Pregnancy announcement

It is with great joy that Steve and I are able to announce that we are expecting a child, due in October.

This is a wanted baby, and a very carefully planned one. Without going into too many gory details, it's been a bit of a long and turbulent journey getting here. But worth it - although I still reserve the right to occasionally sound off about how tired/sore/fat I'm feeling! Just take it as a given that no matter what else I say, I'm also feeling fortunate, happy, and excited.



So, this is 14 weeks, out of a potential 40 +/-2 weeks, which means we're a third of the way there and safely out of the high-risk miscarriage zone. While there's no such thing as a guarantee, our risk has plummeted into the tiny-fractions-of-percents and we can feel confident that by November we'll be a family of three.

That said, it sometimes feels a little bit abstract at the moment. On an intellectual level I understand what's going on, and I can look at my scan pictures and my maternity notes and see that everything is just as it should be, confirmed and verified in multiple ways. But as an issue of belief, I'm kind of struggling to believe that we've finally been that lucky and that I won't wake up tomorrow and it not be true.

You see, during the first trimester there wasn't really much doubt about whether I was pregnant or not. All things considered I didn't have a particularly bad time, but the symptoms were definitely there, more or less all the time. My boobs were growing, my mood and appetite were all over the place, I was feeling (although thankfully not really being) sick most of the time, and of course the tiredness goes without saying. I could feel that I was pregnant.

Now, the baby is properly anchored in, the placenta is up and running, I've got used to the bigger boobs, and everything has become much easier than it was a month ago. But at the same time, I don't yet have a pregnancy bump to speak of, I'm still wearing all the same jeans I was wearing last year, and I can't feel any movements yet.

Trying to remember that the little wriggling creature they showed me on the screen is actually doing all that wriggling inside me, and it's not microscopic or anything, it's already more than 8cm long from crown to rump, and my uterus is the size of a grapefruit, and I definitely didn't dream it... feels weird, in a "who am I trying to convince?" kind of way.

The other problem with the current lack of bump is that there's this hormone called relaxin, which loosens up the muscles, joints and ligaments in the pelvis and stomach area so that everything can get out of the way of the growing uterus. My relaxin is doing a brilliant job, which means that what muscle tone I had around my stomach has just gone blup. It's not that I was very fit beforehand, I was overweight and I know that, but this just looks like I ate way too much pizza. Glamorous it is not.



Nevertheless, this picture has to exist so that the proper-bump ones over the next few months have something to be compared to!