Spilling The Beans!

Believe it or not, that's a teeny little baby! See his little hand up there by his face, giving you a wave??

This little peach is the reason I've not been around as much for the last few months, the reason I've been so ill and the reason I was soliciting good luck vibes on Twitter yesterday, before we headed off for our Down's Syndrome screening

After spending most of my life being certain that I was not the baby type and had no interest in having children (puppies - now that's a different matter) I did find myself getting increasingly broody after my nephew was born a couple of years ago - I expect my advancing age might also have had something to do with it. And we decided that this would be the year that we would start our family. It happened a little quicker than expected and gave us a bit of a shock to be honest - who knew it was that easy?? 

We found out in February, the day after Matt's birthday (if only I'd taken that test a day earlier - what a birthday present that would have been!) and only five days later the morning sickness kicked in. It started off fairly mild, progressed to all day long and was joined by a cold, a chest infection and sinusitis at one point. Which is when I laid in bed thinking 'just kill me now'. Not being able to take any cold medication/antibiotics to fight off any of this nastiness was tantamount to torture!

Not long after that came my lowest point - I basically spent my whole time either vomiting or unable to lift my head off my pillow. I managed to drag myself to my GP and was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum - an extreme form of morning sickness which affects around 1% of pregnant women ('Typical', said Matt. '1% of women and it HAS to be you, doesn't it??') But I'm in good company - Kate Middleton suffered with it late last year and apparently Charlotte Bronte had it too. She died from it but we won't dwell on that ....

I can't stress enough how BLOODY AWFUL it has been. I'm quite clear that there will be NO MORE BABIES for me, I really don't think I can go through that again. I'm much better now - once the dehydration was sorted out and I got some help from a fabulous support group that my GP recommended, things seemed to improve. I'm still off work, I'm still vomiting every morning but these spells seem to be getting briefer and I can at least function normally for the rest of the day - before I was so exhausted that I couldn't get out of bed/off the sofa and daren't stray far from the bathroom. And looks wise I was doing a pretty good impression of a pregnant Bella Swan. As the lady who did my scan told me 'babies are parasites. They take what they need from you and you get whatever's left'. Which wasn't much in my case!

But I really feel like I'm making progress now and seeing our little baby on the screen has made it feel more like a side effect of pregnancy and less like an horrific, neverending illness. Obviously we don't know yet whether it's a girl or a boy but we seem to call it 'he' a lot - it sounds better than 'it'. He is measuring big for his dates - a huge relief as, having lost nearly a stone due to sickness, I was really worried he'd be tiny and not getting enough nutrition to grow. He displayed some pretty impressive baby acrobatics during the scan - I had assumed that he'd just be lying still in there but he's definitely not, he was spinning around so much that it was hard to get good pictures!

It's still hard to believe that we're going to be parents and that this Christmas we will have a baby in the house! But it's feeling more real all the time and now we've seen him (I did have an irrational panic on the way to the scan and said to Matt 'what if there's nothing in there??' Pregnancy does funny things to your brain!) I feel like I'm starting to know him already

And I can't wait to see him again at the next scan!