Viability

Viability is, for many, a huge milestone.

There is no set date when the fetus nestling in one's womb becomes a fool-proof survivor if kicked out early but – thanks to the wonders of modern medicine - there is a good chance of the baby surviving earlier and earlier.

At 24 weeks a premature baby has a 50% chance of surviving. From 26 to 27 weeks – assuming the baby is over 500 grams the survival rate is a staggering 90%. After that the survival rate doesn’t improve much until the baby reaches full-term. But this is less to do with the fact the baby is premature but those 10% who do not make it are likely to have underlying health problems that caused them to be born premature in the first place.

I am, today, 27 weeks pregnant.

Curiously enough I haven’t been hanging out for viability. I just haven’t had the feeling this baby is going to come early.

Don’t misunderstand me this doesn’t mean that I have been sailing through this pregnancy sanguine, confident of a healthy hearty baby. I’ve been petrified on numerous occasions.

The worst was Christmas day, not two hours after I’d sheepishly revealed to the womb mate why I’d decided against cooking a lovely rare joint of beef for lunch. I went to the loo and I was bleeding. There was nothing I could do, no one I could call so I went to bed for a couple of hours. It wasn’t a top ten Christmas but, thankfully the bleeding stopped and, well, here we are now.

My biggest fear is the baby just dies inside me and I have no clue that it has happened. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this stems from last May when after loosing one twin in a torrent of blood the second’s heart just stopped beating with no outward sign, not even the cessation of morning sickness, to alert me to something being wrong.

This is one of the reasons I am absolutely loving feeling the little one having a wee wriggle. Early mornings, after lunch and late at night are her favourite squirming times. Which is ok at the moment but, once she is born I am hoping things change pretty sharpish as those are times I’ve mentally earmarked for her (and me) to be sleeping.

Of course there are points where I think I’ve not felt a little internal squiggle for a while and I start to worry again. I’ve been given a few different techniques to get her moving – the cruelest was the suggestion to have a hot bath followed by an ice-cold drink. I find however, sucking a sweet seems to give her the sugar rush she needs to land a healthy boot into my duodenum.

Which is, obviously, a trial.

Generally my fears are abating.

We’ve all heard people say they don’t care whether the baby is a boy or a girl as long as it has ten fingers and ten toes. (To which there is always some smartarse who expresses the hope that the baby has eight fingers and two thumbs, and then they usually do a little snort at their incredible wit.) Even this I am quite confident about - the scans have been so exhaustive that I am pretty confident any missing digits will have been spotted by now.

The only concern that has been raised at my scans has been the last one they said my placenta was low lying. I always imagines the placenta swaddling the whole baby. In actually fact it is more like a feeding bag attached to the belly button. Where it was at the last scan was essentially blocking the baby’s escape route. If it stays in this position then I will have to have a cesarean.

Even this isn’t unduly concerning me.

It feels like there is plenty of time for things to get into the right position – I’ll have another scan at 33 weeks to check where everything is.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t relish the idea of a cesarean in the slightest. I might be too posh to pronounce bath and grass exactly to my husband’s satisfaction (yes I talk properly, unlike the husband and his vulgar vowels - I'm more Downton Abbey whilst he is a touch Trainspotting), but I am not too posh to push. I worry about the recovery time, not being able to lift up my baby and let’s face it having a fairly major operation. But I am hoping it won’t come to that, so pushed that worry from my mind for the time being.

But despite viability not being a date I’ve been hanging out for it is quite nice to have reached it.

Now I guess it is just a case of feeding up the baby – pass me another sweet please.

Little Insights

It is rare for a wife to come home from a weekend away and be delighted when her husband tells her she "definitely looks bigger."

I quite like one of his new nicknames for me; 'Bumpy'.

I'm less keen on 'Chunk'.

In fact, if he continue to choose to use the latter then thank fuck we have two more embryos in the freezer because the lack of testicles that will result will mean these are the only two options for Doug to have a sibling.

****

A guy at work got a free stamp with a craft magazine he advertises with. He offered it to me to stamp on the baby when she is born.

I told him if there was one thing this baby could not claim to be it was "Homemade".

****

I was emailing a bloke at work who is relatively new and doesn't therefore know about my six weeks off in 2011 for IVF.

I'm practicing my best street slang. As one does when conversing wit da yoot.

He writes that I'm gonna be one cool mother.

I respond that it is a worry I can't read that without thinking he's calling me a motherfucker.

To which he says it is that action that got me into this state.

I paused, deciding eventually that this random guy didn't need to know that this baby wasn't conceived in the normal way.

See, I do have some kind of self control.

****

I've added a new word to my vocabulary.

I'm off on a wee trip this week. I thought it was a citybreak.

Three separate people have informed me it is a Babymoon.

Grandpa

If I believed in a higher power I might start to think there was a one in one out policy. That the population is aging and growing would prove otherwise but I have often noticed a death in the family around the time a new family member makes themselves known.

My Grandad died this morning.

Rationally this is a good thing. He always told me that should he go “gaga” I was to shoot him. For the last six months or so he has been in an old people’s home and confused. I am not sure he recognised my sister and I when we last went to see him, but being bought up to be polite and an eminent bullshitter he bluffed his way through the visit.

Much as I would like to say I’d fulfilled his wishes I decided against shooting him, I value my freedom too much for that. So his death now, rather than lingering for years more in a retirement home is undoubtedly a good thing.

But it is still very sad.

I have very fond memories of my Grandpa. He was a proper old school country gentleman. Hunting, shooting, fishing, playing bridge and choosing to wear a twine belt rather than a leather one. One Christmas I remember him getting about six belts as presents from various members of the family. He still stuck with the string more commonly used to bind the bails on his farm.

I felt sorry for him at Christmas because it was also his birthday and I vividly remember him telling me one year, as a child, that his sister got more presents than him. This sort of anecdote had a profound effect on an eight year old and was another reason for me wanting a summer rather than a winter baby. My sister and I tried to compensate him for a few years celebrating his half birthdays in mid-June.

He loved to recite us poems as kids. The Jabberwocky was a particular favourite. As was Tweedledum and Tweedledee – though quite what inspired him to recite a poem about the two fat twins from Alice in Wonderland to the wombmate and I eludes me. Another poem he enjoyed reciting I warned him I would read at his funeral – an idea that delighted him:

Grandpa’s fallen down the drain
And cannot scramble up again
Now he’s fallen down the sewer
That’s one Grandpapa the fewer.


I’m not sure that I’ll have the guts.

He’d read us stories. The Saki ones stick in my mind. One very gruesome tale was about a hyena called Esme. The story was horrible but ever since I’ve liked the name Esme which was very near the top of my shortlist for girl’s names until I checked its popularity and realised it had had a massive spike last year thanks to a character in Twilight also having the name. (Also spell check has just suggested the word Semen instead of Esme, which has sealed its fate as a name I won’t use.)

He was a governor at a primary school I attended for a short while and I remember sitting at lunch with a friend one day when the girl next to me snorted with laughter. “Look at that man’s nose” she said pointing at the eminent visitors who were being shown round. Of course it was my Grandfather's large hooter that had set her off. It is odd really that his snozzle had caught her attention when far more impressive was the fact that he had a glass eye as a result of shrapnel in the second world war and wore a monocle as a result.

Once, no doubt having had a lesson about oral history, I tried to draw some tales out of my Grandad starting the conversation with an innocent “You never really talk about the war...” He turned to me (right round as I was on his blindside so it could be quite an effort to look me in the eye), “That” he said “I consider a very great compliment.”

In fact the only war story I remember him telling me was when he was first taken to hospital after his eye-losing injury; he was more exhausted and ill than he’d ever been in his life and slept solidly for almost 24 hours. When he woke the man recuperating in the next bed had drawn a sketch of him with a donkey’s head happily snoring through the day.

He did, as I may have mentioned, have an impressively sized nose.

He, like my Mum – but with a different spelling – was called Francis. Which adds more weight to the idea of naming the little one Ivy Francis. Maybe if she’d shared his birthday Ivy F. would have been a shoe-in.

Whenever I saw him and asked how he was he'd have a stock answer  "I can't think of anything to complain about."

Let's hope that is still the case.

****

Whenever I write about people I always send them what I am going to write first to check they are ok with it. In this instance I couldn't do that, but I have just checked with my sister's that they were happy this post.

The wombmate added:
"It's funny how we all remember different things, my memories are of the rain poem, collecting mushrooms and being taught to gamble."

And my older sister said:
"Counting cows and playing twenty-one with matchsticks."

Two plus two equals five

I don’t know how pregnant I am.

Ok that was an exaggeration. I know exactly how pregnant I am (23 weeks and six days, I could do hours but that'd just be boasting) but I don’t know how pregnant I should tell people I am.

Back in the day, before I started on this whole trying to conceived thing, I had very vague notion of pregnancy (I hope you are impressed I can remember that far back). I knew women were pregnant for nine months. So when I asked people how pregnant they were I’d get a bit flummoxed when they would respond in weeks.

Five months meant much more to me than 20 weeks.

This a problem that followed me after the birth as well. Why did people bother with telling me their baby was 18 months when “a year and a half was” a much more manageable figure to get my head round. Don’t get me wrong I can do the maths, sometimes even in my head without the use of my fingers and toes, but I didn’t see the need. “One” is anything between 11 and 13 months, “turned one a few months ago” will get the baby through to 15 months, then progress onto “nearly one and a half”. I didn’t need a to-the-minute age.

The upshot is, when I got pregnant I decided to just use months (unless talking to someone who had given birth and therefore understood the significance of getting past the first trimester or that 20 weeks was a big milestone for the second scan).

All was fine until I was asked how pregnant I was today.

24 weeks – give or take. Divide that by four and you’d think I was six months pregnant.

But I’m due towards the end of August – it is the end of April now. So end of May should be seven months, end of June would be the eight month mark and that magical nine months ... Tadah ... End of July.

Hmm not so much.

Ladies, we’ve been sold a pup.

Pregnancy is approximately forty weeks (although admittedly this includes the two weeks between finishing your period and actual release of sperm into the right orifice / having the embryos popped back in). So one's pregnancy is actually ten months rather than nine – this is based on four weeks in a month.

Thank goodness no one is nosey enough to ask about conception, because they’d probably be very confused if I explained that happened back in February 2012.

This was a full year and a half (give or take) before my due date. Which if Doug was in the womb for that whole time wouldn’t quite take me to the dizzy heights of an elephant’s two year gestation period but puts me on a par with the Dolphins.

Oh there's a thought, maybe I should call Doug 'Flipper'.

Naming the kid

I had a moment the other night.

The husband was sitting on the sofa reading out girl's names. Not perusing his little black book but contemplating what to name our daughter.

Our daughter!

Holy shit.

I hope that every single one of you gets to have this conversation. It breaks my heart that not everyone has. It was fun.

Naming is a minefield. (Look at the picture above. I have no words).

There are definite fashions and amongst the London middle-classes, (of which I cannot deny I am a fully paid up member), there is a trend at the moment for harking back to the traditional names of our grandparents. I'm down with this. I like an old fashioned name. But as with all trends you need to be careful.

A mate of ours of the left-wing persuasion named his daughter Florence. A lovely name. A couple of months later the right-leaning leader of the Conservative party gave his daughter the same name. He wasn’t happy (the mate, I doubt old Dave C gave a damn, he doesn’t seem to care about much).

Then there are the hundreds of tales of friends who think they have seized upon a unique name for the apple of the their eye (oooh! Apple there’s a name!) only for the kid to start nursery and find they are one of five Oscars/ Archies/ Lilys/ Tabithas.

Back in the day you could try and mark a bit of differentiation by a “special” spelling. Why have Daisy when you can have Daysee? In fact I know two people whose names are spelt wrong because their dad’s screwed up their birth certificates. Once this wouldn’t have been too problematic but now you've got the dual consideration - an unique spelling can render any email address unworkable as people are inclined to stick with the traditional spelling. On the plus side, when you set up their website (come on aren't all parents registering a domain name along with their baby name nowadays?) your less likely to find it has already been snapped up.

The husband has put two strict rules on any name he will contemplate. It can't start with an A or end with an A. This is because our surname starts with an A and he isn't happy about our daughter's initials being AA. (Can't think why, I'm a fan of the Automobile Association.) And he thinks that ending one name with an A and starting the surname with another will prevent the name rolling off the tongue.

So my favourite name was vetoed.

Then there is my natural inclination to have a bit of fun with this name.

If Posh and Becks see fit to name Brooklyn after where he was conceived surely Petri, after the dish our embryo started its life in is a shoe-in for a name.

Or Ivy. Ivy is a nice name, and I could couple it with a middle name in memory of my Mum. Frances. So Ivy Frances - or for short: Ivy F.

I know what you are thinking - that I'm a fucking genius.

You aren't wrong.

For some reason the husband isn't buying it.

Finally, however, more through a process of elimination rather than choice, we have arrived at a short list of names.

The next stage is to test these names out in the field. But that is a post for another day.

I've Changed

Now that I am half way through my pregnancy it is time to discuss the changes that I have experience since getting up the duff.

There are the normal things:

Never having been bulimic throwing up on a daily basis has been a novel experience – and the one that keeps giving. I am no longer choosing my breakfasts based on the likelihood of it easing the nausea (it doesn’t) but more on the degrees of revolting it is on its way back up. Toast = good. Yoghurt/ dairy = bad.

I am getting fatter. To the untrained eye I wouldn’t say I look pregnant just stoutly girthed. As a celebration after my 20 week scan I bought a pair of maternity trousers. Not because I couldn’t fit into my pre-pregnancy togs but because I have spent so long putting off buying new clothes “in case I get pregnant” the strides I have been wearing for the past few years finally fell apart and I felt it would be indecent for me walk around showing my arse off to all and sundry.

My boobs are weird. They have grown (much to the husband’s delight, a few weeks ago before they grew he was muttering about wanting a refund – which was frankly greedy as they have never been small). But the nipples have grown too, and got darker. I found myself gazing at them in awe in the mirror the other day in much the same way one does when leafing through National Geographic, you know with a scientific, anthropological bent.

All of these things should, I know, make the pregnancy feel more real. And I guess they do. I have no doubt I am pregnant. The idea that I will have a baby at the end is still too much to contemplate and difficult to associate with these bodily changes.

Oh and the other day, in the supermarket, a jar of gherkins caught my eye.

I had a little giggle to myself thinking, now I'm pregnant I should be craving these.

Ha.

Ha, ha.

Ha.

Mmm ... tangy ... crunchy goodness.

They went in the basket. I have yet to couple them with ice-cream, but I'll keep you posted on that culinary delight.

The most dramatic change however has been my ability to start to 'look' again.

A couple of weeks ago I walked past a woman with a young baby it was only as I peered into the pram (as I strolled past not in a creepy getting all in the crib type way) that it occurred to me I hadn’t done that for a very long time. It had become instinctive to look away from a pram. It wasn’t even a conscious thing, but now I am looking at all these gorgeous, chubby-cheeked youngsters again I realised how long I must have been averting my gaze whenever I came into contact with a stranger’s baby. Not with friends, obviously, because that would be odd - going round to a mates see a new kid and blanking it wouldn’t be considered polite.

Mind you I am going to have to have words with the wombmate at her insistence at calling me with “face-time”. I love seeing my little nephew but don’t enjoy also checking myself out in the thumbnail picture in the corner, and she does have an annoying habit of telling me how he was just giggling but can’t understand why he has now stopped. Just a guess, mate, but possibly shoving a camera in his face with a close up of a bedraggled looking Aunty Lizzie has scared the shit out of the little dude....

On a serious note

This is quite a hard post to write, but it needs to be said.

First off my baby is fine, this isn’t that kind of post.

The thing is, I have been blogging for coming up to five years. In all that time I have never once had a troll. Virtually every comment has been incisive, or supportive, or funny, or all three. On the few occasions where someone has disagreed with me or questioned something, they have done it in a way that it couldn’t possible offend or upset me. (I am, of course, choosing to ignore the spam that has forced me to use captcha - sorry about that.)  

Unlike the majority of the commenters who generally leave messages under YouTube videos, Daily Mail articles or on toilet walls I felt that I had a better class of reader. In a way I thought of you as friends, some I know personally, many more I don't but I still thought we had a connection.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I thought that over the years I had earned your respect, but I hoped that I'd engendered some degree of affection in you.

So it was a bit of a shock to see your responses to my question about whether you thought I was having a girl and a boy.

Most of you were making a decision based on a gut feeling, but you'd also read this post - the one where I said I thought I was having a boy.

What do I get from you lot?

70% deciding that I am having a girl.

IN DIRECT CONTRAVENTION OF WHAT I TOLD YOU MY INSTINCT WAS. 

It has been a real body blow to see how little my opinion really counts.









You are right of course.

We are having a girl.

Which I am ridiculously excited about. I'd be excited if it was a boy too, but now I know she is a she it feels right.

I'm going to have to buy her a tutu and stripy tights, aren't I?

What is 'it'?

"A boy steals your health; a girl steals your looks." A girl at work told me recently, leading me to conclude I'm having a hermaphrodite.

Today's 20 week scan was all good. Again it took a long time and the scanner managed to obscure my view for most of the scan with a combination of her arm and hair.

Once she'd ascertained that we did want to know the gender she said that she'd check the sex at the end. Which meant whenever I did get a glimpse of the baby I tried to work out the sex myself.  At one point I was pretty convinced I'd seen a juicy pair of testicles. "And there are the eye sockets" she explained.

I was also fairly confident I'd spotted the belly-button until I thought through the biology, so pretty quickly stopped navel-gazing.

We saw fingers and toes and left and right ventricles. The brain was in the skull and the spine looked, well, spindly.

Eventually we did get to the money shot. We now know the gender of the womb's inhabitant.

I know it would be easy just to tell you now, but who wants easy? Let me know in the comments what you think is in there.

Here is a clue.

It is definitely one of the two main genders.

Almost 20 weeks

I've been away.

I spent last week in Spain which was perfect timing, not least because the UK hasn't worked out that it should be spring so is doing a pitch perfect impression of Narnia during the White Witch's reign.

I hadn't been sure if my crippled nipples were a result of the freeze causing them to implode or the pregnancy sharpening them up ready for a sucky little mouth. Judging by how much they continued hurt even when warm I am guessing the latter.

My morning sickness however has been clearly affected by the cold and early mornings, as for three days in a row whilst on holiday I wasn't sick. Coming back yesterday after getting up at sparrow-fart o'clock to get to the plane it struck back with vengeance, on the plane, train and taxi. Luckily I'd stocked up on sick bags on the plane. EasyJet paper puke bags for the win!

The best moment happened on Friday.

Good Friday.

I hadn't quite been sure whether I'd felt the baby move previously. You know when someone starts talking about nits, or fleas, or Piers Morgan and you start to itch? Well, I wasn't sure if the sensations I thought I was feeling were actual movements or a manifestation of my hopes. I knew what I was supposed to be looking out for - something like bubbles or butterflies in my uterus. Or maybe something that could be mistaken for indigestion.

Instead, on Friday night, I felt something more akin to tectonic plate movements in my uterus. A huge shift of something. And that something, I am guessing, was Doug making it's presence known.

I hope to see a bit more of Doug soon, on Thursday, I have a 20 week scan - after which I can start to refer to her or him rather than it. Which is nice.

Let's talk about sex, baby.

The two most common questions that I get asked when people discover I am pregnant are:
1) Have you actually been sick?
2) Are you going to find out the sex?

The answer to both is an unequivocal yes. It would be very odd to have a baby and not find out the sex - I mean how would you change a nappy without noticing?

I think what they generally mean is, am I going to find out the sex of the baby before I give birth.

You'd be amazed at how worked up people get over this.

For some, finding out the sex is the equivalent of opening Christmas presents on Halloween. All kinds of wrong and indicative of a lack of self-control which marks you as a unreliable shyster in all areas of your life. For others, the idea of waiting until after the birth when you have clothes to buy and a nursery to paint is a clear demonstration of your lack of forethought that could scar your child for life*. What if HE has to wear a pink babygrow to leave hospital in?!

I couldn't give a toss what other people decide, fair play to them and whatever they go with. The husband and I have chosen to find out the sex at our twenty week scan in three week's time.

Almost nothing about this process has been conducted away from the closest of medical scrutiny;we even have a photo of the baby as a mere blob of cells: finding out the sex seems perfectly natural. I don't really buy the argument that I'd want to have a surprise when the baby is born. Whether I discover the sex at 20 weeks or 40(ish) it'll be a surprise. (As much as a 50/50 outcome can be.)

At 20 weeks I figure I'll have the time and energy to absorb the news. At the birth I might have a be a bit preoccupied with other stuff.

There are a couple of other things that have decided me:

When the wombmate had her little boy she and her husband knew the sex but chose not to tell anyone. Not even me.

Well, that bit her in the arse when our aunt presented her with a hand-crafted little jacket lovingly embroidered with flowers and what-not. I'm not against a bit of cross-dressing. I write this in the husband's cardi (which I guess is me cross-dressing as a chap because I'm wearing his clothes and his cross-dressing as a woman because he owns a fucking cardigan). However, I have been conditioned just enough to baulk at dressing a little boy up in such a flamboyantly decorated garment.

Also I have a very strong feeling that this kid is a boy.

Call it instinct.

Those of you who have read this blog for a while will know that to date almost every gut feeling I have had has been utterly wrong. Therefore I wonder whether to call my instincts bluff and decide I must be having a girl. But could it be a double bluff? Maybe I really am having a boy and my psychic ability is screwing with me.  Can you imagine living with these thoughts on a daily basis? I have to find out the answer for the sake of my sanity!

So only a few more weeks to find out whether we have a Douglas or Doug-ess in the making.

* With three older nephews I can pretty much guarentee a large proportion of this one's clothes will be blue with tractors emblazoned across the front. I'm quite keen on the idea of a gender neutral dark grey nursery at the moment ...