Some things I have had to stop myself Googling this week:

01. If I have to have a c-section with a spinal block, and I sneeze during it, what will happen?

Like, will my guts just all go flying across the room, and hit the surgical team in the face? Because it seems to me like that’s EXACTLY what will would happen?

02. If I have a c-section, can they just take my appendix out while they’re in there? Also maybe my gallbladder, and anything else I don’t really need, but which might start causing trouble at a later date?

Can you tell I’ve had a life-long fear of appendicitis? Mostly because, when I was a child, it was the only thing I’d heard of that I knew FOR SURE would lead to me having to have surgery (See: phobia of general anaesthetic) and be in hospital (See: phobia of hospitals). I also grew up terrified that I would get the consumption and die: thanks, Jane Eyre!

(I am joking about asking them to remove my appendix, btw. OR AM I?)

03. “How to pee in a plastic tube”

If you’re thinking this sounds self-explanatory, then I cordially invite you to go and try peeing in a plastic tube. Now I invite you to tie a beach ball to your stomach, and try again. Just for added fun, try doing this first thing in the morning, when you’re so groggy you can barely even remember your own name, let alone why you’re peeing in a tube. Not so confident NOW, are we? This graphic depiction of the third trimester brought to you by Forever Amber (TM): thanks for supporting the plastic tubes that make this pregnancy possible!

So, yeah, week 30. I kind of feel like I’ve crossed another one of those lines in the sand with this one: if I do end up having an elective c-section, it would be done at 39 weeks, and even if I don’t, the consultant told me they’d be reluctant to let me go beyond my due date, so I really feel like I’m in the home stretch now. I mean, I technically could have this baby NEXT MONTH, people, and given that I already feel like I’ve been pregnant for roughly 1,000 years now (I expect it feels even longer for you, doesn’t it? I am so sorry…), nine weeks really doesn’t feel like THAT much longer, in the great scheme of things. So, here’s what week 30 of pregnancy has looked like for me…

Week 30 Pregnancy Symptoms:

Being a complete basket case

Yup, STILL super-emotional over here, and liable to cry at the slightest thing. Pictures of baby animals are one of my biggest triggers, but this week I saw an old man out for a walk on his own, and it just about broke me. I mean, dude was probably just grabbing a few minutes of peace from his gigantic family or something, but I was fresh from a dramatic meltdown caused by Terry – get this – TRYING TO FILM ME ON HIS GO-PRO WHEN I DIDN’T KNOW HE WAS FILMING ME – so my emotions are aaaaalll over the place. It is not fun, trust me.

(Terry was filming me because he had the idea of making a little video for the baby – for when he’s older, obviously – showing him some snippets of our lives while we were waiting for him, and how we were getting the house ready, etc. I think this is a lovely idea: my issue – and I’m prepared to concede that it was totally a hormone-driven one – was that, so far, all of the shots of Terry have been ones that he has planned and executed, and in which he appears as “fun dad”, while all of the ones of me have shown me either in bed, with no makeup on, or looking down at my phone or something, with a furrowed brow and approximately 17 chins on display. In this particular case, I was looking at outfit photos we’d just taken, and saying, “But I don’t liiiiiikkkkee them! I look so uuuuggllleeeee!” I just don’t feel my future child will need to see that, you know? )

Also:

Snoring. GOD.

So, Terry informs me I’ve started snoring. “Like a pig,” apparently. This has actually confused me, because Terry has ALSO been snoring a lot recently, so now we each believe the other is keeping us awake with their snoring, and, well, we can’t BOTH be right, can we? Anyway, on Monday night my snoring was allegedly so bad that Terry had to go and sleep on the couch, just to get away from me. Unfortunately, he decided to wake me up to tell me he was doing this (Because he was worried I’d wake up, realise he was missing, and, I dunno, think he’d been kidnapped or something?), and he did this by standing at my side of the bed, kind of looming over me, like a character from a horror movie. I screamed the place down, then lay awake for the next five hours, so, yeah, no real need to sleep on the couch in future, Terry, just scare the crap out me and we’ll take it from there, yeah?

The solution to this problem (And I use the word “solution” in its loosest possible sense, here…) has been for us both to wear nasal strips at night. I already wear my SYLA headband to prevent sleep lines, so between that and the nose strip, I have never been more glamorous, seriously. Or more tired, now I come to think of it.

In slightly less snore-worthy news, meanwhile…

I think I finally got the “pregnancy hair”!

I’ve been noticing for a while now that my hair seemed thicker, but I was mostly attributing that to my new hair care regime (Which I’m still loving, by the way). Over the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve been finding much less hair on the floor after a blow-dry, too, so I’m thinking maybe this is IT, and that I’m finally getting to experience the thick, lustrous pregnancy hair I keep reading about, but which seemed determined to elude me.

I’m in two minds about this: on the one hand, I can’t deny that I’m really enjoying the thicker hair, obviously. On the other hand, though, when I DIDN’T get thicker hair, I thought maybe that meant I’d ALSO avoid the dreaded post-partum hair loss, and, now that I’m not shedding, I’m guessing that won’t be the case, and that, one day next year, I’ll go into the shower, and emerge bald. I am quite upset about this: in fact, I know this sounds ridiculous (I know ALL of these diary entries sound ridiculous, by the way: I mean, I might be crazy, but I’m not so far gone as to not KNOW I’m crazy. To mis-quote Justin Timberlake, I’m crazy and I know it (uh-huh)…) but I have literally – LITERALLY – been having nightmares in which I’m pulling giant chunks of hair out of the plughole, and the fact that this nightmare will likely soon be a reality is just… OMG.

Also, I kind of feel like I’m just being taunted with the thick hair now, and I’m preemptively annoyed that I’ll only get to experience it for a few weeks, and then go bald and patchy. Hey, I wonder how much hair extensions cost?

Week 30 Pregnancy Preparations:

Yes, folks, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, and, in what surely must be the biggest anti-climax this blog has ever seen, I can now exclusively reveal that WE HAVE A SHED!

Er, we also have a really scary gnome, and one day I fully expect one of our friends to ‘fess up to leaving him in our garden (Yes, Steven and Danny, I’m STILL looking at you, here…), but that’s neither here nor there, really…

See that little spade/axe thing lying next him? I WONDER WHAT HE DOES WITH THAT, HUH? HUH?!

Anyway. After the five months we’d spent waiting for this shed, in the end it was up within the space of an hour, which meant we then just had to spend the next five days or so sorting out the mess that was the rest of the house. It’s done, now, though, as is the interior of the Cupboard Under the Stairs, which is finally – FINALLY – getting to live its dream of being an ACTUAL cupboard, that you can walk into an everything, as opposed to the Gateway to Hell that it’s been for the past five years.

(I did try to record the momentous moment when the Bag for Life finally left the house, but I somehow managed to miss it. Don’t worry, though, Terry tells me he thinks it only made it as far as the shed, so it will at least still be in our lives. Or, I assume so, anyway: I had a quick look around the shed when it was built, but I’m aiming to never go back there now, because it’s Terry’s domain, and Terry has the uncanny ability to turn ALL living spaces into Gateways to Hell (Seriously, that man spends five minutes in the kitchen, and you’d think a bunch of students had broken in and thrown an all-nighter in there…) so it’s best that I just don’t know what it looks like. What happens in The Shed stays in The Shed, amiright?)

The upshot of all of this is that I finally have my house back, and seriously, it’s such a relief, I can’t even tell you. (I’m going to, though…) Once he’d filled up the shed, and cleared the cupboard under the stairs, it was like Terry was suddenly hit with some manic kind of nesting instinct, so he’s also cleared out the kitchen cupboards, his closet, and a bunch of other stuff I’ve spent the last few months nagging asking him about. I have never loved him more.

(My own nesting instinct kicked in about 5 months before I got pregnant, meanwhile, so I just got to sit there looking smug and going, “See, if you just tidied as you went, you wouldn’t be having to do all of this now!” Yes, I hate me, too…)

Anyway, as I said, it’s a big relief to have the house back in order again, and we’re almost there with the nursery, too. Speaking of which, here’s what arrived this week:

Week 30 Pregnancy Purchases:

So, my parents and Terry’s mum have both continued to keep up with a steady supply of cute baby clothes, as has my sister-in-law, Lila, and my mum also informs me that she has “found” yet another pile of muslin squares that she’d forgotten she had. So we will definitely not be struggling for muslin squares, that’s for sure.

(People keep asking me what you actually DO with muslin squares, by the way. It’s flattering that you all think I would know stuff like this, but, er, HAHA, AS IF, so here’s a handy link…)

We’ve got so many clothes now that I’m not going to be able to show them all in these roundups, but this week we also received a package of personalised baby clothes c/o Tunetoo, who basically allow you to add any amount of customisation you like, to any of their products:

Some of these are actually standard designs, created by the brand themselves, but most were the brainchild of Terry, who’s really gotten into the whole slogan thing. I have to admit, I’m not one to shy away from a slogan myself, which is one of the reasons I liked this site: some of the items we’ve picked are for 3-6 months, so the baby won’t be able to wear them right away, but I’m sure you’ll be seeing more of them when the time comes!

Finally – and, really quite excitingly – we need a new rug. Yes, another one. See, once we’d cleared out the nursery and got it painted, Terry brought the rug from our bedroom down there, just to see what it looked like. We really loved it in the nursery, but, well, we really love it where it was, too, so we figured we needed another one, which would ideally be similar, but not totally identical:

Luckily for us, Modern Rugs have come to the rescue, with the offer to send us a rug for the nursery. We have two of their rugs now (The one in my dressing room also came from there), and we really love the quality of them: which just leaves the question of which style to go for? We’ve narrowed it down to this category, as we love the geometric look, and reckon it works well with the neutral, Scandinavian style we’re going for in the nursery (Think grey, white and beige), so your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take a look at the geometric rug category, and tell us which one you’d choose for a nursery. The final choice will be revealed along with the nursery itself, and I will try my best to make it all a little more interesting than the whole “shed” fiasco, although I can’t promise anything. Rugs are WAY more fun than sheds, though, right?

Week 30 Pregnancy Fears:

The usual fears continue this week, although, given that the arrival of week 30 has made the whole thing feel a lot more real somehow, The Fear has been correspondingly intensified. And yeah, I know it shouldn’t take 30 WEEKS to realise that, hey, I’m going to have a baby, here, but because of my anxiety, and previous history of loss, I haven’t really “allowed” myself to think that this might actually HAPPEN. I still don’t really consider it “safe” to think that, to be honest, but as time goes on, the whole question of how the hell this baby is going to get out of me has been occupying more and more of my thoughts, and I’m still obsessing over the hospital stay, which TOTALLY freaks me out.

To this end, today I’m paying a visit to the maternity unit at the local hospital, to take a look round, and talk to the nurses there. I’m hoping this will alleviate some of my fears, but I’m also a bit worried that it could have the potential to add to them, instead. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Terry’s mum has spent a lot of time in hospital over the past few months, and our daily visits there while she’s been in were really triggering for me, and just served to confirm my impression of the hospital as a scary, awful place where you have zero privacy, and everything seems designed to be as isolating as awful.

This visit, though, is designed to try to reassure me that it doesn’t have to be as bad as I think it will: I’m also still having regular counselling sessions, which have so far mostly centred around trying to understand WHY I have these fears, but which will soon be moving on to what I can do about then, so hopefully that’ll help, too.

Wish me luck…