Project Baby Week 40 +1: Julien's Debut

As I plodded towards week 40 with Julien wriggling and hiccupping inside me, labour and delivery was nowhere in sight. In fact, after the false alarm in week 38 when I had serious contractions which landed me in hospital for a night, I was in heightened anticipatory mode as my doctor put me on medical leave for a week. Alas, the baby was not going to make an appearance before EDD -- 19th May.

So on Thursday, 19 May, Daniel and I got our paperwork and hospital bag ready and walked the 8 minutes (pregnant walking speed) from our home to the hospital to see Dr Chieng, hopefully, I thought, today would be THE day. 

It turned out that Baby was still happily floating in his watery world with no signs of impending labour. The water level was decreasing, said the doc, so he offered us an inducement. I would have to check into hospital and wait for the pill to coax my stubborn cervix open.

So after I was admitted (they gave me my own double room because they were out of singles and I informed the front desk there was no way I was sharing a room with a potential snorer - happened last time and I got no sleep at all), I was strapped to this baby here which monitors the fetal heartbeat and my contractions.

 Dr Chieng came at 1pm to stick the pill up my vagina -- not pretty -- but it didn't hurt half as much as the cervical check. The wait began.

At 7pm I felt a few twinges in my lower abdomen, the same kind as that of my false labour, the twinges on the right side were especially stronger. It felt like a series of very strong cramping. I watched TV as Daniel took photos. I was sure labour would not begin till much later in the night since everyone told me it takes an average of 1 day, even 2 after the pill was inserted.

9:00pm: In the labour ward and waiting for my Pethidine injection.

By 8:15, the contractions were up to 100 and I was wriggling around in my bed trying not to get upset. The midwife came to check my cervix (this would irritate even a saint, not that they would know what it feels like to have your pussy invaded by two groping fingers trying to reach God Almighty himself). Barely 1.5cm! By now the nurses were all keen to get me down to the labour ward where I could get "something for the pain". Apparantly labour pain management is something the hospital is keen to offer patients. After some moaning and groaning, I agreed to go to the labour ward but I wanted only the Pethidine. No epidural for me if I could help it.

2:00 am: Left - Baby's heartbeat; Right - contraction

I felt better after the pethidine jab and settled down to sleep. Daniel had made himself comfortable in his reclining chair next to my bed.  All we could do then was wait. By 5am the contractions had subsided and I was no longer in much pain. It could be the pethidine, but I didn't want anyone checking me again unless it was absolutely necessary. Too late, the midwife from last time (the one who gave me the flu) checked me and I almost had the baby then and there, the stinging pain was awful, it was like she had the hands of a steel miner. I demanded a cup of ice for my vagina.

Daniel's bed for the night

By 6.30am I had the sinking feeling that this baby was not coming. I woke Daniel and we talked about our options. Did we want to try another inducement and wait another day (or longer), or go for the C-section? I had been adamant that I would not go C-section unless it was an emergency -- the cost would also be triple that of a normal birth -- and the thought of being sliced open gave me the creeps. Then again, I did not want to wait any longer or go through even worse pain (in addition to the actual labour itself) to deliver this baby. 

At 8.30am, Dr Chieng came to give me my options. Thankfully, no cervical probe.  One: he could break my ater bag but labour would be long and arduous -- no thanks, I said, after seeing the blunt instrument he would use which looked like a primitive wooden kebab skewer. Two: We could try another pill to induce labour, and this would be anything between a few hours and another day. I looked at Daniel and it seemed we had both come to the same conclusion: C-section.

"Okay then!" the doctor said cheerfully. "Let's schedule C-section for 2pm today."  To Daniel's dismay, Dr Chieng added that he could be in the operating theatre too.  "Oh okay!" he said with a nervous laugh.

And so that was that. In 6 hours, we would have a baby.

****************

9am: I had to fast until surgery, no food or water. As Daniel started to prepare his post-baby sms draft to our friends, I lay on my bed - still strapped to the beeping maching - and let the reality of our decision sink in. How did I feel? Dr Chieng had been concerned that I would regard C-section as a failure on my part to deliver naturally.  I assured him I felt no such thing. My only trepidation was being under local anaesthesia while he cut me open. I had seen a live C-section on Discovery Channel some years ago and believe me, grossed out is an understatement of what it looked like. My consolation was Daniel would be there with me (not really much of a consolation since he seemed even more reluctant to be in there amidst the action) and I would have my baby out in 20 minutes.

12pm: The nurse came in to shave me -- ugh, why hadn't I just scheduled this operation and get waxed a day before?

12.15pm: From next door came the sounds of wailing -- somebody was giving birth without an epidural it seemed. We looked at each other and laughed. Would I have wanted that?

12.30pm: The wailing woman sounded like she was giving birth to an elephant. The midwife and doctor were shouting at her to push. I paced about nervously in my hospital gown.

1pm: I was given some medication for my stomach. Next door, I heard the cries of a baby. My gurney was already parked outside.

1.25pm: I hopped onto my gurney and they wheeled me into the operating theatre. Daniel had to go someplace else to change into his scrubs. I was parked in the "waiting area" so the nurse could take my information. I declined to watch TV -- who could watch TV right now?  Next to me, another nurse in scrubs said cheerily, "Don't worry, I had 4 children, all by C-section!"  I didn't feel better since I was just having the one baby.

1.40pm: I was in Operating Theatre 2 and several nurses (1 male) hoisted me onto the operating table. From my perspective, the place looked like a sanitised butcher shop with the bright round lights above me. The anaesthesiologist plugged the epidural into me like he was doing the laundry. "Roll up tighter, tighter! Your spine is too straight, curl up! It will hurt less." The male nurse helped squeeze me into a calamari shape and I held my breath as I felt something inserted into my spinal cord. All this while the anaesthesiologist was going on about somebody who had transferred to some other hospital. Focus on my damn spine and where you're putting that big-ass needle! "Okay, do you feel numb-numb in your legs? Should be numb-numb!" I still felt my legs damnit! The needle in my left shoulder was killing me but before I could complain I felt a wave of nausea. The doctor would give me a total of 3 jabs to contain the nausea throughout the surgery.

2pm: [Well, I think it might have been 2pm because Daniel said he only entered the OT at 2.15pm] I felt the pins and needles in my legs and soon I felt like I could fall asleep. It was a strange feeling: I could still feel the surface of my skin being touched but as if the stimulus was buffered by a great big spongey wall so I felt no sensation, only movement.  My doctor came into the room and then I saw Daniel in scrubs and a mask. He sat on my right, but he had to duck below the curtain they had put up to shield me from the butchering so he wouldn't see too much gore.

2.20: I felt the first slice. It was u-n-r-e-a-l.  No pain, just cut, cut, pull, pull. I was feeling really high and drowsy but was cognisant of the murmuring, the clinking of instruments, beeping and people moving next to me and behind me. Daniel held my right hand tightly and told me what was going on. I guess he decided to peep after all.

2.25: They must have gone quite deep by now because I was feeling more sensation closer to my buffer zone of numbness. I took deep breaths and squeezed Daniel's hand as I felt even more pulling and pushing. The doctor mumbled something and the anesthesiologist positioned himself behind me. What on earth..... Daniel sounded like he was 10 feet away when he said, "Babe, there's the head!"

2.30: The two men behind me bent over my curtain and started heaving my belly forward. "They're pushing him out!" Daniel sounded excited and grossed out at the same time. I squeezed my eyes shut. The amount of pulling and pushing going on disturbingly close to my bladder felt like they were overhauling a carburator rather than taking out a baby. I was getting anxious as I could hear Dr Chieng hmm-ing and huh-ing. From far away I could hear him say, "Okay push...." and the two guys behind me heaved on my tummy like there was no tomorrow.

2.33: "Okay, he's out!" Dr Chieng announced. He said something else but I could only hear, "...what a little giant!"  and then the cries. I don't know why but tears ran down my face. I felt exhausted even though I had only been lying there, but mostly I felt relieved. Daniel gasped in my ear, "Babe, he's crying!" and indeed our boy was yelliing at the top of his little lungs.  I imagine they were cutting his cord and cleaning him up, since Daniel later informed me that Baby looked like a pale shade of blue when he first popped out. In fact after the doctor got his head out, his shoulder got stuck and they had to do a rugby tackle on my belly too get the rest of him out.

Daniel gave me a kiss and told me he would go with Baby to get him weighed and tagged. No problem, I nodded weakly. I fell back into a swell of darkness with only the swishy, sucking sounds in the background as the vacuum and suction pumps started cleaning me out like a gutted fish.

Weight: 4284 kg/ 9 pounds 7 ounces; Length: 55 cm

Project Baby Week 40: No Bloody Show

It's the 40th week. Everybody has been asking me if he's here yet. Bets were taken of labour day and bets were lost. There has been literally no bloody show -- my cervix remains stubbornly shut and there is no sign of Julien except his wayward foot poking regulary out of my right side and his daily hiccups.

"You're really a 6 star hotel," said Bernice after I replied to her that Ju is still playing hide and seek. Bern's baby girl came at 37 weeks after inducement and an emergency c-section. At week 38 I went into false labour when I was hit by a series of intense contractions that got increasingly more painful over the hour. Daniel and I plodded to the hospital 5 minutes away, and I was strapped and monitored. Contractions were 5-6 minutes apart but not strong (even though i was suffering extreme discomfort) but it all faded away after I was checked by the bloody midwife when she stuck her fingers up my cervix. Nobody told me that having your cervix checked would be the most tortuous ordeal short of gang rape! It was all for nought, as it was firmly closed -- no dilation.  I was checked in overnight for observation. The next morning my doctor put me through another bout of medieval torture by giving me a membrane sweep.  I was not pleased.

So the only thing that came out of that experience was a bout of flu for Daniel and me, from the midwife who had attended to me that night. She had been snivelling nonstop for the whole 2 hours I was in the labour ward. I would say "Sorry ah, I have a flu!" is untenable in -- of all places -- a bloody labour ward!!! I was royally pissed off 3 days later when we came down with a cold and sore throat. Julien obviously had no intention of coming out that night and getting infected by a midwife harbouring an infectious virus. I registered my protest with my doctor last Saturday.

I will be 40 weeks along come Thursday. Daniel thinks I've had a miraculously smooth pregnancy. Aside from the false alarm, Julien has been the perfect foetus: his head is where it should be, his weight is what it should be, he's floating in all the amniotic fluid he could wish for and my cervix is holding him in tighter than a chastity belt. Even the doctor is impressed and said I could do nothing else but wait it out. Apparantly, I am not even at my maximum capacity! He was amazed that my skin hasn't yielded to stretch marks yet. More on that later.

So now all I do is sit on my couch under my beloved ceiling fan and try not to sweat while the temperature outside soars to 35 degrees every day.  For a week now my fingers have swelled to the size of small frankfurters and the joints feel arthritic.  My hands are as large as Daniel's and my feet have gone up to size 41. The pain in my hip joints are so bad that it takes me 10 seconds just to get up from a sitting position to standing and last night I had heartburn for a while. Sleep eludes me more and more after each bout of bladder-voiding at 4am. My dad has forbidden me to drive alone, since his nephew was born in his car on the way to hospital some 40 years ago.  I assured him that Julien is not going to fall out of me on the 2 minute drive to the hospital from my house.

I've never waiting longer for anything in my life, especially for an event that is as mysterious and unpredictable as labour.  I'm mentally prepared to suffer the pain, my aversion to it is just barely outweighed by my aversion to sweating another week at 72 kg.

Ready when you are.

Project Baby Week 35: Pain Pain Pain

On Sunday I felt a squeezing contraction in my lower pelvis. It felt like a ring of pain and gave me a lower back ache which was really strange because I had just had my 1 hour pre-natal massage. The squeezing continued after our ramen lunch and I winced all the way home and through the next half hour or so. I timed the intervals and it was an irregular 13 minutes apart.

Then just as suddenly as it began, the pain vanished.

I was bemused. Baby had been making quite a few movements during this time, and I wondered if he was okay in there. The pain was not unlike severe period cramps and I felt the baby making some dropping movements. It is hard to describe but it was clear to me that something was going on. The next day, I inspected my belly and to my amazement it looked like the baby had gone down a few centimetres. I hollered at Daniel to have a look, and he also agreed that the belly had dropped a little lower.  On top of that, I now had a constant ache in my pelvis, the part between my hip bones which I am still experiencing. It feels like I am wearing underwear 3 sizes too small for me with the elastic cutting into my skin. Walking is a literal pain.

With a little research, I realized that the pelvic pain is likely from the baby dropping lower into my pelvis. This could explain the contractions I had on Sunday, which was probably the uterus squeezing him downward. It's amazing. I am now living with a constant low-grade pain but it's rather worth it to know that Baby's on his way.

Project Baby Week 34: The Labour Prep

We are into our 34th week of pregnancy and boy, are things moving along.  I am as big as a house, and moving from point A to B feels like a major event that includes grunting, groaning and very slow steps.  Baby's head has moved lower towards my cervix and it's definitely past the placenta, as the Doc showed us on the screen. The good news is this makes it easier to have a natural birth. Bad news is it's irritating my bladder so I have to walk gingerly so as not to have an accidental leak.

We've been attending prenatal classes religiously. Daniel even cancelled his football game with ze Germans today, of course, only after getting a heavy lecture from me about his priorities. On a scale of 1 to 10 on squeamishness vs. machismo, I would rate him 1.5. The look of appallation on his face during last week's birth video was priceless. He looked like he was going to pass out right there.  I have to forget about him cutting the cord after all. He is still thinking of how to get out of being in the delivery room, but the only way out is if I need an emergency C-section, and I am having none of that.

I've done some research, reading online and talking to my friends who have been through this ordeal. The one thing I can be certain about labour - when it eventually comes - is that no two women will experience it the same way.  I'll have to be prepared for a plethora of scenarios, from dilation issues to amniotic fluid issues (if the baby defecates inside before I've dilated enough for him to be delivered, I'll need a c-section).  But I am convinced that there are some things I CAN do to help myself have a smooth labour.

Most people I've spoken to who have had uncomplicated natural births did some kind of physical exercise during pregnancy, this included my Mum who got me out in 2 hours without pain relief. So I've started swimming in our pool and I found it really helps with my aches and pains. Plus it's really nice to be able to be on my stomach after over 2 months of sleeping on my side. I'm mentally prepared for all the things that could "go wrong" - you might say knowing too much just adds to the stress and fear. On the contrary, the more I know about the process and what could happen, the calmer I feel about going through it. The prenatal class on the labour process was really a big help in that they give you information about everything from the drugs you could have for pain management to what happens during a C-section (gory video included).

It also helps when you have a partner who's willing to be there with you all the way. I am sure I would be a complete basket case if I had to do this alone. Daniel will take 2 weeks off work to be with me and Julien when he is born and then stay home 3 days a week after that till Julien is a month old. Now all we need is a good contingency plan for if I go into labour in the office!

Project Baby Week 31: Getting Things Done

Kinderzimmer Phase 1

We are getting into the thick of Baby Preparations.

All major items have been purchased or ordered: baby cot, stroller, car-seat, breast pump, curtains for the kinderzimmer, portable changing table, electronic devices. We read Dr Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham as well as a book of Chinese animal nursery rhymes every night to the baby - well, almost. Daniel is not very enthusiastic about Green Eggs And Ham, but it's the only English book we have, so he is rather bored with reading it over and over.


We are officially into the third trimester and I could not be more uncomfortable at this stage!  I have ballooned to 66.7kg. The downside of having hippo proportions are the frequent backaches (I can't walk for longer than 10 minutes) and squeezing in between two cars. Nowadays I wake up every night between 2 and 4am because my bladder needs voiding. Baby is 1.5 kg now and kicking more profusely than ever. Again, no picture of his face during our checkup last Saturday. He is now head-down, facing inwards.

We visited our friends last weekend, they just had their German-Chinese boy a week prior and had a lot of interesting things to tell us. The baby was small and quiet with huge feet! He's going to be Julien's friend, we hope. His Mum had to have an energency C-section after 12 hours of labour as she couldn't dilate far enough. I sure hope I can avoid this fate, if it means walking every day from now on for 20 minutes, I will do it. So far, I haven't found any conclusive evidence linking proper cervical dilation with any one factor. I already know of a few women who couldn't dilate and had to get the C-section. My mother had fast labours with me and my sister, no dilation problems and she recommended I walk a lot prior to labour. We will just have to see if this works out.

Daniel and I are getting a little closer to the Big Day. Sometimes, it can be quite a wonder to imagine the new addition actually here with us, in our house. After all, it's only been the two of us for the last 3 years. On the one hand, we're looking forward to this new chapter of our lives; at the same time, we will have to bid farewell to the life of Just The Two Of Us. I wonder how we would feel about that, but I reckon we won't have much time to ponder for the next half a year!

Project Baby Week 27: Sleep, Just Sleep

Baby is 27 weeks along and just over 900 grams last Friday.

He is also kicking me every hour at least, and it's very cute because sometimes I can see my tummy grooving to the beat. I am now 62 kilograms and finding it harder to get up from a sitting position, especially getting out of cars. Sleep is becoming less comfortable as I am only allowed one or two positions - on my sides - and a full night of uninterrupted sleep eludes me more and more.

Today, after waking at 2am the third night in a row to use the toilet and feeling like I got run over by a truck, I told Daniel that we are definitely training the baby to sleep through the night before I go back to work - no arguments. I can't do this, and I really don't know how Daniel has tolerated years of bad sleep (he wakes several times in the night) without doing something about it. Maybe he should be the one having this baby.

I'm still eating normally, no cravings for anything which makes me think all that is utter nonsense. There should be no excusable reason for anyone to blow up like a baby whale and blame it on pregnancy. We signed up for antenatal classes at the hospital which would begin in March. We are also going to take a tour of the place to select our choice of birthing suites. There are only 3 months to go!

The doctor said Baby's head is down, I suppose the right place to be, and from the pokes I am getting in my ribs, it explains a lot. We still haven't seen his face, on Friday there was no space between his face and my uterus to take a good enough 3D photo of him, so we had to settle for a 2D image. He wasn't doing much, just mucking around I guess, making smoochy movements with his lips, totally cute.

Daniel is all psyched about him, he wants to feel Baby kicking all the time and he talks to him before bed (unfortunately, in English). It's a shame fathers don't really have much to do with the baby's growth beyond the few minutes it took to conceive it. As much as I would pooh-pooh the emo crap women say about the lovey-dovey feelings of gestating a baby, I can't deny that the 9 month journey with its attendant hormonal explosions, wretched nausea and sickness, the burgeoning stomach and the thump-thump-thumping of Baby rocking it out in me is the most inexplicable and strange sensation I've had.

I am experiencing Nature in the most profound manner. Perhaps this is what they mean about motherhood. There's nothing else quite like it.

Project Baby: Week 22 - Fathers and Pokes

How I wish this could be possible!  Then we would not have the problems we have with women having to do just about ALL the childcaring, take ALL the parental leave when baby is born and be the ones (rather than the husbands) who have to quit their jobs if they want to raise their kids themselves.

This was a poster found in the ladies room of a restaurant in Thailand, courtesy of my friend Jatuporn.  It's part of a breast-feeding campaign but also tells you about how much more European dads are encouraged to be involved parents. Here is what the caption says:

Shame on us - Singapore's men are only entitled to 3 days' paid paternity leave. I don't want to compare it with the Western European states, since our social systems are based on radically different principles of welfare and taxation. We have done a lot more than the other Southeast Asian countries in terms of maternity and childcare benefits and have come a long way in changing and improving our policies since the nefarious Stop At Two campaign of the 70s.

Still, our TFR in 2010 was 1.16. The lowest the nation has ever sunk to yet.

My comments on our birth dearth have already been expounded in this blog. This post is not a critique, it's a note on fathers' involvement. I do not have anything really original to contribute to the debate that hasn't already been said, so I will instead share our ideas about how we're going to solve our Dual Working-Parent Dilemma.

I get 16 weeks paid maternity, which I will take as close to popping as possible (so let's hope my water doesn't break before 21 May).  Daniel will take his 3 days when Julien makes his way down the birth canal and then some of his own annual leave to help me out at home. He has 4 weeks of this so that's more help than a normal  mother can expect from the husband. My mother and aunt will be on hand to feed me nutritious stuff while I am feeding Julien, and Tobi should by then be squatting with us on internship, so he can feed Daniel and help us with the chores. When I return to work full-time in September, hopefully, Daniel can work one day from home so that Julien gets some Papa Time and German exposure once a week. The rest of the week he will be with Grandma from 7am to 7pm.

How long the above arrangement will last, I do not know.  But this is the best we can do now, given that I work in a bureaucratic and rigid organization where working part-time would mean I lose 50% of my income and all my career prospects in the next few years. Daniel works in the private sector, so he has considerably more flexibility than I do, it makes sense for him to get the most out of it as a new Dad while I keep my job which pays us the other half of what we need to get by and raise a kid too. It means I will see less of Julien than Daniel, but this is okay as Julien needs as much quality time with his dad as he can get if we are to raise him multilingual.

As they say of us middle class parents: raising kids isn't only about the financial cost to us. It's about giving the kid a quality childhood, and the "edge" over the rest. Competitive as this might sound, I have no illusions about the society and world that Julien is going to inherit as a grown-up, and this world is going to reward him a lot more if he has the linguistic, social, cognitive and cultural gifts that we help him acquire. And this means Mandarin from Mummy, German from Papa and English from everyone else from the get-go.

Goodness, we're already modifying our behaviour now that Julien can "hear" from the womb - trying to swear less in the car and trying (unsuccessfully) to speak German and Mandarin to him before bedtime.  On his part, he's poking around a lot more these days, I call it poking and not kicking because he's still quite small at 400 grams and Daniel has to press his face against my tummy to feel his movements. I get a few pokes at various intervals, usually when I am lying on my back (which I hate, as it gives me an awful backache).

On my part, I now weigh the heaviest I have ever weighed in my life at 60.5 kg. That's 6 kg more than my heaviest weight, and it causes so much pressure on my spine that I cringe in pain  when I have to wake up at night to cough. I also look funny because at 1.7metres, I look like an ordinary, skinny girl from the back (as I have not put on visible weight anywhere else) but from the front you see a huge basketball poking out of my tummy. That means I am not visibly pregnant as a whole, until people look down at my tummy. Someone told me that being taller and skinnier than average probably means the baby/uterus exerts more pressure on my spine, and the baby is likely sucking my calcium supply -- I have been having cramps in my right calf.

I have 4 full months to go. So far, I've been feeling better than I've ever felt since getting pregnant. All systems go, as they say, and all I have to do is put on weight and stay healthy. I've got some misgivings though, I do not intend to heap on more than 15 kg and I've been eating no different than before (no snacking except for ice-cream on some days), that means I should not pile on more than 9 more kilos between now and May. I really do not know how I am going to carry around 15 extra kilos in my mid-section!

Project Baby Week 16: The Mad Xmas Rush

It's the week before Xmas and I have presents to buy and errands to run before our flight next week.  Not to mention things to get for the bitter cold in Germany - stockings for example, thick ones!  I have had to shop reluctantly for stuff that fits my burgeoning mid-section (jeans and pants no longer fasten without making me look like a twisty doughnut) and last week I spent 2 hours going through my closet doing an inventory of what I need to survive winter and the Alps.   

Speaking of clothes, here's stuff from H&M's new Spring/Summer 2011, perfect for me when I'm packing the extra kilos next year. But H&M is only coming to Singapore the second half of 2011 so I am hoping the one at Koblenz or Frankfurt (Daniel, take note) decides to carry the new collection. Oh, and horror or horrors, I am now officially a size 10. Both above and below!

Monday we have another visit to the doc to have a peek at JuJu. Sometimes I feel so normal that I forget he's there. But then I have to gag from the acid reflux and sigh, I remember again. I still have to regulate my liquid intake very carefully, otherwise too much liquid too fast makes me gag and vomit. Totally gross.

I now suffer acute pain in my lower back, right behind my uterus, and it shoots out like a spray of torture bullets whenever I have to get up from a lying down position. Slumping on the sofa causes it too and the only thing that alleviates it somewhat is sleeping on my side. I have to ask the doc about this cos I am now packing only an extra 3 kg, by the time I am over 10kgs I might have to roll around in a wheelchair.

All I can say is this kid better be worth it!

Project Baby: Week 15 - Hallo Julien

So finally I am starting to chronicle my - our - latest project: Baby. I am 15 weeks pregnant this week and it has taken me this long to write about it because I have been in the toilet bowl and the darkest, most miserable recesses of my mind since week 7. Coming out of the worst phases of my first trimester, I am pleased to announce that Baby is doing alright, meaning all tests and scans so far are normal, much to my and Daniel's relief. The other thing is - you guessed it - Baby looks like a boy. The doc would not committ 100%, but he was as surprised as we were during our 13th week scan to see a little dangly bit between Baby's legs. So Julien, he will be, until he or she proves otherwise.

Week 4 - September
I was deliriously happy to see two lines on the test stick! In fact, it was only the 4th month we had "tried" to get pregnant, and rather half-heartedly too, because I had to go to India for work (3 weeks) in October and we had purposely chosen a "safe" window to have our Quality Time....but oh my, looks like the reason we had not gotten lucky the past 3 months was because the online ovulation calculator had timed my ovulation a week early and we had been doing it the wrong time all the while! But we were in the club now, and India was out. So off we went to our first Ob/gyn appointment, had a scan and then got married! (this one we planned since June.)

Week 5 to 6 - Spotting
Being pregnant was just fine, I didn't feel any different and I wondered if I was gonna be one of the lucky few who could get away with no morning sickness. My Mum disabused me of that soon enough, she said hers came at week 6 and lasted till week 12. In week 6 I started getting some spotting and the doc checked me over - all seemed okay. He put me on progesterone to boost the development of the fetus. The bleeding went away in a few days.

Week 7 - All day sickness
It finally came. Like a recurrent nightmare happening ALL THE TIME. I was crawling around in bed, scrunched up on the floor in my cubicle, running to the toilet bowl every 2 hours and swearing I would NEVER again have a baby. It's not just the nausea, vomiting and all-day bloatedness that is bad, your whole mental state becomes that of a depressive patient. When I was not shouting at people on the phone, I was thinking of ending it all, period.

Week 8 to 10 - Still all day sickness
Eating too little made me sick, eating too much made me puke. I could not drink any water as it was too bland and tepid and would make me puke. I lived on Yakult, canned green tea, 100 Plus, yoghurt and whatever was on offer at the cafeteria in the mornings. Surprisingly, breakfast was the only meal that didn't kill me after ingesting it. I didn't want to go to work because I didn't feel like getting dressed, doing my face and being in the bloody sickening air-conditioning from 8am to 6pm. Pimples were breaking out all over and in the unthinkable places - like my chest! I looked like shit, felt like shit and did not want to go out, see anyone or be anywhere.

Week 11 - Getting better
I didn't have to take the progesterone anymore and the vomiting was easing up to once or twice a day, usually after a big dinner. My food intake was by no means large, in fact eating the same amount as I would normally eat would be too much for me. I didn't snack, just had two small breakfasts most days, and then normal lunch and dinner after that. My pants and skirts were getting tighter but I had only gained 1 kg. Still looked like shit and didn't feel like putting on makeup.

Week 12 to 13 - Stabilised
I finally stopped vomiting, the taste of chewed and semi-processed food was no more! The NT scan went well and all my blood tests came back normal. I gained another 1 kg and started using a safety pin with my pants. I consented to going out and meeting people again (much to Daniel's relief) but the newest adjustment was alcohol abstinence. That really sucks. I still sip Daniel's wine from time to time though.

Week 14 - It's a boy?
The doc said it's likely to be one, but we shall have to look again next time since Baby is still developing his sex organs. Everyone asked me if I was disappointed - I'm not really, I wanted a girl badly, but I am just thankful it's healthy. Besides, Daniel is pleased as punch. At least I can say all the shit on my face is cos of his testosterone runnign around inside me! I burp a lot after ingesting anything, and gagging is now a regular part of my day, it's preferable to puking of course, but still annoying. I live in fear of a urinary tract infection cos of the reduced amount of water I am drinking. It's really frustrating when I can't drink normally and this puts me at UTI risk. My bladder is starting to feel compressed and my belly is sticking out more, even though I don't look at all preggie, said Daniel. All in, I have only gained 3 kg.