Last week

Sorry I haven't written in a while, the start to last week was really rough. Here, I'll do a flashback... *think warbly lines*

Monday morning I had an appointment to get some blood taken to get my thyroid levels finally tested. (I know they took blood at the scan appointment to check my levels, but when I called for the results the receptionist told me the paperwork from the lab stated that no blood had been provided with the sample... or something odd like that. So someone out there in Greenock is trying to clone me.. erm or just very absent minded. I wasn't thrilled - to say the least, considering how complicated it was to get the last sample of blood from me, not to mention that I really wanted these levels checked WEEKS ago. I think I've mentioned all this but am repeating myself cause I can't remember for sure.) Moving on... I booked in at the treatment centre at my health centre have the blood taken. The nurses on staff pretty much take blood day in and day out so I was hoping they'd be better at it than the practice nurse. When I explained to her that they'd lost my last blood after it was so hard to get it in the first place, she decided it would probably be best if I was laying down. Eureka! Success! and on the first jab too. I was impressed. Treatment room for the win. I also managed to finally have someone take a sample to test for toxoplasmosis too. Finally that's all sorted. This is where it takes a downward turn.

I was feeling a normal level of nausea but it always gets worse if I haven't had enough sleep and waking up at 7:30am to get to my appointment was definitely too early for me and baby. We left the health centre and were in the car less than 2 minutes when that horrible, overwhelming need to throw-up hit me. I fluttered my hands, whimpered, whined and generally looked like a dork but I couldn't make it go away. The little paper bag I've had stashed on the floorboard since I found out I was pregnant was going to finally get its big day. I freaked. I did NOT want to throw-up in the car, who cares if I had a bag? It's still horrible and Mark was right there. Ugh. Yes. I threw up in the car. *sigh* I will have nightmares forever. Mark had to immediately stop because while it was all in a bag, said bag was paper and no way was it going to hold. So me and my bag got out of the car and walked along the road in the rain to find a bin. Get back in car, head home. Lay in bathroom for 10 minutes before my stomach decides that it's not finished with me yet. This goes on intermittently for the next hour. I feel like dying. Finally I fall asleep again. Wake up around 4pm. Eat lunch. Lunch laughs at me and goes to join breakfast.

Tuesday: Another early appointment. This time me and Mark have an appointment at the dentist. Dentist is lazy. He's supposed to do a full scale and polish. He de-scales all the teeth but then only does the brushing bit on the top teeth. Lame. Good thing I'm pregnant and not paying for it or I'd be really angry. I have horrible pregnancy gums though. When he's through with me I look like a vampire after a big meal. He laughs and says it's just my gums having an exaggerated response to plaque because of the new hormones and that it will all go back to normal after I give birth. We get back in the car to head home.. I think I'm going to be okay. Then it hits again. This time though (after much yelling from me at the other traffic for not moving) I make it home before Mt.St.Becky explodes again. More sleeping. More being sick. Life is fun.

I spend the rest of the day in a queasy haze between asleep and moaning. At midnight Mom calls... never a good sign. My parents had taken Indiana to the vet to get him a check-up. He'd only been home a day, but was having trouble walking and his breathing was incredibly laboured. They were hoping to get him on some pain medication but the vet found a whole host of things wrong with the poor guy. Not only did he have multiple tumours, arthritis, larynx problems but cancer as well. The prognosis wasn't good and the vet advised putting him down. It was hard on everyone. I can say that my raging hormones did not make it easy on me but it must have been incredibly hard for my parents. Having him home for only a day before they were forced to make the hardest decision a pet owner ever has to make. At least I was able to see him and talk to him (via Skype) one last time. I want to say that it would have been easier if he had never come home again... but just the thought breaks my heart and I wouldn't have given up that last day for anything. Now we have all three of my beautiful labs together again and my parents are planning to bury their ashes next time I can make it home. For the next few days whenever I tried to tell anyone what had happened I burst into tears. I'm going to miss that puppypotamoose so much. It's the end of an era. I can't believe our labs are all gone.

I'll catch you up with the rest of week and baby baking process later.

It's ALIVE!!

Baby Meatball is making his presence known!! I wasn't expecting to feel any movement till closer to 17 weeks and since today is just 14+6 I was a bit surprised. (What am I saying, I was completely shocked!)

It was the middle of the night and I woke up feeling a bit strange, definitely nothing new there. At first I thought my belly was just making the traditional, "feed me" or "I'm digesting a cow" kind of noises, but then I realized there was definitely something different going on. My lower ab area would start to feel really heavy and then there was some swooshing. Like something was rolling around. I discounted it and went back to sleep, then I woke up again with the same feeling. Someone was definitely moving around down there. The house was quiet, I was quiet,.. so I laid there for ages and tracked it. The heavy feeling would disappear and the come back immediately before the swooshing feeling. Made me wonder if the little one was doing back-flips. The next time I woke up it was around 9:30 so I figured I could wake Mark up and tell him. He was definitely excited. I told him not to get his hopes up though because I was only feeling it on the inside, I wasn't making anything out with my hands. But I decided that if he laid his head on my belly he might be able to hear a swishing noise when the baby moved. It worked!! He heard the swishing! and then amazing enough he said it felt like tiny faint kicks!

For being so early on this baby must be HUGE! Hopefully the growth will slow down to a normal speed and I'm not faced with the prospect of a 13 lb baby or anything crazy like that.

So excited!! It was amazing to feel the little one moving around and know that it's still there! I'm still feeling queasy all day but it seems a bit less intense.

I need a hug.

Ugh. Today has been bad. Okay well, yesterday AND today have been bad. As soon as I think things are getting better, they get worse. It was just the residual effects from the magic pills that kept me feeling okay on Tuesday. The wretchedness is back with a vengeance. It's worse than before. Nothing I'm eating is staying down. Well, I take that back. I had a granola bar at 7:30am when I got up with Mark but went back to sleep afterwards for a few more hours, so that stayed down. Can't exactly vomit if you're asleep now can you! :) I should just sleep all the time.

Mark talked to a few of his friends who have kids and they've all said that their wives didn't stop feeling ill until 16 weeks... (so why did so many people tell me that it would go away at 3 months?) So the countdown starts again. 1 week and 4 days then it'll magically disappear. Right?

and now the world knows!

You will all be thrilled to hear that my allergies have calmed down again. I seriously have no idea what it could be. (Well I guess it could just be an overdose of cat hair - but you'd think if it was that, with my housekeeping skills, I'd be suffering all the time.) Either way I'm just happy they've disappeared again for a while. :)

Mark and I had another wedding to attend this past weekend. You can really tell that we're getting to be a certain age now because this was our third wedding of the year and before now I'd only ever been to two weddings, mine and Maggie's! I took my magic prescription pills and while the morning we were supposed to leave for the wedding was horrible the rest of the weekend was actually bearable! As long as I had something to munch on and could sit down every 5 minutes or so I was okay. It was a lovely wedding reception AND we managed to squeeze in some quality time with some friends we rarely get to see anymore. PLUS I got to visit another castle. Always a plus.

So today's big news is that I've finally announced the pregnancy to my Facebook world. There's been a lot of great replies and it thrills me to death that I have so many friends who are interested and care despite how bad I am at keeping in touch! So it's official! The world now knows about the growing meatball, which is a good thing but otherwise people would just start thinking that I'd eaten a LOT of meatballs. Yes. The bump is starting to become a tad obvious.

Oh and more blood-taking issues have arisen. Some of the bloodwork that they were supposed to take at 10 weeks but couldn't and wound up taking at 12 weeks didn't actually make it to the lab. I have no idea what happened. I called my GP today to ask about my thyroid function results and the receptionist kindly informed me that the paperwork they got back from the lab said "sample not received" so apparently, the little vial of blood she was supposed to put in the little envelope bit of paper never arrived. Which means... yes. More blood needed. I have an appointment bright and early Monday morning to get my thyroid checked AND the toxoplasmosis test that I've been wanting to get since I found out I was pregnant. Hopefully all my blood winds up in the right place this time. Then Tuesday morning it's off to the dentist.

Morning sickness has been considerably kinder today, especially taking into account how abysmal the end of last week was. I managed to do two loads of laundry, make dinner, AND take a bath. Can you believe it? No, me neither. ;)

Allergies..

I was reading over my last post and the amount of word repetition, inverted word order, or instances of just plain using the wrong word was incredible! I really should try re-reading these things first. Well at least I explained that I was exhausted right? I use that as justification for my less than stellar literary attempt.

Not to much change in my morning sickness the past few days except that it seems to be a little tamer during the day and more intense at night. Morning sickness my foot! I've never seen anything so inappropriately named.

When we first decided that we'd try this baby thing out my biggest concern for the following nine months was my allergies. I'm not exactly sure what I'm allergic too. I'm pretty sure it's a mix of dust mites, cat hair and mold. My doctor prescribed me some lovely tablets that totally did the trick. My head wasn't even stuffy when I was trying to fall asleep. But he most vehemently explained that I would not be allowed to take these pills while pregnant and that actually, I should just go ahead and stop right now if we were trying. My thoughts = "Eegads!! I won't be able to breathe for 9 months and we'll have to buy stock in Kleenex!" Long story short, I had apparently developed a bit of a dependency on the allergy pills and the longer I took them the harder it was to stop. I could go three days before it got so bad that I needed to take another one... but magically one day (this was before I even got pregnant) I managed to get through an entire week without taking a pill and suddenly everything was okay. Don't get me wrong.. that was one HORRIBLE week. But afterwards I was fine. So strange.. like withdrawal or something. (Okay that was a lot of back story just to get to the next sentence.) 2 days ago my allergies have fired back up and I have no idea why. I've had no issues at all for a good 2 months and now they resurface? How is that fair? Isn't morning sickness enough?

I'm going to try burning the sheets tomorrow (ahem, I mean washing them at the hottest temperature my weak washing machine can handle) and hopefully that will help a bit. It's always worse when I'm laying in bed so I'm thinking the cat invited some friends over and had a party on my pillow case.. or it's MardiGras for dust mites. Either way something needs to be rectified here.

I've made it 13 weeks! Can you believe it? I was sure my body would have self-destructed by now leaving an oddly colored pile of goo on the living room floor.

Oh and my super happy fact of they day? (because obviously there's been a fact of the day before now) Indiana is moving home!! I can't wait to see him again and am thrilled to bits that my baby is going to be able to meet my puppy one day.

Sugar Puffs = Bad

Reminder to myself. Don't eat Sugar Puffs. I've done it at least three times now and you'd think I would have learned by now. Every time I've had the cereal it hasn't stayed down and I've felt rotten the rest of the entire day. When I was discussing it yesterday with Mark and he was commenting on my daftness for eating them yet again, I realized that cereal in general seems to be having the same effect on me. No matter how much my mouth wants to eat it my stomach gets really mad if I cave in. So for a least a few weeks, no cereal for me. Luckily my stomach still seems to be happy with chocolate milk.

Another food low: I realized a few days ago that I had some Tropical Punch Koolaid packets stored away that friends and family had mailed me from America. I was very excited. I'd been wanting Tropical Punch. (Actually I have been finding it really hard to find anything I want to drink. Anything citrus and I get heartburn, most juice is too sweetly thick, water has to be ice cold, and anything carbonated makes me burp for ages.) So finding the koolaid was awesome... until Mark read the ingredients that is... as soon as he saw Red 40 on there I was promptly banned from the koolaid and not even allowed to finish the pitcher in the fridge. :( Just because it was banned from food products in the UK this year... *sniff* The koolaid incident was followed briefly by me remembering that I squirreled away a tub of Tang in the cabinet somewhere to make my Grandmother's spiced tea recipe with. I was excited. It's like koolaid but healthier. Surely it wouldn't have any scary additives. It was expired. Like over a year expired. I still made a jug and tried to drink it but it tasted powdery. I can't remember if that's HOW Tang tastes or a by product of it being so old. Anyhow, as soon as Mark realized I'd tried to drink out of date Tang.. away the Tang went too. Drink nazi. *laughs* At least he's looking out for me.

I dreamed about Mountain Dew last night. mmmmmmmmm dream mountain dew was so yummy.

I'm not feeling as nauseous today as I was yesterday... (of course yesterday would be hard to beat I think I met my vomiting record.) But it's so nice not to have my head in the toilet today. However, to make up for the lack of vomiting I've been exhausted. I woke up around 1pm then fell asleep from 3:30 to 7pm. Even for me that's a crazy amount of sleeping. Little baby must be growing something fierce in there! (Don't worry baby, I'll sleep as much as you need me to! Just stop making me puke and all will be well.)

Magic jumping bean!

So after spending 2 hours at the hospital I'm finally home again. :) All in all it wasn't a bad experience though! Everyone took their time, I wasn't rushed around and I didn't have to wait very long at all!

First we went through to a scanning room. There was a monitor for the nurse and Mark to see and then a nice little flat screen above the examination table that I could look at without having to bend around to see the one the midwife was looking at. Baby was totally awake, bouncing all over the screen! Mark has renamed it "the jumping bean." It took a while for the baby to decide to lay in the correct position for the midwife to get some of the measurements she was after but that was completely okay with me because it meant we got to look at the little one for longer! It was so awesome! It's crazy to think that there's an actual baby in there! While she was scanning I think I said "gosh it's so baby shaped! it doesn't look like a rabbit at all!" She must have thought I was a bit insane.

Here's some photos for your viewing pleasure... Just click on each one for a bigger view.





After the scan I went to another room with a new midwife who attempted to take my bloods... she stabbed me three times before deciding that she needed to get a doctor in. In came the doctor who, thankfully, managed to get it on the first go. Afterwards I guess I was looking a bit pale and slightly like I was going to vomit so after asking if I needed a bowl to be sick in (which I declined) she offered to get me some cookies and juice which I happily accepted. I munched away on these while she went about booking further appointments for me and collecting some paperwork I needed so I wouldn't have to.

My next scan will be September 21st when I'll be 20 weeks. Oh! And they've moved up my due date. It's sitting at February 8th 2010 now. She said I'm 12 weeks 1 day and the baby is actually measuring bigger than that! Can you believe it?! I lose 8lbs and the baby is totally happy. One of the midwives said not to worry "because babies are total parasites and will take whatever they need."

I'm still in awe and I don't think Mark wanted to go into work today. :)