After spending the first half of the pregnancy moaning about how slow time was passing, I know actually want to weep at how quickly the weeks are flying by. I am very behind on these weekly updates because I just don’t seem to have the time or energy to write them (note to self: stop committing to weekly blog posts, you already know you can’t hack it).
So, according to the Ovia app, the baby is now the size of a foam finger. Aren’t they massive?! I’m imagining the one Joey has in Friends. How can the baby possibly be that big and how is it ever meant to squeeze out if it’s the size of a foam finger?!
Week 31 started off all about the sweating. You know what’s a nice idea, summer birthdays. Ah, garden parties and bouncy castles in the garden and scavenger hunts. Yeah, it all sounds dreamy. It’s not worth it though. I don’t care how much this baby loves the summer birthday parties of the future, it will never have been worth the horror of being pregnant on a hot summer’s day. I pretty much have one summer top that fits so I was doing a lot of washing during week 30, so that was fun. Luckily, the sun eventually caved and the rain came pouring down to the relief of heavily pregnant women everywhere. I’m not even sorry, I loved the rain. It is nice to have a wet face and know it is not sweat.
Friday brought with it another midwife appointment. After hardly seeing the midwife at all during the first two trimesters, it now feels like I’m there all the time. They took blood at my 28 week appointment and I had a phonecall from the surgery a few days later telling me I was mildly anaemic. I was told I needed to go in and get a prescription for iron tablets which I did, but I never picked them up because it seemed totally unnecessary. Instead, I simply started taking my antenatal vitamins again, it turns out these contain iron which explains a few things. Anyway, I say simply but actually, my antenatal vitamins taste like absolute ass so it is not simple at all and I often end up throwing them up. But I made sure to eat plenty of kale and nuts and lentils to boost my iron supply, all the whilst feeling like a terrible vegan for being mildly anaemic.
I was expecting them to take bloods again this week to check whether my levels had gone up, but they didn’t because it turns out I was never mildly anaemic. My iron levels are completely fine, good, even. I don’t need to supplement at all. Clearly my doctor is not so great with numbers and a bit trigger happy when it comes to prescriptions. To be honest, the whole thing has really annoyed me. Luckily, I’m the sort of person who ignores medical advice, but had I taken the prescribed iron tablets, I’d probably have been suffering from some unpleasant side effects for absolutely no reason. This is bad doctoring, no?
The student midwife measured my bump and said the baby is on course to be about the same size as Ebony (was when she was born, not now. Though now I come to think of it, the student midwife didn’t actually specify that. Sob). We chatted a bit about the birth, I think I’ve decided to invest in a cheap hot tub that I can use at home. I had a hot tub for Ebony’s birth and thought it was wonderful in every way. You can’t rent them anymore though because there were a few cases globally of babies contracting legionnaires disease from rented heated birthing pools. Obviously, that’s not a risk if the hot tub is new and isn’t filled in advance, so I have decided that I should buy a cheap hot tub to use for the birth. It will be more expensive than hiring a birthing pool, but I figure, you only give birth a few times in your life, I shouldn’t be afraid to spend on money on making that experience perfect.
I’ve started feeling a little more uncomfortable this week, I think the baby must be going through a growth spurt because my bump feels like it is stretching sometimes. I feel slightly terrified that there isn’t much room left in there so I don’t know how I will house another nine weeks of growth. I’ve had a bad taste in my mouth again this week which seems to appear whenever I eat anything. I can’t imagine there will be much enamel left on my teeth after this pregnancy.
I am aware that time is slipping away now and I really need to hurry up and get things sorted for the new baby. We haven’t been up in the loft yet to dig out the old baby things, so hopefully we’ll get round to that soon. I remember when I was pregnant with Ebony I felt a desperate urge to have things ready and feel sorted. I don’t seem to have that this time, I spend more time worrying about house and work stuff than I do about whether we’ll get round to sewing new tabs on the washable nappies in time.
