21 weeks, 2 days - feeling kicks!

Thanks so much for all the lovely comments about the scan last week! I'm just so excited to be having my fourth baby boy!!! I haven't had a single moment of anything else, which is wonderful. He still does not have a name, and I know there's like almost half a pregnancy to go, but it's "late" for us to still have no name for him, hehe! I'm not actually feeling stressed about it at all. Right now I am still ALL about Noah Benjamin, but Neil is apparently not so much. Every few days he'll say, out of the blue, "How about Jonathan?" or "How about James?" and I say, "Umm.... no." ;) I like Jonathan, but we have a Nathan already, and there's just a Jo tacked onto the front there to make it different. There's nothing wrong with James per se, but it just doesn't do much for me and I like the names I'm choosing for my babies to leave me sort of sighing and clutching at my chest (in a healthsome manner, of course! ;) ). We did consider Jamie for Arthur, but it was REALLY clear at the scan that he was definitely not a Jamie. I remember a couple of people suggested Benedict (thanks for suggesting!), but I don't like the name really, although it is similar to Benjamin. I like Toby and Micah, but Neil isn't crazy about Toby at all, and Micah is the other most recent baby at church. I think if we have another son after this one (!!) I would personally be choosing between Toby and Micah. Neil really likes Micah but we both feel it's not THIS baby's name. I adore the meaning - "Who is like God?" Just those 4 words make me want to stop what I'm doing and praise him right away! So I love everything about the name. Next time, though! ;)

Well baby-boy-bean is getting much more wiggly and active in there! I am feeling kicks and bumps and movements all day long now, and especially during the evenings. Arthur felt the baby kick this week - before Neil even! I was so tired (I have been so tired for a few weeks now) and when Nathan went down for a nap one day early in the week (so 20 weeks and 5/6 days or something) I built the boys a HUGE railway with their wooden track and flaked out on the sofa while they played blissfully for ages. While I was reclining there, the little tiny one started to kick. Usually there aren't that many in a row so I can't call someone over and have them wait for the next kick - there usually isn't one, hence why Neil hadn't felt the baby up till this week! But this time I felt quite a few kicks and after 30 seconds or so they hadn't stopped, so I said, "Our tiny baby is kicking Mummy's tummy!" Arthur DROPPED his train and came running! I lifted my top over my tummy and he instantly laid his cheek on my bump, smiling excitedly. He's such a sweetie! Almost straight away, he got a direct kick to his cheek! He lifted his face in absolute awe, it was so precious!! He kept saying, "It kicked my cheek!" and then he laid his face back there again. He got a little pop to his chin this time, and that made him giggle. He was so excited to feel the baby kick, and he told Neil when he got home from work.

He's SO excited about my bump growing bigger. Literally every other day (or every day sometimes) he puts his hands on my tummy and does a sort of squeally excited sound, and then says, "Your tummy's getting BIGGER!!!" like it's the most exciting thing he's ever seen happen. He always says how the baby must be getting so much bigger than before, which is so cute when he says it every day with the same new excitement :) He calls other people's attention to it, usually Neil, saying, "Daddy! Mummy's tummy is getting BIGGER!!!! Come and seeee!" and he jumps up and down excitedly. Matthew doesn't appear to have taken much in about my pregnancy yet, though he does acknowledge that there's a baby in my tummy. He seems happy enough and busy doing other things most of the time, like it's not interesting enough to distract him right now, which is fine.

So Neil felt the baby kick last night, or it might have been the night before (21 weeks), I can't remember exactly. I was getting a few good kicks lying on the sofa, and called him over. The baby seemed to actually turn to his hand and kick it directly. I can't really explain how I feel it but I could tell that there was intent and purpose in the aim of the kicks - I just could feel the difference when the baby was kicking Neil's hand so specifically. Neil likes to feel the baby kick but also gets kind of squeamish (sigh) about the whole "alien being moving about in your body" thing that he has going on in his head. Oh well. *I'm* enjoying every little kick and wiggle! :)

I've also discovered these last few days that this baby likes to play poke-and-kick! I love this stage! One of my babies at least (I can't remember who, but not Arthur) had not much interest in that game, and the kicks back were a bit random so that I wasn't always sure if they were in response to my pokes or not. This baby is very responsive! I poke, there's a very short pause, and I get kicked - a quick sharp pop - in the exact same spot. I wait, poke again, and get a pause and then a kick in the same spot. One time a little hand reached out and bumped me where I had poked, lower down.

I forgot a few things last entry, but then I hadn't read the sonographer's report when I wrote the entry about the scan. The baby is measuring exactly on the 50th percentile for ALL measurements! This baby is definitely not Arthur-shaped, and not likely Nathan-shaped either. Arthur had short legs (2 weeks behind!) and a large head (1.5 weeks ahead) and his abdomen was 1 week ahead. Matthew was pretty much spot on his dates for legs, abdomen and head, though his head was a few days behind. Both of them are exactly that way to this day - it was an absolutely accurate prediction of their body shapes, so we had a good heads-up that they would be very different from each other in build before Matthew was even born. Nathan was a little ahead of dates for head, pretty much spot on for abdomen, and a little behind for his leggies, so we thought he must be a cross between the older boys, and maybe more like Arthur's build? He's still only tiny but so far seems to be a perfect mix of the two older boys in build.

I am therefore expecting this little one to be very like Matthew in build, and nothing like Arthur's build. So that's exciting! Matthew was so different, and I wonder if this baby will be the closest to Matthew in resemblence? I can't wait to see his little face and find out who he'll look most like!

Also, my placenta is HIGH and POSTERIOR! So, no anterior placenta for me after all. I guess this baby is just a much quieter one than I'm used to, so far, and it wasn't that I was having things muffled by an anterior placenta. I still find it so odd that it was SO many weeks later than usual that I felt movements. But oh well! I feeling them now, so that's fine!

I'm trying to think what else? I have had some moderate not-so-fun pubic bone pain since my last entry, pretty much RIGHT after that entry continuously. So that's a shame! But I get it every time. I'm just glad to have had the first 20 weeks without it! I don't always get that. Hopefully it's going to settle down again for a good while before coming back a bit at the end. It's pretty sore at the moment to walk and lie on my side. It's just a nasty clutching pain in my groin that radiates. It feels ever so familiar now. Everything does really, about pregnancy, and I LOVE that feeling! :)

Today is the first time I have really taken all of the boys out on my own whilst looking obviously pregnant. Until now I have been bundled up in a huge winter coat so nobody would have seen anyway, but today it was so mild and I forgot Nathan's coat so I wrapped mine around him in the pushchair. So my bump was WELL on display. As was my "Pregnant and Proud!" top! ;) I would not have worn that if I'd have known it would have been on display to the public, haha! I don't like attracting attention, and I didn't want anyone to think I'd worn it on purpose to show off or something! ;)

So, I walked down the high street with the tandem pushchair - Nathan and Matthew in it, and Arthur on the buggy board behind. Me and my little bumpy boy followed behind Arthur! :) People turned their heads alllll the way down the high street, and it made me ever so uncomfortable. I am anxious about encountering negativity, because I know I hate confrontation like that, and also I have always been super sensitive to other people being mean to me, especially face-to-face. I have no idea how I'll handle it! I'm anxious because I have heard that it's to be expected when you have 3 or 4 closely spaced children - the more children, the more comments, and the worse they can be. I so don't want that!!!! It's really bothering me right now. I don't know how I'll handle it and I'm worried that I'll just do as I did when bullied at school and CRY or something embarrassing like that! I don't want to respond inappropriately in front of my little ones either, especially if they hear negative comments (which would upset me all the more), and I want to stand up for myself too, you know?

Today I got lots of not-exactly-positive looks, especially when I was huffing and puffing with the pushchair laden with children and bags for the charity shop! Thankfully once we'd taken all the charity bags to the shop, it was surprisingly easy to push all 3 on the way back and we seemed to get a lot more interested looks and even some smiles. I just want to walk with my head down all the time, but how rubbish is that?!?! I should be PROUD to have all these little children and another on the way! And I am, truly. I just know that I'm in a teeny tiny minority and the rest of the world thinks I'm likely selfish, stupid or irresponsible, and I can't stand the idea of people thinking that of me or saying anything of the sort to me. I find it upsetting already without anyone having said anything!!! I really need to pray about this and find some peace from God about it, and have him equip me to deal with it effectively. That's the whole idea with trusting God with my womb and thus our family size and spacing of our children - that he'll provide ALL that we need to effectively manage the blessings he bestows upon us, including this kind of detail. I just sooooo don't want to get upset and flustered and shaky and tearful if anyone says something nasty to me when I'm out with the children, and the way I "am" is suggesting to me that this is how I would react. Bleh.

Anyway!

What else? Oh the baby was noted as cephalic (head down) at the scan. She was having the hardest time checking the face for a hare lip because the head was RIGHT down. She really ground that scan probe into my hip and pubic bone for like 15 minutes straight, trying to see. The baby's head was turned at a tricky angle and with it so low, she had to try to dig in under my pubic bone or into my hip, and then grind it round in the direction of the baby! Ow. Maybe that could account for some of the pubic bone pain I've had since?! I even had to have a pillow under my hips and roll onto my side slightly, with the bed tipped head down (!!!) to attempt to rotate the baby a little for a better view! It was not comfortable! But worth it for the lonnnng look at my tiny sweetie :)

I keep wondering if I feel hiccups lately, but then I stop still to check and it's not, or at least, if it was it was very short-lived. So I can't confirm having felt this baby hiccup yet. I know it will be soon! I love feeling hiccups and all these lovely things! I'm so excited about every little thing with this pregnancy! I'm eager to meet my little one but the one thing I'm NOT looking forward to is the process by which he ends up in my arms and not in my tummy! I MUST write Nathan's birth story for my diary, properly. I know I will get further detached from it the further along with this next pregnancy I get, and eventually if I leave it too late I'll probably get the two births confused in parts or something, which will be sad for me. I want to remember all the details of each birth as unique, even if they're not comfortable memories!

Well, there's probably loads more, but my mind has gone blank for now. OH! But I have had some seriously wacky hormones this past week. MUCH more settled this end of the week, but last weekend was just crazy. I have been more irritable and feeling tearful at the slightest things for a few weeks now, but Neil was poorly at the weekend with a migraine (he throws up with these), and I just did not manage well. I clung to my children for security (however daft that sounds!) - at least that's how it felt when they had gone to bed at the end of the day. They just kept me busy and the noise level helped me to block out Neil's throwing-uppy-ness, and so on. When they had all gone to sleep that evening I just fell apart and cried for like 2 hours straight! I missed them so painfully and looking at their toys and things just made me long for them, and I absolutely could not stop crying for anything. I had the WORST sinus headache all night that night, and into the next day as a result, urgh! The next couple of days were also "delicately balanced" (!!), hormonally, and I felt tearful and overwhelmed a lot, but it settled down in the week. This end of the week has been great - my energy is good even though I'm really tired (if that makes sense?!) with Nathan's multiple night-wakings and so on, and I'm spending all my time doing LOTS more housework than I've ever done, playing with little ones, disciplining little ones, keeping vital parts of the daily routine going (naps, nappies, meals, etc) and feeling good about it all. We are not getting out of the house much at all, but it's the most settled things have been for a long time. I have seen a LOT of advice for mothers of many very young little ones (especially when pregnant as well) to just STAY HOME as much as possible, because that's the only sane thing to do and it makes a huge difference to how frazzled both the mama and the children are. I'm finding it to be true, and very helpful advice! I wish the boys could get more run-out-in-the-open-air time every day, but that's the main drawback. If we had moved house by now, we'd have a big garden (we're going to be super picky about that part) for them to run in every day. They do get out in the garden but it's SO TINY now that we've sold the end piece to the neighbour! They have long long walks at the park with Daddy at the weekends, so that's something I suppose. Not ideal, but most definitely advice I'd pass on to any other mother-of-3 very small people with another on the way. Definitely. Probably one of the first pieces of advice, actually!

Anyway, we're getting into stuff that should go in my blog, so I'll stop for now. I will be due to put another belly pic in the gallery in just FIVE DAYS!!! It's going so fast! Right now I am going to go to bed. I have actually had 3 early nights this week! I'm so tired and sleepy in the evenings and I resist going to bed even so, because I just want to enjoy the quiet house for a few hours first, but then I'm just adding to the tiredness. This week I have had a rare burst (!) of early nights, and I'm so glad I did. It meant I really did not check online at all those few days, because evenings are my only online time really - I try not to use the computer at all in the day time when the boys are up (week days). I was still about as tired with the early nights as I had been before, so I'm just glad I wasn't making the sleep debt worse!

I'll try to update again soon! :)

20 weeks pregnant - Back from my scan!!

Ohhh I'm so sorry it's 10.20pm already!! I had very little chance to phone family before the boys were in bed, and then family were CHATTY this evening on the phone, hehe! THEN I had to scan the pictures from the scan and upload them, get Neil to take my 20 week belly picture (I'm 20 weeks, I'm 20 weeks!!!!) and upload that too. Phew! This is the earliest I've managed to get here, which is craaaazy! I'm glad to have it all ready to post at last though :) I could have updated Facebook but I feel so loyal to my pregnancy diary that this is the first place I wanted any sort of online announcement, plus not many people who read me here know me at Facebook.

Soooo! :)

The scan went great! We prayed last night for no delays (we have had long waits in the past), baby in easy-to-measure positions, and gender visible! Also for the boys to do well with Sarah (our friend from church who graciously agreed to come and watch them while we went to the scan, phew!), and for Nathan to be okay at the scan (despite being due a nap!).

God was so faithful! The scan was at 2.30pm, we arrived at 2.25 and were called in the INSTANT I left the check-in desk! :) Never had that before! Nathan was as good as gold, I was so proud of him! He was tired but Neil held him and he just did not make a peep. Well, a few peeps, literally! He just said, "Doh?" every now and then, and otherwise sat still the whoooole time! He did have a garibaldi biscuit for a snack at one point though, that helped!

Anyway! The baby was in mostly good positions for measurements, though some of it was uncomfortable as she had to really press into awkward places with the scan thingy to get the visual she wanted.

We told the sonographer before she started that we really wanted to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl, and that we'd love a gender shot if she could get one, because our 4-year-old was desperate to see evidence that our baby has got a willy, haha! ;) Seriously, he was adamant! Hehe!

She was great and zoomed around like crazy looking at various flashes of the baby's anatomy, and then looked carefully for a gender shot, which was niiiice and clear. We are having a baby boy - again! ;) No surprise to me whatsoever! I actually saw the whole bunch of boy bits clearly as she was whizzing around from the start. He is a very obvious boy! ;) This was the nicest gender reveal, for me, other than Arthur's, because I really did have NOT ONE JOT of expectation that the baby just might be a girl. I was waiting to see the boy bits that I KNEW were there. I looked at the 12 week scan picture again last night and compared it to the "gender nub" shots online that I've seen, and that showed me 100% (pretty much) that there was no doubt this baby was SEEN to be a boy at 12 weeks by the angle of the dangle, as it's known! So, it wasn't like, "Oh maaayyybe it's a girl?!", it was actually like I had already been to a gender scan and had visible evidence, so it was a no-brainer that it would be a confirmation today. That probably helped my mindset a TON today! I was so excited when I saw for sure that the baby is a boy. I just grinned for basically the next 30 minutes, and was so incredibly happy to know he's a boy! I had no sense of disappointment whatsoever about not having a daughter (again!). I'm SO happy about that!

So, we can't decide on his name. When I looked at the moving images as the scan was being done, and just watched him in there, his name did not seem to be Reuben OR Benjamin, to me. It COULD have been Benjamin, and could still be. Not so much Reuben. But Noah.... ohhhh, Noah! It went so well, and thinking the name while looking at him gave me such a warm feeling inside. I am strongly leaning towards naming him Noah Benjamin, and hoping that Neil eventually comments (he is so far not saying much about it, just thinking on it!) and says he is thinking the same! I'm still happy to use the other two name choices, but I love Noah for this baby. It doesn't feel as 100% set in my heart as the other boys' names did by this stage, but it's by far the closest thing yet. I'm TRYING not to think of the baby as "Noah" in case it's not what we end up using! I'll keep you posted on that.

I can't believe how in love I am already!!!! Seriously. My baby boy.... it's like it's the first time, all over again! He's only 2D and grainy to my eye, but I just felt like a puddle of goo watching him, and all my comments to things the sonographer was telling me were, "Oh he's so sweet!" or "So lovely!" and so on. I felt slightly daft for it after a while, but I just couldn't seem to switch it off. The ultrasound seemed NEWLY amazing to me, the technology and what we were seeing, even though we've been there and done that a lot of times now, and recently too.

We watched his little heart chambers and the valves opening and shutting. She took a long long time taking still shots of that, and re-did it over and over, and that started to make us nervous, but she moved on in the end and said everything looked fine and normal. Phew! Everything with the baby was very healthy and normal, from what they can see - yayness! I'm so relieved! I feel more nervous with each pregnancy that something could be wrong, I don't know why. So I'm really thrilled and relieved and grateful to God that he's okay.

He had his hands by his head the whole time. He wiggled and moved and raised and lowered his limbs all the time! He wasn't frantic in his movements at all (not like Arthur was, haha! He's the same way today!), and seemed pretty easy-going for a wiggly baby! He had his chin firmly squashed onto his chest when the scan started, and after the first few measurements, he arched his back riiiight up and tipped his head back, and then just stayed there for ever! She couldn't get some important measurements, but he was refusing to budge from that strange position! She did all sorts of uncomfortable things to my tummy, put a pillow under my hips, lowered the bed so that my head was lower than my legs (!), etc, and still he stayed like that! Eventually he moved and curved his back a bit more, but at the end she said I would have to go and wait outside while she did another person's scan, because then maybe the baby would have moved so she could carefully check the spine. It was the last thing she needed to do and she couldn't see it all properly for his position. Then her machine died on her, and after fiddling about and calling in another sonographer, I was moved into the next ultrasound room to finish the scan. When I lay down and the scan started, the baby was in a perfect position for checking the spine, yay! So we didn't have to wait. I also saw one of his feet clearly at that bit, and it was very straight (big relief - that's 3 out of 4 kiddies so far with straight feet! Neil's mum had 4 too, and 3 out of 4 of hers had the deformed foot gene thingy that Arthur inherited).

She checked his face carefully for hare lip, and it was fine. It was lovely to see his face! His top lip protrudes over his bottom lip quite a bit, and that's SO like Nathan - less so the other two. His nose from underneath looked like a precious pointy little triangle, which they have all looked like at their scans. I feel like I know him already, because of having had 3 babies already who I know well, and I actually recognise this 2D little grainy being because his features are already familiar to me from his brothers. I love that!

So, I am (or soon will be!) Mummy to FOUR boys!!!!! How incredible that sounds to me! I feel so proud, and so blessed, and so lost for words, and I just want to laugh out loud every time I think of it! Four boys. Wow. Who'd have thought it?! All my little boys will be able to say they have three brothers, that's quite something! :)

Arthur is ecstatic about the baby being a boy. We got two scan pictures - one is a sort of profile shot, and the other is too except that the baby's torso is twisted by the scan angle in a weird way so that you can just about see the pelvis and little boy part poking out of the middle of it. I was disappointed not to get a proper gender shot for Arthur like I'd asked, but the sonographer was kind of scatty (although nice) and thought she already took one when she hadn't (even though I thought as much near the end of the scan and reminded her! Tsk!).

Never mind. When we got home, the boys were having a great time with Sarah, and Arthur saw the scan pictures on the sofa arm and grabbed them. He took one look at them and yelled, "WILLY!!!" in great triumph, haha! I don't see how he could have seen what the pictures were of, but he was sure he saw a boy bit and he was so thrilled! I said, "Yes, the baby in Mummy's tummy DOES have a willy - it's a boy!" and he jumped about shouting, "Yaaaaaaaaaay!" and squealing! :) He's so pleased. He wouldn't be convinced that a sister might be nice too, when we were chatting last night. He just hopes the baby won't be too cheeky. I'm pretty sure his hopes are in vain! ;)

He wants us to name the baby Justin, like nothing else! I gave him our shortlist of 3 names and asked him which he preferred. He said, "Justin" (which isn't on our shortlist, by the way!), and wouldn't budge on the matter. He eventually said he had a list too, and the choices were Jesus, Justin, Ruby and Small. And those were the only names we would be allowed to choose from!!! ;)

Okay, here are our scan photos!

In the first one the baby his his legs splinted right up over his head! He got into various positions when she was first prodding him about to take measurements, starting off lying verrry casually with one (very long-looking!) leg stretched right out and the other bent at the knee, and ended up doing this yoga position and various others before the "I'm not budging!" arched-back position! You can see his knee joint in front of his chin/nose area, and the rest of his leg up to his foot is less clear beyond it.

In the second photo you can see his little black-hole of a full bladder! :) I love that! He had a full stomach and bladder the whole scan, so it made them nice and clear and easy to see from the start. Next to his forehead in the second photo is a white blob, which is his little hand. His hands were up there most of the time, just relaxed at the sides of his head. He didn't cover his face like the other boys did at all. See his precious little top lip, looking so much bigger than the bottom one!! I'm so in love with that because I'm possibly-unhealthily besotted (?!) with Nathan these days and want to implode with his cuteness at all moments of the day (pretty much), and Nathan has that same top lip. I loooovvve when Nathan smiles, how his top lip curves so sweetly, and I'm so eager to see something similar and already precious to me, in this next baby boy!

Lastly on the second photo, see how at the other end of the baby, his back curves around at the bottom? The scan angle is weeiird in this picture. You can see his full bladder (the black circle) and then just up and to the right a little is the middle of his pelvis, the front of it. Sticking out of that is his little boy bit! ;) The sonographer had to point that out to me, so I could show it to Arthur.

So there's my sweet baby boy! Another boy! What joy! I'm so happy and thrilled and excited! I'll have a ton more to say about it, but it's getting late and I still haven't updated anywhere online, so I want to hurry and post this and then update Facebook and my arthursmummy blog and so on, before falling into bed! I'm so tired today. Nathan was up a lot in the night. I think he had some trapped wind. So tired and breathless today.

My bump seems way bigger just these last 3 days, and Neil has noticed the same. I'm 20 weeks today so we took a belly pic. I remembered at the last minute that the 20 week pictures is always a comparison picture, wearing the same clothes every pregnancy and standing in front of the same door (pretty much). Sadly I couldn't find the trousers I wore the last 3 times, but I wore the top, just with some maternity jeans instead. Here are the comparison photos, in chronological order - Arthur's pregnancy first, then Matthew's, then Nathan's, and then this sweet baby's! I'll post it in the belly gallery too, but maybe not tonight. I want to hurry and update other places now!

Bigger, aren't I? I think! Than all the other three. Still very samey though - obviously my BOY thing! Or else just how I carry my babies! This theory still has not been tested with a girl pregnancy! ;)

Okay, I must post this to put you out of your misery! Thanks for being excited for me! :) I'm so thankful for my FOURTH baby boy!!!