30 weeks

Today feels like a massive milestone. I am officially 30 weeks and now on the downhill run!

I am so glad to finally be here. The 20s seemed to have dragged on for so long but now, I think the 30s will fly by. I’ve got the next 9 weeks broken up into small milestones:

• 30 weeks – finish work and have the last of my 4 weekly obstetrician appointments where we will hopefully get confirmation of the caesarean date
• 32 weeks – Sticky will reach the next stage of “viability” which means if I go into labour from this point I won’t have to go to another hospital
• 33 weeks – baby shower (yes, I have only just decided to have a very small gathering thanks to a fabulous friend offering to hold it for me) and baby first-aid course
• 34 weeks – all baby stuff has to be completed (this is my cut off date where all the baby shopping and nursery planning needs to be done by)
• Christmas
• 38 weeks – my last appointment with the obstetrician before Sticky arrives
• 39 weeks – Sticky’s birthday.

So there you go,  that’s the next 9 weeks of my life planned out. I’m not going to break it down anymore than that because I don’t want to freak myself out. That’s enough for me to have a few things to look forward to and some achievements to work towards.

My husband and I had some wake-up calls over the weekend to what the demands of parenthood will bring us. Firstly, we woke up on Saturday morning to find I had a bad cold and he had a tummy bug. We were not in a good shape and had to think about whether we would go to baby class or not. In the end, we both decided to go.

It was a struggle to sit there for 3 hours but it was a good class. This is a pic of my husband with our seudo baby ready to go! As we walked in, I noticed another woman had her Cabbage Patch Kid too! We both smiled at each other and I wondered if she had gone through the cleaning extravaganza I had!  

We practiced putting the nappy on and swaddling, what to do with a crying baby and how to hold and bath the baby. It was a good refresher for me. The other interesting thing was the instructor telling us that babies don’t look like the “Johnson and Johnson baby” when they pop out. They can have a range of strange looking things on various parts of their body, some of which I knew – “stork marks” which are red blemishes on the back of the neck or face, milk spots which are white pimple looking things on their face, rashes and misshapen heads from the delivery. Some I had never heard of such as “Mongolian spots” which can look like bruises, discharge or bleeding from a girl’s vagina or swelling of a boy’s scrotum. The point of running through these things was to let us know that it was normal for a baby to have any of these things - they are all due to the hormones in their system and will dissipate over a few weeks.

By the time we got home we were exhausted. I quickly realised that when you’re run down, exhausted and have a head that feels like it’s going to explode, it’s very easy to become quite irritable. I thought about adding a newborn to this situation and realised what we will soon be in for. Overall, we handled it pretty well. We looked after each other, put in our strength when we had it and let the other rest when they needed to. But, I think the greatest lesson was learning that there will come a time when we just have to suck it up and keep going. Sticky won’t care if we’re feeling sick and need to lay down, or one of us needs to hand her to the other to make an emergency dash to the bathroom or our noses are red and swollen. She will just look to us to provide her with what she needs, and as parents, meeting her needs will be our job, no matter how we feel.  

This weekend also taught me how lucky I am to be finishing work now. I am so appreciative of the fact that financially we can afford it and my work is supportive. Physically, the last few weeks have been tough so I am very much looking forward to having some time to just rest up and take it easy before Sticky arrives. I must be conscious not to over do it in my time off by getting too involved in activities which would of course negate the very reason I am finishing work early. But, I realise how exhausted I am, how much my body aches and how much I need to take some time out. Basically, this will be the last 9 weeks for quite sometime where I will have some time to myself to rest up. I better make the most of it!