week 39? 40?
I've gotten both mails from the baby sites, so it must be true - I'm somewhere between the 39th and 40th week of pregnancy. The big news for me at the moment, though, is the back pain that was keeping me from walking? gone. YES.
It's very difficult to describe but when it was going on, I couldn't walk more than a few feet without giving myself some kind of pep-talk ("okay it's probably only another ten steps to get to the kitchen/ it's just another block until you get home/ etc") and it was very similar to the pain I had before my old back surgery. I feel like a new woman, having it finally gone, and I can now walk at a normal pace again. I can only assume that the little dude was pressing on a nerve in there. He's changed position now, though (he's ready to get out of dodge, I reckon) and I think that's helped a lot.
Now my only real complaint is that the sciatica at night has gotten worse. I know you all with kids are going to tell me I'm never going to get any sleep once he's out but really, I'm not getting any sleep now. I went to bed at midnight last night and I think I finally fell into some kind of sleep around 2:30am or so. Then up 5-6 times for the loo, then by 7am my legs were worn out from being pressed on and I was awake again anyway. So I guess I'm saying is: let's get this babyshow on the road.
(baby says *bumpbumprub* I'll miss that!)
This pregnancy has been sponsored by: boatloads of fresh pineapple, seedless grapes, pink grapefruits, and various salty snacks. I still wish they had Cheez-its here.
I met with my prenatal group again today at a coffee shop in town. Two of us are left to go; the rest have had their babies, and had them with them today. They were all ridiculously cute (the babies) and it was good to hear the stories of what everyone is currently going through. For example, it sounds like the midwife situation in this county is more dire than we'd previously been led to believe, and one woman has only had one follow-up visit so far, as opposed to the several she should have had by now. And during all the snow (more on that in a sec) she was phoned and told that 1) the midwife would not be able to make it to her house because of the snow, so 2) she would have to pack the baby up and go to the hospital herself to check herself out (ie, the 2 weeks of supposed midwife visits were done now.) Now, this woman did it, but I have got to say that my first and only reaction was "it's too treacherous to drive out there for you to get to my house but you expect me to pack up the newborn and drive myself?" Not to mention, it's their damned paperwork, and if they haven't even been doing the visits they're supposed to do, what do I care that their paperwork gets filed on time?
Okay, I'm ranting. I recognize that it's nice that they do home visits at all, but when they aren't actually doing the home visits, and all they want from me is to go file papers to officially say that they don't have to continue to not visit me, they can seriously take a leap.
We had loads of snow here last week, which I'm sure most of you heard about. It shut London down, and had pretty much the same effect here, except that we aren't London so you wouldn't have heard about us. I know a lot of people from snowier places are patting themselves on the back about how sad the Brits are at dealing with snow, but really, I bet your snowy hometown owns some plows, and the people there probably also own snow shovels. People here don't even have snow boots as far as I've seen. The last time England had this much snow was 18 years ago, so people aren't really prepared for it, to say the least. My favorite comment I saw online was from some guy in Alberta or something who ranted about how they are required to have snow chains on their tires from Nov-March (or whatever) and how their city never shuts down for this sort of thing. thanks for that input, Albertaman.
In Uni news, my tutor dropped our group several weeks ago, and we've just now been assigned a new one. This has caused a bit of chaos, as we've been left to drift for a while and in the meantime we had a paper due. It's done now, though, and hopefully he'll take into consideration that we had no guidance at all for the assignment. We'll see.
*edit* also, this advert still makes me chuckle when I see it. trumpets! Brits reading this are probably sick of it by now. No, it's not referencing anything in particular. It's just random. And yes, fans of the IT Crowd etc, the voice is Matt Berry.
also *edited* to fix some stray 'their's. bad bad.