Folks, I am sitting here at 9.15pm rejoicing over a bowl of shredded wheat in MILK!!!! At 9w6d!!!!
Okay, so for much of this past week, I have had the odd hint that my morning sickness wasn't QUITE as bad as it was last week. I totally denied it and put it out of my head. You know how it is - allow yourself to think that it might be improving, and get your just desserts the next morning! :S Little things though, like instead of having to grimly sip tiny bits of water (and feel horrible for it!), I am finding that I can take a few good gulps of water without really thinking about it, even if I feel a bit yuckier for it - that's still a big improvement. But then on.... trying to think which day it was.... Thursday (it's Sunday today), I had a surprisingly good day. The nausea kicked in at the start of the day as it normally does, and got worse throughout the day as usual, BUT it was very very mild to start with and so as it got worse, it really only got to just plain nausea, rather than HORRIBLE all-consuming nausea, by late afternoon! It was SO much better than I was used to that I was able to put together (from scratch! Including yeast, which I personally think smells more gross than anything!) a homemade pizza to surprise the boys when they got home from the park! It's been so long since I have actually cooked anything decent, and I've been feeling bad that Neil is doing so much meal-prep and cooking while he's out of work. It was nice to do that! In the evening I did feel pretty sick, but still, it was a good day!
The next day (Friday) I felt nearer to my usual level of nausea - blech! Saturday, I woke up with a horrid cold and Benjamin (and eventually Nathan) were feverish and sad and tired, so it wasn't a usual day. BUT, my nausea was quite mild for what I was used to. I noticed in hindsight at the end of the day that I had eaten breakfast and then with all of Benjamin's unwellness I hadn't eaten again for over 3 hours (nearly 4!) and hadn't noticed!!! Now, usually I eat breakfast and then within 20 minutes I'm so green that I have to stagger back to the kitchen and find food whilst not being able to bear looking at it (a tricky combination!). And so on every 20-40 minutes till I fall asleep at bedtime. If I go an hour or more, I get so nauseated that I start to panic because I CAN'T get near food to choose something I might try to eat, so I don't know how to stop the cycle. In other words, I've gone too far. Every day for 5+ weeks I have had to make sure I nibble or eat within every hour or else I am done for. I have been done for a fair few times though! ;) And it's hard to force myself to eat once I get to that stage, but if I keep at it then eventually I start to feel better.
Anyway, the point is - THREE PLUS HOURS!!!! And I didn't even notice!!! That really made me ever so slightly hopeful last night! :)
Today, my cold is kicking my butt in an extreme manner, and I have just had to go to bed with it for some of the day. I'm so achy and stuffed up and streaming and throaty and exhausted on top of the usual pregnancy exhaustion, so I got to thinking that mayyybe yesterday was just a better day because my cold symptoms were distracting me or something?! Is that even possible?! Well, today I had to go back to bed without having breakfast for most of the morning, I just felt terrible. Neil has the cold too (he's the source!) but is doing better today, and hasn't been so whacked over the head with it as I seem to be. I'm SO glad he's home right now! Phew.
Anyway, when I got up again I had some breakfast, and realised I was not even slightly queasy. I bumbled about feeling rotten and snuggling little boys, and then they had lunch. I rested on the sofa while they ate, and then some more time passed, and I was going to put Benjamin to bed for his afternoon nap when I realised I hadn't eaten lunch. So I grabbed an apple because my head was stuffed up and I just wanted something cold and juicy. Then I put him to bed. After THAT we were getting the boys ready to go out for a walk with Neil, and suddenly I realised that I did not feel nauseous. Not one bit! I searched and searched for a bit of quease, but found none!!!!! This was more than 3 hours after breakfast, and at least an hour after my apple! I hadn't had ANY nausea yet for the whole day! I still didn't want to get my hopes up, so continued to put it down to cold symptoms being more of a focus right now, and perhaps when those let up in a couple of days I would feel yucky again. I just felt grateful for the cold so that I didn't have such a focus on feeling sick, at the time!
Well then a couple more hours passed, during which time Benjamin woke up too early and was very cross with me for trying to resettle him, and threw his Very First Real Big-Boy Tantrum Ever on the living room floor (he's only 10 months old!!!), and after he calmed down I let him breastfeed for a long time, and then the boys got home from their walk. Then we ate dinner, around which time I noticed evvver such a slight feeling of queasiness. I ate okay except for not really feeling up to a big meal with how rotten I was feeling, and then it was only at about 5.30pm (we eat early!) that I started to notice a general queasy feeling just sitting on me. But it was ever so mild. I put Benjamin to bed without the queasy feeling being bad enough to bother me, and tucked the boys in, chatted with Arthur for a bit and snuggled him in his bed, and then came downstairs feeling OKAY!!! Still that background queasiness, but wow! For me, by this time of day, that's amazing and definitely very different to usual. I ate some chocolate!!!! Wheee! :)
Then after an hour I felt a bit more queasy, probably getting on towards actual mild nausea, so I heated up some Covent Garden Soup (those ones I mentioned before which have been great lately for my nausea) and ate that. While I was eating it, I really started to think that my morning sickness IS ACTUALLY GOING AWAY! But so early?!?! I usually feel sick till 13/14 weeks, and Nathan's went to 16 weeks, and Arthur's to 18 weeks (or was it Benjamin to 16 weeks?? I can't remember!). Matthew was the lovely surprise feeling better at 12 weeks! But in Week 9?!?!?! So right away, once I was really letting myself believe that the morning sickness might actually be going, I started to worry about WHY. I haven't listened with the doppler this week, so as soon as I finished my soup I whipped it out. For ages and ages I looked everywhere at every angle, and was starting to freak out a bit, getting all sorts of mental images of seeing a tiny baby with no heartbeat on the ultrasound screen, and things like that. I started to think, "Please, please let me find it!..." Eventually I decided to try an inch higher than my bikini line (where I've found it all the other times) in case my womb has just grown more than I thought recently, and PHEW, there it was! :D Beating at 180 beats per minute, and sounding good and fine! Soooo relieved!
I do still have ever such mild "background" queasiness, but as soon as that started to pick up a little, I just went to find something to eat. I realised that I could probably test it by trying to eat something I haven't been able to face since the very start of my morning sickness. I haven't been able to eat cereal with milk on it at all - though I tried at first. I can't get more than a couple of mouthfuls into it before I have to stop for the nausea getting overwhelming, and then it takes an hour or two to ease back to the normal level of nausea. Yuck! So I was really excited to pull out the shredded wheat, sprinkle some SUGAR on (another no-no!), and drench it with milk! I just finished it, and loved every bite! :) So now I feel much more convinced that for some reason or other, my morning sickness really IS coming to an end before 10 weeks has even arrived! Wow. I just can't believe it! I'm so thankful! And don't really understand it, but yeah, soooo thankful! :)
And now that I'm beginning to return to somewhere near normal fluid intake (although I have a cold, plus a poorly baby permanently attached to a breast), the frequent weeing is REALLY kicking in! I was wondering why I really hadn't noticed that symptom at all. Now I am getting it! Last night I resettled Benjamin (in the evening) and went for a wee, and then back to the laptop. I read blogs for about 10 or 15 minutes and Benjamin fussed again (wind) so I burped him and put him back down, and lo and behold, I had to pee again! Craziness - for me, anyway! I also had to get up at 2am to go, even though I went right before bed. Today I am having to go fairly frequently, and I REALLY like it! It makes me feel happy and pregnant to have to keep nipping to the loo for a wee! :) I think that as well as the fluids increasing a bit, my womb is also growing big enough now to squash my bladder much more than it has been. In fact if I recall, between 10 and 12 weeks can get rather uncomfortable and even crampy in that department, as it runs out of room in my pelvis before it pops up.
Now, my nausea has been fluctuating from day to day, so if this is a "good day", I could feel a fair bit queasier tomorrow. But even so, it should be a lot less than my bad days used to be! I really hope this is IT!
So TWO weird differences from all four of my other pregnancies this time: Different morning sickness (starting a week early, tailing off WEEKS earlier than usual), and NO bleeding! My brother is starting to think it's because it's a "different sort of baby!" ;) I still can't bring myself to think that it could ever really be possible that I might be pregnant with an actual girl, hehe!
My SIL had her big scan on Friday, and found out she's having a girl! Which adds to the whole "we'll be having a boy then!" feeling for me, because it does seem that our siblings have the girls and we have the boys! ;) I do have one scrummy little nephew though - but four nieces now! My brother's little girl turned 3 yesterday and she is so girly! She just wants a dress that's pretty, and ballet shoes, and anything pink or sparkly! My mum bought her a dress, and for weeks we would talk about it on the phone, and I would say how lucky she is to go shopping for girly party dresses (how I would LOVE that! I'm very girly myself, you know!). Then Bennie told me that Thea can never have too many hair clips (she loves them) - the more sparkly the better, so I have had the JOY and privilege of browsing through racks and racks of hair clips for little girls - pink ones, purple ones, smiley ones, sparkly ones, butterfly ones - ooooh the choice is endless! It really brought home how I never see, do, or buy anything girly at all, with alllll my little boys! I am so glad to have nieces to legitimately browse through girly things for, but I admit, it isn't quite the same as your OWN baby girl.
I know I said (and I stick by it!) that I would LOVE a fifth precious baby boy! I DO love boys, and would be glad to have eight boys and no girls! I would never prefer having a girl over a boy to the point where I'd try to "swing it" so that we conceive a girl instead. But ohhhh the truth is, how I would love to have a daughter! I know they are a whole different kettle of fish to boys, and can be harder work apparently! But I don't care. I would love to have a daughter! I am such a girly type. I would love to buy pink! And dresses! And flowery stuff! And do her hair! And on and on (really, pretty much ad infinitum). My heart will NOT sink when (if??) we see those ever present boy bits flashing at us at the scan. We already know his name and we love him, and we WANT him! I want to burst with pride and joy thinking of my FIVE little boys, and the fun they'll have, and the snuggles I will get, and how very cute a tiny little boy is when he's wearing denim dungarees with cars embroidered on the front and taking sweet little stumpy toddly steps! I am LONGING for that particular baby boy, and the likelihood is that we'll meet him in December. But, totally aside from that feeling.... I would so like a little girl as well! :)
Well, whoever this sweet little person is, he/she is currently known as Cornflake (Arthur's choice). Oh! I never did give detail on how we told them! We told them after dinner one evening, a couple of weeks ago. They had been busily playing imaginary games all afternoon, and the one they were called away from at dinner time was Pretend Christmas. All three older boys were playing as they usually do - they play together all the time and enjoy each other so much! :) So they had been wrapping each other presents in playsilks, and were about to play Christmas Morning and be all excited. It gave me the idea to tell them about the baby, and tie it into Christmas, because Cornflake is due so soon before Christmas. So while they ate, Neil and I snuck little bits of conversation about how best to tell them, in between supervising the meal. That one just happened to be a meal just for the boys, though we usually eat all together as a family probably 6 days a week. While they ate, I prepared clues, since that's how we decided we'd tell them!
When they came out from eating, we played Christmas Morning with them and they opened all their presents and so on. After they finished, I told them that we had some news about something that was going to happen right before Christmas this year! They were all interested, and Arthur was especially intrigued, and hopped about eager to hear. I told them I had some clues to show them. They weren't the best because they had to be thought of and put together really quickly, but it went down a treat all the same! The first clue was that I handed Arthur one of their teddies wrapped in a while terry towel, and laid it in his arms. They looked at it, clueless. So I asked if they wanted another clue. They were excited and said yes! So I pointed to our button numbers up on the wall, and put my finger under the number 5 (bit cryptic for little ones, I know, hehe!). Arthur said, "Five??!" in a confused way. So I gave them clue number three: I went to the blackboard and let them each choose a colour because I told them I was going to draw each of them on the board. I drew stick figures with smiley faces - Arthur first, then Matthew next to him, a bit smaller. Then Nathan, a bit smaller still, and then Benjamin even smaller. I wrote "4" underneath them. Then I wrote "+" next to their line, and drew a baby with "1" underneath it, and then wrote "=5". I stopped to look at them, and you could see their little cogs turning, hehe! That one seemed really obvious to me, I was sure they'd get it, but they were staring at it with furrowed brows. I know probably only Arthur would understand it though.
So I stood up and asked if they needed one more clue, and they said yes, still looking at the blackboard. So I let my button and zip down a bit on my jeans, stood sideways on and said, "What shape is Mummy's tummy?" Arthur took one look at my tummy and said, "Big... BABY!!!!" The dots in the middle represent about 0.24 seconds where his eyes shot into wide-as-saucers mode as he got it! :) He yelled, "BABY!!!!" at the top of his voice and started jumping up and down squealing and shouting, "It's a BABY in Mummy's tummy, A BABY, A BABY!!!" Matthew and Nathan started jumping up and down about 2 seconds after Arthur did and shouting similar things. I could see that Arthur and Matthew really did get it, and were very excited! But it was so sweet to see Nathan joining in with his brothers as he always does, hugely excited and shouting, "A baby inna tummy! A baby inna tummy!" with great glee, but he obviously didn't have a CLUE as to the reality of the situation, lol! ;) Sweet little boy! :) Neil took photos which came out blurry (such a shame! I hoped he would take video, but apparently not), and Benjamin sat on Neil's lap shrieking and clapping with joy and excitement as he watched his brothers. It was the sweetest picture, and I WISH I had it captured for prosperity, but alas I don't! :( Still, it will stay in my memory for ever all the same :)
Once they stopped jumping, and caught their breath (they kept it up for a while!), Arthur and Matthew started to ask soooo many questions for the next hour before bed - these were mostly from Arthur, but some from Matthew: "How long has the baby been in your tummy? Since MARCH?!!! Why didn't you tell us?!?! Can we call it Cornflake?! Can we call it Crumb?! Can we call it (insert any one of fifty million increasingly silly other choices - Matthew and Arthur alternated these for quite some time!)?! How big is your baby now? Is it this big? Is it this big? Is it this big? (repeat same question with different hand shapes for a long time) Is the baby going to die? How do you know? Will it be born at Christmas? Which date in December? (arranges and re-arranges calender) This one? This one? This one? (this goes on for a while) What if it's late though? What if it's later than Christmas? How do you know? But Matthew was late, so what if THIS baby is late like Matthew was? Can I hear the baby's heart beating? Here? Here? Here? (various ear-to-my-tummy poses) Shoosh boys, I'm trying to hear the baby's heartbeat!... Why wouldn't I be able to hear it? When can I? Will I be six when the baby is born? Will Matthew be 4? Will Nathey be 2? Will Benji be one? Will you have the baby in our house? Remember when you had Nathan in the hospital? Will you do that? When will we know?! Will Heather come and see us? Will you make lots of noise? (followed by much cheerful reminiscing from Arthur about Benjamin's homebirth) Are we really calling it Cornflake?! When will we know it's REAL name? Can we come to the scan?! Why not?! Will you see the willy? Yes, but it'll probably have a willy - will you get a picture of it to show us? Why not?! Can we see that picture though? Oh good!.... I can't WAIT till December!!!" :)
They are so happy and excited, and Arthur is joyfully telling people that we run into: "Did you know that my Mummy has a baby due in December?!" He sounds so proud and pleased, and that makes me soooooooo happy, because you know, he's the eldest of soon-to-be FIVE children, and he's only FIVE himself! I have actually had insensitive people tell me in the past (when we only had 3 I think!), "Poor Arthur!" or "Your poor kids!" because they see it as some huge burden we're putting on them, especially Arthur, being the eldest and still so young. Well I am here to tell the world that he is so very excited! He loves his role as biggest brother, and he's one blessed little boy with endless playmates who look up to him and adore him. Every year another little boy develops enough skills to suddenly be able to play cars and trains with the rest of them, and he LOVES being in charge of that kind of game! ;) He is also joyfully affectionate with his baby or toddler brothers, and finds them cute and cuddly. He gets excited about their milestones, and looks forward to ones that mean they can get more involved in playing with him. He will happily entertain a sad baby brother if I ask him to for 5 minutes if I'm tied up, and usually that results in a happy and giggly baby brother, and a proud and victorious Arthur who is enjoying playing with the little one! I think it's proof positive that it's GOOD for him, our expanding family with close age-gaps, if we tell him yet another baby is coming and he rejoices so VERY much! :) And I can't tell you how happy that makes me! I do have my moments of not knowing what we're doing and worrying and guilt-tripping that we're messing them (particularly Arthur) up! But it's good to have feedback like this from him!
Well I think I will finish this post for now. Oh except that tomorrow I am TEN WEEKS pregnant!!! Double figures! A quarter of the way there! :D I have not forgotten about a belly gallery! Usually I take a photo at 5 weeks (to compare) and then at 10 weeks. Then 14 weeks, and then fortnightly from then on. I have taken a 5 week photo, but not made a gallery yet. Tomorrow I'll try to remember to get Neil to take a photo and then once it's uploaded I'll make a "Belly Gallery" post with both of them! :)
And as of tomorrow, Cornflake is no longer an embryo. He'll be in the final stage of embryonic development (Stage 23), and then officially a FETUS from that point on! Yay! :) Cornflake looks like a little human being, about an inch long. The tail is almost gone, ears and eyes are not quite in the right place but will be soon, and the fingers are separate and the hands can grasp across the body. All the internal organs are in place and the critical period for their development has finished, though they'll still be continuing to develop and grow. Tongue development has just finished. Baby teeth are at cap level, and adult teeth are beginning to form high up in the jaw. The eyes are partly closed, and the gonads are now recognisable as either testes or ovaries (inside the body though). Genitals are beginning to form, and the muscles are getting stronger. The baby can make all sorts of spontaneous movements, and around this time the first brain waves can be detected! My little one is being knit together so amazingly by my wonderful Father God! I can't wait to meet Cornflake, but ohhh how I enjoy "growing" him (her?) in the mean time! :)
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