22 August 2008

Table for four

I had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Oxford last night with one of my (many!) pregnant friends.

‘Table for two?’ asked the East European waitress in a thick accent and barely audible voice.
‘Yes,’ answered my friend, N.
‘No, table for four,’ I whispered, smiling at N.

Ah, pregnancy bliss! The pleasure of being able to imagine and, now, to know that there is someone in there, a real person, who is growing stronger by the day, kicking harder every day...

Soon, there will be three of us in this household, but I can already feel that we are a family now. It is a wonderful feeling, one that I had not anticipated. Roll on third trimester!

19 August 2008

Bruised

Six months today! Three more to go!

I am bruised.

All over.

But inside.

Mind you, outside too – I keep bumping into things, dropping things, hurting myself with forks and knives and jewellery and pens.

But on the inside, it’s not my doing. It’s Sprog’s.* I am battered, beaten, shaken, trodden, flattened and crushed. Day in, day out, and at night too.

I couldn’t go back to sleep last night. It was only half past midnight, I had been sleeping for a couple of hours, but Sprog had woken up and just used my bladder as a punching ball – the loo beckoned. Then Sprog never went back to sleep, hiccupping one minute, kicking the next. So I didn’t either. Well, until about 2.30 a.m., that is, after lying still on my back on the sofa bed in the study, resting, reading, till my eyes couldn’t distinguish the words on the page any more.

I hope that this is not the first step on the downhill slope that leads to the abysmal first few weeks after Sprog has joined the world (till he/she finally sleeps through the night). If so, it will be a long winter...

* I don’t like using the name ‘Sprog’ for our baby, but Monsieur l’Anglais likes it and it stuck pretty much from Day 1, so we carry on using it. I did suggest using the boy name we’ve chosen on ‘he days’ and the girl’s name on ‘she days’ (no, we don’t know what sex the baby is), but no, he prefers to use ‘Sprog’, so hey, I might as well use it here too!