?

I kind of wish I could go back in time to my 1st-trimester (or post-miscarriage, or post-ectopic) self, and tell her that one day she’d reach the 3rd trimester, and be embarking on the home straight. (I’d probably also tell her not to cut her hair, because it didn’t ACTUALLY make that much difference to the drying time, and she’s sort of regretted it ever since, but that’s neither here nor there, really…) I mean, I obviously wouldn’t be able to tell her she’d one day stop worrying, because, LOL, AS IF, but I honestly never expected to get this far, and I’m pretty amazed that I have, to be honest.

But, of course, this post is supposed to be about week 27, not week 28, so let’s get on with that, shall we?

Week 27 Pregnancy Highlights

Visible baby kicks! I’ve noticed my belly moving a few times lately, from particularly vigorous bouts of kicking, but this week I managed to capture it on video, so everyone else could see it, too. Not sure quite how much fun that video actually was for anyone else (although my mum watched it at least 1765 times, apparently), given that every time my belly moves from the kicking, I start shaking with laughter, which makes it look like King Kong is trying to break out of my abdomen, but hey, you have to get your kicks (Boom boom!) wherever you can these days, don’t you?

Week 27 Pregnancy Appointments

This week I had yet another midwife appointment, and I think I have some kind of medical appointment or other every week now for the rest of the month. It’s all a little bit overwhelming, really, given that my health anxiety normally makes me avoid any kind of medical situation like the plague, but it’s all for the greater good, I guess, so I’m doing my best to just suck it up, like a good girl.

This particular appointment consisted of another blood draw, plus the anti-D injection I had to have at this stage, on account of my rhesus negative blood type, so I felt a bit pin-cushion-y afterwards. Still, the bump is measuring 28cm, so he’s right on track, with a good, strong heartbeat, which makes me very happy indeed.

Week 27 Pregnancy Symptoms

Insomnia. Which leads to exhaustion. Actually, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have had the exhaustion anyway at this point, because it seems like the kind of thing that would happen when you’re lugging around a giant bump all the time, but the fact that I’ve been lying awake most nights, thinking about random crap ranging from whether I’ll die in childbirth, to when I last saw that old baby towel that had been lurking in the linen closet before Terry emptied it out this week, hasn’t helped either.

The tiredness hasn’t been nearly as bad as the exhaustion of the first trimester, when I’d regularly fall asleep on the couch any time I tried to sit on it for more than ten minutes, but I’d happily sleep the clock around right now – which is a bit of a bummer, really, because I’ve been so busy with work etc, that I’ve had to just keep powering through it… and then lying awake at night, thinking about old towels. Because that makes TOTAL sense, brain, thanks!

Week 27 Purchases & Preparations

I’m once again breaking this one into different sections, so…

Things My Parents Bought:

My parents are growing in confidence with their purchasing power every week now, so this week brought…

A pram blanket!

A hat with ears!

And also gloves!

A storage bench for the nursery!

This is actually something Terry and I had picked out: we also have a toy box on order, but I thought something like this would be useful to store books and other stuff (This baby will have a LOT of books: don’t worry, though, the lid has a special soft-close mechanism, so little fingers can’t get trapped… ), so my parents very kindly bought and assembled it for us. It actually looks quite nice in the kitchen, dontchya think?

Finally, this wasn’t purchased by my parents, but here’s a photo of me hugging a teddy bear:

(Also pictured: my bump. Not pictured: my face, because, damn girl, it looks like you’ve been storing up nuts for the winter in dem cheeks right now…)

Handsome chap, isn’t he? This bear was actually a gift from Terry’s mum a few years ago. I knew I wanted to pass him on to the baby, but he had the words, “GIFT COMPANY 2014” embroidered on one paw, which I thought might be a bit confusing, so my mum gave him a couple of new paw pads, and now he’s ready to rock. Or whatever it is teddy bears do when we’re not watching them.

Things Terry and I Bought Did:

No major purchases for Terry and I this week, but Terry has been hard at work re-fitting the closets in the hall and nursery, and has made an amazing job of them both. In what could possibly be one of the Top Ten most boring photos I’ve ever published on this site, here’s the “before” shot of the nursery closet:

I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a while for the ‘after’ shot here, though (Please try to contain your understandable distress at this news), because that’s going to require yet another trip to IKEA, and I’d ideally like to move at least some of the crap from the floor, first. With that said, this room is actually looking quite a bit clearer than it did last time you saw it, but that’s mainly just because Terry has taken all of the junk that was in it, and re-distributed it around the house, where it’s been joined by every power tool known to man, plus a really quite disturbing amount of cardboard packaging, which, where did it even come from?!

The house is an absolute MESS, in other words, and I don’t just mean “by MY standards,” I mean, ‘By ANYONE’S standards.” Seriously, who knew that clearing out two closets and one room would end up destroying an entire house? It totally has, though, and, at the time of writing, there are currently piles o’ junk in:

The ground floor hall:

(If you’re thinking that open door at the end of the hall is the door to the under-stair cupboard, you’re wrong: that is, in fact, the Gateway to Hell, and it occasionally opens and spews out more power tools and random other crap. If only we had a garden shed we could put that stuff into! <FORESHADOWING>)

The first floor hall:

Everyone has a random collection of cardboard and a bag of wigs in their hall, right? Just checking.

(Also pictured: the main bathroom, now with added paint rollers. Not pictured: its floor, now with added paint splashes. GOD.)

(No, the bathroom is not being painted. YET.)

The kitchen:

I’m now on the lookout for a question mark to add to the end of that wall sign, so, instead of saying , “EAT” it says, “Er, EAT? Maybe? If you can find some space at the table?” On the plus side, as you can see, there is no shortage of chairs right now, and, on a related subject, hey, does anyone want some chairs? Anyone at all?

(Alternatively, I could just move the arrow so that, rather than pointing to the table, it points to the living room couch, which is where we ACTUALLY eat, with our plates precariously balanced on our knees, and my bump getting in the way. It’s a classy joint, ours…)

The office:

Because we obviously don’t have quite enough to deal with right now, this week Terry’s computer decided that now would be an AWESOME time to totally kick the bucket. It had to be pulled out and basically re-built, in a delicate operation which took three days, and cost a fair bit of cash, plus my remaining sanity. Most of the stuff in this photo is computer-repair related, but the rest of it is… I have absolutely no idea what the rest of it is. Not even sure I WANT to know, tbh, I just want it to LEAVE MY HOUSE, and I’m considering an exorcism, if it doesn’t happen soon.

In happier news, however, the patient made it through the surgery, and is now recovering peacefully on Terry’s desk, where it has the support of a thousand and one other bits o’random crap, all of which Terry tells me he “needs” to have out on display, otherwise the entire fabric of the universe will fall to pieces. Or something like that, anyway.

The nursery:

Which, actually, is almost looking tidy now, compared to the rest of the house: maybe that’s why Terry did this? (Also, we bought a lightshade from IKEA for it. I’d go and look it up on their website, but I lost the will to live somewhere between the “first floor hall” photo and this one, so, meh, it’s just a light, you can live without the exact details, I’m sure…) Also, I really hope the baby has fun playing with that VAX carpet cleaner, because, God knows, there’s nowhere else for it to go right now. <MORE FORESHADOWING>

(I’d apologise for the crappy photos, btw – phone camera, low light, you know the drill – but I actually think it’s better this way, because no one needs high-res photos of this kind of mess, do they? I mean, it’s not like you’re all going to be begging me to turn it into a coffee table book or something, FFS…)

Most alarmingly of all (for me) MY DRESSING ROOM was also breached, by Terry apparently opening the door and and just throwing in an armload of STUFF at some point yesterday afternoon. “Was it just bothering you to think there was at least one room in the house that WASN’T a mess?” I asked when I found it, and then he didn’t speak to me for the next 20 minutes: whoops. There is no photo of that, though: it was just too traumatic.

Finally, in the news I know you’ve all been waiting on the edges of your seats for:

SHED MAN UPDATE:

So, after almost 6 months of swearing blind that he would TOTALLY be providing us with a shed, Shed Man has confirmed what I’ve been predicting since May, which is that, no, actually, he will NOT be providing us with a shed, like, what is he, a SHED MAN or something? I KNOW, SHOCKER, HUH? Unfortunately, Terry’s contingency plan (which, it turns out, was to buy another shed, which he’d seen on Gumtree) has also fallen through, which leaves us shedless. And also speechless, to be totally honest: I’m trying very hard here not to use the words “I TOLD YOU SO,” but, well, I kind of just did, didn’t I?

So, yeah, it looks like, on top of everything else, we now have to buy and build a shed. And if anyone’s looking for a Shed Man in central Scotland, I have one I can definitely NOT recommend…

Week 27 Pregnancy Fears:

I’m actually just going to skim over this section for now, because my fears haven’t changed, really, but I HAVE come to realise that I’m not doing a great job of helping people understand them, so, rather than keep on beating that same old dead horse, I’ll simply say that things like health anxiety and tokophobia aren’t “cured” easily, unfortunately (and sometimes aren’t cured AT ALL…), and, while I know a lot of the people reading this either don’t believe those problems exist, or think I should be able to just shake them off with a bit of retail therapy, or a nice hot bath or something, mental health problems don’t really work that way (I mean, I REALLY wish they did, because I’d be the most chilled person in the world, if so…), sadly. I have another counselling appointment coming up soon, though, so hopefully that’ll help: for now, I’m just grateful to have made it all the way to Week 28, messy house and all.

(I could REALLY live without the messy house, though…)

Related: Sleep in rollers

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