Also, I forgot to mention, I have a guest post up over at Jenni’s today! She’s just about to give birth to her second baby any moment now. Unfortunately, after planning a home birth, her baby flipped breech in late November and has since refused to turn. She is now 40w5 days pregnant and OH so ready to be done.
Head on over to read about my stresses for giving birth to #2 (which incidentally, is only 6 weeks away now).
AND… it’s only 14 more sleeps until Christmas. Are you panicking yet?
Right, so Monday I had an appointment first with my midwife and then later that afternoon, with a physiotherapist specialising in pregnancy.
The baby is fine, still measuring quite small, but the midwife is confident that he is healthy, just a little below average. Honestly, as the person who is intending on pushing this baby out through my vagina, smaller than average suits me fine. Amy was ‘smaller than average’ and yet she was a completely healthy weight. I have been told not to expect a baby any bigger than Amy and really, I can deal with that. Healthy is all I care about.
Plus, I have enough clothes in the teeny sizes to not really want a huge baby.
The physio was … interesting. It was meant to be a class, only the other girl booked didn’t show up.
According to the physio, all my pelvic and hip pain stems from the fact that the right side of my pelvis has twisted anterior, while the left side of my pelvis is normal. She realigned my pelvis and then gave me a sex-ay pelvic brace to wear to keep everything in position.
So.
We talked a little about my CFS and the condition of my muscles and joints which are in her words ‘the worst muscles and joints I have ever felt’. Apparently all my joints and the muscles/ligaments holding them together are very weak and not in great condition.
Even better? She doesn’t think that any of this is related to my pregnancy at all, she feels that it is all related to my “CFS” and has been aggravated by my pregnancy.
My CFS was never ‘formally’ diagnosed. It was what my GP told me I had after 2 years of tests and bloods showed nothing conclusive. It was what everything boiled down to when I was still sick and nothing could be found.
I got put in the ‘too hard’ basket.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome though, generally has disappeared between 2-5 years after the onset. This February I will have been sick for 7 years without any change.
A while ago when Mum blogged about everything, Bendy Girl emailed Mum to ask if I had ever been tested for Ehlers Danlos Syndrome [I hadn’t] because my symptoms sounded very similar to EDS. We never thought that much about it because my joint pain and other issues were always talked about as secondary to my fatigue and nausea.
However, with the Physio having said what she did, it brought EDS back into something that may be a possibility.
I went and did some research into the symptoms of EDS and wouldn’t you believe it, I agree with just about every symptom.
I can do this with my wrist
And this is my foot when I sit on the floor with my legs extended and foot relaxed.
Yes, I curled my toes up, it’s cold here today and I had to take my socks off to photograph. Heh.
I can also do this, but I can’t photograph while I do it, so I stole this photo from Bendy’s site.
At this stage, I’m still speculating and worrying, but coupled with everything else, it seems like it could be a possibility, especially as almost every photo I have seen of EDS causes me to say ‘but I can do that too’.
So, I’m off to my GP Friday to see what he has to say and to get a referral to a specialist who knows about these kind of disorders.
And frankly? The whole thing scares me.
Well, here are my 33 week photos (33+1 if you are counting down as assiduously as I am), taken stretchmarks and all. I figure that taking the shots with a t-shirt covering my belly seems to give a skewed view of how big (or small, depending on who you are) I am.
Prior to the photos, lets all talk about stretchmarks.
I got hardly any stretchmarks on my belly when I was pregnant with Amy. The one or two I did get all appeared in the 2 days before I gave birth to her, so post partum I was pretty much stretchmark free. On my belly at least. My breasts? Well let’s just say that I’m was counting the stripes of real skin left on them by the time I gave birth to her.
If you are considering not breastfeeding because you are worried about what it will do to your breasts, I am here to tell you – Do not be such an arse! Pregnancy changes your tits heaps more than breastfeeding ever will. If nothing else, breastfeeding at least left me comfortable with my post baby boobs because god knows I had them out of my top more than they were ever in it.
The rest of me didn’t escape unscathed either, I got stretchmarks behind my knees (seriously what is up with that? My legs didn’t gestate a baby) and all over my hips and bum. I even got 3 very pretty ones right at the base of my spine. You know that spot where all the teenage girls are getting tattoos done? Yep, right there. Oh the sexy. Hehe.
But even in all my stretchmarkiness, I was proud of the fact my tummy was mostly unscathed.
Then I got pregnant with a second baby.
And now? I’m laughing at my old self the whole time I rub Vitamin E cream into my belly.
Every single stretchmark I have on my belly now has generated from one I got with Amy. Most of them I didn’t even know I had prior to them growing. This time around my tummy is looking less than unscathed, but my boobs? Well they must have been stretched to their limits already because I’m not seeing anything new appearing there.
Let’s not talk about the backs of my legs though. Let’s just say I doubt I will be barelegged in public for a long long time. Stockings all the way baby.
Anyway, I digress. I promised photos right?
Here you go!
I think I’m covering the worst of them with my hand. Not to mention I still have another 7 weeks to go! To be honest, I’m not in the slightest bit worried about them, except for the fact that they itch like a motherfucker and who wants to be wandering around in public scratching themselves? Not me. I’m using lots of moisturizing cream, but it doesn’t seem to help the itching. Next step? Amy’s all natural eczema cream. Just as soon as I find whereabouts it has been put.
The other side, minus my hand. I took this one by myself using the mirror in the bedroom to see what I was doing. Nathan gets the photo credit for the one with my head in it.
Hmmm, I seem to have stretchmarks I haven’t even seen yet. God knows that I can’t see my vagina anymore. Which leads me to my next bit of advice. If you can’t see something FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT TRY AND SHAVE IT. Not unless your razor has guidewires (my new one doesn’t). Not unless you want to be wishing for soothing aloe cream every single time you pee for the next 24 hours.
Thank me later, okay?
Oh and my gorgeous daughter. How could I not throw in a photo of her?
She is completely unimpressed by the idea of me having a baby. She refuses to look at my stomach anymore and won’t even let me talk about the baby. Any mentions of a baby brother or a baby in my belly are met with an adamant SHHHHH Mummy! and her pulling my top down to tell me ‘All done!’.
Poor kid, her world is going to be blown apart. Hehe. I think she will cope quite well with it though, she is reasonably gentle with other people’s babies and has only just decided to take issue with her cousin since her cousin learnt to walk – her cousin just turned 1.
Apparently babies are okay when they are lump like and useless. Walking talking babies who take the attention away from Miss I’m The Centre Of The Universe? Not so much. Probably a good thing that we will have a few months of crying lumpdom for Amy to get used to her brother.
In other pregnancy news (aka – how I’m feeling news) I have an apointment with a physiotherapist this coming week in order to try and address my pelvic pain that makes rolling over in bed/putting socks/underwear/pants/shoes on/walking etc excruciating. Most days I am okay and can function, but some days all I want to do is sit with a heat pack on my pelvis and never move again. The Midwife is hopeful that the Physio will be able to suggest something. Personally I think the only thing that is going to fix it will be giving birth, but that’s neither here nor there. I plan to ask the physio about my separated tummy muscles and how to help them heal or reattach to each other or whatever they need to do to be normal again after the baby comes.
[Coming to a pregnant woman near you, ALIEN BELLY BUTTONS! Feel your baby kick with just a thin layer of skin and uterine muscle between you! Freak your partner out by asking him to press your belly button and him feeling nothing behind it! Try to convince your gestating baby that your belly button is NOT the exit and he should not kick you there! Good times my friends, good times. You can have all this and more when your stomach muscles separate during pregnancy too!]
The baby continues to be completely ambivialent about what position he lays in. He’s mostly head down, but sort of sideways and sometimes he spins in circles before stopping to hiccup and kick me in the bladder. He seems to enjoy long sucks on his toes and wiggling just enough to stop me falling asleep. I anticipate that I’m not going to sleep the whole night through for another 2 years, but hey, my blog isn’t called Sleepless Nights for nothing.
[And before you ask, no Amy does not sleep through the night regularly. We maybe get 2 nights a week where she doesn’t sleep too badly, but mostly I am up to her 1-2 times a night for nightmares or thirstiness or just plain needing mummy. We’re getting there though]
So really, that just about sums up the last few weeks. We’re planning on moving the bedrooms around this weekend so that Nathan and I have a bedroom that a cot will actually fit into and god knows I’m starting to feel antsy about getting things together. I want Amy to see the cot and get used to it so that it isn’t a big deal later. Plus with Christmas coming in the very middle of the next 7 weeks (actually it’s 20 days away, but who is counting) I expect that January 22nd will roll around incredibly fast.
We aren’t buying gifts for anyone this Christmas except for Amy.
Now just let me read that sentence over again while I wait for the guilt to subside.
It’s taken me a while – and lots of whinging to Nathan – to come to terms with why I alternately feel compelled to not buy for anyone except our daughter and then within the same moment, feel incredibly guilty that we aren’t buying for anyone else.
Part of our decision came down to money. Nathan and I both have large families and to buy for everyone just ends up much too expensive for us.
It doesn’t help that I am notoriously tight with money, taking a long time to actually make a decision to buy anything big (it took weeks of contemplating a Dyson before I was ready to say ‘Yes, let’s buy one’ and then we bought it with money we had put away).
The other part of our decision came down to my annoyance with the commercialisation of Christmas. I don’t want to spend every year trying to outdo myself with gifts and decorations. I don’t want or need that kind of stress. I don’t want people to expect anything from me except good food and company, because good food and company I can always do.
I don’t want to make myself crazy making sure that no one is forgotten.
It’s much easier just to remember Amy.
Much easier.
I will still be making biscuits and truffles, wrapping them in cellophane and giving them for gifts. I will still be making something to take to Nan’s for Christmas lunch.
So really, everyone will still be getting gifts, they just won’t be getting things I have bought. Instead, it will be things I have made with my own two hands and sometimes I wonder if that is enough.
Common sense tells me that of course it is enough, but I worry that I will go to all the effort of making these things – while 9 months pregnant – only to have them pale in comparision of gift wrapped stuff from shops.
Am I being stupid? Probably.
But that doesn’t change anything, I’m still not buying presents regardless of how conflicted I feel about it.
What are you doing for Christmas? What are your plans for gift giving? Who do you normally buy for?
If you don’t celebrate Christmas I would be even more interested to know what you do celebrate. How do you deal with a holiday season that seems completely skewed towards a Christian holiday? Do you mind me asking?
(I’m not a religious person by any means, Christmas for me is about good food and good company and a tree and tinsel, not so much about the religious significance.)
Now I know that I have been neglecting this blog terribly, but really, is that any reason for over 50 people to unsubscribe? Really?
Hmmph.
I will try and get something of substance up later today, okay? Just bear with me here.