Last night, I felt the baby move for the first time. The poor thing might have been waving its wee arms for all its worth for ever by now but it took all this time for it to break through the layers of fat and reach me! I was reading somewhere that you might start feeling some light flutters around week 16 but didn’t give it a thought cos it ended with a statement like “this is for regular women – not you fat bozos!”

But then, last night, I really felt it! P was asleep and hubby was deep in Horizon so it was a private moment. Well not any more! Earlier in the day, P and I had looked at the Babycentre pregnancy update for week 16 and read that the baby would be roughly the size of a pear right about now. This lead to some comical moments with P positioning a pear across my tummy and then over on his! So when I felt something later, I had visions of a pear-shaped being with limbs floating about and waving! (Yeah that’s the way to take the ‘awww’ factor out of things and take it right onto gross territory!)

Let’s hope the baby chooses this method to let me know all’s well inside there and gives up its current way of making me throw up whenever and wherever!

But for now, I am steaming. I had some coleslaw one night and have been worrying ever since about the ‘eat no raw eggy product’ preggie rule ever since. This morning has been spent in trying to speak to a midwife who can appease my mind and essentially say ‘you had just a couple of spoonfuls? now quit worrying!’ to me. So far, I have drawn a blank.

I live in, let’s say, Booville and have decided to have my baby in the nearby Bashville. But my GP surgery, when giving me the choice of hosps between the one in Bashville and another in nearer Rroomville (ah jeez!) didn’t tell me that their midwife supports only those that chose to have their babies at the latter hosp. Now, I rang my hosp who said the antenatal appointments are the GP’s concern. GP says as I am going to have my baby at the Bashville hosp, their midwife cannot help me as she cares for those deliverables at Rroomville. So I am stuck in some sort of ante-natal no man’s land. Just peachy, eh?

I wonder why people act surprised when I say I want to leave this brilliant place for the shores of home, where at least I can be assured of some decent medical care as long as they know my money’s solid! *sigh*

It did. I emerged with a few scars and a firm belief that I will not go through it again. Of course I changed my mind. But being older and wiser (ha ha!), I decided that this time, I will not be caught unawares. This time, I will prepare myself mentally and physically for the labour and beyond. This time, I have not just one baby but two depending on my stability – the last thing I want to become is a stranger to my beloved son and make the whole thing more difficult for him.

So the first three months have been spent in research. Whilst I firmly believe that a little science is dangerous and so did not succumb to reading up on labour room war stories, I have been, however, reading up on alternative methodologies and therapies in relation to  labour. In particular, the form of labour called active birth.

Last time around, I spent my labour in the classic position – flat on my back, legs in stirrups, with a midwife, a midwife-in-training, an OB/GYN who was called in due to a last minute complication, a nurse and some lady who was insistently waving a paper in my face and saying something. I was too zonked out to know what she was going on about. S thinks it was about storing the cord blood but I am not sure.

This time, I am going to make my wishes clear well beforehand so I shall not be told about fledgling research and other assorted stuff at the last minute. Also, so far, I have been classified as a low risk pregnancy (touchwood) – I hope and pray that this remains throughout, in which case, I can sign myself in to the midwife-run ward, which does not believe in anything stronger than pethidine injection by way of pain relief.

In an effort to understand what the active labour deal is all about, I have been educating myself chiefly by means of the Buddha Bellies DVD and website. The concept is all about using yoga to help you deal with the rigours of pregnancy and labour. I started the DVD just this week (week 14 – the DVD advises you not to start before) and find it soothing and calming. Clear instructions make it easy to understand and follow.

Buddha Bellies believes in ‘giving birth back to women’ and goes to great lengths to demystify this frightening rite of passage. The woman behind it, Nicole Croft is a qualified Yoga teacher and conducts these ante-natal classes in Oxford. For women like you and me, who aren’t lucky to be residents of that city, we can arm ourselves with the DVD and reap the rewards. Her website contains quite a lot of information on the various stages of labour, water birth and a lot of other related issues. It all makes for fascinating reading.

What’s more, I quite like her concept of letting the woman be and not “dehumanise” her (as the Mad Momma put it whilst describing her own labour stories). Please do visit the site and read the articles – if anything, they do not scare the jeebies out of you and make you run for the hills. The matter-of-fact way of describing everything actually calms a person down. Even if you are too late into your pregnancy to get hold of the DVD and practice the asanas, these articles at least put your mind at rest and provide you with a set of options in dealing with your labour.

I hope to continue doing the exercises, following the DVD and would dearly love to see what sort of effect it has on my labour. However it turns out, you will read about it here!

So we had the first scan today, at 12 weeks. I was apprehensive about it for two reasons – any possible anamoly and more importantly, the requisite full bladder. Keeping a litre of water in for more than an hour, when I know my bladder is full is a feat I have never attempted before. My bladder generally works on a ‘see water, will go’ principle. The time I had to sit in a half-day long training with the coffee machine going ‘drip drip drip’ less than two paces behind me was the most torturous thing, bladder-wise, till date.

I downed half litre an hour in advance and kept sipping from a 500 ml bottle the rest of the time in a move to take things easy. As S kept going around in circles (literally) in search of that elusive parking space, I had to hoof it to the Maternity Ultrasound unit. Having so much water sloshing inside me while I was pounding the pavement was painful, let me tell you.

For the first time in the history of my NHS experience, my name was called a mere five minutes after I sat down and wasn’t mangled, chewed and spat out in a way I did not recognise it – another first! Off I went, lay down on the bed and the nice lady with the doofus started prodding me.

‘Ooh a nice full bladder, very good’, was her opening statement.

As I was gritting my teeth tightly at that point, I couldn’t risk any pithy comments.

Next came the dreaded ‘uh oh!’

And I was like ‘what? what? Are there more than one? Wassamatter?’

‘No, no, dear, don’t panic. The baby is just upside down!’

Eh? Sure enough, there the little mite was, showing us her/his bottom. Nice!

So the nice lady tells me to pootle to the loo and do a ‘little wee to the count of 20′ and come back in. ‘No worry, dear, we have got all morning!’ was her parting shot.

I walked in to the loo. How the hell does one do a ‘little wee’ when you have so much liquid inside you that is threatening to do a Niagara if you so much as do a sneeze? It was bloody hard, I tell you, fighting nature.

Back in, take 2. Thankfully the baby had decided to play nice and lie down. But what a difference from Big Bro! P was such a sweetie – he just lay there and let the sonographer do his bit and take piccies. This one seems to be a bit of a drama queen. For the next ten mins, the nice lady kept going ‘ooh don’t you do that, you naughty baby’, ‘come back here!’, ‘oh no you don’t!’, all punctuated with nice deep prods too near my still full bladder.

Finally she got the baby where she wanted and she went out and bellowed for S to come in and join us. As she sat down to show us which is where, the drama queen tried to turn and swim away! Cue another prod. It was a scream to see the lady prodding and the baby posing with a hand on her (got to be a girl!) head, like a tired movie star! It was surreal to see the ickle baby form – with the tiny heart beating like a hammer. Brought back memories of the first time – with P, I was still in the denial stage then and seeing him on the screen was the first step towards accepting that there was a baby in there and he is mine. This time, it was ‘ooh I hope everything is fine’ kind of feeling but wonderful, nonetheless.

P’s opening statement to me at the school gates was ‘did you get the pic of the baby? Where is it?’

Apparently he thought I would be standing there waving the pic like a mad woman. He could hardly contain himself till we came home and I showed him. His face, when confronted with the vague, blurry squiggles was a picture!

‘Is THAT the baby? Really?’ he couldn’t believe it!

He has changed his mind about his choice of a sibling – after weeks of insisting that he wanted a brother only (‘cos girls are slow, Mummy and they squeal!’), he has decided to plump for a sister. And that he is going to be the deciding authority when it comes to naming the baby and buying her stuff – baby cot, buggy, the works. He has even offered to do the nappy change, though I don’t think I will hold him to that!