storbarnsförälder

If anything you post to a public forum starts with "I hope [the party whose information you're posting] won't mind me posting this here," you need to stop posting and start asking permission.

When Linnea hears Rob's voice, she turns to him and smiles.

She's five weeks old now.

She slept over 7 hours last night.

She has one red and one blue foot. Bathtime!

I love breastfeeding. It's lovely. It doesn't feel of much physically though.

So, it's 5 am, and apart from one almost-clear hour, I've had painless contractions regularly since 8 pm yesterday. That's 9 hours. By regularly, I mean every 20 minutes, with a couple of 10 minutes, a couple of 25 minutes, and a few 15 minute intervals. So I suppose I mean often more than regularly. All this and you want coherence too?

It's appallingly lousy timing, because whether or not this is early labour, we have a very dear friend - family, really, though not blood-related - arriving from a transatlantic flight at about 11 am today and I can't cope with the idea of another person in the house. There's me, Rob, and my mother, and that's quite enough. I especially can't cope with the idea of a female who hasn't had children in the house; I think I'm afraid of advice, since I've already had a gutful of that from people with lottle or no personal experience of living in my body, and no professional qualifications. This is unfair, because the arriving guest isn't stupid enough to give advice on a topic she knows nothing about, but I'm putting it down to hormonal paranoia.

At 2:30 am Rob called the friend's mobile and left voicemail asking her to please call before leaving the airport in case we need to make alternative arrangements, so hopefully she'll do that. I really hope she can accept the irrationality of my current state of mind; I don't want to offend her, and I still can't handle the idea of another person in the house. I also called the hospital then and told them the pattern od the contractions and they said it sounded very like early early labour, and that I wasn't a paranoid hypochondriac freak, and that I should try to doze between contractions if possible. Well, that hasn't been possible, but I'm no longer crying from the stress of it all, which I was when I called them.

I got Rob to give me his laptop and go to sleep; at least one of us ought to be partially functional, I think, or try to be. I will wake him at about 8:30 and ask him to call someone who might be able to accommodate our friend for a day or two while I work out if this baby is or isn't coming; I know I'll feel a lot better if she has an alternative place to stay, because no way can I just close my door to her - not possible. Need to sort out alternatives.

Waffle waffle. Here comes another contraction. The weird thing is, these don't hurt - but nor did fracturing 5 bones in my arms, at first. I can't trust my pain-sense to tell me when I'm in pain unless something else does too. I almost always feel pain when I see an actual wound in me, for example.

Am I making any sense? It's 5:15 am and my stomach is all sick and queasy and I haven't had any sleep and I think I'm having a baby, in a laid-back slow-movin' never-gonna-happen kind of way.

Gosh, suddenly I love my baby a whole lot more than I did a minute ago. Wow. Maybe it will be born, after all? I was beginning to think I'd just stay pregnant forever.

I think I should shut up and post this. I bet I regret it after a sleep and desperately want to delete it. I can't tell whether it reads like a drunk post or a loopy one.

Now that Rob and I have stopped moving around all the time, we can have people come to see us. We're busy in March, so it's got to be February, more or less. We're planning on an all-day snack-food party; this is our house, so there will be alcohol, but none of it is likely to be wine or beer, and most people probably won't drink any alcohol at all. There will be board games and other games, undoubtedly some geeking, and no smoking indoors. As I won't be attempting a full roast dinner, the food is almost guaranteed to be good; the main event can't be burned to a crisp.

[Poll #242407]

Well, I arrive late, of course. That goes without saying. I walk out of the changing rooms into the main pool area, prepared to peer around until I decide in which of three possible pools the class is held... But that's not necessary, because there in front of me, like ducklings, is a straggly line of bulging ladies, each bearing a long, cylindrical, flexible polystyrene float (floats are available in pink, pale green, blue, and washed-out yellow; they all look as though they've been savaged by lions and have impressive chunks ripped out of them at intervals). I, with my qualifying bulge ahead of me, join them. The instructor gets me a float too.

We get into the pool. Nobody seems to be talking to anyone else, though people have formed little groups - I can tell that those two know each other, and those two, and those three. Surely antenatal classes are places where British reserve falls apart? Doesn't look like it. I decide against smiling nervously and saying hello; it might be considered rude.

The (male) (wearing shorts and trainers and a tshirt) (with bad teeth) instructor, whose name I don't know, instructs us to straddle our floats, so that we are sitting in the U as in a particularly supportive saddle, and scissor our legs. We bob, en masse, down the pool, heads and shoulders out of the water, the ends of the floats sticking up fore and aft - nape of neck and just under the chin, really. Most awkward. Bob, bob, bob. People crash into each other intermittently. That's fine too; we make polite British noises about it.

When we have mastered scissoring motions, we move on to running motions, and strong kicks, and frog kicks (ooooh, is my hip supposed to make that noise? It's probably just as well that I started now, rather than finding out in week 35 that my knees are this bad), and even some arms motions, though the arms motions are almost all kind of pointless. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I keep overtaking people.

15 minutes of continuously moving against the water is quite tiring.

So's the next 15 minutes. Ow. He's talking about calf muscles. I don't have any calf muscles. Ow.

Then we climb out. Gravity kicks back in; it's amazing how much support a swimming pool and a polystyrene u-bend can give you. I feel like someone has dropped a bowling ball into my abdominal cavity (well goodness me, would you look at that? I look like someone has dropped a bowling ball into my abdominal cavity! My stomach muscles are gone!) and my knees ache. We get into the shallower pool, and stand straight up at the sides (this is hip-deep for everyone else, and waist-deep for me), and stretch our right legs out in front of us, and balance our right feet on the float. I have to sink my float to achieve this, and even so the float digs into my ankle and gives me pins and needles. This had better be good for me. The instructor (whose name I still don't know) claims it's stretching our lower backs; it's definitely stretching my hamstring and calf and possibly my femur, too. Swap legs. How can I stand on a leg that's fizzing away madly with pins and needles? Never mind, never mind...

Finally we get to relax, float about aimlessly, and crash into each other some more. I've managed to speak to someone - I said "This is very silly. Imagine what an anthropologist would make of it?" as we bobbed on our floats from one end of the pool to the other (she laughed, but I couldn't tell whether it was a "what a nutter!" laugh or a "what a wit!" laugh), and I said "oops, sorry," a couple of times as I crashed into people. I can tell I'm destined to be a socialite, flitting to mother and baby groups, after-playschool knitting marathons, that kind of thing.

I made the serious mistake of thanking the instructor on the way out. No-one else did. Have I ostracised myself forever?

Heavily pregnant British ladies are just as modest in communal showers as ordinary British ladies, by the way. And some of them managed to go through the whole class and shower without getting their hair or makeup wet.

After class, I felt revitalised and rejuvenated, and I made lots of necessary phonecalls before I keeled over and slept on the sofa for two hours. I'll go again next week; it's probably good for me.

Sometimes, I just have a lot of love floating around at random. I just sort of Love, undirected. It feels just like when I love someone, only without the specific someone. I'm likely to attach this feeling to any pleasant someones in my vicinity when it happens.

It's a nice feeling; it makes me grin while I walk down the street. It gives me energy. It doesn't need being loved back to maintain it, though it does fade if I get too tired or hungry.

It happens more often now that I'm pregnant. It happens often when the light is clear, rather than foggy.

Some people have been intimidated by the way I just sort of go ahead and love. Some people find the fact that I tell people that I like them, when it's clear I mean in a non-romantic way, either scary or risible. This is only briefly embarrassing, because likingness and love feel so nice that I keep doing them.

Perhaps I'm a freak.

Today I sat my exam - Open University philosophy course. I'm pretty sure I didn't fail, but I didn't do my very best either.

Also, ( small photo under here )

This is intended as an explanation of why I've been so oddly silent, rather than as a plea for sympathy, by the way.

I've been sitting at home, most days, since I got back from Ireland. I had a lot of fairly draining emotional stuff to process, and I have been a bit ill too (stress-induced stomach problems, mostly).

My life has been busy enough that when a friend met me in town and said "Congratulations!" it took me ages to realise that he meant the wedding, because two months seems like forever ago.

I have an assignment - the last one before my exam - due on Friday. I have decided to do the easy one, which covers material I've already studied to some extent, rather than the one which would require me to read a whole 'nother textbook. Now I need to decide to start work on it.

I keep waking in the middle of the night really, really hungry, between 4 and 4:30 am. I can't cook without feeling nauseous, which means that Rob has been doing all the cooking - yes, including toast, sometimes - and I can't eat very much at a sitting. I've been eating 6 snacks a day, on average, including something just before going to bed. I still wake in the middle of the night feeling hungry.

This waking at night is tedious, because I can't sleep unless I'm exhausted, and I'm not exhausted after 4 hours of sleep; I'm slightly refreshed. So I then sit up for a while waiting to feel tired again. My schedule is all out of whack.

Writing about myself has been tiring too. It's usually enjoyable. Hopefully when I'm better it'll all be back to normal, insofar as that is possible.

I'm off to Aran tomorrow. I'll be gone until Sunday 24th. I'm also going to try to quit smoking.

Wish me luck!

I received a delivery from PJ minerals Ltd and proceeded to make four necklaces. Eventually there may be photos. The first one was 14 inches long, mostly blue. The next one was 17 inches long, mostly green (including some great beads that look black until the light shines on them). Then I went for broke, decided tostop being so stingy with my beads, and made one 24 inches long in shades of brown and amber. And then I realised that I had some interesting read beads I'd hardly used yet and made a red one 16.5 inches long.

I feel very satisfied, and want to order more beads and make more things. Perhaps I should order some elastic and make some bracelets to match.

The only snag is that I don't actually wear jewellery very much. Ho hum. Perhaps I'll start.