32 weeks

Pregnancy: 32 weeks 1 day
Total weight gain: 13kg (28.66lbs – it sounds so much better in kg’s!)
Baby size: 28cm (11.02in) head to butt
Baby weight: 1.7kg (3.75lb)

Aaron and I have decided to use cloth nappies (well, Aaron doesn’t really want to be shaking poo into the toilet instead of just folding up a disposable nappy, but I said he could take off the nappy, then give it to me). Aaron was asking me how much we would save this way, so, bored at work one day, I decided to do a comparison. The cheapest bulk buy disposables I could find came out at 31 cents per nappy, which on average would cost about $1355 per year, times 2 years (I’m not quite sure when you start potty training, but we’ll go with 2 years to make things easier…) = $2710. Then of course, when you have another baby, you need to pay all of that again. My preferred brand of cloth nappies (the fitted, absorbent, waterproof outer layer, soft inner layer, with moisture catching inserts kind), Pea Pods, are $499 for 25 of them (including inserts, etc.), which accommodate baby from newborn to 9 months. Then you get another kit for the same price, which accommodates 9 months to 3 years (in case you have a very large baby, or a slow learner…). Total $998. Of course, you then get to use the same nappies for your next child(ren). I haven’t factored in washing costs, mainly because I can’t be bothered, but also because I have no idea how much money a load of washing costs. Detergent is pretty cheap, and you only need to wash them in half strength detergent, and we don’t pay for water, it is included in the rent, then I will hang them on the line to dry. So, I can’t see the washing costing $1700 over 2 years. I’m pretty sure we don’t pay that much for electricity for 2 years of electricity as it is.

We went to our Antenatal class as usual on Thursday. This time, we learned about pain relief options and techniques. The teacher brought in a TENS machine (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) and let us try it out. When it got around to me, I put it on my arm (in labour you put it on your lower back, but the arm is easier for a trial), pushed the button, and turned the dial. I felt absolutely nothing. I kept turning. Nothing. I turned it all the way up, and still nothing. I was beginning to think there was something seriously wrong with me. Then someone realised that the machine had come unhooked from the pads attached to my arm. Relief, nothing wrong with me after all. I plugged it back in, turned it on, and startled every single person in the class when I jumped so far out of my seat I almost hit the ceiling. I didn’t know I could jump that high. Usually I can’t jump very well at all (height wise, I’m sure I could cover some ground if I wanted to). I forgot to turn the dial back down to minimum output before plugging it back in…. It didn’t hurt, but boy did it startle me (and everyone else)! Later in the class we had big posters that we had to fill out as groups. One poster for each type of pain relief, with the pros and cons for mother, and for baby. One cheeky group put risk of electrocution – like Sheri, as a negative for the TENS machine. We are going to hire one of these contraptions, so at least I’ve learned what not to do with it!

The hospital also wanted us to know the full weight of making the decision to get an epidural. One nice male volunteer had to go before the class and don a lovely “sympathy belly.” Anyone who has seen ’10 Things I Hate About You’ has seen one of these. The weighted vest with boobs and pregnant belly. Male Volunteer (can’t remember his name at the moment) then had to sit in a chair while teacher told us everything that happens when you get an epidural, complete with mock IV lines, etc. By the end, I was determined not to have an epidural even more. Not only do you have the epidural itself (which is a hideously large hollow needle that, surprise!, has a tube inside that stays in your spine (well, not actual spine, but just outside the spinal column) so they can top it up), but you will also need a catheter (as you can’t feel your lower self, and therefore can’t feel your bladder and may well wee all over yourself, the bed, and everyone else), an I.V, and maybe something else too (I can’t remember). Male Volunteer looked rather like a science experiment by the time everything was attached. There were tubes and things everywhere. Not only that, but they actually passed around an epidural needle. How to really really scare a pregnant woman: show her an epidural needle!!! OH MY was that thing GINORMOUS!!! Teacher (can’t remember her name either…) said we should all have a plan in place before labour and tell our partners our wishes. I told Aaron to only let me have an epidural if I was screaming for one, and we had tried every other possible pain relief method (TENS, bath, position, massage, gas, morphine (they don’t use pethadine anymore), etc.), and was still screaming for one. I figure if that is the case, then I must really really need one. There is no other possible way I want all those needles anywhere near me (unless I have to have a Caesar, then I don’t really want to have my belly cut open without one. I think that would be far worse…).

On a better note, I tried the slow cooker (or crockpot for you americans) for the first time last week. I had my reservations, but I think my chicken stroganoff turned out quite tasty. It was so easy too; mix everything up, put it in, go about your daily business, then dish it up 5-6 hours later. Easiest home made dinner ever! I think it will come in very useful when Mushi is born.

Speaking of Mushi, his/her favourite new position seems to be foot in my right rib. It is rather uncomfortable, but at the same time, I still like feeling him move, to know that he is still alive and doing well in there. There’s nothing like feeling your baby moving around in your uterus. It’s also fun to feel my belly with my hand while he is moving. Then I can feel it from the inside and out. I can push on most of my belly which will be relatively pushable, then I come to a foot or elbow or something, and it is very hard. Aaron also likes to feel Mushi moving. It was quite comical when he decided to turn from head up to head down. My whole belly was moving every which way for a good 10 minutes. Aaron was there to witness it too. I didn’t know what Mushi was doing at the time, but realised later that he was correcting his breech position. As I said before: Good baby.

30 weeks

Pregnancy: 30 weeks 1 day
Total weight gain: scale ran out of batteries…. check next week
Baby size (head to butt): 27cm (10.62in)
Baby weight: 1.3kgs (2.86lbs)

It’s crazy to think that in 7-10 weeks (considered “full term at 37 weeks, but due date is calculated at 40 weeks), we will have a little baby. That is really not that long. I’m kind of freaking out, we haven’t picked up the crib, bassinet, or pretty much anything else yet!! We need to get on that ASAP so I can nest in Mushi’s room and get it all ready. Yesterday Aaron and I walked up the road to a baby shop (pre-loved, new, and hire) and had a look around. We bought a really cute little Noah’s Ark puzzle toy. It even has some hebrew (I think that is what it is, Trish told me, but I can’t remember if it was hebrew or greek or whatever other ancient language the Noah’s Ark part of the bible is written in) on written on it. The artist musn’t have done his research too carefully though as in the background of the magnetic portion of the toy is another smaller fishing type boat. I’m pretty sure the bible says there was only the Ark floating around during the flood, and not random little fishing boats as well, but we’ll overlook that… the toy is cute anyway.

A month of so ago, Aaron shared a photo from his RSS feed (um… Internet reader thingy, no idea what it stands for) that showed photos of funny mobile phone towers see them here http://waynesword.palomar.edu/faketree.htm). It seems these days they are trying to make them inconspicuous by fashioning them to look like trees. They still look pretty fake though. When we moved, I was waiting for the bus to work when I spotted a funny looking tree behind the petrol station. After studying it for a few minutes, I determined that said tree was indeed a mobile phone tower. There is no way that plasticy looking tree was real. I kept telling Aaron to look out for it because it was so funny, but he came back saying he couldn’t see a cell phone tower tree. Hmmm…. Finally, when we were driving back from Penrith this weekend, I noticed some other trees that looked just like the cell phone tower tree, which did make me feel a little bit silly. Turns out, it’s not a cell phone tower tree at all, but a real tree. In my defense, it doesn’t look like all the gum trees surrounding it, and it does look very plasticy. Note to brain: after baby is born, please work properly again. At least I was amused for a week.

Oh, FYI, the bowls were in the cupboard of our old place, I did forget to pack them. They are nicely in the cupboards of our new place now.

The other day, I was making a roast dinner (roast chicken, potatoes, sweet potato and corn). The chicken had been in the oven for an hour, so it was time to put in the potatoes. I grabbed the oven mitts off the fridge (they have magnets at the top to hold them on the fridge), and took the pan out of the oven. I took off the oven mitts and put them on the counter. I would need them to put the chicken back in the oven. After putting the potatoes in the pan with the chicken (they taste so darn good when cooked in the chicken juice!), I put the mitts back on and was about a millimetre from touching the pan. To my horror, I realised that I wasn’t wearing the oven mitts at all, but instead, I donned the bright pink, melt to your skin if you touch a hot pan, dish gloves that were sitting on the edge of the sink next to the oven mitts. Oh that was close. The absentminded baby brain at work again!

Thursday we had our third antenatal class. We got to go on a tour of the delivery suites. Luckily, the birthing rooms are all single occupant. I don’t have to push a human being out of me while listening to someone cursing loudly while also pushing a human being out right next to me. You can adjust the lighting to make it darker in there, play CDs, have some snacks, use the shower or bath. There’s even a sofa to sit on. The bed itself goes into wacky positions so you can squat on it, make it look like a giant throne. There is an exercise ball and mats if I want to kneel on the floor over the ball or something. I can pretty much give birth in whatever position I darn well feel like. That’s good, I’d rather not lay on my back with my feet in the stirrups (it makes labour more difficult and makes you tear easier). The rooms are also very noise proof so if I scream bloody murder, no one on the outside will hear me. I’m hoping it won’t come to that…. If the baby needs oxygen or extra warmth or something, there is a special crib in the room. There is no nursery, the baby stays with you. Unless of course, it needs intensive care, there is a special ward for that. I was quite annoyed about what they said about water births though. I was told during all of my check ups at the hospital that a water birth is fine at RNS as long as I was in one of the rooms with a bath (2 of them do not have baths, the rest do). They never told me that it also depends on which midwives are on duty. You can only have a proper water birth if there is a midwife on duty who is accredited with such things, and not all of them are. I much would have preferred it if they told me that to begin with instead of just saying no problem and writing water birth on my yellow card. It’s not so bad though, even if no accredited midwives are on duty, I can still be in the bath right up until it’s time for the baby to come out. That’s ok I guess, just not as good as actually having Mushi in the water and then pulling him/her out (of the water) myself. This of course also depends on if I can have a natural birth anyway. I still have to have an ultrasound (at 32, 34, or 36 weeks, I can’t remember which) to determine if my placenta has moved up. If not, I will have to have a C-section. I’d much rather push a human being out of me then have a c-section any day.

The door to the delivery suite used to be on street level so cars could drive straight up to it and the labouring women could go straight in. They no longer do that though. Over zealous husbands used to accidentally run the car through the doors in their frantic “oh no, my wife is in labour, must get her to hospital” panic. Now the new maternity ward is not on ground level and you need to take an elevator to it. Probably for the best. I hear they had to replace the doors way too many times.

The Jess and I are having an audition to be on Ready Steady Cook on Wednesday, so wish us luck!

29 weeks

Pregnancy: 29 weeks 2 Days
Total weight gain: not sure, too busy packing, moving and unpacking….
Baby size (head to butt): 26cm (10.23in)
Baby weight: 1.15kgs (2.53lbs)

Just a word of warning with this post: If something doesn’t make any sense at all, or if I’m rambling about anything or nothing, it is because I’m very very tired from working like a mad woman packing/moving/unpacking for the last week. I know I should have a rest, but there are things to be done darn it! Aaron said to me yesterday “you know you only work 4 hours per day because you are pregnant and need a rest right?” Me: “Yes, but I NEED to unpack everything!” Apparently I don’t understand that things don’t all have to be done at once, and can take my time. I’ll work on that. My feet are still swollen from all the packing (I packed while Aaron was at work), and unpacking (again while Aaron is at work), but the sleep last night helped. I’ll have a nice bath and a nap (not at the same time of course…) when I get home.

Our new place is lovely (can’t remember if I told you about it last week, so here we go again if I did. Sorry). Wait, I think I did describe it last week, so I won’t do it again. I could just look at the blog for myself, but I can’t be bothered. We did find out that there are lots of cockroaches in our new place. Had we found this out when we first got the keys, we could have roach bombed it, but now it’s too late. I don’t want to be breathing in fumes that kill things. I don’t think Mushi would appreciate that very much! The cans say you can re enter a room after 2 hours, but of course, the can doesn’t allow for paranoid pregnant women. Instead, we put out a lure’n’kill in every room. They seem to be doing the job quite nicely (although a lot slower then the bomb). I spent all day last Friday scrubbing the inside of the cupboards which were filled with roach dander and poo, as well as more spiders then I think I’ve seen my entire life. Not poisionous ones (I don’t think anyway. They looked like daddy longleggs to me. Oh dear, I just spelled leg with 2 gg’s. Special…).

Yesterday I unpacked pretty much everything that was left to unpack (Aaron and I got a lot of it done on Sunday, and I got the kitchen pretty much done on Saturday). After unpacking every single box, I discovered a problem. Where are all the bowls? I’m not talking about just the small bowls, or just the large ones, I’m talking about every single bowl that we own (apart from the one that was in the dishwasher that I remembered to bring last minute). How do you lose an entire large box full of bowls? I looked in the car, in every room of the house, everywhere, but still, the bowls are nowhere to be seen. So how do you lose a box full of bowls? Well, you get a pregnant woman to do the packing, that’s how. I’m pretty sure I forgot to pack them at all. I think they are still sitting happily in the cupboard at the old unit. I thought I remembered packing them, and was adamant that I had. But then, I really thought about it, and my memory was putting the large fruit bowl stacked with the other large bowls after washing it. I was assuming that was stacking it in a box, but the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it was the cupboard and not a box. Darn pregnancy brain! Luckily I’m going there today for the final inspection, so I can have a look. Unluckily, I will have to explain to the real estate agent why there is a cupboard full of bowls, and that I will need to keep my keys for one extra day to get said bowls when Aaron returns home from work. I can’t exactly lug an entire box of bowls on the bus (or on the walk to the bus).

We had our second antenatal class on Thursday. The infamous knitted uterus made it’s first appearance, complete with fake back, and knitted placenta and umbilical cord. I hope that’s not what my uterus actually looks like (or baby for that matter!). We were given some homework as well, a photocopied sheet of a crying baby. Now we should have done the homework straight away, but of course, we didn’t. I can’t remember now if we are supposed to list reasons why babies cry, or what to do when they do cry. If we chose one and then it turns out to be the other, we are going to look very silly indeed.

Quite a few nights last week Mushi was having his party at 3am. I think he was trying to reproduce the get down tonight video from YouTube (see below). That’s what it feels like anyway.

That’s all for now, see you (well, write) next week!

28 weeks

Pregnancy: 28 weeks 1 Day
Total weight gain: 9 Kilos (but the bump and baby are bigger. Maybe the ass has gotten smaller??)
Baby size: 25cm 9.84in (head to butt)
Baby weight: 1 Kilo (2.2lbs)

Since being pregnant, I have seen the inside of my belly button for the very first time. Before pregnancy, my belly button was just a slit (which I covered with a piercing because I didn’t like it). Now though, the inside is about to become the outside. For a short while, I had a normal belly button, open, but with the inside nicely inside. Currently my belly button looks like something that should be used for target practise. There’s the normal outside of the belly button, making the first ring of the target, but then comes the bullseye – I have quite a large freckle right in the middle of the inside of my belly button (which is nearly the outside now, making it look like a bullseye). So as if having a temporary outie isn’t bad enough, my temporary outie looks like it’s looking at you. I might have already told you about my crazy freckle, and if so, I apologise…I have the baby brain.

The other week I went to put something in the microwave, and something caught my eye, making me let out an involuntary little scream (I am a girl, what can I say). On closer inspection, I could see the offending movement was none other then a cockroach, the first one we have seen inside our apartment (oops, I lie, it was the second). This one though, was very unusual. This one is residing in between the outside glass and the don’t-let-the-microwaves-through mesh in our microwave. Now for the bigger issue here: How did said cockroach get there? The mesh is far too small for even a baby cockroach to get through, or an egg for that matter (they are about the size of sunflower seeds with the shell on). There is no opening between the glass and the mesh, nothing is out of place. He musn’t be able to get out either because he still lives there. That is right, we have had a cockroach living in our microwave for about 2 weeks now. We can’t get it out, he can’t get himself out. I still get a fright every time I go to put something in the microwave. It’s just not natural to have something living in there (and with the baby brain, I always forget about it until I go to put something in there and see him crawling around out of the corner of my eye). Needless to say, we are not taking the microwave with us to the new unit. We will get a new one (and hope a cockroach doesn’t magically appear).

The other day some brand new tenants arrived to live in one of the apartments where I work. They were fresh off the plane from Japan, and don’t speak a word of english. About an hour after they arrived, they came down to the concierge desk (where I work) and tried to tell me something. They kept saying garage, and making a some sort of hand movement that was like opening a door. Of course I had no idea what they were on about, so finally they got their real estate agent Yuka (who speaks beautiful English and Japanese) on the phone to translate. Yuka told me that they had accidentally thrown away one of their passports and thrown the garbage bag down the garbage chute. We had a brand new manager who was in his second day on the job, so he got a nice initiation picking through all the trash in the garbage room with me, searching for the passport. He did finally find a bag containing some Japanese garbage (it had Japanese writing on it), but no passport. I came out and told the upset Japanese tenants (via Yuka), who then insisted that there was not one, but 2 bags of rubbish (how you make 2 bags of rubbish in one hour I do not know). This time new boss had a look on his own. After about 30 mins of searching, he did not find anything. Wouldn’t you know it, later that day the tenants came down with big smiles and held up the passport for me to see. They had never thrown them away after all, but put them in a drawer in their apartment (next time maybe look through apartment before getting people to dig through rubbish??). Speaking of them, they just walked by and smiled and waved at me and said sorry (I’m at work). Aww they are cute (they are quite elderly).

On Thursday night, Aaron and I started our very first antenatal class, Birth and Beyond, at the hospital. As per every antenatal class that has ever existed in movies, we were shown a video of an actual birth. I must say though, it didn’t look quite as bad as I suspected. We also had to do an exercise about what will change when the baby arrives. The girls were to make one poster of things, and the boys another. It was quite funny to see the difference in the poster. The boys’ poster had things like: less time for fishing, more toy magazines laying around (which to them was a good thing as they like toys). Ours was more like: Less time as a couple (bad thing), gives you a sense of purpose. Aaron told me that one of the guys said “less time for titty bars.” Then another said “or maybe more time.” Then another concluded “ok, maybe the same amount of time for titty bars.” Luckily, I’m pretty sure they were joking. We, on the other hand, were discussing how our babies all liked to wake us up at 3 or 3:30 in the morning to have a party in the uterus.

Aaron and I went to Trish and Grandma’s house on Friday night (and so did The Jess and Shane) for a nice family Easter dinner. I would highly recommend staying out of the kitchen while Trish and Grandma are doing any sort of food preparation involving knives. They are both animated hand talkers, and they seem to forget they have a knife in their hands when talking. Grandma came to within 2 inches of The Jess’ ear. I thought she was going to be the new Chopper Reid. We always laugh (and are a bit scared) when we see them with knives. If only we brought the video camera. They don’t mean to be funny, but goodness me, they are hilarious. I’m just surprised there has never been an accident. I suppose that is because we all keep on our toes when we know they have a knife….

When I was little, my mom (I mean the Easter bunny) used to hide chocolate eggs around the house on Easter morning for my brother and I to find. I always thought that was quite fun (and um…still do), so this year, I hid some chocolates for Aaron to find on Easter morning. All was well until he only had one left, the first one (of 8) that I hid. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I hid that egg (and I had only hidden them about 10 minutes before). So, Aaron and I both searched. We still hadn’t found it some time later and gave up, figuring we would find it. I did eventually find it. I was squatting next to Aaron’s desk getting something out of his backpack when I saw it staring at me from on top the CD filer thing under Aaron’s desk. That is the baby brain for you. You just forget everything!