baybeasts

bean is still sick and tired. but there is light at the end of the tunnel - in two weeks we are going for a scan. we thought long and hard about it, as we do about most things, and eventually concluded that seeing little B1 floating happily inside bean’s belly would make up for the weeks of nausea and general feeling rottenness.

tomorrow we are off for five days to (even) warmer climes. first family christmas with bean’s lot - i am really looking forward to it. they are warm, lovely people, and there is always a lot of happy banter and walks and afternoon rest periods and wholesome, yummy food. i am a bit sad to not be seeing my lot this year, but hopefully we can make up for it next year, with baby in tow.

I guess you could call this our baby trousseau.

I have been working on it for a while (though I should admit that bean made the incredibly beautiful rug), but I am feeling a new sense of urgency now that there is apparently a real live baby wriggling around in bean’s tummy. I’m working on two rugs, and have plans for any number of booties and cardigans and vests and jumpers and little knitted pants. I think I am obsessed.

The one thing I haven’t done is visited the button shop - 90 per cent of these little things need a button, or two or three. bean and I can’t wait for button day - it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Each one has a story: the brown hoodie (my favourite) was started and unravelled numerous times, but the snail I got right first go; the orange and cream striped hat was initially made for my manager at work when she was pregnant, but I got the colours around the wrong way and had to make her a whole new one that matched the booties that I had already made; I hated the green vest pretty much the whole time I was making it and for some time afterwards, but now, strangely, I adore it; the tiny dark blue dress was made from our friend K’s mother’s old ring binder of crochet patterns that I just can’t bear to give back yet because there are some more wonderful patterns in there; I started making the white dress for another friend’s baby but then loved it so much that I couldn’t bear to let it go and so had to knit her something else (which also turned out to be stunningly beautiful); the wool for the maroon shawl-neck jumper was outrageously expensive (hand dyed) but I do not regret a cent of the cost; the four hats are all actually properly known as helmets - the bottom two come from the ‘pretty baby helmet’ pattern…and so on and so on.

I am really looking forward to these garments accruing more layers of story, of vomit and cuddles and showing off; to having photos of them filled with chubby arms and warm soft bodies; to telling these stories to our children, remembering how small they once were.

S is still managing to find me sexy despite an almost constant pained look from the (all day) morning sickness, enhanced by a very snotty cold.
I was ravaged in the organic grocer behind the bread and eggs.
I’ve also burped more in the last few weeks than I have in my entire life and even S is getting worn down by that one.
The sudden tears are hard to predict but easy to get under control. I usually don’t cry often, so it is a little odd, but perhaps cathartic. This morning the tears were prompted by hearing that the emergency 000 number is being swamped by people calling about the smoky haze through the city, thus hindering genuine callers. People can be so thick.

For now, the tears are handily disguised by my cold. When I’m better, I’ll have to pull myself together.
The nausea gave me a little respite for the first two days of my cold and even though colds are awful, it just felt so good to not have that grinding pain in my belly that sometimes even wakes me up during the night. Nothing I eat makes any difference although it gets out of control if I’m hungry.
The nausea is hard to describe, but it’s something like a combination of the sick queasy feeling you get if you haven’t eaten for most of the day, combined with the sort of nauseous pain you can get from a trapped fart.

I’m ashamed to admit how much crappy white bread I’ve eaten.

I’m still finding it very hard to believe I am growing a baby and wishing like anything I had a little portable wang-cam scanner for home to check that things are still ok in there. S keeps hoping that I’ll start to let go of the need for medical reassurance, but after such an extreme amount of intervention to get this far, I’ve lost faith that my body knows how to do this properly.

IVF is so hit and miss. I feel very lucky to be pregnant after only 7 IVF transfers. All the women out there who are still cycling and heading into the painfully family focused silly season are in my thoughts.

Pregnancy is doing strange things to bean.

She told me today that she is getting randomly teary. When there’s something sad on TV, while I’m on the phone to someone else talking about B1, when I’m reading to her from the newspaper about the Labour party leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard… We’re not even rabid Labour supporters (though we do think Julia Gillard is a bit of alright, in a pointy kind of way).

Bean’s sense of smell has blossomed into a superpower. She can smell things a good minute or two before I register them, and odours that I sort of notice but don’t think anything of send her into gales of loud comments about how much said odour reeks. Luckily my temples apparently still smell good.

And then there’s the sickness. I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It’s more like all-day-needing your girlfriend to prepare all the food because the kitchen stinks-needing to lie on the couch with the doona pulled right up to your eyes-sickness. It’s ok for me - it means I get to watch lots of tv and work furiously on my B# wardrobe. (I’m currently making yet another hat - next I need to make more teensy-weensy jumpers and vests because of B1 being due in winter and all - I just can’t help myself…)

There haven’t really been any wacky food cravings, apart from a need to put tomato sauce on almost everything. This is a good sign - it means we are eating a fairly balanced diet (lacking only in sugar and salt?). But the sickness is interfering quite severely with her appetite, and the thought of particular foods at particular times provokes a very athletic contortion of her usually lovely face. Of course, which foods are ‘in’ and which are ‘out’ at any one time is completely unpredictable, so I am unable to avoid regular distortion of her features. I hope the wind doesn’t change.

It’s all feeling a bit surreal really. I hold the image of the little heartbeat winking at us clear and steady in my mind, but still it is hard to believe that inside bean’s tummy is a little lump of a mini-baby (a kind of ugly lump if visembryo is to be believed). Despite all the symptoms and the ultrasound and the collection of pregnancy tests with strong second lines, there is still a part of me that feels like it is all a dream - too good to be true, too good not to be. I know that, as with all big change, reality will creep up on me, and one day it will just be the way the world is - bean’s tummy will be big and I’ll be able to poke at a lump of foot through her skin and feel it kick back. And one day soon after that there will be a whole other tiny person in our house, in our family. I can’t wait.